I knew early on I would not find ‘Death of a President‘ to my tastes, and now that I have heard the plot summary I know it for a certainty. Since most major US film outlets are not running it, I will spoil the plot for you for the movie few of you would have bothered to go see any way.
The black guy did it.
Yes, you heard right. The BBC decided to make the movie villain a black father who had lost his son in the Iraq War. Apparently most of the movie is about a rush to judgement of an innocent Arab-American.
The plot is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start. First, the BBC just does not get it. ‘Black Americans’ are Americans first and melanin enhanced second. They are as patriotic as any other Americans and perhaps more so.
What would be a realistic plot? If I were writing such a script, I would make the killer a Cindy Sheehan follower. There are loads of serious nutcases around – you can find hundreds of them on certain web sites – who no doubt day dream about doing something like this. The attempt on President Ford and the wounding of President Reagan were both done by fruitcakes. It is almost certain the biggest threat to George Bush would similarly be a nut. It is of course possible a nutjob presidential assassin wannabe could be black… but it would be a first in US history.
I think the people who created this movie are simply detestable.
Correction: It was not a BBC production. It was done by Gabriel Range and is to be or was shown on UTV Channel 4 in the UK as part of a series on the effects of the War on Terror
“Detestable” because they don’t get it? That seems a bit harsh. Wouldn’t we want to reserve detestation for the malicious and just pity and attempt to educate those who are misguided?
I haven’t seen the film (yet). However, if the plot is that the “black guy did it”, and he did not do it because he was black, what is the problem?
Are we still in the age of social positive racial “correctionism”, or have I not got Dale’s point? Apologies if the latter is the case.
I have. however, noted Dale’s point that the film is of dubious quality.
Best regards
I’m unlikely to bother seeing the film, but detesting those who made it seems a bit extreme – your only actual objection seems to be an unrealistic plot. Sure, it’s unlikely that a soldier’s father would murder the president in revenge for his son, but, err, since when was it so bad for films to have rather implausible plots?
Do you think the film would have been good if a left-wing nutter had killed the president?
I’m guessing this film is a trite morality play with some (possibly clever) pseudo-documentary filming techniques. If I object to the morals it supports (and you haven’t mentioned them, so I’ve no idea if it actually comes out in support of the assassination) then I can see why I might dislike the film, but your objection seems to be entirely based around the ethnic probabilities of killing the president and the plot’s lack of realism in respect of it. Odd.
It’s detestable because it’s putting up there for fantasy and entertainment the fictional assassination of a current political leader who is not, in fact, dead (Dick Cheney may be a revenant, though, the jury’s still out on that one).
Would I have a problem with a movie that went with a what-if scenario in which FDR was assassinated? No. FDR is long dead, and it’s not disrespectful. On the other hand, putting out an entertainment product that asks, “Hey, what would happen if we killed the current vastly unpopular president?” is creepy and disrespectful.
It’s a matter of class, and the jackasses that made this thing have none.
I think Dale’s main point is this:
Just like the BBC thing a bit back about a global financial collapse precipitated by a commodities scam which was initially pinned on a muslim (this time South Asian).
The point is the BBC can never show muslims doing bad things. They must always be misunderstood victims unfairly accussed by an Islamophobic society.
The tag line, according to imdb is:
“The nation’s gonna cheer for the bad guy”
So the nation elected him but they are ‘gonna’ cheer for the bad guy.
Yes, detestable seems rather too bland a word.
Minor point, a little quibble, the fact that “Death of a President” was not made by the BBC and isn’t showing on the BBC. Or is that inconvient for the purpose of ranting?
So.. let me get this straight. In a time when our enemies send their sons and daughters to detonate themselves at us, work fervently to attain a nuclear weapon, jam our sattelites, kidnap our civilians, torture their own men and women under the oppression of violent theocracy, and shriek for the destruction of us and our allies… we are invited to sit with popcorn and a Big Gulp and tuck into a film about WHAT?
I wonder how much money was spent to make this film. It is likely that even half of it could have been used to make a better film, a documentary, perhaps, of the suffering in Darfur, the mutilation of girl children, the oppression of women…
People like this offer no solutions, no real help. They are fixated on the negative without offering anything better. What cowards they are.. so much easier to attack your own side, isn’t it?
This pathetic film reeks of “hunting magic” to me, like primitive man in the caves of Lasceaux, intently drawing bulls and deer and bison.
I do hope that this film is remembered, though, for posterity. What a shameful contrast it will make, when future historians compare the films of WWIII to those of WWII, like “Why We Fight”, and “The Lion Has Wings”.
