Movie Review: Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Brian Knappenberger.

Written by: Brian Knappenberger.

 

The documentary Nobody Speak starts out as an examination of the bizarre legal case in which Terry Bollea aka Hulk Hogan sued Gawker for posting an excerpt of a sex tape featuring him and the wife of his best friend – a radio personality known as Bubba the Love Sponge. That case really should have been enough for one documentary to be about – but that doesn’t satisfy director Brian Knappenberger, who spins off into other stories in the back half of the documentary – like billionaire Sheldon Adelson buying a Las Vegas newspaper that was critical of him in order to control them, to Donald Trump and the rise of “Fake News”. Undeniably, there are connections between all of these cases – cases in which billionaires try to manipulate the press into giving them the coverage they want, and trying to actively shut down those who don’t – and yet because the film is only 95 minutes long, the film starts to feel more scattershot than it should. I couldn’t help but think of the excellent doc from a few years ago – Best of Enemies – about the infamous Vidal/Buckley debates during the 1968 Presidential campaigns, which in the last few minutes contains a montage about the unintended consequences those debates spawned. That was a smart, effective and efficient way of taking a smaller story and giving it larger relevance – Nobody Speak does essentially that for 45 minutes, and isn’t as effective. By the end, as the music soars, you’re watching a sermon.

 

That doesn’t mean that the film is bad – far from it – just that I wish the film had followed the crazy Terry Bollea vs. Gawker case throughout – because that case is bizarre enough to support it, and the case may well be stronger had they done that. By cramming that into 50 minutes or so, it kind of just hits the highlights, and doesn’t give as nuanced a view of anyone involved in the case as it should. For instance, Gawker was a journalistic cesspool, but the doc brushes by that quickly, in order to make Gawker into Free Speech heroes. I do believe Gawker had the right to publish what they did, and their right to freedom of speech should be upheld at all costs – because even if it is a cesspool, they still have those rights. By making them into heroes, the film makes things easier on the audience than it should be to side with Gawker – they were right, but saying so should make you feel a little dirty.

 

Knappenberger – who has made two other, rather laudatory docs, about the internet – We Are Legion about the hacker group Anonymous and The Internet’s Own Boy – about Aaron Swartz, another activist, hounded by the government until he committed suicide – doesn’t much work in shades of grey though – he likes things black and white morally speaking. And while here, there is clearly a right side and a wrong side, it would be nice to at least see what that other side was – from someone other than Bollea’s poorly touped lawyer.

 

Still, my problems with Nobody Speak aside, it is a fascinating movie about the slippery slope of journalistic integrity in America when billionaires can essentially control the media. Hogan’s suit against Gawker was funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who apparently didn’t like previous stories they had done on him. Perhaps sensing that audiences may not like the Gawker people (one of whom did say that they only celebrity sex tape that wasn’t newsworthy would be if the celebrity was under 4 – and even if he was clearly being sarcastic, that doesn’t really help) Knappenberger switches focus to the Las Vegas Review Journal – a newspaper that was bought by another billionaire, although he tried to cover his tracks, and was only ousted by the dogged work by the reporters at the paper he had just acquired.

 

As with Knappenberger’s previous two films, I agree with a lot of what Knappenberger is saying in this film – and think that the connections are there, and they are important, and we do need to defend full, free journalism. I also wish that Knappenberger could impart that message without resorting to flattening everything into moral black and whites, and speechifying in the final act. There is a great doc to be made of this material – to be honest, there’s probably two or three great docs to be made of it. This one is merely ok.

Movie Review: The Internet's Own Boy

The Internet’s Own Boy
Directed by: Brian Knappenberger.
Written by: Brian Knappenberger.

Aaron Schwartz was a computer prodigy, who was working with teams and on projects that most people his own age – or of any age for that matter – wouldn’t have the slightest idea about. He was a genius programmer – one of the minds behind Reddit – and he became rich at a young age. But money didn’t interest him. He eventually left Reddit – badly – because he didn’t want to use his mind to simply make money for himself. He was an idealist who thought the internet and the knowledge it contained should be open to everyone. It’s this belief that will eventually cause him to do some times that bring the attention of law enforcement – and Prosecutors who will charge him with a litany of crimes, which could cost him decades behind bars. Under this immense pressure, Schwartz eventually snapped, and killed himself. It was a tragic loss of a bright young mind.

