Slate’s David Weigel:
It’s hard to count the explosions. Battle for America has the sort of pyrotechnics that would make Michael Bay worry about the viewers’ retinas. Some buildings implode as fireballs tumble out the windows. Others crumble into clouds of dust and rubble. A group of dinosaurs, minding their own business, scrambles away from a meteor that causes a mushroom cloud, bringing them all to extinction.
All of this is in the service of a very sober argument about the failures of the 111th Congress.
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Battle for America is the fifth film produced in 2010 by Citizens United and the third by a former mergers-and-acquisitions manager named Stephen K. Bannon. Not too long ago, he was an amateur director. Now, he’s playing his movies at Tea Party events, conventions, and special screenings like the one in Georgetown Thursday night. Citizens United President David Bossie was there, as was the movie’s host, Dick Morris, and Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. Bannon, wearing a West Point windbreaker (his daughter attended the school), was giddy about what his movies can do to the Democrats.
“We’ve tried to weaponize film,” he said. “And we’ve tried to do in it a certain way to get this view to people who might not necessarily see a political documentary. We made this film for independents and for Reagan Democrats. We’re actually going to take it to Paul Kanjorski’s district,” he said, referring to the Pennsylvania Democrat who’s on the first line of the incumbent deathwatch. “His constituents, those are the kind of people who need to see this.”
Outside the theater, one of the Washington panics of the moment concerns the surge of campaign spending brought on by Citizens United. It was Bossie’s group and its advertisements for Hillary: The Movie, that initiated a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. “We won,” Bossie told the premiere audience. “And we want to make use of that.”
Battle for America is one of the products of that big win. It’s the group’s final film of the year and the one with the least promotion, especially compared to last month’s Newt Gingrich spectacular America at Risk. Bannon’s Fire From the Heartland had the irresistible hook of being all about conservative women; this weekend, it is being screened at the Smart Girl Politics blogger conference at a Hyatt across the Potomac. Bannon’s first film, Generation Zero, premiered at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn.
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