The Unknown Known
-
History on Autopilot: Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known
Throughout season one of The Newsroom, viewers could play an idle game before each episode: which recent news item would be put through the Aaron Sorkin wringer, morphing from painful recent incident to an amusing babble of rapid-fire speech set in comfortably familiar rhythms? Sorkin’s been around so long his trademark back-and-forth/walk-and-talk exchanges smack of self-parody even when well-executed. His familiarity/inflexibility suggests a belief that any historical event or dramatic situation can be processed through the writer’s usual dialogue tricks and emerge with a sufficiently revelatory perspective. The same erroneous assumption underlies Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known, which has expanded […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 14, 2014 -
First Look at Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known
Errol Morris’ Donald Rumsfeld doc The Unknown Known played at Telluride last night (to somewhat mixed reactions), and today Vice has the first clip from the film. Delving into almost 50 years of Rumsfeld’s memos, which he refers to as “snowflakes,” the film obviously harkens back to Morris’ Oscar-winning The Fog of War — also an intimate examination of a failed U.S. war with the Secretary of Defense who oversaw it — but with a difference. Whereas Robert S. McNamara was looking back 40 years after the fact on his handling of the Vietnam war, Rumsfeld is here talking about a […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 30, 2013