Brian Knappenberger’s documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy, unsurprisingly is a one sided documentary firmly in the pro-Aaron Schwartz camp. This is the same filmmaker who made We Are Legion last year about the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, which also was firmly in their camp. I thought that in that situation, he could have been harder on Anonymous than he was. But in this case, I find it hard to complain too much. Aaron Schwartz didn’t deserve the treatment he got.

What was Schwartz’s crime that could have landed him in prison for decades? He found an unlocked server room at MIT, and used it to downloaded thousands of academic research papers from J-Store – one of the companies who collect all the academic papers published, and hide them away behind a paywall that most people don’t have access to. He didn’t do anything with the articles – not yet anyway – and there’s no real evidence to suggest what he was planning on doing with them. He had done something similar with court documents earlier – creating an automated program to download the documents that you have to pay to access. To Schwartz – and many others – this seems absurd. How can the law not be free for all in democracy like America? To Schwartz, the Academic papers are similar. How can the collected knowledge of human kind – which these papers represent – not be made public knowledge? It’s not like the people who wrote the papers are getting paid. Just companies like J-Store.

Why was the government so hell-bent on prosecuting Schwartz? They, of course, refused to be interviewed for the film, so we’ll never really know for sure – just like we’ll never really know what Schwartz was going to do with the articles he downloaded – but it’s easy to make the case that they wanted to make an example out of him. This was a crime where the victims weren’t really complaining – J-Store didn’t want a prosecution to go forward, but had no say in the matter. MIT remained neutral in the matter – which infuriated many, who think this neutrality goes against what they are supposed to stand for. For the people in the movie – and I find this hard to disagree with – this should have been something that was handled internally, without getting the criminal courts involved. But not to the government. They go after Schwartz hard – and when he refuses to accept a plea – they go even harder.

The Internet’s Own Boy is a tragic story. To a certain extent, Schwartz brought the attention on himself. He knew what he was doing what not exactly legal – but he didn’t expect the reaction he got. Still, how anyone can argue that what he did deserved the charges filed against him by the government is beyond me. Why should people have to pay for access to the law, or access to Academic papers? This are fairly basic things. He wasn’t downloading movies or music so he didn’t have to pay; he wasn’t making any money off what he was doing. He wanted knowledge to be free. And what about that is wrong exactly?

Movie Review: We Are Legion

We Are Legion

Directed by: Brian Knappenberger.

Anonymous is an internet collective, with no leadership, that has become a force online. What started out on websites like 4chan, where a bunch of people posted strange, sick, deranged and often hilarious pictures in an attempt to one up each other, has turned into a very real movement – that is responsible for some good and some bad online. Because there is no real leadership, essentially anyone can be part of Anonymous, and they can do anything they want. Some people in the movement are, to put it bluntly, dicks – yet some are idealists, who are doing what they do for the right reasons, even if that means breaking the law.

We Are Legion is a fascinating documentary, perhaps a bit too slanted in favor of Anonymous, but mostly plays fair, that tracks this organization’s development from a group of people just trying to amuse themselves, to a group who sees themselves as a force for good. Whether it’s taking on racist radio talk show host, and essentially ruining his life (but who the hell is going to feel sorry for him), to going to all-out war with Scientology, when they tried to block Tom Cruise’s promotional video from being available online, to attacking Paypal, Visa and Mastercard when they stopped letting you donate to Wikileaks using those methods (although they apparently have no problem with you donating to the KKK that way) to helping those in Egypt during the protests still be able to get online and let the world know what was going on, you may not agree with everything Anonymous does, but for the most part, their hearts are in the right place – and they are willing to stand up for what they believe in. The assholes you thought Anonymous was getting too serious, and so hacked the epilepsy site to make it flash bright lights on and off though are just jerks. And the offshoot group LulzSec, who were not just targeting corporations, but harming innocent bystanders, are also near impossible to defend.

We Are Legion is hardly a great documentary, but it remains a fascinating and insightful one. Pinning down a group like Anonymous is pretty much impossible – they have no leadership, no official spokesperson, and many of them refuse to show their own faces or reveal their own identity, preferring instead to hide behind Guy Fawkes masks – in part to protect themselves from prosecution, and in part because they feel they are more powerful if they cannot be identified as individuals.

But what We Are Legion does do, better than anything else I’ve seen anyway, is show you how Anonymous became what it is today, and how it continues to evolve, fracture and move forward. With so much of our lives happening online now, cyber activism or hacktivism as they call it will only grow in the coming years. What form that takes is anyone’s guess, but it is important to show how it got this far.