Control Room: If you haven't seen it, please go! [View All]

[HuckleB]

It's not comparable to F911, but it's every bit as good, and every bit as powerful. This movie would make the perfect double-feature partner for F911, in fact.

From the review in The Oregonian for last February's film festival:

"THE CONTROL ROOM" When the rhetoric reached red-hot and the bombing of Iraq became inevitable this time last year, most Americans learned for the first time of Al Jazeera, the satellite news network that holds the place in the Arab world that CNN holds in the United States. In subsequent months as war raged in the Persian Gulf, Al Jazeera's coverage -- including footage of dead and captured American soldiers and dead and wounded Iraqi civilians -- became a lightning rod for criticism by the Bush administration and other patriotic American interests.

But as Jehane Noujaim's absorbing documentary shows, Al Jazeera was only one of many institutions spinning the news out of Iraq and neither the most shameless nor the most blameless. Working alongside Al Jazeera producers, technicians, translators and correspondents, Noujaim shows that the network is no more biased or deceptive than any Western news organization or indeed, the publicity divisions of the U.S. armed forces. Indeed, in certain cases, Al Jazeera provided the closest thing to the so-called objective truth about what was happening on the ground in Iraq.

If this sounds suspiciously anti-American, think again. We watch as an Al Jazeera producer gets a tongue-lashing from his boss, who feels that the American antiwar analyst he rounded up for an interview wasn't credible. And we are won over by a thoughtful young American press officer who speaks frankly of trying to see outside the blinders of his own perspective, learn a little Arabic and forge a bond with a combative Al Jazeera correspondent. It makes for one of the best and most important documentaries about the media ever made. (Shawn Levy)"

http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/107719581773340.xml

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Another review can be found at: http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-040609-movies-review-mc-controlroom,0,1045525.story?coll=mmx-movies_top_heds

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You can go to http://www.controlroommovie.com/site/01.html and check out "screenings" to see when it will be in your area.

Enjoy!