Is It True What They Say About Ann? (Short)
One of my frequent film suggestion individuals from the past few years, whom I’ve never met, and usually just sends the link, sent me the link to this short documentary about conservative firebrand Ann Coulter a while back. Anyone who knows me relatively well knows that I am very much a liberal and Democratic voter. That said, I’m sometimes curious to see, from a cinematic standpoint, how the conservative side looks at itself, which I’ve done in seeing two of Dinesh D’Souza’s films in the past few years. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the directors behind this 37-minute short on Coulter, Elinor Burkett and Patrick Wright, are explicitly conservative, although they certainly give Coulter more of a benefit of the doubt that I would, in their position.
We see a lot of Ann talking into the camera, at first, as she recalls the personal history that would eventually lead her to be one of the most popular conservative pundits in America. We also see her as she is confronted by the likes of Bill Maher, Katie Couric and Bill O’Reilly on her sometimes-inflammatory views on Muslims and liberals, whom she often labeled as traitors after 9/11 for not rallying around the Iraq war, and get a sense of the passions she inflames on the left. I personally cannot stand her rhetoric, and even after this film, I have a hard time understanding why conservatives would support someone who harbors such a black-and-white view of the world as she does. I understand the point the filmmakers tried to make at the end, by boiling down some of her rhetoric to its essence, and asking whether it was REALLY that bad, but it’s not just the point-of-view, but the way it is presented, that is why liberals view people like Coulter as toxic to not just political discourse as a whole, but conservatism especially. This film, though well-done, does nothing to change that perception.
