Movie Review – The Unknown Known

Donald Rumsfeld is a master or rhetorical flourish, as the title of this new Errol Morris documentary, The Unknown Known alludes to. Talking point sleight of hand like “Unknown Unknown,” and “The absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence,” was one of the reasons that Rumsfeld was, at once, both one of the most beloved and most hated senior advisors during the perilous first years of the War on Terror. Naturally, the man himself is staggeringly more complex than this simple caricature implies, and Morris has decided to put the spotlight him, albeit rather uncomfortably, in his latest film.

Movie Review - The Manor

If you live in Guelph, Ontario, the establishment known as The Manor has what you’d call a reputation. On the outside it still looks like the century old mansion that once housed the local brew master and politician George Sleeman, but the inside, for more than three decades, has housed a Gentlemen’s club with an attached hotel where many of the dancers stay. The implication is that the place is seedy, but in the documentary about The Manor, which I finally got the chance to see recently, the eponymous establishment isn’t seedy at all, but home to a colourful cast of characters who happen to be mostly a loving Jewish family engaged in the adult entertainment business.

Movie Review – Game Change

In modern politics, if you’re not on the attack, then you’re a target, and nobody appreciates that – or practices it – better than Sarah Palin. In the week leading up to this past Saturday’s airing of the HBO movie Game Change, Palin, as well as her supporters and surrogates, launched a salvo decrying the film as a hatchet job on the former Alaska governor based on spurious information given by vindictive former staffers. Of course, if Palin and Co. had watched the film they would have understood better that Game Change does the impossible: it makes her relatable to people that could never in a million years get behind Palin’s politics.