Charles Lewis Movies

The 2000 presidential election -- marked by an extremely narrow margin of victory, troubles with ballots going missing, and mechanical problems with poorly designed paper ballots in the state of Florida -- led many pundits to debate how effective the mechanics of voting had become in America. However, many who have set out to "solve" these problems have in fact only made them worse; many commonly used electronic voting systems are significantly less accurate than their mechanical counterparts, a number of them offer no hard-copy backup of the votes cast, and one of the largest manufacturers of electronic voting machines, Diebold, is headed by Walden O'Dell, a man who told attendees at a Republican fund raiser in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president (George W. Bush) next year," leading many to question his objectivity and if certain problems with his machines occurred entirely by accident. A growing number of political activists are looking to the 2008 presidential race as a test of whether fair elections are still possible in the United States, and the battle to see that all votes are accurately counted and election laws are properly observed is explored in the documentary Stealing America: Vote by Vote. Filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman weighs the evidence that political influence may have been used to leverage presidential election results in certain states, that a significant number of voters may have been illegally prevented from casting a ballot, and that the latest generation of electronic voting machines could be easily susceptible to tampering. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Directed by Robert Kane Pappas, Orwell Rolls in His Grave questions whether the bleak, feverishly regulated world of author George Orwell's 1984 is no longer a dire fictional account of government power gone wrong but a creeping reality of recent American media trends. The film focuses on the media's least covered topic -- itself -- in an effort to trace the process by which newsworthy stories are either dismissed entirely or distorted into something more politically suitable for the heads of various media conglomerates. It also studies how influential politicos became responsible for an industry that was largely created in order to keep political abuse in check. Among the interviewees include legal scholar and former L.A. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, film director and author Michael Moore, and Danny Schechter, a former producer for ABC and CNN. Pappas also covers the expansion of the news media and examines whether the onset of competitive 24-hour news stations has actually led to a nationally less informed public. ~ Tracie Cooper, Rovi