On The Media did its program from China last week. A story on pitching brand China to the world took a fascinating tour of that nation’s emerging business, fashion and cultural media. Almost in passing, there came this important truth:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Publisher and blogger Hong Huang says that the deepest generational divide separates those born before 1980 and those born after, because of what they saw happening around them, and what they saw on TV.

HONG HUANG: If you want to know [LAUGHS] what contributed most to a peaceful evolution in China, it would be pirated DVD. From cartoons, from Disney to movies, it’s the only thing that broke the censorship barrier. I’m sorry Hollywood lost a lot of money about this, but just consider it a donation to democracy around the world.

Jack Benny was one of the 20th century’s most beloved comedians: a star of vaudeville, the golden age of radio, movies and television. He actually invented the situation comedy on radio. And he could milk a laugh by scanning (slowly turning and looking at) the audience — extending a laugh seconds longer than any other comedian. He helped pioneer 20th century comedy that was more attitude than just setup/joke setup/joke.

Mel Blanc was a comedian who became a legend in cartoons. He did the voices for most Warner Brothers cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Tweety, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig and more) and later on for Barney Rubble and Dino on The Flintstones.
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When people ask me, as a professional entertainer, who my favorite comedian or entertainer of all time is, they’re surprised by my reply: it’s Lou Costello, the chubby half of the classic Abbott & Costello comedy team.

They’re also surprised to hear me say I’m not talking about Costello as he appeared in the team’s films — but the Costello I watch (and study) on DVDs of the team’s filmed Abbott & Costello Show, a nutty situation comedy that inspired Jerry Seinfeld to create his show. And, especially, the Lou Costello as seen on DVDs in the old Colgate Comedy Hour shows where he and his parter performed live, a zillion things went wrong, and you wondered how Costello could keep the pace up without having a heart attack.

In fact, he died at age 52 of heart disease in 1959. But for students of comedy and aspiring comedians, he left a body of work that can still be studied and enjoyed.

Here’s one of the classic routines the team performed in burlesque, filmed and adapted for their TV show (so they could copyright and own it) — and one where Costello shines.

If you’re a young reader who is studying comedy and never really seen him, note here:
(1) His timing on his key lines.
(2) How he reacts to everything going on around him.
(3) His glances and comments to the audience and his enormous likability.
(4) The appearance of his partner Abbott (with the mustache) and, at the end, the appearance of the most unloved of the Three Stooges’ “Curley replacements,” Joe Besser as “Stinky,” an obnoxious brat (played by a grown man in ridiculous early 20th century kids clothing). Besser’s creation of the bratty kid is a classic.

This show comes from the collection noted below of remastered half hour Abbott & Costello Shows from the first of its two seasons.

Here’s another Guest film Review by Dan Schneider, who has this heavily-visited website and whose reviews for TMV have been highly popular.

DVD Review of Robot Monster

Copyright ©2007 by Dan Schneider

Ok, a DVD review is not exactly what this is. Yes, I watched the 1953 legendary schlock B sci fi film Robot Monster on a DVD, but since it was on one of those cheapo 50 movie DVD packs, there were no extras whatsoever- ok, there was a chapter selection. Yippee! But, given the level of the ‘art’ the film attains, is there anything wrong with going virtually featureless?

And, given that the 66 minute black and white film was originally shot in 3-D, who cares that it has nothing else to offer, save giving the English language such terms as psychotronic and calcinator death ray (which somehow turns the reality of the film into its own filmic negative)?

Robot Monster, which I’ve watched fifteen or more times in my life, is generally considered, along with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, to be one of the twin titans of the ’so bad it’s actually good, in a weird way’ genre of B sci fi film from the 1950s. While not as manifestly spoofable as Wood’s classic film, Robot Monster- directed by first-timer Phil Tucker in less than a week, and for under $20,000 (reputedly), does have the goofy title character- called a Ro-Man, portrayed as a thing either in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet and tv antenna attached to it, or a gorilla in a diving helmet.

