USA,
2006, 90 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
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Chris Hegedus, Nick Doob
- prod
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Rebecca Marshall, Frazer Pennebaker, D.A. Pennebaker
- cam
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Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus
- editor
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Nick Doob, Chris Hegedus
- source
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Pennebaker Hegedus Films, 262 West 91st Street, New York, 10024 FAX: 212-496-8195. EMAIL: fpenne@aol.com.
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COMMENTS
Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob in attendance.
OTHER
Love him or loathe him, the sharp-tongued liberal pundit Al Franken is on a mission. Since the 2003 publication of his bestselling book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, he has been fixated on discrediting the right-wing media's alleged propensity for fomenting misinformation in its reportage and on exposing the Bush administration for its own acts of distortion. Dismissed as a “vile smear merchant” by arch nemesis Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, the bespectacled political satirist will stop at nothing to enrich the country’s media diet by relentlessly, as Franken says, “taking what they say and using it against them.” In this unflinching probe into the daily working life of the former Saturday Night Live writer and principal voice of Air America Radio, filmmakers Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob apply their classic, unobtrusive style in tracking the obstreperous Franken over the course of two years. Partners of renowned documentarian D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room, 1994) for over 30 years, Hegedus and Doob’s direct-cinema strategies provide a candid, engrossing portrait of freedom of speech as exercised by one of the nation’s more colorful political insiders, interspersing existing TV footage of Franken in action with frank, behind-the-scenes glimpses into the pundit’s personal life. Whether he’s hobnobbing with Henry Kissinger at a swanky gathering of Republican bigwigs, engaging in an onstage contretemps with conservative vixen Ann Coulter or pondering a 2008 senate run, Franken is never anything less than unstoppable.
—Andy Bailey
FACTOID #173
Though he starred in an Opening Night film (1967’s How I Won the War), lent his image and songs to 1968’s Festival entry Yellow Submarine and was scheduled to appear at the 1971 Festival with wife Yoko for an evening of their short films, John Lennon never attended the SFIFF.
