a review of

"nobody wanted to know that the united states was the bad guy..." yeah woah, holy hell. i wanna get something out of the way. i do not think i like laura poitras. i am not convinced she follows an ethic i agree with. but hey, maybe you have to cross lines to get "good stories". then you have to ask yourself, how far can i let my ethics slide until i'm doing stuff similar to the people i'm documenting. i'm certainly not saying poitras is a villain, but i hope she studies consent and moves forward in life in a more respectful way. much like in "the oath", the middle section here is trying to tell a story more about our human subject than the events he reported on. we watch her repeatedly try to force seymour to out his sources. she's a documentary maker...that is close enough to journalism to know better. (fuck, i'm not a journalist or a documentary film maker and i know better.) she knows that's dangerous for all parties involved...yet here she is, proudly doing it on camera. she thinks she's making a point about seymour's personality, but in reality she's just entering into the record her absolutely bullshit ethics. if you wanna be a journalist, you have to hold yourself to a high standard. the fact that american journalists have deviated so far from that standard (mostly in the name of capitalism) is why the profession is dead in this country. there are a few true american journalists left alive, but they are in the gross minority. poitras may fall technically outside the scope of true journalism, but her documentaries are journalistic, and i think at times purposefully masquerading as journalism. so yeah. higher ethic would be cool. that out of the way...this is absolutely captivating in the most horrible way. the problem with america, and the reason our democratic experiment is coming to an end, is that the side that is supposedly resisting fascism does not truly understand the fight. the problem is all the white liberals carrying american flags at anti-trump rallies. the american flag is donald trump. the american flag stands for evil and violence, and always has. the stories in this documentary are horrific. i wasn't alive to live through them, so this was an incredible series of stories to be exposed to. how many stories of the same magnitude happened during the initial genocide that founded this country? hundreds? thousands? how many more untold atrocities happened in vietnam? hundreds? thousands? iraq? afghanistan? palestine? anyone shocked that the us would do stuff like this is, quite literally, part of the problem. these atrocities are the norm. the fact that we don't hear about them more often is because you literally risk your life to leak or report stuff of this level against the united states government. seymour hersh is incredibly brave. that is what a patriot looks like. i assume it would be very hard to start a career like his at this point in history. i just have a big big hunch that if he got started fifty years later in his career, they would have disappeared him without a second thought. there are people in america doing stuff kinda like this, but...not really. sadly, not really. if journalists (and people in general) still had the courage and fortitude this man carried himself with, we would not be in this mess. absolutely incredible film. the middle interlude, very, very hard to watch. basically one star for about twenty minutes. the main story here about seymour and the stories he broke is incredible.