The confusion is because, despite the gorilla costume, the few times we look dead on into the diving helmet we see only a misty visage, which almost seems skeletal.

That said, there are only two essential ways to take this film, in any semi-serious vein: 1) as a child’s dream (which it is, ala William Cameron Menzies’ film Invaders From Mars, released the same year), or 2) as a character study of a non-human coming to terms with the very humanity he aims to destroy. The first option is the exterior option of the film, and the second is the interior.

But, let me give a brief synopsis of the film, shot entirely in the famed Bronson Canyon, in California- home for hundreds of good and bad film and television shoots over the decades (Bonanza, anyone?). Its shooting location and the film score by Elmer Bernstein, who would later score The Ten Commandments and The Magnificent Seven (among many classics) are the most effective things in the film, aside from some horrifically funny pseudo-philosophy. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs guest voice posts from time to time. One of the most popular guest voices is Dan Schneider, who does guest reviews for us. TMV coblogger Shaun Mullen loved Ken Burns’ The War…but as you’ll see below, Dan Schneider had a different reaction and he tells you exactly why.

DVD Review Of Ken Burns’ The War

Copyright © by Dan Schneider

In regards to art, greatness is not merely a difference of scale, but a difference of kind, in that the elements that constitute greatness force an almost alchemical change in the nature of the beast. The brushstroke, wordly coinage, motion of the camera, or whatever it is that constitutes the given art, becomes more than the brushstroke, wordly coinage, or motion of the camera.

There seems to be an almost ineffable rise in the ability to invoke reaction from the art’s percipients, and while certainly not supernatural, the great art and the great artist is a cut above, even if the mechanism of the ascendancy is not immediately evident, even to the most astute critic.

This ideal was brought home to me while watching filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The War, co-directed by Lynn Novick, for Burns, despite his ability to often stumble into a great moment, seems not to fundamentally understand the mechanics nor elements that constitute greatness. This 15 plus hour film follows in the wake of three other monumental documentaries he has crafted in the last decade and a half: the magnificent The Civil War- whose only dramatic flaw was the melodramatic schmaltz historian Shelby Foote displayed for the Confederacy, the too long Baseball, and the somnolent Jazz. In between he has crafted some interesting shorter documentaries on subjects as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack Johnson, but his bread and butter has been the marquee ‘big doc.’

Burns has been plagued by years of controversies, both artistically and historically. His best film, The Civil War, which pioneered the Burnsian template of talking heads, melodramatic readings of personal letters, and slow scans of still photographs, accompanied by sometimes highly poetic words (and often purple prose), and swelling crescendos of music, was a triumph of art in a journalistic form.

Yet, even that artistically great film was dogged by numerous historical flaws- documented in Robert Brent Toplin’s book Ken Burn’s The Civil War: Historians Respond. Baseball was far too long, and too obsessed with the cult of personality, rather than the thing that made the game America’s pastime: its history, season by season, and its pennant races. Jazz was a snooze that hagiographized often obscure musicians, and the whole project was a bit too weighted down with Political Correctness.

Now, with the release of his fourth epic, more cracks in the Burnsian aura have shown through. Yes, it is a significant uptick from the downward trajectory of the last two epics, but The War still falls short of The Civil War, and by a longshot. This is because Burns does not seem to understand that content must impact form. Given that the talking heads of this film are the percipients of that event, and not historians, one would think that he might have edited out some of the more banal segments, where the oldsters tend to babble on about minutia- important in their minds, but utterly irrelevant to the neutral observer.

Also, by using actor and celebrity World War Two enthusiast Tom Hanks to read the written observations of a small town journalist, Burns commits another great error of judgment- namely that most of what the editor, and the other quoted letters and commentaries say, are simply not as well wrought nor as emotionally engaging as those culled from the Civil War archives. Moral: not all small town newspaper types are budding Ambrose Bierces.
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As a performer in my other incarnation, I study classic and contemporary comedians…and seem to keep coming back to one comic/tragic figure. It’s Lou Costello, the rolly-polly part of the famous Abbott and Costello comedy team that dominated radio and movies in the 40s, appeared on early TV, broke up in the mid-fifties and ended definitely in 1959. It’s because in March 1959 Costello died of heart disease at age 52.

