Three sections, three acts, and one thread to bind them, yes.
And immediately what a fella realizes is that Brian Standing is a fine individual, these are fine points, these are fine arguments, and look at those posters siftin pass the vision-glands, beautiful tapestries of manipulation and ideological bullying.
Is all this enough to carry a film, a slab of cinematographic something?
No sense worrying just yet, not when we're flung kidney-deep into A Brief History Of It All, of the form, yes, of the motives.
This first third, it's got a hell of a task ahead of itself, it wants to lead us all the way from WW1 to last week in Iraq in less time than it takes for an episode of The Simpsons to run its course, with the adverts removed and those hideous "Sponsored by Dominos Pizzas" things that bookend it here in the United UK flung to the fires of memory.
What Standing does, though, is rather than offer a chronological run-down at the kinda pace would break a man's spine in five, he gets all Goddard with regards the A, B, C, yes, he talks about those anti-Hun works at the same time as he'll discuss that footage of Hussein's statue being dragged cross the streets of Iraq.
And so the parallels, the constants in the whole affair, they slap a man cross the yap every couple frames.
Except he won't discuss them, Brian Standing, no, it's the talking heads, the talking heads pointing out the misrepresentation and the doublespeak from then to now, Same As It Ever Was, indeed.
Who are these talking heads, who are these faces bobbing back and fourth in front my very teeth?
There ain't a lot of them, and that might well be Problem A, if we're gonna lay these things cross the tables and examine the fuckers at length.
Two of them are responsible for Weapons Of Mass Distraction, a book that wanders cross the same planes Standing explores in this first third, and also, far as I'm aware, became a documentary in its own right.
And problem B; No-one interviewed for the flick has any sort of dissenting opinion whatsoever, as in, dissenting from the dissenters, you understand.
So the irony of it all, of this first chunk a screentime, yes. That this film exploring the intricacies and evils of propaganda does, in fact, become nigh-on propagandist itself. A man can't help but scratch the head-plates when an individual onscreen is advising us not to accept the words of a few folks as gospel truth, you understand, and the next speaker says the same thing, and then back to the first, and a third who'll agree with the earlier folks.
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
This review contains what might be known as a brilliant observation, if a fella were so inclined to quantify observations. Phillip finds himself nodding his noggin with great enthusiasm at the realization that many films expressing a dissenting opinion rely most heavily on the idea of skepticism, and yet don't themselves necessarily hold up under the fine standard of skepticism they're asking a fella to employ.
It's ironic, is what!
2 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Thank you Phillip! yeah, that right there is the central irony, maybe, in, if not all, then at least a large proportion of these typsea documentaries. Which is not to say i don't support the sentiments at least 97%, but still, you'd hope that folks take it upon themselves to examine the information afterwards. Most likely that's the point of the damn things. to get folks to think.