Yes, you are right. It was UTV that showed it here and was done by Gabriel Range. I am still digging for the information on who did back it. But this bit should give you some of the flavour of the poltics:
I would add btw, that I wonder which Americans have seen four assasinations. I didn’t realize we had nanotech and functional immortality that long ago 😉
It just goes to show anyone can make a slip of the punctuation or get the object of a phrase ambiguous.
Not wanting to pick nits, but which americans have seen 4 presidents assasinated? One of those was Kennedy, another was Lincoln (I’ll confess to not knowing who the other 2 are). This would mean that any american who had seen the assasinations at least 150yrs old. Where have they been hiding these methusalean citizens?
To the two crazies you mention Dale, I add Sirhan Sirhan, who killed a very likely to be president minutes after he won the California primary, and if you belief JFK happened as reported, Lee Harvey Oswald was probably a nut case.
I would also like to know the money behind this. A George Soros shell?
Hank Scorpio has it. THis is a living sitting president that they are attempting to inspire the assassination of. Forget party affiliation, that’s way beyond the pale.
Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy
The overall most significant element of this whole story is that, “the black guy did it” etc, is that it is an embarrassingly trite recitation of Leftist fantasy through and through, starting with the insurmountingly obvious presmise that they forthrightly WANT to see Bush assassinated, and would celebrate it’s occurance. (“Oh, we don’t ADVOCATE this, you understand, we’re just SPECULATING…. blah blah blah….” Uh huh.)
And the identity of the assassin is the modern equivalent of the 1942 movie that ends with the innocent farm kid dying in the Pacific, the American flag clutched to his chest, crying “I did it for you, Mom… and my country!” It’s target audience will be emabarrased by it’s triteness (if they aren’t already), and it won’t take 30 years for that to be the case.
But the big point is the Left’s seeming choice to create their “bold pregressive vision” in fantasy, since reality just stubbornly refuses to play along with everything they have beleived since 1965.
I am most curious, as the Net saves everything, to witness just how the left looks back on themselves, a mere six or so years from now, when GWB is four years gone, and their insane gibberish regarding him is still around to be thrown in their faces, and it most certainly will be.
Should be fun.
The story would have been much more interesting and perhaps realistic if the president had been murdered by a delusional leftist film director.
This same filmmaker didn’t make the film about an angry parent assassinating Bill Clinton over his son dying in Somalia or Kosovo or Haiti…while Clinton was president.
This same filmmaker isn’t making a film about an angry antimonarchist assassinating Queen Elizabeth while her butt’s still in the throne.
This same filmmaker didn’t make a film advocating the automotive assassination of Diana for being so unroyal and unEnglish and dating a middle eastern muslim man and possibly being impregnated by him, bringing shame to the royals….while Diana was still alive.
The BDS is so bad people can’t see what’s wrong with making a movie about the assassination of a sitting president.
I’m an immigrant…when my family moved to the USA, my brother said he didn’t want to live in a country that assassinated their president. (Said in 1967.)
This fantasy wish depiction of the BDS crowd is UGLY.
The tenuousness of the filmmakers’ grasp of reality is shown by their depicting the establishment as rushing to blame an Arab-American when they have no evidence. In reality, every time some outrage is committed by Muslims on Western soil (the Seattle Jewish center attack, the Toronto plot, the Washington sniper killings, the Paris riots), the party line is to studiously avoid the M-word as much as possible. It’s always “youths”, the “broad strata of society”, etc.
Choosing an assassination of Bush as a vehicle to make their point is pure loony-left wet-dream self-indulgence. I don’t agree with most of Bush’s agenda, but this is grossly tasteless.
I would have said the same, btw, if the movie *had* been about Bill Clinton while he was in office. Speaking of that permanent record of the internet, I am sure old postings of mine to the Libertarian Alliance Forum are still around in which I stated my distaste at the Republican attempt to humiliate Bill by making him publicly state he got a bjob in the oval office loo. I found that whole sad Monica thing contemptable. There may well have been things to strongly dislike about Clinton, as there are about Bush as well. (Niether is exactly a libertarian’s presidential daydream.) It is a sign of the times the depth to which political discourse has sunk.
Lefty porn.
Yes, you heard right. The BBC decided to make the movie villain a black father who had lost his son in the Iraq War.
I think a lot of you are missing the really detestable part of that description. It’s not the fact that they made the killer black. Not only is the film about assassination, they obviously tried to make the assassin’s reasons as sympathetic as possible.
Funny someone should mention the killer of RFK – I guess that just goes to show that an Islamo-Nutter as an assasin is completely out of the question… Never Mind.
