The Hunting of the President

After seeing this movie I feel even more certain that we should change the

constitution to allow Presidents to serve more than 2 terms. Clinton was the greatest President in my lifetime and I am Embarrassed for our country with

the recent election of Dubya. How could 58 million people be so DUMB! We

are hated and despised throughout the world. Our economy is in the tank and

over 1000 of our finest have died in an illegitimate war. When Clinton lied, no one died! His lie was about a personal failing. He was pushed into the

impeachment thing by right-wing zealots. If those idiots had been doing their job and not salivating over a sex scandal maybe the President could have

concentrated on more important things. I blame the right-wing congressmen

and Senators for the build up to 9/11.

This film has some major problems. One,it explains almost nothing. Even if you paid close attention in the '90s to the "deep-in-the-weeds" details of Whitewater and the pre-Monica sexual allegations against Clinton---this movie not only assumes you understood this stuff to begin with, but that you remember it too. Mistake. If you are looking for a movie that will shed some light on these subjects, this isn't it.

Second,the director constantly interrupts the storyline with flashes to clips of "gangsters" or "train crashes" which I assume are supposed to imply the dastardliness of the "hunters of the president". The impact is distracting to the viewer and trivializes the subject at hand. If a class of sophomores somewhere were asks to dramatize this subject, I have the feeling this is what they would come up with.

Weak effort.

This documentary revealed in a narrative style, how shockingly powerful the campaign to destroy Bill Clinton was.

The documentary ran like a thesis paper. Each statement was backed up by several facts, with at least one reputable political figure backing it up. There were also several confessions from well know republicans involved as well.

The narrative style backed up by Morgan Freeman's dark voice provided yet another bonus.

It truly provides an insight you've never seen. It changed my views on Clinton and how far certain political partys will go to get their way.

Music- 4 Out of 5 Narration- 5 Out of 5 Proof- 5 Out of 5

Overall- 9.5 Out of 10

How did we come to be here? That was a question asked during President Clinton's impeachment proceedings and this film sets out to answer it by stepping back in time to the start of his political rise. The documentary charts the many and varied attempts to undermine Bill Clinton as President and see him removed from office whether it be for murder, sex, corruption or just plain lying. Or at least that is the story it tries to tell but somehow it manages to take what should have been a fascinating thesis and turn it into a jumbled documentary that seems to think that old movie footage and comic asides are somehow going to help it build its case.

It is of course wrong because the film manages to somehow take this investigation and mostly f**k it up. The delivery is terrible from start to finish. The first and biggest problem is that it assumes that you know all about the subject, the people and the players and it starts with this knowledge a given. Now I appreciate that when you deal with a subject everyday, it is easy to forget that the majority of others don't live in your world but for the makers of a documentary it is quite unforgivable a mistake to make. The fast pace of delivery also means that once you are being left behind you're done for and I was barely coping with all the new names and events that I was supposedly meant to have read up on before the film. Of course as a liberal I'm meant to think this film is brilliant just because it criticises the right (which is the only reason I can figure for this film being so highly rated on IMDb).

The contributors are not all that impressive either. They all have plenty to say but the most important people are notable by their absence – understandable perhaps but damaging to a film so heavily reliant on interviews. The delivery issues didn't stop with the actual material though because I also had issue with the comic "film clips" used to illustrate points for no real reason. I can see that they were stealing the idea from Michael Moore but it doesn't sit in the middle of the mostly laugh-free material and thus only detracts from the film.

Overall then an interesting subject given shoddy treatment in a pretty poor documentary. It asks much of the viewer but offers little in return and, although Democrats will lap up any opportunity to see the Right taking a kicking but this alone does not make it a documentary worth seeing – not by a long shot.

Less a vindication of Clinton than an indictment of the press, this film provides a timely commentary on the excesses of journalistic zeal that almost brought down a presidency. I was especially moved by the women players, including Susan McDougal, aka Joan of the Ozarks, who was treated like a serial killer during her two years in prison, after she ran afoul of nasty-minded Ken Starr and his minions. I also like the brave and witty portrait of ex-Arkansas Governor Riley's wife Claudia. The facts presented here may seem all too familiar by now, but we can thank authors Joe Conason and Gene Lyons for unearthing a good number of them. Students of history will long debate the merits of the Clinton presidency, but the incompetence of the press is now an established fact.