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Poverty Inc (2014)
Boring conspiracist claptrap
Conspiracist films can be amusing, if they are as insane as What The Bleep, but this is about as entertaining as being harangued by a street-corner evangelist.
Even if you are sympathetic to the the view that the banking industry is corrupt and that politicians collude to protect it from its own greed and incompetence, the film still comes across like fingernails on a blackboard. It is strident, it treats the audience like children, and I am far from convinced that the views of the people interviewed are correctly represented (propaganda films do have a tendency to quote-mine).
It lacks the slick presentation and off-the-wall loopiness of Zeitgeist, and I think the budget was probably about ten dollars.
Gary Null is no Michael Moore.
Zeitgeist (2007)
Credulous nonsense
No, this movie will not "get you thinking" - if you "do your own research" as other reviewers suggest, you will find that virtually everything it says is either flat wrong or grossly distorted.
The only merit this film has is as a study of the art of emotional manipulation. Rarely has such a compelling presentation contained so little of objective merit.
You know what they say: always keep an open mind. Just not so open that your brains fall out. If they do, this is pretty much how the world will look to you.
For trivia fans the animations, done by director Peter Joseph (Mercola)'s brother Eric, will offer a foretaste of the techniques he later uses in his own conspiracist whacknut fantasy, Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business. Between them they seem to have cornered the market in Conspiracy: With Colons.
Brass Eye: Paedophilia (2001)
Quite possibly the funniest satirical TV show ever
The premise of "paedogeddon" is simple: it is to satirise the hysterical tone of media coverage of the predatory paedophile trope. If I had been writing this my benchmark for success would be outraged pieces in the Daily Mail the following day. Result.
"Genetically, paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact. There's no real evidence for it, but it's scientific fact" - one of my favourite lines from any TV comedy ever and a fabulous way of making the point that some people will completely suspend normal critical faculties if they believe they are doing it "for the children". Sorry, Neil Fox, they got you, but console yourself with the fact that you delivered a priceless moment of pure comedy gold - and you did it with such panache.
Morris offers a wonderfully accurate satire on the way the very word paedophile causes the tabloids to abandon all connection with reality. He takes on the taboo - you can't joke about paedophilia? yes you can! - but most of all he delivers a truly brilliant pastiche of media hysteria.
If Chris Morris had never made another programme, this would still secure his place in the comedy hall of fame. The record number of complaints he received - balanced by a record number of supportive letters - is a mark of how accurately he hit the bullseye with this one.
Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business (2010)
Conspiracist nonsense
You have only to read the hysterical reviews above to realise that this film is propaganda, and you'll probably recognise that the propaganda is designed to offset the fact that the subject of the film has failed to carry scientific opinion.
In fact, he hasn't even tried to carry scientific opinion. His long list of "publications" is basically resume-padding; there is nothing by him in any of the high impact medical journals, and nobody appears to have reproduced the results he claims (a massive red flag, especially when you consider that tens of thousands of doctors and scientists around the world are working to find cures for cancer).
There is no conspiracy to suppress Burzynski. Nobody forced him to run unethical trials, to break the low on interstate trade, nobody forces him to charge tens of thousands of dollars for clinical trials when normally they are free to patients, only he controls the inflated prices of generic drugs in his pharmacy, only he mandates that pharmacy for his patients, only he chooses to run endless trials without publishing the results for others to review and perhaps replicate or improve on.
Burzynski is behaving like the worst kind of quack. This propaganda film seeks to gloss over that. It is despicable.