Axis of Evil: Perforated Praeter Naturam
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Features
• Color
• Dolby
• DVD-Video
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : 2004
DVD Release : 28 December, 2004 |
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Axis of Evil: Perforated Praeter Naturam Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
This documentary's thesis about evil becomes too broad when discussed and has less educational value as a consequence
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This film begins by replaying George W. Bush's speech where he declared North Korea, Iran, and Iraq part of his "Axis of Evil." A professor from Barat College of Illinois, James J. Brask, said that the Bush's Axis of Evil speech was an "absurd formulation for American policy." Although Brask begins the discussion by focusing on Bush's speech, the filmmakers abruptly turn towards another issue: evil and racism. Filmmaker Floyd Webb and professor of law at the University of Chicago Geoffrey R. Stone comment on the problem of racism. Then another abrupt turn, professor Bernard Dohrn says that it is wrong that 11 million children in the richest country in the history of the world do not have healthcare. Her argument is that we need universal health care. Martha Nussbaum who elaborates on Dohrn's point by observing that Justice Marshall said in a dissent in a case in the 1970s that a right to a decent education is implicit in our freedom of speech, and she agrees that freedom of speech is just a phrase on paper unless citizens can actualize those freedoms.
Then, another abrupt turn, under the heading of "Criminal Justice" where it is said that the "United States currently incarcerates 2.1 million citizens or 686 per 100,000 of the national population: this is the largest prison population and the highest imprisonment rate. Almost 900,000 or 42% of US prisons are black men." Next, narrator, Warren Leming, says "In his first 2 years in office, Attorney General John Ashcroft overruled federal prosecutors 28 times in order to advocate the death penalty. In 95% of those cases the defendants were people of color."
Another abrupt turn begins when the panelists start discussing our torture tactics in places like Abu Ghraib. After showing many pictures of torture tactics at Abu Ghraib, the filmmakers showed a fake mail stamp with the heads of Mount Rushmore replaced with Rumsfeld, Hitler, Stalin, and George W. Bush."
The next heading begins with, "War." Howard Zinn discusses how, during his tour in the military, he unknowingly took part in the first experimental use of napalm. This section explores the notion of evil in the Cold War. The focus is on Vietnam. The narrator says, "Of the estimated 1.9 million Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam War nearly half were civilians."
Another abrupt turn is back to the beginning, with the heading of "Axis of Evil." James Weinstein says that Bush took Reagan's idea of the "Empire of Evil" and Roosevelt's idea of an Axis of German, Italy, and Japan. The editor of this film stupidly re-ran Brask's earlier video clip where called Bush's "Axis of Evil" and "absurd formulation..." Leming adds that "terrorism is the new communism."
Another abrupt turn is taken but without giving a phrase to begin it. This next section is how the media promotes the government's agenda of promoting fear and their own commercialization of news. This may be confusing political rhetoric because much of the conservative punditry argues that except for FoxNews, the news at large is liberal. But these liberals are arguing that because the news is run by corporate conglomerations they must have their own big-business agendas in mind and are actually pro-war conservative.
I thought this film would approach the topic of evil in a similar manner that Richard J. Bernstein approached it in his nice little book [[ASIN:074563494X Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Themes for the 21st Century Ser.)]]. In some ways they overlap, but this film is largely just a liberal rant. This could have been a much better discussion of liberal politics if the director, Carmine Cervi, had asked more focused questions, asked for more historical examples to back up the claims made, and had given more statistics. This film is only 84 minutes so by talking about problems ranging from racism, to criminal justice, to the Cold War, to the Iraq War, to the War on Terrorism, this film becomes too broad and too unimportant educationally. The most accomplished intellectual to be interviewed was Martha C. Nussbaum, and she only spoke for about 2 minutes and she was answering a question that was almost irrelevant. She had the least air-time of the panelists yet is the most accomplished (along with Howard Zinn). This botched effort to utilize someone as diverse in ideas and scholarship as Nussbaum is a small example of the broader lack of coherence and focus that the director, Carmine Cervi, shows in this film. |
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