Friday, February 17, 2006

When Hollywood Gets it Right, There's No Need for a Sequel

Netflix rocks. But aside from that, I had Tim Robbins' film "Bob Roberts" sitting next to the television for days waiting for a moment to watch. No late fees! If I had done this with our old corner video store, I would have had to pay fees equivalent to the cost three times the DVD purchase price.

Anyway, as I was watching the film, which was shot in the early nineteen nineties, and was periodically struck with the eerie sense that Robbins was predicting the future by telling a story for the present. I had watched it long ago when it was in theaters and found it side-splittingly funny. Last night, I found it to be a sad statement about how it really is - morose in a way that comedy can be when it is spot-on true. Check this paraphrase (as close to a quote as I could get) out from most of the way through the film:
The corruption is so deep they send soldiers to war to protect their prurient business interests.
Then, as I am want to do, I clicked on the "out takes" feature on the main menu. The very last
segment of this deleted scenes section was both eerie and troubling as it was a strong statement that resonates for today's government. I'm not going to tell you what it was, but am going to conduct a first for Educational Whisper: I'm giving y'all a homework assignment! Let's call this:
Windspike's Fun Political Homework for the Weekend

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to:

A- Rent the film "Bob Roberts" from your favorite purveyor of films (DVD with outtakes a must).

B - Watch the film (note Jack Black in a very young role...along with some other noteworthy celeb types).

C - After watching the film click on the "out takes" segment in the special features component. Skim through the batch, and make sure you watch the closing soliloquy from the "senator" defeated by Bob in the film. You may want to watch it twice to absorb the powerful sentence or two.

D - After doing all the above, come on back and tell us your thoughts by leaving a comment to this post.
This post will self destruct in thirty seconds after the NSA taps it for subversive content.

Enjoy and Blog on All.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you need an even more extreme example of a prophetic film, rent 'Network'. IMHO, one of the smartest films ever made and a siren for what the MSM has become.

Anonymous said...


All about the entrepreneur behind Netflix, in the January/February 2006 issue of Stanford magazine.

enigma4ever said...

What about Wag the Dog ????