Control Room

On the subject of movies, tonight I went downtown to go see I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Apparently, there had been a jazz performance in the theater and they left their piano in front of the screen. The fine people at the Orpheum Theater gave us free tickets to Control Room and a free bucket of popcorn. The theater is amazing. It's sprawling and beautiful. Something like the Paramount, except that they've converted the sidestage area into a smaller theater. Very nice. The movie was great. It's a documentary about the behind the scenes of Al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war. The film does an exceptional job of forcing the audience to take into account the perspective of the Middle East. For the most part, the war is portrayed as negatively, while the American soldiers are treated as unlucky people following orders. It's an impressive movie. It leaves you feeling a bit more sympathetic towards Al Jazeera than you would think. A great moment comes when the US Central Command Press Officer discusses Al Jazeera as one end of the ideological spectrum and Fox News is the other extreme. He clearly wants the message to be somewhere in between. The American press gets treated fairly for the most part, which is to say negatively. Rumsfeld comes off looking like a jackass, but that's more than fair.