The unlimited checkbook. That’s how Big Tobacco wins every time on everything, they spend you to death. Six hundred million a year in outside legal – Chadbourne-Park, uh, Ken Starr’s firm, Kirkland & Ellis? Listen: GM and Ford, they get nailed after eleven or twelve pickups blow up, right? These clowns have never, I mean EVER…
Why it’s a left-wing film
Once again, like “A Civil Action,” we’re presented with a left-wing film using the cover of a true story to further an overall message. And once again I’m not going waste time and energy digging into the weeds of arguing for or against the facts of this particular “true story.” So let’s stipulate the story is true and get to the bigger issue: The True Stories Left-Wing Hollywood Chooses to Tell. But first, my own biases up front…
Believe it or not, I don’t hate Hollywood. People think I do and I take complete ownership of that misconception but my feelings towards today’s movie industry are something more along the lines of the parent of a bad seed. I love Hollywood, wish it would do better (both morally and creatively), forever hope it will, and for my troubles am constantly getting my heart broken. Also, to their credit, on the field of political battle, Hollywood is at least something of an honest broker. Like Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, and the Huffington Post, leftists in Hollywood make little to no attempt to disguise their agenda. Yes, it’s unfortunate that too often they stand against good, but they’re also fairly upfront in presenting themselves as who and what they really are. On the other hand, there’s the left-wing media…
As far as the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Jon Stewart, the broadcast networks, the wires, and sites like Mediaite, etc… Well, let me put it this way, the only way I’d piss on any of them is if they weren’t on fire. Yes, on a human level there are no doubt some genuinely nice people who work within these completely corrupted institutions, but as a whole they are committed leftists willfully lying and manipulating the truth to further an agenda and most unforgivably, doing so under the guise of sanctimonious elites who puff themselves up as pillars of objectivity.
There just isn’t a corner of Hell hot enough to stack the legacy of the whole bunch.
On the other hand, there’s a redeeming quality in the person of an Oliver Stone and those like him who say “I’m a Leftist and this is what I believe.” By contrast, there’s absolutely nothing redeeming about Jon Stewart and Katie Couric and those who say, “I will tell you what the truth is.” Would I press the red button that would make them all disappear forever? No. But I would stroke it as though it were a cat and I were the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
Where was I?
The hero of “The Insider” is real-life, left-wing journalist Lowell Bergman (portrayed by Al Pacino and his rooster hair) and he is presented to us in the way Hollywood always presents left-wing journalists, as a crusading truth-teller who oozes integrity, is incapable of lying, and who only runs into trouble when he stands too firm upon noble principles. Maybe that’s true about Bergman and maybe that is exactly the case surrounding “The Insider’s” story of a whistleblower tobacco executive and the reluctance of CBS to air his story on “60 Minutes” for fear of how the threat of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit could upset the impending sale of the network to Westinghouse. I don’t know and more importantly, I don’t care.
What I do know is that the only time Hollywood criticizes the news media is when they’re not liberal enough, when they’re not anti-American, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-business, and anti-war enough. Which, of course, is the least of the media’s problems, much less “60 Minutes’.”
Where’s the film on RatherGate? Talk about a rise and fall story. Where’s the film on the fallout from Walter Cronkite’s decision to abuse his position and turn against the Vietnam War? Better still, where’s the film laying out how the Tet Offensive was completely mischaracterized by the entire media which ultimately resulted in the massacre of a few million innocents in Southeast Asia ?
Good grief, Walter Duranty anyone? How about the fall of ACORN?
There are so many scandals involving the American media’s malicious liberal bias and sins of omission that contain all the human drama and history you could ask for in a great film, and yet all we get from Hollywood are cherry-picked representations like “Good Night and Good Luck,” and “All the President’s Men” that venerate liberal journalist chasing conservative politicians or “Shattered Glass” that are meant to show us just how ethical and trustworthy a liberal institution like the Nation is or “The Insider” that laughably tries to tell us journalism isn’t liberal enough.
Michael Mann’s film hits every left-wing sweet spot there is: Big Evil Tobacco, corporate evildoers threatening a brave whistleblower and his family, the left’s latest straw man about corporate influence on the same media that’s currently more biased in favor of the left than ever before, and the bottomless integrity of those old-time, left-wing muckrakers.
Context is the left’s Kryptonite, which is why “The insider” (and Hollywood) views and delivers the story of the American media through a soda straw.
Finally, watching the same Leftists who are in favor of schools handing out condoms, free needle exchanges, sex education for grade schoolers, legalized marijuana, abortion on demand (without parental consent), and euthanasia rail against cigarettes is always good for a laugh.
Why it’s a great film
One of the failures of the absolute junk Hollywood’s creating in an effort to undermine the War on Terror, artistically embarrassing stuff like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs,” “A Mighty Heart,” and the dozen or so others that brightened al Qaeda’s day, is that rather than focus on a universal theme everyone can relate to, they instead focus on the agenda. The result of this will always be the same, a laughably bad, spell-breaking heavy-handedness that manages to drive away even those moviegoers sympathetic to the message. Never forget that there were more than enough Bush-haters in America to make every one of those flops a major hit.
Michael Mann, however, is way too gifted of a filmmaker to ever fall into that trap and so the story he tells is one that focuses primarily on the timeless theme of finding the courage to tell the truth when the cost is so personally high no one could blame you for not doing so. Bergman (Pacino) has one of the greatest jobs in his chosen profession to lose. His whistleblower, former tobacco executive Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), has a nice severance, a home, a family in need of medical benefits, and the perfect Get Out Of Telling The Truth Card known as a non-disclosure agreement.
Neither man will profit from telling the truth. In fact, both have everything to lose, especially Wigand who believes his life and family are in real danger. And yet, in the end, both men selflessly and admirably do the right thing. On the flip side, though, there’s Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) and Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall), two giants of the news business who, for lack of a better term, sell their souls for their own selfish reasons.
“The Insider” isn’t a political tale, it’s a morality tale. And a damn good one.
Well shot, well scripted, beautifully acted, and perfectly structured, “The Insider” not only takes you inside the fascinating world of high-stakes television journalism for a thorough tour of all the sausage-making, it also wraps its agenda in the simple idea of a complicated moral dilemma and shows us how the story’s characters react to it.
As someone who freakin’ hates the MSM and who sees the left’s war on smoking as just another assault against personal liberty, Michael Mann still manages to manipulate me to his side. And because I really do love Hollywood, I admire that when I should probably resent it.
What’s not on the list:
Fort Apache the Bronx (1981) — Good film but not terribly partisan.
There Will Be Blood (2007) — Good performances, beautifully filmed, and a first and second act that mesmerize. The third act, unfortunately, falters. Too dark, too unrelentingly ugly, too self-conscious in its symbolism, and ultimately this all ends up being surprisingly boring. In the end we have no protagonist, no one to root for. And once we stop caring about the characters we’re watching, there’s really no story left to tell. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t sit through two hours in the hopes of a final confrontation between big business and organized religion.