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I often leave CNN on as background noise while I'm doing stuff. You know,
just in case some evildoers do some of that evil. So the last thing I
wanted to see was a movie that had anything to do with John Kerry, Viet Nam,
or Swift Boats. Sadly, those are the three very things that comprise Going
Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, the new documentary from George Butler.
The only thing that could have been worse was if the film threw in Kobe
Bryant and/or Scott Peterson.
But here's the thing: Even though I'm sick to death of Bush and Kerry and
the election, I still found Upriver to be a fascinating and moving doc. It'
s also, at least indirectly, a pointed comparison between atrocities
committed by US forces in 'Nam and the nightmarish acts perpetrated at the
Abu Gharib prison (and who knows where else - ever get the feeling that LBJ'
s war would have been a lot less popular if we had imbedded journalists and
24-hour news channels back then?). Plus, we finally get a look at that
goddamn swift boat. And ain't she a beaut?
Upriver begins by showing home videos of the young Kerry, who already had a
thick face and bad hair. We see him spend his Kennedy years at Yale (if you
pause on frame 20,763, you can just make out a young Dubya snorting coke off
of a whore's ass in the background of pan across the campus) before shipping
off to The Conflict. Voluntarily, I might add. You probably know what
comes next: Attacks, shrapnel, and three Purple Hearts. A Bush counterpoint
documentary would likely show our fearless, flight-suited leader at a posh
country club, yelling at Pedro for not putting enough ice in his rum and
coke.
The bulk of Upriver deals with Kerry's life once he returned home from
active service. You've heard only snippets of his testimony before the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but Upriver contains the entire chilling
rant. Fox News tell you about Kerry tossing his medals away like bottle
caps? You get to see it here, and if the extended scene doesn't put his
actions in perspective in a deeply moving way, you're an evil, cold-hearted
prick. And that probably explains why you were watching Fox News in the
first place. Hey, at least the Kerry clan never airbrushed retards out of
their family pictures.
Upriver was made by George Butler, the brains behind the intriguing The
Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition and,
unapologetically, a long-time friend of Kerry. This matters not, for in
terms of making a classy, compelling documentary that doesn't point fingers
and doesn't seem like the work of a borderline crackpot, Butler succeeds.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38725 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1324029 X-RT-TitleID: 10004420 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 7/10
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