Bush Family Fortunes

Author of the George W. Bush critique The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, award-winning "reporter-sleuth" Greg Palast--whose contributions appear in the UK's Guardian and Observer newspapers as well as on the BBC--wears two hats too many as the writer/director/star of Bush Family Fortunes. Adopting a faux Raymond Chandler-esque gumshoe persona (which is absolutely irritating), Palast crisscrosses the country searching for dirt on Bush and finds it in his early wartime preferential treatment (Palast argues persuasively that Bush leapfrogged over numerous other Air National Guard applicants to be out-of-harm's-way during the Vietnam War), the numerous Bush administration concessions for fat cat cronies such as convicted Enron CEO Kenneth Lay (in a clip, Bush claims to hardly know the man he called "Kenny-Boy," although footage of Bush offering Lay best birthday wishes strongly suggests otherwise), and the Bush family oil connections to the Saudis (including the Bin Ladens, as Michael Moore demonstrated in Fahrenheit 9/11). Most impressive of all, however, is Palast's look at how tens of thousands of Florida voters (many of whom were black) were kept off the voter rolls in the 2000 election because of supposed criminal records (the film makes a very convincing case that this was an outright sham, as an overwhelming number of these alleged name matches turned out to be false). Unfortunately, Bush Family Fortunes strives hard to undermine its own compelling arguments with Palast's tiresome detective shtick, supposedly sinister (but really just plain cheesy) repetitive shots of an oil derrick (the smoking gun, as it were), and a distracting fingernails-on-chalkboard music soundtrack by Moby. Still, if you can look past the often obnoxious format, there's serious food for thought here (ironically, in the DVD's extras--which include DVD-ROM-accessible archival documents, as well as video and audio clips--Palast appears in an excellent plainspoken 10-minute interview). A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)