the Al Franken movie post

I didn't like the documentary Al Franken: God Spoke as much as I thought or hoped I would.

I like Franken, especially his books and when he used to work on SNL. I don't think he was as good on the radio as he could have been, and he certainly wasn't as effective as he should have been, though he definitely had his moments.

But I like him, and I would have liked to have seen a...dare I say it? "Fair and balanced" portrait of the man. Besides more throughful one-on-one interviews with Franken himself, I'm imagining interviews with writers like Eric Alterman on Franken's books, Lorne Michaels and Tom Davis from his SNL days, maybe his onetime radio cohost.

In other words...people who can put him in context, which would smooth out the films rough edges greatly. But maybe rough edges are the point. My problem with the film is not that it doesn't do what it's trying to do well.

It's trying to be a fly-on-the-wall documentary of Franken's evolution as a political entertainer. It does that all right; though I think it could have been done better. The trouble was that's not what I wanted to see.

The parts of the movie dealing with Franken's radio career also suffer from comparision with HBO's documentary about the first year of Air America, "Left of the Dial." And whoever misspelled the name of Molly Ivins, who appears in documentary footage, in the credits deserves to be slapped twice by someone with her books in their hands.