The End of America.

"The End of America, an unsettling documentary polemic about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, brings up matters many of us would rather not contemplate in the middle of a financial crisis and on the eve of a new administration," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The pointedly inflammatory film, adapted from Naomi Wolf's book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, compares the Bush administration's attempts to discourage dissent and to wield increasingly unchecked power to the events preceding the establishment of 20th-century dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Chile and elsewhere. Without explicitly invoking the word, it implies that since 2001 the United States has drifted toward fascism in the name of fighting terror."

Updated.

End "belabors what might have been a compelling study of the last eight years of threatened fundamental American rights by resorting to strained examples (the Dixie Chicks, again?) and fear-mongering manipulation, the latter a tactic as cheap as those employed by Bush," writes Michael Joshua Rowan in the L Magazine. "The film is also a bore, with Wolf awkwardly explicating her thesis at a live public lecture, a lecture that wouldn't be possible if the Mussolini-esque policies she so readily cites had really germinated into full-blown Black Shirt intimidation."

"Despite the totalitarian drumbeating and the Constitution love, the movie feels strangely ahistorical and lacks real systemic analysis," writes Nicolas Rapold in the Voice. "Acclaimed filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (The Devil Came on Horseback) here deliver a tardy Robert Greenwald salvo (also available online) instead of looking to The Corporation, Taxi to the Dark Side or The Power of Nightmares."

Wolf, Sundberg and Stern will be at the IFC Center tonight through Friday and again on Tuesday.

Update: "Whatever its limitations as a filmed lecture..., End of America serves as a crucial distillation of the ways that post-9/11 America has lapsed into what Wolf calls a 'closing society,'" writes Akiva Gottlieb in Slant. "Valerie Plame, John Yoo, Blackwater, Guantanamo, COINTELPRO - plus the lesser known but equally horrifying stories of citizen journalist Josh Wolf and imprisoned Muslim army chaplain James Yee - all make appearances. Most importantly, as we head toward the new dawn with a constitutional scholar President-elect who promises to close Guantanamo but who still voted for the FISA bill, the film begs the question: How much further do we have to go to find ways to eradicate terror without abdicating our shared values?"

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2008 6:21 AM