Still, moving beyond the absolute vileness of both the premise and presumed presentation of this film, there is actually an interesting question begged, though I don’t think it was intended by the filmmakers. After Sept 11 and since, we’ve all been told that the terrorists are “a few crazed individuals”, than they “distort true Islam” etc – things most folks know to be at least not entirely true, but many agree these are necessary lies to prevent anti-Muslim bigotry and violence, and maybe help to bring “moderate muslims” on side.
So the question is: at what point will a substantial portion of Americans (or Brits, Frenchmen, whomever) – meaning enough to form a really good-sized lynch mob – decide that all this RoP stuff uis bunk and that the only way to be “safe” is forcibly deport (or worse) all Muslims from their country? Would it be a nuke? Several nukes? Maybe just an unending string of shopping mall bombings? Or is there such a point? We’re lucky that we haven’t yet seen a Baruch Goldstein, and hopefully we won’t – still, I think the fact that we haven’t is really remarkable and speaks to the goodness of Americans.
Finally, I consider myself a Bush supporter – overall he’s better than the weak alternatives presented by the Dems in 2000 and 2004 (a VERY low bar to clear), and, having mangled an occasional sentence myself, I kind of feel for the guy. Anyway, were he to be killed by an assasin, Muslim or otherwise, I would be outraged (and yes, I would also have been outraged if it happened to Clinton or Carter) – but not nearly as furious as I was on 9/11. As much as I like the guy, he has volunteered to be a visible target – the guy has a huge bulls eye on him, he knows it and he ran for re-election – he gets a lot of cool perks and, in the Secret Service, the best bodyguards money can’t buy, but he is also assuming a certain risk – aprox 9.3% of sitting Presidents have been assasinated in office (statistically much riskier than a tour in Iraq), plus attempted assasinations like Reagan and Truman. People killed on Sept 11 were bondtraders and busboys – they didn’t choose to assume that risk – which is what makes their killers the purest form of terrorists, and which is why I could not imagine that Bush being assasinated would be nearly as enraging as 9/11.
Mitch is right, it’s lefty porn for people so afflicted with Bush Derangement that they wish the man dead.
Many Americans alive today remember the assassination of President Kennedy; many remember the assassinations of Senator Kennedy and Dr. King. Another Presidential candidate, John Connally, was badly wounded in the assassination of President Kennedy and yet another, George Wallace, was crippled for life. There were two attempts on the life of President Ford and President Reagan was badly wounded shortly after he took office.
It is not the assassination of President McKinley a hundred years ago which makes this movie so disgusting to Americans. More likely, it is the recollection of blood-spattered Jackie Kennedy holding pieces of her dying husband’s brain in her hands which makes a movie about an assassination of President Bush seem so tasteless.
The implication that shooting a president is unpatriotic shows an ignorance of the basic ideals behind America that I find totally unsurprising on this site–but very much in keeping with the nauseating and un-American exaltation of the Presidency shown by the various other commenters.
As another “detestable” man once put it, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
In the sense that porn is a form of wish fullfilment, I strongly agree with those members of the commentariat who regard this as “lefty porn”. It is obscene. It is offensive. Just put yourself in the position of Laura or the kids/ It is also facile. I don’t like Bush (this is, of course, tempered by the fact that as a Brit it’s none of my business really) but the commonplace that Bush=Hitler is beyond parody and beneath contempt. Yet the manufacturers of this nonsense will find a ready market mentally masturbating about having been the one to pull the trigger.
Mr Hagler. The quote is from Patrick Henry. You missed out the final part in which Mr Henry added, “It is its natural manure”. “Natural manure” sums up both your argument and the mentality of the fuckwits behind this travesty of film making.
Unlike the sort of people who enjoy this kind of movie I will not protest by issuing death threats, burning anything or being generally obnoxious. I just wont watch.
clorinda has already said what I would want to say, and better than I could say it.
K. Hagler, one could argue that both the blood of tyrants and patriots is indeed watering the tree of liberty…. in the Middle East.
But to posit a counter to “The implication that shooting a president is unpatriotic” is to in fact assume that such an act even COULD be “patriotic”. Of course, given the “tyranny and evil of the Bush administration”…. blah blah blah …. yap yap yap… we all know the drill…. you appear to be proposing that many could consider killing him “patriotic”.
But the self-evident reality is that just as many wing-nut Americans could justify killing a President Clinton or President Kerry et al for the very same reason, and thus we are not talking about “patriotism” we are talking lunacy, anarchy, and murder. No matter what Patrick Henry said or how you may interpet it. Killing a President, whoever he is, rather than peacefully denying his party from power and then himself in four years, is stone evil, nothing less. Even trying should be a death penalty offense. Line Hinckley up against a wall tomorrow if I had my way.
