Goodykoontz: Down-and-dirty 'Hillary's America' is awful
Dinesh D'Souza is back with his latest right-wing polemic, this time bashing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. It's vile stuff, but it will doubtless play right into the political climate.
- Critic's rating: 1 out 5 stars
Anyone who has watched the Republican National Convention during the last few days might have noticed just a bit of an obsession with one person.
Donald Trump? No, the Republican candidate for president has been the supporting actor in this particular production. Hillary Clinton has been the focal point, the center around which Republicans have focused their energy. Or ire, honestly.
On that front, the timing of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest cinematic screed, “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,” is perfect.
On almost every other front, it is a disaster. D’Souza, you may recall, is the polemist behind the films “2016: Obama’s America” and “America: Imagine the World Without Her.” It turns out these predictions of a dire future for the U.S. at the hands of Barack Obama were simply a warm-up. Now, he’s really getting down to business.
But he also has changed his focus, or at least expanded it to include himself. In 2014, D’Souza was convicted of violating campaign finance laws, a felony — a conviction he blames on Obama going after him for making movies that criticize him. He spent time in a minimum-security halfway house, an experience he dramatizes here in unintentionally hilarious fashion. This particular halfway house, in his telling, included prisoners convicted of manslaughter and murder, among other violent crimes. While talking to one con man who murdered people after selling them insurance policies, he realizes that Democrats are trying to pull off the biggest theft of all — they’re trying to steal America.
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Clinton doesn’t really show up as a subject for more than an hour. Instead, D’Souza first runs through the “secret” history of the Democratic party. Did you know that it was responsible for slavery? For killing Lincoln? For starting the Ku Klux Klan? For stealing land from Native Americans? And did you know that Woodrow Wilson was a racist? That last is well-documented, but D’Souza finds Wilson so inspired by a screening of “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House that Wilson imagines a KKK rider literally escaping the screen on his horse; an enraptured Wilson follows him out onto the White House lawn.
“Overkill” comes to mind.
This is the level of discussion we’re talking about. When D’Souza finally gets around to attacking Clinton — and I’m sorry, there’s no other word for it — it’s mostly a rehash of the kind of scandalous, poorly researched and often blatantly false misinformation that infects your Facebook feed. “Hillary doesn’t want you to read this — No. 3 will shock you!” That kind of thing.
In the past, I’ve given D’Souza the benefit of the doubt, going out of my way to be extra objective. I actually gave “2016: Obama’s America” a somewhat positive review in 2012 (3 out of 5 stars).
But this thing is madness.
It’s also in vogue. When convention goers chant, “Lock her up!” at the top of their lungs about the opposition’s candidate, we’ve entered a new world. This film plays right into it. D’Souza calls Bill and Hillary “depraved criminals.” He also shows tape of Hillary Clinton stressing that we should not lapse into hateful rhetoric. “Hateful rhetoric?” D’Souza then says. “The Clintons are hateful people.”
A lot of that going around these days. Look, there are plenty of reasons to not like, trust or vote for Hillary Clinton. Legitimate reasons, not trumped-up ones (pardon the pun), the kind of thing D’Souza traffics in here.
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Then again, if the rhetoric on display at the convention hasn’t been negative enough for you, rejoice. You’ve found your film.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.
'Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party,' 1 star
Directors: Dinesh D'Souza, Bruce Schooley.
Cast: Dinesh D'Souza, Jonah Goldberg, Andrea Cohen.
Rating: PG-13 for some violence, thematic elements and smoking.
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