So what do you DEMS/LIBS think of this movie? Let's see how hypocritical you really are! Especially after some of your comments concerning the CBS 9-11 TV clip tonight. There are two articles posted.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,213289,00.html
Bush 'Death' Film: Placing a Target on the President?
I’m guessing there are a couple of things Americans, no matter what their party affiliation or political ideology, really don't want to see in a movie. One would be the assassination of a sitting American president, and the other would be a black man getting pinned for his murder just to make a point about anti-Arab sentiment since Sept. 11.
But that hasn’t stopped British filmmaker Gabriel Range and his team from Film Four in Great Britain. Their film, “Death of a President,” which will air on television tomorrow night in the UK, was such a hot ticket last night in Toronto that publicists at the Paramount theater had to make a human chain to block out gate crashers. Weeks of hype had caused a frenzy, and there was talk of scalped tickets.
But as one potential distributor said to me as we went in, “What if it’s bad?” Whoops! We never thought of that, did we? Film Four makes very good documentaries in Britain, so the assumption was that there would be merit to this controversial film.
Maybe it’s me, folks. Maybe I’m not hip enough for “Death of a President.” I know there’s a point to this thing. As the writer and director said during the Q&A after the screening, they wanted to show our “rush to judgment” and how Arabs have been treated in the U.S. since the World Trade Center disaster. But this really sounds to me like stuff people who don’t live in New York and didn’t actually experience Sept. 11 might say from a safe distance.
In “Death of a President,” George W. Bush is murdered after making a speech in Chicago on Oct. 19, 2007. Outside the Sheraton Hotel there are massive, violent demonstrations that recall the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago more than anything of recent times.
The president’s motorcade is stopped by unruly protesters; the police don riot gear and use tear gas. It’s a bad scene, as the faux Secret Service agent who was protecting Bush recalls during the mockumentary part of the film.
I will cut to the chase. After Bush is killed and Dick Cheney becomes president, it takes about seven months for law enforcement to arrest a Syrian-American for the assassination. He’s tried and convicted. In the meantime, we meet a black soldier recently returned from Iraq. He is initially suspected but later dismissed. Then it turns out his brother died in the war, and their distraught father has killed himself because of it. The soldier goes through his father’s things and realizes that his grieving dad was Bush’s real killer. He held the president responsible for his son’s death.
There weren’t many African-Americans at last night’s screening, but I do suspect that the many people who fled the theater during the closing credits were Americans of all colors. When the lights went up, it was mostly people with foreign accents and a few Americans in the film business. There was no applause when the film ended, but there was a little clapping when the credits ended.
To compound things, security guards picked a fight with my friend Baz Bamigboye, the film critic for London’s Daily Mail, when he attempted to use his tape recorder for backup on note-taking during the Q&A. This resulted in a skirmish with nasty security guards in the theater who’d been patrolling the aisles during the screening looking for people with film cameras. I mean, what fun!
Rather than be ejected, we immediately appealed to the people who’d taken the stage: the filmmakers, as well as Noah Cowan, head of the Toronto Film Festival.
“They’re going to throw us out for taping the press conference,” this reporter said loudly, to which Cowan replied: “This isn’t a press conference.”
He was no help, whatsoever. Luckily, the filmmakers said they didn’t mind and the guards backed off, but the whole thing was very weird.
The filmmakers did say they went to Chicago twice and filmed President Bush — unbeknownst to him. This sort of makes their film a version of Steve Martin’s “Bowfinger” more than a documentary. They say they told the Chicago Police Department they were making a documentary, but never said it was about the assassination of President Bush.
Range and his crew manipulated the footage of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to make them into characters in their film. One woman in the audience raised her hand during the Q&A and made an interesting statement. She said: “It’s amazing how simple it is to make people seem like they’re saying things they’re not.”
The director, thinking at first this was a compliment, then realizing maybe it wasn’t, replied: “It’s not as simple as you think. It took us months.”
There are some big questions that have to be answered about this movie. One, will it give some crazy person the idea to go out and try to kill the president? I don’t know, maybe. I think there’s something tasteless about showing a sitting president in this light, whether you like him or not. The producers of the film told me they thought Bush looked sympathetic here, but I didn’t see that.
Their intention is to show him hoisted by his own petard, as it were; the ultimate victim of his Patriot Act. This doesn’t quite work, since “Death of a President” simply turns into a laborious episode of “CSI” rather than expanding the premise so we can see America post-Bush.
And then the revelation that Bush has been killed not by the Syrian but by an African-American seems like the companion statement to the new “Survivor” series — also produced by a Brit.