But he’s still such a joy to watch and study — moreso in his filmed TV show…a show that Jerry Seinfeld says inspired his show “Seinfeld.” Or, you can study him and Bud Abbott performing “live” before early live TV audiences.

If you’re a student of comedy, watch Costello closely in this 8 minute clip from the first season of team’s TV show.
See how he looks at and connects to the audience. Note his timing. His incredible likeability. His charisma (he was actually the highly assertive member of the team) shines through. I keep watching him again and again because he left a legacy of still-wonderful comedic performances that you can collect on DVD:

The Moderate Voice runs guest voice columns from time to time by readers who don’t have their own sites or by people who want to contribute to the voices and perspectives offered to TMV’s ideologically and demographically diverse readership. This is in another one of the reviews by Dan Schneider, who has his own site HERE and whose reviews have been popular on TMV.

DVD Review Of A Certain Kind Of Death

Copyright 2007 © by Dan Schneider

Where would contemporary documentaries be without the Michael Moore style of self-promotional agitprop, or without PBS’s Burns Brothers’ solemnly historical talking heads and recitations form of docudrama? Well, back to straightforward journalistic techniques, of the sort employed in the outstanding 70 minute long 2003 documentary from directors Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh, A Certain Kind Of Death.

And no, this is not the exploitative pseudo-documentary style that was pioneered in camp classics like Faces Of Death nor Mondo Cane. Instead, the directors hew to the early style of Errol Morris, albeit even more starkly. Their technique- of emotional distancing, by having employees of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office simply tell how they do their jobs when dealing with kinless decedents, rather than telling how they feel, gives the audience an unbiased ‘in’ to the rather rote way municipalities deal with the hundreds of annual unclaimed dead- what used to be referred to as ‘going to potter’s field.’

The film follows the deaths of three single white middle-aged men in 2001. One is a 63 year old homosexual, Ronald Eugene Tanner, who seems to have died of complications from AIDS; another an obese drifter, Donald Wright, found in a motel, who either accidentally injured and killed himself, or was killed; and the third, Tommy Albertson, is a man who lived in a small roach-infested apartment and died on his bed.

The inurement and occasional humor displayed by the people who clean up after the dead bodies, sift through their belongings, research their lives, and try to find next of kin, is to be expected in government work (as I was once a civil servant), where the roteness of civil servitude even less interesting than this often holds sway, but especially when one has to deal with about 2000 such cases a year.

And when we see the bodies- naked, emotionless, with welts, bruises, or partly rotted and decomposed portions of their forms (these stiffs are called ‘decomps’ in the parlance), inurement seems a wholly reasonable approach one should take to such tasks, such as slinging the dead by their four limbs, like a shot deer (something I recall watching my own dead dad’s body enduring).

The film follows the three or four month process the county has to go through. We see that the first man, Tanner, ends up having oddly prepared his own death in detail, as well as those of his dead (from AIDS) lover and mother. His lover he even buried in a plot he bought for himself. We find out of his older brother’s suicide nearly forty years earlier, and of his inheriting some money from a relative and business associate, and then watch as a county drayage crew wraps up and notes his belongings, which are then sold at a county auction, with the money used to defray county costs.

The sight of the cleanliness of his apartment walls, where once hung his paintings is very moving, especially when the aging, likely from cigaret smoke, just beyond where the pictures hung is visible. It is a potent symbol of the dead man’s life. It, like the clean portions of the walls, is just an empty space, and soon the dirt of the rest of the wall (or society) will fill it in, as if it always never was anything else.

