Films that portray the way in which ordinary people have a right to choose public policies and can bring about political change by making officeholders accountable to the people.
Peter Weir’s continuing effort to inspire filmviewers to reflect on the stupid mistakes committed by those in power has hit the jackpot again. Whereas his Gallipoli questioned why Britain used soldiers as cannon fodder, and his Dead Poets Society depicted the cruelties of authoritarianism and antisemitism, The Truman Show tells us about the most frightening […]
Mike Nichols’s Primary Colors develops the same theme as Wag the Dog—a president’s campaign is in jeopardy, so political advisers invoke various measures of damage control. In Primary Colors, a Clintonesque candidate is confronted by sex scandals but manages to distract the public into believing that he deeply cares about human problems. Political advisers, including
Bruno Barreto’s Four Days in September is a retelling of events of 1969, when the American ambassador to Brazil was kidnapped by youthful, idealistic “Marxist” guerrillas seeking to free their comrades from detention and torture by the dictatorship ruling the country. Though the words of the ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick, we learn how a career
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Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog has been nominated for best film in 1998 promoting the need for greater democracy. Similar to Catch 22, the film plays out a plausible scenario to an absurd conclusion. In this case, a presidential candidacy wanes, provoking the incumbent to launch an external war in order to boost his re-election