dirty hook, no bait
Feb. 15th, 2014 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni just finished watching rick rowley's dirty wars, part of this year's fine selection of oscar bait. it's about america's covert no-longer-called-the global war on terror™. despite my sympathy for the subject -- the apparent lack of congressional supervision over the military -- skip it.
i think rowley ended up with about a half-hour of good documentary film on the subject, but felt obliged to stretch it to an hour and half by making jeremy scahill, an investigative reporter, the subject. mr. scahill co-wrote the movie, which may have something to do with that. scahill did break one of the stories the movie is supposedly about -- a botched JSOC raid in gardez, afghanistan -- but the movie seems to be mostly a long advertisement for him: the tenacious investigative reporter, haunted by what he's seen.
beyond that, rowley breaks the fundamental rule of story-telling: show, don't tell. i really have no interest in hearing scahill intone, "after X, i knew there was [more to this story|something hidden in the shadows|ObClichedPhrase]" repeatedly. i wanna see more stuff about the war. rowley and scahill interview a bunch of interesting people -- anwar al-awlaki's dad(!), a senator, and a handful of ex military guys, but there's more of scahill being deep and haunted than any of them, and likely a bunch of them put together.
even getting senator whatshisname to repeatedly ask his (unseen) handlers if something is classified, and having him say "i can't talk about that" into the camera is more interesting. had rowley kept up with that, it would have made an excellent motif for the movie: the obama administration doesn't want you, the people, to know the answers to the ugly questions about the war. (how many innocent people have we killed? why did we kill anwar al-awlaki's son a couple of days after whacking daddy? (yes, that's a buried lede; strange the movie didn't make more of it.))
even more so that dror moreh, who lets too many interesting questions remain unasked in the gatekeepers, rowley and/or scahill seem to be unable to seize any number of moments to make a great documentary, by asking a key question that just might get somebody talking. too many big ones seem to get away, and so we just get a couple of heavily-battered fish sticks rather than something more meaty.
i think rowley ended up with about a half-hour of good documentary film on the subject, but felt obliged to stretch it to an hour and half by making jeremy scahill, an investigative reporter, the subject. mr. scahill co-wrote the movie, which may have something to do with that. scahill did break one of the stories the movie is supposedly about -- a botched JSOC raid in gardez, afghanistan -- but the movie seems to be mostly a long advertisement for him: the tenacious investigative reporter, haunted by what he's seen.
beyond that, rowley breaks the fundamental rule of story-telling: show, don't tell. i really have no interest in hearing scahill intone, "after X, i knew there was [more to this story|something hidden in the shadows|ObClichedPhrase]" repeatedly. i wanna see more stuff about the war. rowley and scahill interview a bunch of interesting people -- anwar al-awlaki's dad(!), a senator, and a handful of ex military guys, but there's more of scahill being deep and haunted than any of them, and likely a bunch of them put together.
even getting senator whatshisname to repeatedly ask his (unseen) handlers if something is classified, and having him say "i can't talk about that" into the camera is more interesting. had rowley kept up with that, it would have made an excellent motif for the movie: the obama administration doesn't want you, the people, to know the answers to the ugly questions about the war. (how many innocent people have we killed? why did we kill anwar al-awlaki's son a couple of days after whacking daddy? (yes, that's a buried lede; strange the movie didn't make more of it.))
even more so that dror moreh, who lets too many interesting questions remain unasked in the gatekeepers, rowley and/or scahill seem to be unable to seize any number of moments to make a great documentary, by asking a key question that just might get somebody talking. too many big ones seem to get away, and so we just get a couple of heavily-battered fish sticks rather than something more meaty.