Recount
The Thick of It meets Kevin Spacey headdesking repeatedly.
This is a film about the clusterfuck of epic proportions named Bush v. Gore, the Florida lawsuit that swung the 2000 election towards Bush Jr and made Al Gore do that crappy joke for all these years. Even though it’s only about that lawsuit in particular, it’s not exactly flattering to the Republican side. Seems more like a case of “Reality has a left-leaning bias” than outright propaganda, but this was released right into Obama’s campaign, so caveat emptor.
This is almost two hours long, so they get into the nitty-gritty of the thing. “Overvotes”, “Undervotes”, “interpreting the intent of the voter” and other bullshit like that. The richest nation on Earth with technologically advanced inventions spent months arguing about manually creating punch cards in the twenty-first century. This seems like a solved problem since pre-historic times, but what do I know? Then there was manual voting counts, hordes of people doing menial work to decide who gets to win. Lawyers that bill eye-watering fortunes arguing over pieces of paper smaller than a fingernail. Never so many did so little in so much time. If this is propaganda, is for a fascist regime that does way with this crap and Gets Things Done.
The timeline for my emotions during this is simple. I started ripping my hair off by the 10-minute mark or so and it never stops until the end. Every scene is more enraging than the previous, and the days turn into weeks and months, and I almost cried in frustration.
When you step back and look into the Big Picture, you see this whole thing had the objective of choosing 25 of the 538 representatives that elect the President. If both parties were tied, wasn’t it much easier to just give 12 electors to each and make the 13th name on each list fight to the death in a stadium. It’s both a fairer system, and doesn’t involve “chad”.
This has an all-star cast that doesn’t do much other than look completely exasperated. Dennis Leary is as cool as ever.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.