There’s little wonder that the filmmakers chose to focus the bulk of the film on his death’s tale. He simply recorded far more of his existence as a budding actor, and far more of his plans or death. We get to know more of him, and even come to like him for the care he displayed toward others, as revealed by the legal ramifications of his actions and the letters of kindness he stored, when others reciprocated his good will.

Wright and Albertson, by contrast, are much more enigmatic in their relatively ciphered deaths, and thus need the county strangers to decide their fates more, whereas Tanner’s preparations obviate others’ intercessions.
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When I received the screener of Cities of Light a documentary about Islamic Spain, it was also mentioned to me that if I wanted to ask questions to one of the producers, I could. After watching it - and writing the review published yesterday - I decided that I could not let this opportunity pass, so I send out an e-mail, got in contact with Michael Wolfe - executive producer of Cities of Light - and we did an interview. Meanwhile, do not forget to watch the documentary about Islamic Spain - tomorrow (Wednesday August 22nd), at 9PM on PBS.

MvdG: Where did the idea to make a documentary about Al-Andalus come from?
MW: We’re history buffs at Unity Productions. We’re always reading, constantly searching for great stories in the past that will make exciting films modern people can learn from.

MvdG: Why did the subject appeal to you?
MW: The true story of an Islamic state in Medieval Western Europe where Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together for centuries is both fascinating in itself and pertinent to our times.

MvdG: How did you prepare for it and how did you study the subject?
MW: I read a few dozen books and then started talking at length with an initial handful of brilliant scholars. In particular, James Monroe at the Berkeley to start with. Then I lunched many times with Brian Catlos, of the University of California at Santa Cruz. A prize-winning author and Medieval historian, Brian speaks all the languages and lived for many years in Spain. He gave guided tours as a student there and later wrote guidebooks for travelers. He has both immense erudition and real, hands-on experience on the ground. Talking with him and other scholars like Tom Glick, at Boston University, was enormously inspiring at the outset. It also kept me from making dumb assumptions about this extremely complex period that lasted more than seven centuries.

MvdG: How long did it take to prepare for the documentary and how long did the actual filming take?
MW: We started planning and then researching the film in 2002 and 2003. Raising money took a long time. The filming went more quickly. As I recall, we filmed abroad twice over an 18 month period—once for about a month and once for about two weeks.

MvdG: As mentioned in my review, the tolerance of Al-Andalus was a rare in that day and age. I wonder, was the entire Muslim world as tolerant as, for instance, Abdul Rahman III, or was Al-Andalus also an exception for Muslims? I wonder about this, because of the fact that Istanbul (or Constantinople) also was a multicultural society for several centuries.
MW: Al-Andalus was unique in Europe, though the region of Sicily and southern Italy had a similar experience of sorts, for a shorter period of time under Muslim rule and the so-called Turbaned Kings. The multi-faith aspect was as true in Baghdad under the Abbasid rulers as it was in Cairo under the Ismaili sultans like Mustansir as it was in Cordoba under Hakim II. The great Jewish philosopher and author Maimonides was physician to the Muslim sultan in Egypt. Jews held high office in many Muslim courts, including Cordoba.

MvdG: Where did the leaders of Al-Andalus get the idea of tolerance from?
MW: It’s all derived from the Qur’an and the story of Muhammad’s life. What made this possible in Medieval Spain was a strain of religious and legal thought in Islam in those days that treated Christians and Jews as faiths related to and so socially in synch with Islam. Tolerance as we understand it was not an active concept in those times. The process by which this occurred in Spain later acquired the name “Convivencia,” living together. In Spain, the wisest regimes recognized that the most productive route to a thriving country was through utilizing the strengths of the different faith groups, not by pitting them against each other. That came later, as themes like ethnic purity, the Crusades/and Jihad, and religious exclusivism won out over notions of pluralism and inclusion. Spain commenced as an experiment in pluralism. It ended in the Inquisition and expulsion or conversion of two-thirds of its population, the Jews and the Muslims.

