Vice is a seriously underrated biographical film
Tells the political career of USA Vice President -Dick Cheney.
I think the biggest difference between this and other biographical films in Hollywood is that this is not an inspirational film. The film only shows Dick's step-by-step ascension process and his grasp of power; there is no detailed explanation of the reasons for his rapid promotion (through the plot, you can probably feel To Dick is a master of feeling public opinion and manipulating public opinion, which is also an extremely important ability of politicians in a democracy)
This also ensures that the film does not stray from the topic: it satirizes the oligarchy in the United States (there are 3 wonderful places in the film:
1. After Dick and others came to power, they wanted to curry favor with the powerful, so they wanted to reduce taxes for the wealthy, mainly to reduce or exempt additional property taxes for properties over $2 million. The public would not support tax reductions for the wealthy, so Dicks used their own The media and PR team described the property tax as a death tax that took advantage of people's loss aversion to pass the bill.
2 is the famous Gore v. Bush case in American judicial history. The film also vaguely implies that Dick had some influence on the supposedly neutral U.S. Supreme Court, leading to "the Supreme Court appointing Bush Jr. as president".
3 is the Iraq war. The panic brought about by the 9/11 incident made Dick see the opportunity to expand his power to become the emperor's president. In a state of war, it was easier for Congress to grant the White House joint executive power. In addition, Dick's old club, Halliburton, coveted it. Oilfields in the Middle East have been around for a long time; one is to expand their own power and the other is to obtain tangible economic benefits. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are inevitable. So Dicks began to count public opinion again and found that the reason why the people were reluctant to go to war was that they did not know who to vent their anger over the September 11 incident. So the Dicks portrayed Saddam as an ally of bin Laden in Iraq, a stronghold of anti-American terrorist groups. It gave the public a target to vent their anger, and released a large amount of unverified CIA intelligence (even a lot from the dark web). After understanding that public opinion is sensitive to biological and chemical weapons and nuclear weapons, they accused Iraq of possessing a large number of such weapons. During this period, oil companies, the Department of Defense, the CIA, a certain media, some members of Congress, and the White House office all joined forces to start an inexplicable war that killed more than 600,000 Iraqi civilians. During the period, there was also an episode where Dicks portrayed a small figure in Al Qaeda as an anti-American, anti-Shi'ite extreme Sunni religious leader during the campaign. As a result, he used the artificial force of the United States to establish an organization that is still active today - ISIS )
The problem with this film is that the editing and narrative point of view is very similar to "the big short". But there is a huge gap in the amount of information between the two. Dick entered the White House from the Nixon era and witnessed how Nixon and Kissinger skipped Congress to go to war with diplomacy, showing the domineering US president (ps complained that Nixon really infected many young American politicians in the American movie) to the Ford era, which became history The youngest chief of staff, or White House chief of staff, went through the Carter era, became the Republican chairman in the Reagan era, and became the secretary of defense in the Bush era. Until 2000, he partnered with Bush Jr., the "silly son of the landlord's family".
There was too much information during this period: the Vietnam War, the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, the secret negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the bombing of Cambodia, the Watergate incident, the war in Afghanistan, the Gore v. Bush case, the 9/11 incident, the Iraq war, the rise of ISIS, the Halliburton corruption case, Homosexuality Act...
Many Americans can't get these from the fragmented clips of the movie, let alone overseas audiences. But I still recommend it. After all, this is the first time that an American biographical film mocks its own national system.
Epilogue: At the end of the movie, Obama's victory speech when he came to the stage really gave people the feeling: saw the light
I didn't expect Bush Jr. to be the stupid son of a landlord's family. It's a cute thing. It's really amazing that this kind of person can be the president of the United States for 8 years. The Republican Party is really weird. You can refer to today's Trump.
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