Yet another crap film from poisonous right-wing troll and confessed felon D'Souza, a man so contemptible that he actually trolled Rosa Parks and the Parkland shooting survivors. His bigotry has been denounced by decent people both liberal and conservative.
Why is it crap? Let me count (a very few of) the ways:
1) Ideology aside, it's just a bad, boring film, made no less so by D'Souza's droning voiceover. Remove all the padding added to achieve theatrical release, and this film wouldn't even be a short subject.
2) Through the use of selective editing, the film gives the impression that D'Souza was unfairly convicted in a bench trial, when in reality he pleaded guilty and allocuted to his crime in bid for mercy, which he then received: overnight detention and a lousy eight months of community service. Hardly Devil's Island.
3) Then, less than five minutes into the film, he asks "but what was my real crime?" followed by a firehose of cherry-picked quotes and out-of-context anti-Democrat clips, framing himself as the persecuted truth-teller. D'Souza is no martyr; he's a liar and a willful violator of campaign-finance law who got off easy and whined about it anyway.
4) Next: Dinesh in the slammer (funny - how did he get that camera crew in there) doing interviews. Note that he is never in the shot with the "inmate" interviewee. More creative editing? He had plenty of time to do it - remember, he gets out in the morning.
5) At last, a kernel of truth (however selective): the Democratic Party's admittedly shameful support of slavery and segregation vs. the Party of Lincoln, the Republicans. Of course, he fudges the reasons why Democrats and Republicans largely switched sides after the Johnson administration passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and omits the pivotal importance of Nixon's Southern Strategy. Republicans have been the party of anti-civil rights and voter suppression ever since.
Rather than continue item-by-item, I'll save us both some time and leave you with this: the remainder of the film is an hour or so of fact-free conjecture, paranoid innuendo, amateurish "re-creations" of ideology-soaked pseudo-history, and community-theater-quality dramatizations of D'Souza's anti-Democrat fever dreams spewed in voice-over.
Like all of his execrable oeuvre, it is an unadulterated hit piece without a shred of balance. This one will cost you some brain cells - avoid it.
Why is it crap? Let me count (a very few of) the ways:
1) Ideology aside, it's just a bad, boring film, made no less so by D'Souza's droning voiceover. Remove all the padding added to achieve theatrical release, and this film wouldn't even be a short subject.
2) Through the use of selective editing, the film gives the impression that D'Souza was unfairly convicted in a bench trial, when in reality he pleaded guilty and allocuted to his crime in bid for mercy, which he then received: overnight detention and a lousy eight months of community service. Hardly Devil's Island.
3) Then, less than five minutes into the film, he asks "but what was my real crime?" followed by a firehose of cherry-picked quotes and out-of-context anti-Democrat clips, framing himself as the persecuted truth-teller. D'Souza is no martyr; he's a liar and a willful violator of campaign-finance law who got off easy and whined about it anyway.
4) Next: Dinesh in the slammer (funny - how did he get that camera crew in there) doing interviews. Note that he is never in the shot with the "inmate" interviewee. More creative editing? He had plenty of time to do it - remember, he gets out in the morning.
5) At last, a kernel of truth (however selective): the Democratic Party's admittedly shameful support of slavery and segregation vs. the Party of Lincoln, the Republicans. Of course, he fudges the reasons why Democrats and Republicans largely switched sides after the Johnson administration passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and omits the pivotal importance of Nixon's Southern Strategy. Republicans have been the party of anti-civil rights and voter suppression ever since.
Rather than continue item-by-item, I'll save us both some time and leave you with this: the remainder of the film is an hour or so of fact-free conjecture, paranoid innuendo, amateurish "re-creations" of ideology-soaked pseudo-history, and community-theater-quality dramatizations of D'Souza's anti-Democrat fever dreams spewed in voice-over.
Like all of his execrable oeuvre, it is an unadulterated hit piece without a shred of balance. This one will cost you some brain cells - avoid it.