MvdG: Is it fair to say that the Muslim Empire - at least the ones in Andalus / the Ottoman Empire were de facto the heirs of ancient Greece and perhaps even Rome and - at that moment - not the European Kingdoms?
MW: I don’t think so. These were very different experiments in organizing territory and living together. They are not really inter-related, though of course the Roman Empire did re-package the Greek ethos in many ways and refashion its culture. I would say that Al-Andalus was an historical period and a place that partook of Western European and Middle East culture and values and forged a unique civilization out of them.

MvdG: As mentioned in the documentary, the Muslims studied the ancients and added to it. Could you explain to the reader what they exactly added to these works?
MW: The best scholars, for example Ibn Rushd (aka. Averroes in the West), didn’t just make word for word translations of Aristotle. They wrote commentaries that viewed the work of Aristotle in terms of then-modern monotheism. There were real philosophers among this group. They did what the great Catholic writers would do later: that is, bring science into line with religion. The difference is that the Catholics did it largely on paper, while Islam as a culture proved actively friendly to scientific dialogue and discovery in a way that was not so often fettered by organized religion. There were periods of book burning among strains of Muslim culture, even in Spain, but they didn’t dominate to the degree that the Roman Office of the Inquisition dominated and fettered scientific practice and knowledge in the Middle ages and Pre-Modern period. That is why the circulatory system was discovered hundreds of years earlier in Islamic science than in the West, and why optics and medical knowledge in general was so advanced that Arabic text books were cornerstones of Western medicine for centuries.

MvdG: Is what’s known as “Mevlana” (or Sufism) - the peaceful almost Buddhist like Muslim philosophy taught by Rumi influenced by the culture of Al-Andalus?
MW: Not directly, that I know of. Religions of all kinds, and particularly the mystical variety, tends to share a lot of common ground. The Peace That Passeth Understanding is as much a part of Judaism as Christianity and Islam, in the form of Sufism. But the person Rumi was a Persian, not a Spanish Muslim, who relocated to the west of his father’s country, and worked in a cultural style that was quite different from the Andalusian. That said, there are many giants of Sufism who happened to hail from Muslim Spain, including Ibn Arabi, whom many consider, intellectually speaking, the Giant of them all.

MvdG: A question about poetry. In the documentary poetry plays quite an important role: every now and then a part of a poem about Al-Andalus is read by the narrator and important poets of Al-Andalus are highlighted in the documentary as well. This led me to conclude the following: if one wants to know whether a given society is progressing (and civilized) one needs to look at the level and importance of poetry. Do you agree with that and if so, what does this tell you about Western and Middle Eastern civilizations / societies today?
MW: Poetry is important in Middle Eastern societies today. Many people can recite their favorite works, by their favorite poets, and there are some poets writing in Arabic and Urdu and many other languages who are both Muslim and gifted poets. I think the same is true of poets in the West, though our “society” appears to give them less weight and importance. I don’t know how the future will judge western or middle eastern cultural production. Good poets speak to eternal themes while speaking of their times.

MvdG: 11) When watching Cities of Light, one gets the impression - as the experts said as well - that society can only flourish if it is open and open-minded. Isolated societies, on the other hand, stagnate. Could you explain that a little bit more?
MW: Societies and civilizations go down for different reasons. Greece disappeared under Alexander, because he literally took off, spreading its culture from Ionia to Egypt to Baghdad to Persia and India but in the process dissolving the borders of a very tiny, integrated geography of inventive city states. Self-Isolating societies, on the other hand, cut themselves off and, as you say, stagnate. Spain in the end committed a kind of act of schizophrenia, divesting itself of two-thirds of its cultural and spiritual psyche at just the moment when it became a unified “nation.” In a sense, this is what Cervantes is writing about and making fun of—a society steeped in old codes of chivalry that no longer apply, with a tradition it no longer understands, and a dilemma it can no longer define because its cultural basis—Judaeo-Islamo-Christian—had been willfully shattered. For the sake of ethnic Purity, Catholic Spain cast two-thirds of being to the winds.

