Posted by
Michael on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 9:15:23 PM
This may surprise those reading this blog, but I do not by any means object to the creation of
Death of a President, a fake documentary portraying the 2007 assasination of President Bush. I'm intrigued by the idea of the film and find it pretty creative.
Also, I almost always find it disgusting when a film, book or other work of expression is called upon to be censored. I don't stick to defending those films I agree with. If someone believes that FDR had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, that the Holocaust didn't happen, that JFK's assasination was ordered by George H.W. Bush or that the second plane that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 was being followed by an F-16 (as Michael Moore himself claimed after the attack), they have the right to say it.
So to those who think this film shouldn't be allowed to play in American theaters, can it. It should be. Like any work of art, it's fair to criticize. It's not fair to censor.
Wall Street Journal today has a
review for the film:TORONTO -- The first question posed by "Death of a
President" is whether a filmmaker has the right to shout Assassination
in a crowded theater. That's what happened, in effect, on Sunday night
at the Toronto International Film Festival when Gabriel Range's film
was screened for the first time, to a turnaway audience. A fake
documentary set one year in the future, "D.O.A.P.," as it has also been
called, depicts the assassination of President Bush by a lone gunman,
and the prosecutorial rush to judgment that follows.
The answer to the question is yes, of course a
filmmaker has the right. A distinction must be made between provoking
controversy with obviously fictional, albeit incendiary, events, and
provoking panic over a nonexistent fire. What's more, Mr. Range, an
Englishman with an uncommon gift for simulating reality on screen,
plays a clever game with his audience, inviting a rush to judgment on
the merits of his film. I confess to having done just that -- jumped to
the conclusion, sight unseen, that nothing the film might contain would
be likely to justify the implicit opportunism of its premise. Now that
I've seen it, I think that sometimes one jumps to the right conclusion.