Sunday, July 11, 2004
Review du Jour: Control Room
Just got back from watching Jehane Noujaim's (she of "Startup.com" fame) new documentary, Control Room, which offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of Al-Jazeera. This was a movie that grabbed me at so many different levels -- as the level of someone who did some amount of journalism, at the level of someone who is a student of communications and propaganda and just at the level of someone who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning.
Though sympathetic to Al-Jazeera, it also portrays in Lt. Josh Rushing (the coalition's media man), the decent and human face of the United States military. The good thing about Al-Jazeera's reporters is that they make no bones about their biases (clearly they think the war is a disaster) unlike certain American reporters who insist that they're being "fair and balanced" when they're nothing but the government's propaganda machine. In fact, Lt Rushing, in a moment of candour admits that Al-Jazeera performs the same function in the Arab world that Faux News does in the U.S. They even touch upon an old debate on what objective reporting is supposed to mean and whether there exists such a thing.
The two highlights of the movie, for me, were the killing of the Al-Jazeera reporter by U.S. jets and the less exaggerated version of what actually transpired when Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down on April 9th (the moment that was supposed to symbolize the moment of Iraqi liberation). Though the rumour that the event may have been stage-managed has been doing the rounds of the blogging world for a long while, this is the first time one gets to see how much of a made-for-TV event it truly was.
The benefit of hindsight allows for some pretty funny moments (mostly unintentional) especially when Donald Rumsfeld holds forth on compassion, honesty, truth, prisoner abuse (this was before Abu-Ghraib) and so on. Everything coming out of Rumsfeld's mouth reminds one of the bit about living in glass houses and throwing stones.
All in all, I think this is a movie that "Fahrenheit 9/11" could have been, if only Mike Moore were a little more intellectually honest and wasn't as carried away as he is by his hatred of the Bush administration. I would definitely recommend "Control Room" to just about everyone (including fans of Team Bush) and if you don't believe me, check the critic's ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. It has an unbelieveable 97% freshness rating.
Though sympathetic to Al-Jazeera, it also portrays in Lt. Josh Rushing (the coalition's media man), the decent and human face of the United States military. The good thing about Al-Jazeera's reporters is that they make no bones about their biases (clearly they think the war is a disaster) unlike certain American reporters who insist that they're being "fair and balanced" when they're nothing but the government's propaganda machine. In fact, Lt Rushing, in a moment of candour admits that Al-Jazeera performs the same function in the Arab world that Faux News does in the U.S. They even touch upon an old debate on what objective reporting is supposed to mean and whether there exists such a thing.
The two highlights of the movie, for me, were the killing of the Al-Jazeera reporter by U.S. jets and the less exaggerated version of what actually transpired when Saddam Hussein's statue was pulled down on April 9th (the moment that was supposed to symbolize the moment of Iraqi liberation). Though the rumour that the event may have been stage-managed has been doing the rounds of the blogging world for a long while, this is the first time one gets to see how much of a made-for-TV event it truly was.
The benefit of hindsight allows for some pretty funny moments (mostly unintentional) especially when Donald Rumsfeld holds forth on compassion, honesty, truth, prisoner abuse (this was before Abu-Ghraib) and so on. Everything coming out of Rumsfeld's mouth reminds one of the bit about living in glass houses and throwing stones.
All in all, I think this is a movie that "Fahrenheit 9/11" could have been, if only Mike Moore were a little more intellectually honest and wasn't as carried away as he is by his hatred of the Bush administration. I would definitely recommend "Control Room" to just about everyone (including fans of Team Bush) and if you don't believe me, check the critic's ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. It has an unbelieveable 97% freshness rating.
