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Reviews
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
Unbalanced and frustrating
Clearly a movie targeted at people who are already familiar with and sympathetic to Chomsky's theories. Chomsky presents all sorts of ideas which deserve critical analysis and rebuttal but his detractors, when they show up in the film at all, are reduced to something less than sound bites. Tom Wolfe gets all of one sentence in and that's presented as a shot of an out-of-date television showing grainy footage of an old TV interview. This is typical of how his critics are presented throughout the film; in brief and at a distance.
And, boy, do his ideas beg for cross examination. For example, Chomsky seems to believe that if it weren't for active manipulation of the media the American people would have been much, much more aware of and concerned about the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. This isn't even stated outright; it's basically an assumption running throughout much of the first part of the film.
Chomsky also posits that professional sports are promoted as a way of distracting people from what's truly important. Oh? Is it really the case that folks who follow sporting events are less politically engaged than those who don't? Even if that was the case (and I doubt it), should we leap to the conclusion that some shadowy cabal is actively using this as a form of manipulation?
The film really presents almost no critique of these wild ideas. Not only are his critics reduced to blips but the film uses a series of oddball shots and editing techniques which seem designed to distract the audience. From what? Are Chomsky's theories so weak that they need to be sheltered in this way?
This movie isn't doing Chomsky any favors; it's too obviously one-sided to be seen as anything other than the propaganda that it is.
Finsterworld (2013)
Falls apart in the end
This is one of those movies where multiple characters weave and interconnect through multiple stories which all reach their dramatic conclusions in a burst of activity at the end of the film. Unfortunately whatever charms this movie has in its first half evaporate in the second, when the director tries to inject a false sense of dramatic weight by having almost every storyline devolve into meanness and tragedy. In the final quarter the movie piles on more and more contrived events and inexplicable reactions from the characters, glossing over the more glaring ones by stuffing them into a where-are-they-now montage at the very end. And even the first half relies a bit much on caricatures, such as the German couple who spend an inordinate amount of time discussing how much they loathe everything German while simultaneously reveling in the wealth Germany's economic might has bestowed on them. If you're really in the mood for this sort of thing go watch Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" instead.