Obama Documentary: Catnip for Liberals
Will new film show much beyond the candidate looking classy and hopeful?
AP
Early word on the upcoming doc suggests it's no hatchet job.
Rejoice, Obamaphiles, because soon you will have a documentary to watch about your hero, the man who hosts beer summits out in his back yard.
A crew for the documentary film "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama" followed around the future president from his Senate days in May 2006 all the way through last month.
With all that footage in the can, you'd think they'd find some pretty awful or embarrassing stuff to share -- but no, instead of a gritty expose they came out with "a document of the internal reality of the movement," according to its producer, the very Serious Hollywood Liberal Ed Norton.
This documentary isn't "The War Room," D.A. Pennebaker's 1993 documentary about the Clinton campaign that focused almost exclusively on George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. "By the People" is less expose and more historical record, capturing the campaign from start to finish and most often in a positive light.
"Our intent was never to try to make an expose per se," Norton said after the screening. "I think it was always to make a document of what the internal reality of the movement was."
Remember? That was the whole deal with the Obama candidacy, that hopey and changey thing, which was a "movement." Well, boo to that!
"The War Room" was a great documentary precisely because it focused on the base, venal, and extremely entertaining machinations of Stephanopoulos and Carville, two deadly effective political operatives. If this new doc doesn't show us anything but Candidate Obama staring pensively into the distance while Jon Favreau hammers out earnest line after earnest line about "this isn't about me, this is about you," then YUCK.
Sure, if the movie gets released on DVD it'll make a great stocking stuffer for that drippy cousin of yours who got his authentic Shepard Fairey poster framed and still sends money every time Mitch Stewart asks him to.
The rest of us -- or, those of us can still afford to have televisions and subscriptions to HBO by Fall -- can watch the thing when it premiers on November 3, and then never have to think about it again.
Part-time movie critic Sara K. Smith also writes for NBC and Wonkette.
Posted Friday, Jul 31, 2009 - 12:50 AM EST