MvdG: Lastly, a reasonably negative question two actually: you do not address in Cities of Light how to behave (tolerance wise) when one of the religious groups falls hostage to fundamentalists and grows, therefore, increasingly intolerant. Furthermore, one can also wonder whether any multicultural society can last. When we look at history, we see examples of multiculturalism, and Al-Andalus is a prime example of it, but if we look at the fate of these societies and especially Al-Andalus, is it not fair to conclude that perhaps – sadly – multicultural societies are doomed to failure because, in the end, man becomes intolerant since intolerance (evil) is in our nature?
MW: Got me! The institutions of our society today are so very different from the institutions of Spain under Abdul Rahman I, or III, or again under Ferdinand and Isabella…

MvdG: Thank you for giving me the chance to ask you some questions.
MW: Thank you for the chance to think about them.

I always have had an iffy relationship with French New Wave cinema in general and director Jean-Luc Godard in particular, so when I first saw his Week End at an art cinema in the late 1960s, I knew it was really good but didn’t quite know why. I was afflicted with the same uncertainty when I saw Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, as well.

I gave the DVD version of Week End (1967) another gander over the . . . well, weekend and was wowed.

Godard, I’m told, was the first filmmaker to make movies reflect themselves, Exhibit A being Breathless in which the gangster hero deliberately imitates movie myths; for example, constantly checking himself in the mirror to see if the angle of his cigarette is properly Bogartian.

Week End is the culmination of Godard’s most productive period. He uses a weekend traffic jam in rural France, of all things, to depict an apocalyptic vision of man’s cruelty to man as the world slowly self destructs, which seemed like a real possibility at the time the movie was made. (Good thing prospects are so much better today, eh?)

Week End is alternately surreal and slapstick, and as goofy as this seems, I believe it is a whole lot more accessible to me nearly 40 years on because of all the Monty Python skits and movies that I had absorbed in the interim. And the knowledge that, if anything, we are a whole lot closer to that apocalypse.

That make me real good film critic, no?

Anyhow, check out Week End. Mireille Darc as the needy and nubile Corinne and Jean Yanne as the feckless Roland are terrific straight players to Godard’s anarchic moveable feast of fellow motorists, farmers, villagers, shop keepers, musicians and gendarmes.

An Unreasonable Man is a documentary about one of the most criticized, and hated, men in America today: warrior for justice Ralph Nader. It brings us the highlights and lowlights of one of the most remarkable men - whether you agree with his views or not - of the last 40 years.

The directors, Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, did a wonderful job telling Nader’s story: from the start of his career (fighting for seatbelts) to the elections of 2000 and 2004. They interviewed, among others, Ralph Nader himself, his campaign manager, Pat Buchanan, Howard Zinn, and many others who all spoke openly and honestly.

The directors of An Unreasonable Man do most certainly not worship Nader, but they do sympathize with him. They let critics explain why they detest him as much as they do, and they let supporters and Nader himself respond. When a critic says something negative about Nader, for instance that he should have withdrawn from the race in ‘00, Nader himself or one of his supporters explain why they did not consider giving up to be an option.

One could say that Naderites constantly have the last word.

The question is whether this is a good or bad thing - in my opinion it is more good than bad. An Unreasonable Man is not meant as a defense of Nader, nor as a piece of propaganda, it is - as I see it - meant to make the audience understand Nader. After watching the documentary one might still believe that Nader should have withdrawn, but one at least understands why he decided to persevere and one might even respect him for it (if one did not do so beforehand).

Critics often say that there is one thing that truly drives Nader: his ego. Ambition. I do not believe that to be true: he is a man, sure, and as such he most likely greatly enjoys positive attention / media coverage, but fame, ego or ambition is not what drives him, it is not what made him dedicate himself to fight - what he perceives to be - injustice. In the end, there is only one thing Nader wants to do: he wants to help his country. He wants to let, as he describes it, America be the democracy she can be and was meant to be.

