Recount Movie Review of Bias and Events

In many ways Recount is a great example of the good that Hollywood can do with real events rather than fiction. More recently, we’ve seen a great upswing in Hollywood producing movies based on historical events, or people. To name a just a couple, Argo and Lincoln are both movies that are based on actual history. While its clear Recount has some major and deep flaws in its writing, sometimes the 100% true events must be forfeited if the movie is to reach a mass audience. Movies like Argo (which I’ve seen) suffer from the same issue, which created heroes where there were none, and excluded blatant and important facts. Movies consistently distort the facts so that they can entertain a mass audience. Time and time again, consumers have proved that unentertaining movies consistently rake in less money than those that can. Audiences want heroes, and need an enemy for people to rally against. Directors just deliver what the consumers want; directors really can’t be blamed for creating movies that lack facts. While I could go on for hours about Argo and its blatant bias in demonizing the Iranians and only providing one side of the story (the American side), that’s not what this essay will delve into. I only use Argo to provide an additional side to American movies like any good journalist/researcher should do, saying that Recount was biased would be unfair if I didn’t provide the context for the current state of “real-life” movies. In other words, what Recount does to the 2000 election should’ve been expected. To say that Recount reported mostly every major issue that occurred in the 2000 election, wouldn’t be entirely false. They brought up the key issues of the election: Butterfly ballot, hanging and dimpled chads, Katherine Harris, Vice Presidential candidate Lieberman? (I’ll talk about him in depth later on), US and Florida courts making rulings based on political preference, people being turned away at voting booths, media reporting results early, and hand