The Senescent Man

Filmaker and fellow blogger Roger L. Simon reviews the controversial, anti-Kerry documentary "Stolen Honor:"

"The filmmaking in 'Stolen Honor' is mediocre and employs shopworn techniques of documentary melodrama. Replete with portentous music and pretentious editing, it does not trust its audience to discover the truth for themselves, pounding it in over and over. This technique can work sometimes in a forty-five second commercial but in a film of forty-five minutes, it becomes tedious and actually undercuts the film's message - and this is particularly unfortunate because this documentary's message and content are devastating.

"The movie consists of interviews with now gray or graying men who were incarcerated and tortured in the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. Their stories are juxtaposed with the testimony of John Kerry at the Winter Soldier hearings. Despite the quality of the filmmaking, and my poor viewing conditions, I was deeply disturbed while watching this. It is not a "filmic" experience in the traditional sense. While viewing this movie, I imagine most of my generation find themselves reviewing themselves and their actions at the time rather than the film..."

But what is especially interesting, as Simon also reports separately, is that in Saturday's WSJ On-line editorials page, something nasty is going on regarding this film. It appears that Sinclair Broadcasting is suppressing the film due to pressure from a number of Democratic Party partisans that took aim at Sinclair's investors and advertisers.

The Wall Street Journal opines, what if this had happened to CBS or the New York Times during the Watergate era?