Let's get political for a little while here. Two important documentaries are on the way that present two very different sides of America. The first is the acclaimed Sundance doc, The Internet's Own Boy, about Reddit founder Aaron Swartz. The other is America, from Dinesh D'Souza, the guy behind 2016: Obama's America. He really needs to come up with more imaginative movie titles.
At a time when the FCC is about to gut the very idea of net neutrality, the timing on this trailer for The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz couldn't be better. Swartz was a co-founder of Reddit and a fierce activist for the cause of free access to information, but his effective championing also made him a target of forces that wanted to shut him down. In 2011 he was arrested by MIT police for breaking-and-entering and downloading thousands of academic journals illegally. What followed was a very public smear campaign and aggressive prosecution that would have led to 35 years in prison, but Swartz took his own life before that could happen. Director Brian Knappenberger chronicles the fight that became Swartz's life's work, even as it put him in harm's way.
And then there's that poor, tortured Dinesh D'Souza. He's being persecuted by the Obama administration, you know, charged with campaign finance fraud. To him, it's payback for the wildly-successful, factually vacant film, 2016: Obama's America. Or at least that's what D'Souza is telling anybody who will listen, and that list includes, coincidentally I'm sure, everyone who hates Obama's guts. Go figure. If the last film was about how Obama had destroyed America or something, this one is about why America is great despite a bunch of leafy, crunchy liberals saying otherwise. So you get informed lefties like Michael Eric Dyson talking, quite truthfully, about this country's past expansionist agenda, while others after him use more fiery rhetoric. The emphasis seems to be on these hot-button comments, interspersed with Civil War reenactments and shots of D'Souza staring blankly into the sunset. Yes, this will be a train wreck that fact-checkers will be having a field day with.
The Internet's Own Boy opens June 27th, while America arrives (of course!!!!) on July 4th.
