'Control Room' - the movie-documentary

[peacetalksforall]

If you live in any city or town where this might be shown - go see it. The Control Room is about the Al Jazeera head office, manager, journalists, snips of footage, opinions, and U.S. press handlers.

The other day I said that I thought Al Jazeera was a right wing facilitator. I don't know what to believe anymore. I think, though, that I was wrong. They couldn't have faked this movie.

There are many reasons to see it - behind the scenes coverage and many interviews presented with humor and pathos. The most eye-opening for me was the bombing of the building where Al Jazeera was located in Baghdad (remember that?) - where, in the documentary, they have previously shown several interviews whereth Rumsfeld rants and raves against Al Jazeera. They (neo-cons-gons) didn't want any coverage in Baghdad that wasn't imbedded and not taking our word for what was happening (Al Jazeera wasn't, it appears).

Excellently done. Go see it.

Sorry if the movie has already been discussed here.

I feel so sorry for the U.S. press people who have to spin and lie and handle the mishandled humanity/inhumanity. They should just own up.


Please kick, if you can, so that the word can go out about this movie-documentary. For 'balance'.

Has anyone else seen it?

[jeff30997]

1. Sounds interesting!

[anarchy1999]

2. see this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1783355

Plenty there already. Definitely a film to be seen and as important as MM's.

[alarcojon]

3. Saw it in Minneapolis

at the Uptown. It's only there for a week, I believe. Very good movie.There was a story about the American soldier featured in the film at Salon:

There's a moment a half-hour into "Control Room," Jehane Noujaim's widely acclaimed new documentary about the Arab news channel Al Jazeera and media coverage of the war with Iraq, when U.S. press officer Lt. Josh Rushing discusses his reaction to the brutal images of captured and killed American soldiers that Al Jazeera chose to broadcast in March 2003 -- to the condemnation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"The night they showed the POWs and dead soldiers ... it was powerful, because Americans won't show those kinds of images," Rushing says. "It made me sick to my stomach." The viewer then expects him to proceed in the same vein of patriotic rhetoric he's been using up to this point in the film -- he is, after all, a Marine -- but instead what follows is an unexpected, and profoundly moving, observation.

The previous night, Al Jazeera had shown similarly graphic images of Iraqis killed during a bombing in Basra, and Rushing calls them "equally if not more horrifying." At the time, though, he admits they hadn't bothered him as much. "I just saw people on the other side," Rushing says, "and those people in the Al Jazeera offices must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war."

Rushing comes across as a sympathetic character in the movie -- earnest and thoughtful, a patriot and a skeptic -- with shrewd observations about partisan media coverage (Al Jazeera and Fox) and the failure of U.S. media to fully explain what is happening in the Middle East. But now the Pentagon has silenced Rushing, 31, ordering him not to comment on the movie. And as a result, the 14-year career military man, recently promoted to captain, plans to leave the Marines, his wife told Salon in an interview Thursday.

http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/06/04/control_room/

[not systems]

4. Saw it last night. It is a must see...

Rushing certainly suffered from a level of natural human emotion
and empathy with his fellow humans that make him unfit to defend
the Junta and it's war crimes.

A lesser man is need for that job like Kimmet.

The overall optimism in the face of powerlessness the people
in that movie showed was heroic.

It is a very good reminder that 13 month ago Bush declared
"Mission Accomplished" when the only thing he had accomplished
was buying the US a giant shit sandwich for the price of a few lies,
200 billion dollars and thousands and thousands of dead people.