One of Nader’s main themes is that both the Democratic and Republican Party are owned by K-Street lobbyists, or Big Business. Big Business influences American politics, according to Nader too much, and he believes that, although the Republican Party was the party of Big Business, the Democratic Party has come under their influence as well and lets it agenda be determined by organizations that do not care about the good of the American people, but only about the profit they make.

This belief - or better, observation - made Nader say that there is no difference between the Republican Party and the Democrats, between Gore and Bush. Today, many people are angry at Nader for saying this. What these people fail to understand, however, is not that Gore and Bush would be exactly the same once they were President - obviously, the Democrats are ‘less bad’ in Nader’s view - according to Nader, no, his point was (and is) that both are influenced too much by Big Business and ignore what is truly in the best interest of the average American.

His reasoning, then, is: “if you vote for the ‘less bad’ party, you allow that party to become worse and worse. After all, they do not have to change their behavior to get your vote. You’ll vote for them anyway.”

It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Besides this aspect of Nader’s career, An Unreasonable Man also tells the story of Nader’s early days. He started out as an advocate for safety in traffic, after he won a heroic battle against General Motors (which tried to destroy him), he won many more political battles; legislation was accepted because of his work in many, many areas; he created a team of people that reviewed just about every department and wrote books / essays about how to improve them, how to improve America, etc. His early career was one of many battles, but especially many victories. He truly became a hero of the left.

All of that changed when Ronald Reagan became president of the US. Suddenly, all the reforms, initiated by Nader’s work, were repealed. Suddenly, laws that limited businesses in what they could and couldn’t do were abolished… Nader saw his entire career made irrelevant.

That is why he changed his approach which in the end resulted in two runs for president.

As you all know, I am a conservative. As such, I often disagree with Nader. That does not, however, mean that I cannot respect him. He does what he considers to be the right thing; he is convinced that he is doing something important; and, yes, sometimes he is right. Without Nader cars wouldn’t, for instance, have safety belts in them. If it wasn’t for Nader, 200,000 more individuals would have been killed in traffic accidents by now.

I disagree quite strongly with Nader on a lot of issues - he believes that government is the answer to America’s problems - but I agree with him when he says that the BB has too much power and influence over American politics. Lobbyists have far too much power over America’s politicians, be they either Congressmen, Senators, or, yes, the President.

The An Unreasonable Man DVD consists out of two disks: one with the documentary (and a few features) and one with many, many featurettes. For instance:
- What Happened to the Democratic Party?
- Why is the Right Better Organized than the Left?
- Debating the Role of Third Parties in the U.S.

All these featurettes are short documentaries themselves and… disk two is reason enough to buy the entire DVD. Normally, most featurettes add little to nothing, in this case they make the reader think even more, and they provide fascinating debate material.

No criticism then? Well… no. Sure, I do not always agree with Nader, I think he’s somewhat of a conspiracy theorist, I think that he believes too much in the power of the government to change society, etc. etc., but that does not make the documentary any less good. The documentary and the extra features are, quite simply, of a tremendously high quality. I looked at Amazon and saw that the documentary was rated with 5 (out of 5) stars.

That seems about right to me.

I encourage all of you to buy and watch An Unreasonable Man.

And yes, this is coming from a conservative. The documentary truly is that good.

The DVD will be sold in the shops June 12. You can also pre-order the 2-disk DVD set.

It seems that, what promises to be a fascinating documentary, will be released June 12. The subject of the documentary: Ralph Nader’s (political) career. The publisher is Genius Products. It’s a two-disc DVD set, loaded with 1.5 hours of bonus features, among them:
- deleted scenes (The Congress Project, No Nukes and The Congressional Black Caucus)
- featurettes:
— something that will interest a lot of TMV readers I am sure: Debuting the Role of Third Parties in the U.S.
— What Happened to the Democratic Party?
— Why is the Right Better Organized than the Left?
— and much more

The documentary itself is 122 minutes long.

You can order it here.

I hope to receive the documentary by mail soon: I am looking forward to watch it. Once I have, I will publish a review, both here and at my own blog.