Posted on 07/03/2002 5:18:54 AM PDT by X918
The concept: Showtime asked seven of international cinema's best directors to each make a 10-minute film on the subject of time.
The deal: They would have total creative freedom to express their vision.
The seven: Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Chen Kaige, Aki Kaurismaki and Victor Erice.
The result is an uneven but always interesting and occasionally dazzling series of 10-minute films. The series premieres tonight at 10:45 with Lee's We Wuz Robbed, a documentary that revisits Nov. 7, 2000, in Florida -- one of the most controversial election nights in the history of American presidential politics with its legacy of butterfly ballots, recounts and hanging chads. While some will call the film pure propaganda, We Wuz Robbed is one of the works in this series that absolutely dazzles.
It starts with Lee's fluency in the grammar of political documentary -- his masterful ability to manipulate visual symbols, words of the interviewees and bits of factual data to arouse emotional response. Yes, that is propaganda, but that's exactly what Ken Burns or any skilled documentary-maker does. We generally only notice, though, when our politics are the ones being gored by the filmmaker's manipulation of montage.
The core of We Wuz Robbed is Lee's interviews with campaign workers for Al Gore, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000. Also in the mix is Associated Press White House correspondent Sandra Sobieraj, who covered the election-night story. Selectively using Sobieraj lends an overall aura of objectivity to what the other partisan interviewees are saying. Lee is so smooth in his use of her, though, that it took me three viewings before I figured out the filmmaker's game.
The film focuses on the 10 minutes between the time Gore started making his way to a microphone on election night to concede Florida and the election to George W. Bush, and the moment when campaign workers were able to whisk Gore off the ballroom floor and into a holding room to tell him that the television networks were wrong about him losing and that he must not publicly concede. The rising rhythm of recollection that Lee constructs through his careful editing makes you feel as if you are standing next to Gore in this whirlwind of data and decision-making.
And where there's Lee, there is always some discussion of race -- usually carrying a supercharged load of emotion with it. The hot buttons are pushed in We Wuz Robbed by Donna Brazile, the African-American manager of the Gore campaign, when she characterized the way the voting was conducted in Florida by saying, "For the first time, Jim Crow came back on the scene."
In explaining how she believes African-Americans were systematically denied the right to have their votes counted, she refers to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris as "Katherine Jim Crow Harris" and Florida Governor Jeb Bush as "Jeb Jim Crow Bush." Harris was the co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida, while Jeb Bush is the younger brother of George W.
Brazile and other Gore campaign workers are all posed with huge American flags behind them -- much the way George C. Scott was in the film Patton -- as they are interviewed. A final shot shows five of them holding a flag in front of themselves (as if being wrapped in it) as they stand outside the gates of the White House.
Click link above for rest of propoganda.
No thanks. Life's too short.
Get over it, Al "The Alpha Male" lost.
What's this? ALL of those military votes were from people of colour??? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
I tired of letting this one pass by. It's NOT controversial! Every count says Bush won! The higher court ruled in his favor! There is NOTHING on the other side to balance Bush's win.
It's not "controversial"! It's "disappointing" to the Democrats.
I find the ebonics in the title of the movie ironic!
It's probably not ebonics. More than likely it's a reference to boxing manager Joe Jacobs' immortal phrase from 1932. Joe Jacobs was Max Schmeling's manager for all 14 of his fights in the United States. The most notable were his bouts with Joe Louis.
Sandra Sobieraj, White House reporter for The Associated Press, spent 17 months traveling with Vice President Al Gore. Prior to that 2000 campaign assignment, she covered President Clinton's second term and, as a member of the AP team that chronicled his impeachment, documented daily the surreal forward march of White House life throughout that scandal.
Ms. Sobieraj, 33, joined the AP in July 1994 when she was assigned to Washington metro crime and politics. Her background on Capitol Hill (she was a legislative aide and speechwriter to Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., from June 1989 until July 1993) won her a spot on the Washington AP's national team after Newt Gingrich's GOP revolution. She covered Congress for six months before being assigned to the 1996 presidential campaign. Bouncing from Phil Gramm to Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan, Sobieraj finished out that year on Bob Dole's campaign plane.
Born in Washington, D.C., Ms. Sobieraj received a bachelor's degree in politics, with a certificate in Latin American studies, from Princeton University. Stanford University awarded her a Master's degree in journalism in June 1994.
She currently covers President Bush at the White House.
I guess Spike found a "useful idiot" for his one-man hate show.
Unfortunately, Spike also seems as competent with the English language as he is with a camera. Go back to Lil' Penny. You hit your stride there.
Al Goron could never be an Alpha male. (even if Tipper let him!)
Here's a "HOT" button you can push Donna "African-American" Brazile..........
"A hyphenated American is not an American at all.
This is just as true of the man who puts 'Native' before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or French before the hyphen.
Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.
Our allegiance must be purely to the United States.
We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance."
Theodore Roosevelt... 1915
You got that right brother.
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