When it comes to political “documentaries” I treat each one with a grain of salt, especially when that movie is released during a Presidential election year. Most of the time, or all of the time if the documentary is made by Michael Moore, these movies are more propaganda than documentary. In Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party you find a movie that is more propaganda than documentary and not presented very well. It is as much one sided to the right wing of the American political spectrum as Michael Moore preaches to the extreme left wing of the spectrum. If D’Souza focused more on telling the story and less then theatrics then this could have been a better movie.
In this movie Dinesh D’Souza decides to focus on the history of the Democratic Party from when it was founded to its current state and tries, in his eyes, to set the history straight on what the Party used to stand for and why the narrative is different now. D’Souza than tries to tie Hillary’s fascination, admiration, adoration of Saul Alinsky and how her love of his work will show if (I say if because when this movie was made I’m sure there was hope back then that she wouldn’t win although now it is obvious she will,) she becomes President of the United States.
This is the first D’Souza film I have seen so I do not know if this is normal style of documentary film making or if he this is new, but the way he shot this film was distracting and takes away from the story he is trying to show. In this film he uses a combination of reenactment and real interview to tell the story of this film. For me this is very distracting and also a poor choice in that any reenactment will almost never be completely accurate so even as I watching the film begin I was busy wondering how much of this was real and much was interpretation. He starts the film showing the reenactment of him being sentenced to eight months in a halfway for being convicted of breaking Federal Campaign Finance Law while he maintains that it was prosecuted because of his documentary on President Obama. This reenactment confused me in the beginning because it was made in such a way that you were watching it through a news organizations feed and it took me a while to realize that the judge was overacting as he was handing down the sentence. D’Souza constantly uses this style of filming to show his conversations with the other criminals in the halfway house as well as all of the many reenactments of historical events that may or may not have happened the way it’s portrayed. Obviously when you show reenactments you leave way to much to interpretation and that allows way too much for an opponent of these ideas to attack. It’s a very poor way of trying to make an argument to convince people that what you may be saying is true if your presentation looks fake. I will say that if the reenactments were produced better than that would be a plus but this had the look of a TV documentary.
If you were to look at the reviews of this movie by the professionals out there, shockingly (Sarcasm,) you will see that all of them were negative and from what I read they were commenting on the style of the film but its content. Considering that most of Hollywood anything is religiously anti-Republican you should look at all of those reviews with a very suspect eye. No one in Hollywood is going to give positive reviews that attacks the very things they believe. One of the reviews stated that this film was full of revisionist history. Now I didn’t read the rest of the review but I am curious to know what this person thinks is revisionist because some of the things in the movie, especially the older historical events, are indeed fact. Fact: Leading up to and after the American Civil War, the Southern Democrats were supporters of slavery. Fact: Southern Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that were passed by Republicans after the Civil War. Fact: The original movie Birth of a Nation, which is extremely racist and historical, was the first movie ever shown at the White House under President Wilson who was a Democrat. Now some things D’Souza says are true like saying President Jackson was racist against the black slaves and native Indians I had not heard before so I am not sure that I believe it. I have no idea if Hillary Clinton truly loves Saul Alinsky although many Progressives do so it is a believable hypotheses but he didn’t really provide any plausible proof. That falls into the realm of Michael Moore which should never be allowed a film called a documentary.
Since I don’t recommend ever seeing a Michael Moore unless you want to watch some of the best propaganda this side of Leni Riefenstahl I won’t recommend you watch the movie for some of the same reasons. This movie will not change the mind of anyone who is a Democrat let alone a Progressive. If you want to know the history of the Democratic Party some of the things in the movie are worth watching. If you are a fan of Michael Moore movies then you should watch this film so you can what a lot people think his films are like.
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