Control Room

The Netflix envelope, and nearly every other synopsis I've read, will tell you Control Room is about Al Jazeera's coverage of the war in Iraq. For me, however, it seemed to be more of a study of how moderate Arabs view the world, and specifically the U.S. I came away encouraged as well as sobered.

I think the only real criticism I have is that they left so much of the good stuff out of the theatrical release. Unlike the deleted scenes on many DVDs, the number and quality of those on the Control Room disk almost amount to a second movie. I can only assume they were left out because documentaries are hard enough to market to theater goers without making them 3 hours long. If you rent it, you must watch the deleted scenes. Otherwise, you simply will not have seen the entire movie.

On a side note, I just read the other day that Josh Rushing, the Marine public relations officer who is a focal point of the movie, was just hired by Al Jazeera. Now that I've seen him in the film, I'll have to admit I'm more than a little impressed they did.