In my position as writer about film, I sometimes get to interview filmmakers and performers about their work. One man I’ve interviewed twice is Errol Morris, an amazing documentarian who alternates between making films about oddballs and films about political issues. Following you’ll find my latest interview with him about the nutty and apolitical new doc, “Tabloid,” followed by my 2008 profile of him for his prior film about the Abu Ghraib photo scandal, 2008’s “Standard Operating Procedure.”

First, the “Tabloid” story:

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Errol Morris may not be as famous as Michael Moore, but he’s had a profound influence on the documentary genre with 14 films over the past 33 years. While Moore places himself front and center as the entertaining and emotional heart of his films, Morris has largely remained off-camera, preferring to allow his compelling subjects to speak for themselves.

It’s Morris’ unique choice of subject matter, which he classifies as being either “oddball” or political,  and the striking visuals with which he surrounds his interview subjects that have made his films cinematic events for connoisseurs. In 2004, he won an Oscar for Best Documentary with his startling profile of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in “The Fog of War” and later returned to dead-serious wartime matters by exploring the circumstances behind the Abu Ghraib scandal with his last film, 2009’s “Standard Operating Procedure.” (more…)

From The Washington Independent:

On September 10, Andrew Breitbart launched his new site, BigGovernment, with hidden-video camera footage of two young conservative activists who’d gotten Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) employees to advise them on hiding prostitution profits from the IRS. Within hours, Breitbart was doing interviews with reporters who wanted to know how, exactly, the story had come about, and why Big Government was releasing the videos and the identity of the muckrackers — 25-year-old James O’Keefe III and 20-year-old Hannah Giles — so slowly.

“It was strategized,” Breitbart told TWI this week, so “that they would be deprived of the type of information that a defense attorney would try to gather in order to create a defense.”

Who were “these people?” They were not just the leaders or members of ACORN itself. “They” were the Democratic Party, the White House, the progressive Center for American Progress and its president John Podesta. The “Democrat-media complex” is Breitbart’s name for the whole apparatus. “We deprived them of information,” Breitbart explained, “so that they couldn’t come up with a vile, kill-the-messenger attack with the media doing the groundwork for them.”

The success of Breitbart’s strategy was immediate, stunning, and is still ricocheting around the political world. Five days after the story broke, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to prevent ACORN from receiving any federal funding. Two days later, the House of Representatives did the same. Meanwhile, Breitbart was talking to more reporters, amused at how the “kill-the-messenger attack” was playing out. When one report from The Washington Post called him for a story about O’Keefe and Giles, Breitbart compared their tape to the photos of Abu Ghraib prison released in April 2004. (more…)

Sometimes I sit at my desk and I think about what I do for a living. Some people say comedy is hard but comedy is a byproduct of our society. Everything that we have and everything that we do in America from telling jokes to curing cancer to turning bolts in a factory is the result of a culture in our country that says country is more important than self. From the early revolutionaries to the men and women standing a post in Iraq tonight, Americans have always stepped up to do what is necessary to protect our freedoms.

I believe that the average person in America, and I include myself in that number, has become complacent about the liberties with which we are provided. Most of us don’t vote. Most of us don’t pay much attention to what the government is doing. Most of us don’t care that little by little, freedoms won and protected by the blood of our young man and women, are being whittled away. Smoking is banned, but hey, most of us don’t smoke. They kicked an old lady out of her house, but we all got a great new shopping mall. The government decides that AIG or GM is too big to fail but that’s OK because my insurance or my uncle’s pension was saved. Each time one of our freedoms is chipped away it is an insult to those who have laid down their lives protecting them.    (more…)

So I’m having lunch with my buddy Sandy Frank, and we’re laughing about his idea to update ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ but have the series set in Guantanamo Bay Prison. You know, a guy pulls back his prayer rug, revealing a tunnel that goes to Raul Castro’s rape room; the fat lovable guard who “knows nada!” and of course the foreign guy who kisses everybody… wait – I fused the wrong Richard Dawson in there for a second…

… Anywhoozer, I’m thinking later how crazy it was that they even got Hogan’s Heroes on the air, but at least the fascists were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys. CUT TO: Any given night this week, no less than three contemporary movies are running on cable where the fascists are the good guys and the Americans are the bad guys… wow, talk about crazy. (more…)