Still works

All the Presidents Men




Kids hadn't seen it yet & with all the WikiLeaks and whistleblowing in the air, I thought it would be topical.

This movie still works, the story still captivates. Corruption, deceit, dirty tricks at the highest levels of American government. Still shocking if you just let yourself sit with the story and consider the types of people we elect to run our countries.

Depending on how much American history you've studied with the kids, you may need to do a quick review of the characters & timeline just to get folks up to speed. It's a pretty slow, in your head type of movie. Mostly it's just guys with big hair sitting around typewriters, dialing for 10 painstaking seconds on rotary phones, and scratching their heads about how all this adds up. Oh yeah, there's swearing - so if your kids fall over when someone says fuck, that might be amusing for them. There's not a lot of visual action and I suspect younger than 10-12 yo will tune right out, unless they've been raised on machiavellian radio plays, but older than that should be able to handle it. Sit on them if you have to & hiss "our leaders are sometimes conniving, immoral creatures. You need to know this!"

You know what else is shocking? The journalism. We rarely see real journalism any more. Most news stories are cut & pasted press releases from government and corporate PR drones. What seems to pass for analysis is a reporter questioning a few party hacks and corporate shills who proceed to regurgitate the same press releases in strident tones.

One recent exception is The Washington Post's (there they go again) Top Secret America. The latest installment, Monitoring America, was published yesterday.

Speaking of whistleblowing, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked The Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War, defends WikiLeaks & Assange.

In other journalism news, Reporters Sans Frontières has begun to mirror WikiLeaks .


Now for happier movies ~ Lee McKenzie (whom I've met! I get to hobnob with such wonderful authors in RWA!) asked her readers about favourite movies for the holidays.  It's a fun list & I added my own suggestion in the comments: Anne of Green Gables. Always puts me in a good mood & I try to watch &/or read it each year during the holidays.

Will you be watching anything special over the holidays?

p.s. I've had to go back & fix some of the links. Hope they work. It doesn't help that I have adblocker on my browser & it never shows my my amazon image links anyway.....