There’s a feeling of insensitivity here. For me, it overrode any sense of fair play. President Bush is already roundly criticized and well-mocked — whether it’s for his policies or his personal comportment — in the press, on comedy shows and in protests. “Death of a President” goes one step further and paints a target on his back.
The producers say they couldn’t make their character a fictional president because they wanted the movie to feel “current.” But by using Bush, they undercut their own point. Is it the act of profiling they want to expose, or is it really just Bush they want to annihilate?
That’s what potential distributors will have to think about before more Americans get to see “Death of a President” in the movie theaters.
http://www.variety.com/VR1117949855.html
TORONTO -- "Death of a President" seemed to cause more of a stir before its world premiere on Sunday night at the Toronto International Film Festival than afterwards.
Styled as a "retrospective documentary," in the words of helmer Gabriel Range, the fictional pic resembled more than anything the multitude of Sept. 11 docs crowding cable channels in recent weeks, except in this case the national tragedy is the assassination of President George W. Bush on October 19, 2007.
While the graphic image released to promote the film, a photo doctored to look like the scene of Bush's death whipped up worldwide controversy, the portrayal of the shooting lasts only a few frames of video footage. Bush is seen from behind doubling over after a few gun shots that sound in the film like muted pops.
Though a dozen TV news crews showed up outside the theater, including a Fox News satellite truck that had been parked there since the morning, and more than a hundred people were turned away, the doc was greeted with only tepid applause by the aud and many left before Range and his co-scribe Simon Finch came to the front began a Q&A session.
The resemblance of the pic to Sept. 11 docs -- talking head interviews overlayed with archival news footage, some doctored in this case -- is perhaps not unintentional, as Grange said afterward, he was originally inspired to by his experiences living in New York shortly after the World Trade Center attacks.
"I was struck by the very profound ways the country seemed to be changing."
Pic begins on the day that Bush is assassinated, follows through the forensic investigation of the crime scene, several suspects who turn out to be innocent, the ascension of President Dick Cheney and the ultimate discovery of the true assassin: an African American veteran of the first Gulf War who is distraught when his son is killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
Driving home the pic's connection to Sept. 11 is its opening words, spoken in Arabic by a woman who turns out to be the wife of the Syrian man who is wrongly convicted for the murder: "When I saw what the terrorists did on 9/11, I cried." She later explains that she feared the repercussions for Muslims living in the U.S.
Story picks up with Bush arriving in Chicago to give a speech to business leaders on economic growth. A White House speechwriter says that despite the impact of high oil prices and the continuing war in Iraq, "As always he was confident our policies were correct -- it was just a matter of time."
Outside the Sheraton where Bush gives his speech, 12,000 angry protesters have gathered and law enforcement is concerned for his safety.
One of the initial dead-end suspects is a protest leader who later declares of Bush in the pic, "If you believe in the death penalty, he was a candidate. He had caused over 100,000 deaths and had he been tried in a war crime tribunal, he would have been a candidate."
From his perspective, White House policy only gets worse when the 44th President of the United States Dick Cheney is sworn in and briefly tries to get Congress to invade Syria after a Syrian IT worker emerges as the leading suspect. Instead, Cheney settles for a further expanded Patriot Act, which is used to convict and send to death row the Syrian man seven months after the assassination.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi vet from a military family comes forward to try to convince the world that his father, who committed suicide after Bush's death following the death of his other son in Iraq. The note he leaves behind reads, "Everything I've raised you to stand for has turned bad. There's no honor in standing for an immoral country. George Bush killed our David and I can't forgive him."
The report is dismissed and the Syrian immigrant is convicted. But even after documents in the vet's belongings prove he was the true assassin, the Syrian remains in prison on trumped charges of ties to Al Qaeda.
Talking about how the pain caused by the assassination, the wife says late in the doc, "When that gun was in your hand, how couldn't you think about the consequences of your actions?"
After the screening, Range said he did not intend the doc as a call to murder President Bush. "I hope we portray the horror of assassination," he said. "I don't think anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film."
Pre-screening hype had made the preem the hottest ticket in Toronto. Outside the theater, the first person in the "rush line," University Toronto student Christopher Stumm, said he had been waiting seven hours for a chance to get in. "The subject is interesting and more controversial, and the film is not coming out in cinemas." His friend waiting with him, Jon Barron, also a college student, said he didn't personally want Bush dead, but added, "I’m sure tons of people want to see this happen."
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Originally Posted by JAAgan
