As I suggested yesterday (hardly a prediction since it was so clearly going to happen), "2016: Obama's America" has taken in enough in estimated gross proceeds this weekend ($6.238 million from Friday through Sunday) to become the top conservative post-1982 documentary (and number six overall, behind four Michael Moore films and Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth").
Some critiques, currently compiled at the Hollywood Reporter (this post went directly to the underlying write-ups), are coming in, and let just say that there's no Michael Moore-level fawning:
The Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Farber praised the film’s “fairly measured” look at Obama’s personal life and early history, however he found the film “really goes off the rails” when it moves from the biographical to the speculative.
“We hear about 'Obama’s Chicago pal' Bill Ayers, though D’Souza admits that Obama met Ayers in 1995, 25 years after Ayers’ involvement with the Weather Underground,” Farber wrote. “D’Souza also points out that Obama took a class at Columbia taught by Edward Said, the renowned pro-Palestinian scholar. Do any of these marginal associations prove that Obama aims to introduce socialism to America and undermine the state of Israel?”
Farber, who wrote his review on August 3, also predicts that the film "will make few waves at the box office or at the polling booth." We'll see, pal.
Here's the most humorous paragraph from Andy Webster's review of the film at the New York Times:
Mr. D’Souza revives figures tied to Mr. Obama by conservative critics in the last election, including the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; the Chicago educator, activist and former radical Bill Ayers; and Edward Said, a Palestinian scholar and a professor of Mr. Obama’s at Columbia, who died in 2003.
Yeah, if it weren't for "conservative critics," Obama wouldn't be "tied" to these guys at all, despite having Wright officiate the Obamas' marriage and Barack's 18 years of membership, or despite Obama working for several years with Ayers on the Annenberg Challenge public school boondoggle.
At Slate, leftist reviewer David Weigel -- well, it seems like he figured out that he couldn't trash its accuracy, so he largely didn't while quibbling a bit on some matters. It appears to be an exercise in benign neglect; once he got his required number of words in, he seemed to walk away.
Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters covered the Washington Post's critique Saturday morning. The lowlight (of the critique, not Whitlock's post) was reviewer Michael O'Sullivan's statement that "D’Souza’s one-sided argument ultimately stoops to fear-mongering of the worst kind, stating in no uncertain terms that, if the president is reelected, the world four years from now will be darkened by the clouds of economic collapse, World War III (thanks to the wholesale renunciation of our nuclear superiority) and a terrifyingly ascendant new “United States of Islam” in the Middle East."
That prediction is only barely more risky than my suggestion yesterday that D'Souza's documentary would hit the number 6 spot in its genre.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