And along this line, evidence number 74,896 that the cultural Bush-haters are completely insane: If they advocate the murder of a sitting President based on sheer hatred, and they are, does it occur to them that the big wheel comes around, a Democrat WILL get elected again, and when he or she does, there are fifty times as many people on the right who know how to use a sniper rifle and scope than there EVER will be on the left?
Stupid twits.
So… Which ones of you lot had said you’d seen it?
This same filmmaker didn’t make the film about an angry parent assassinating Bill Clinton over his son dying in Somalia or Kosovo or Haiti…while Clinton was president.
Or indeed Clinton being shot by any of the women he sexually molested and raped. That’s something the bastard needed shooting for, yet when he turns up at the Labour Conference they are virtually throwing their knickers at him. Funny old world.
“It was done by Gabriel Range and is to be or was shown on UTV Channel 4 in the UK as part of a series on the effects of the War on Terror”. – Dale Amon
But it isn’t part of the effects of the so called “War on Terror”. It’s simply not reality. It’s merely fantasy based on wishful thinking on behalf of people who I can only presume to be Left of the political fence. It’s merely a “Bush-Hitler hater’s” wet dream. This fantasy pretend-scenario is no more an effect of the War on Terror as JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books are. It’s the world of make-believe and thus should not be screened as part of the effects of the War on Terror. It isn’t an EFFECT of 9/11 and shoulndn’t be shown as such.
Ken Hegler,
Sixty-one million people voted for the guy, more than for the other guy. He was elected, TWICE, unlike the people’s heroes whom you no doubt worship.
If you think it might be patriotic to assassinate him, you are disrespecting not just him, not just half the country, but democracy itself. Or do you think we should just stop with this silly vote thing and consult you instead?
Of course I expected hatred and contempt of the basic ideals of America on this site, but it seems I must add ignorance. The quote was from Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, and hero to a people who are now all but extinct.
I hadn’t heard that Patrick Henry quote before, blood of tyrants and patriots is the manure for the tree of liberty. (And I grew up in the US in government schools.)
But it seems to be a knockoff of “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Who said that? St. Augustine of Hippo I’m guessing?
I intensely disagree with the policies of the current administration, but despise the premise of this movie far more. It’s reprehensible, irresponsible, just plain evil to speculate on the assassination of a sitting President. Who could think that making this movie was a good idea?
I have to add, this Righty-Lefty stuff is dead tired and intellectually barren. Am I a leftist/liberal/marxist because I dislike G.W.B.’s policies as intensely as I do? I was registered Republican until 2 years ago. I won’t register Democrat. I support limited government, am financially conservative, but support the right of homosexuals to marry (as I do those of us who happen to be born..ugh.. left handed!). This flinging of labels only defines you as intellectually wanting.
Ken,
I’m surely wasting my breath here, but I’ll say it anyway.
We’ve heard that quote a lot of times and we understand its historical significance–better than you do, I’d say. The key word in it is tyrant. A tyrant is a guy who does whatever he wants to, without regard to the public. George the 3rd & his parliament wrote laws for the American colonies without letting the colonists have any say in the matter. That’s tyranny.
A guy who was elected twice is not a tyrant. He’s just someone you disagree with, because you are in the minority.
Get over it.
1. I await the media outrage which will be directed at those who produced this.
2. This continuous “in your face” educational advertising of such immorality will backfire on the far left.
3. Finally, it’s ironic that this “crowd” calls President Bush Hitler.
Lefty Porn?
I just saw it and figured it was Right wing porn. The overall tone of the film tended towards sympathy for a potential event as this.
I whole heartedly agree that to lake a film about a living person, whatever their affilliation, and to se them killed, especially in such a realistic and graphic manner is very twisted. It seems too gleefully exploitational. The big question is why on earth should this film be made?
Other than a humourous pitch over a drunken meeting in LA, i cannot see anyone really wanting to make this. But after my recent experiences at a film festival looking for money for my film, i saw the teeth of the sharks.
The abject cynicism of the finainciers is brutal. Anything goes.
But back to the content. It has a mischievous right wing slant. The empathy is largely on the female speech writer and the blind patriotic loyalty of the “failed” security members.
The only people who come out of this looking good are the administration. The demonstrators look like wankers, the Palestinians look guilty as hell but emasculated, and the black community look stupid and to blame. Hey couldn’t they fit the spics, wops, dagos and chinks in? Oh, yeah, they did squeezed in the ultra-right hells angels with tattoos…
I understand the potential ironic reading, but i don’t believe this was made by either Chris Morris (The Day Today) or Ricky Gervais (The Office).
Confusing completely.