11/8/16

I read the other reviews here. I did not notice it at the time but agree there may be a slight liberal bias here. Mostly I thought it was just a capture of a cross section of people in America's "election days". The real downfall here is that this movie is so boring. Having no point of view is great for a documentary, to keep their views out of it, but they need to have some kind of point. When I watch a documentary about the 2016 election, I don't really want to watch a guy play a ukulele for 5 minutes and talk about how great his girlfriend is for another 3. It is also quite repetitive. What would make a much more interesting documentary is the story of one of its subjects, for example the well spoken Alabama man who was voting for the first time after just being exonerated after serving 30 years on death row!

This "documentary" was entertaining and I enjoyed listen to the various viewpoints. The problem is, the "documentary" viewpoints were overwhelmingly one-sided. The movie did show a few Trump supporters but the entire movie was edited and the questions asked were against Trump. In my opinion, a "documentary" should show an unbiased viewpoint and analysis on the topics discussed. I especially did not like how they made the couple from Michigan (if i remember correctly) look bad by only showing a small portion of the conversation they were having when they mentioned Muslims. Additionally, the movie shows the racism and how the Hillary supporters talked down about the other side. The "documentary" showed the producers opinion instead of an unbiased analysis. A problem our entertainment industry has.

I watched this whole thing. As the day progressed, they showed dramatic, and rare, examples of people who thought they needed HRC to win. The Trump supporters were shown as stupid or self-centered. As it became obvious that Trump would win, the slant to the left tilted way further. The ending comments were actually offensive if you voted for Trump.

Waste of time- that's 105 minutes I can never get back.

I wen't into this doc without knowing anything about the people that filmed it, the people they observed, or any other information about what was covered other than the election. Now, there is no interaction with the observed people by the documentarians, which I respect, but it was pretty obvious there was a message being pushed, which is that there are much less Trump supporters than Clinton supporters and they don't have any real problems to deal with. The documentary follows somewhere between ten and fifteen Clinton supporters and three to five Trump supporters (I can't remember the exact numbers but that's close). Now, right off the bat, that is a flawed portrayal. The MSM will never admit it, but there are more Trump supporters than Clinton supporters when you subtract illegal immigrants (an estimated 2-5 million illegals voted in sanctuary city states like California and New York). Other than that, I didn't have a problem with it because there wasn't direct intervention by the filmmakers, which I can't stress enough as the best thing a documentarian can do.

There is no doubt that the 2016 election was one of (if not the) most polarizing in the history of the United States. What "11/8/16" does is capture the initial, gut, visceral reactions of people on that day.

I really liked how the documentary tries to form a sort of narrative for itself by starting at the beginning of the day with all the families/people it profiles, and then following those people throughout the day as the balance starts shifting from "Hillary is going to easily win" to "this is going to be a tight race". This strategy really captures what it felt like on that day.

A lot of reviewers have mentioned the "liberal slant" of this documentary (and I think that's the reason for its very middling rating), and there is a definitive bias towards those who wanted Clinton to be victorious. However, I didn't feel that this at all ruined the experience. In fact, for the narrative of this doc to really work dramatically, it had to be focused more on that side of the story.

I enjoyed watching "11/8/16" because it was able to put me back into the whirlwind of emotions of that momentous day. Even though the candidate whose name I scratched on the ballot did not win, I'm fascinated by Presidential politics as a whole and thus am always interested in new perspectives.