Dreams from My Real Father (2012)

Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Am I Missing Something?

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Scrolling through videos to watch in Amazon Prime I came across this one. After having watched President Barack Obama's last Media Correspondent's dinner, I thought before he leaves office I ought to find out a little more about him. Timely, huh? In 2008 I thought we did not know enough about him, but there is certainly more to Barack Obama than meets the eye, so why not learn more? Why not indeed ... but this movie has nothing.It is titled to sound like his autobiographical book introducing himself to the country for his run for the Presidency, but it is not that, it is a very dishonest attempt to pretend to sound like it was written about Obama.Well, it started out interestingly enough, spoken in an intimate first person tone as if it was written in Barack Obama's own voice it starts to talk about his father being a communist and how bringing communism to the US was his lifelong dream. OK ... what's wrong here. I took a closer look and this is nothing Obama did himself. In the reader's voice it says he knows he misled the American people and goes on more about communism.Well, I don't know how unintelligent someone has to be to watch this so-called documentary and believe it, but I knew right away it was nonsense. I am no expert in communism or Marxism, but I know enough to know that Obama is not a Marxist, or a communist or anything close to that. He is more of the 1% and American elitist with a casual laid back pragmatic attitude that allows him to interact with people with great social skills.I am not am Obama fan, though his care-taking of the US from 2008 to 2016 was a fairly good piece of work. He passed ObamaCare which was better than nothing, but certainly not communist or Marxist. I prefer a more New Deal approach of Single Payer Health care. He did not find a way to deal with the Republicans so he did allow the tax cuts to remain and the budget deficits to rise ... and that is sooner or later going to kill the country, or at least bankrupt the government. Who knows how far away that time is, so I think in the near future people will look back on the Obama years with nostalgia.Back to this fictitious attack on Obama ... it is so devious and underhanded that if it was true there would no need to soup it up and try to deceive viewers and push a bunch of lies into it. I am sad I wasted time on this and it is even more sad that there are so many Americans who would waste time, energy and money to attack a popular President who isn't perfect, but has done what he thinks he can do in office - agree or disagree with him.This movie is awful, to be avoided and warned against. 1/10

The sociologists owe us a good, useful, short, simple word for "collective insanity." I agree with the makers of this fake tabloid garbage that there is indeed something wrong with America. This is a symptom.It's hard to know how this movement towards conspiracies got started. Of course it's an expression of our overall move to the right. Two political scientists, Rosenthal and Poole (easily Googled) did a respectable study of voting patterns in the congress and found that the drift to the extreme right began around 1970.Note that it was before Obama so racism can't account for all of it.In any case, the rough beast has slouched towards Bethlehem and given birth to this.

Here is how you do it:1. Listen to the "Obama quote" played over a montage towards the end of the film, where it sounds like he says the following: "There are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. The free market, it doesn't work. It has never worked."Doesn't sound quite right, does it?2. Type in "President Obama Speaks on the Economy" in a search engine and click on the video on the White House website. 3. Play minute mark 23:23-23:30 4. Go back and play 10:58-11:01 5. Go forward to 16:18-16:22 More concerned about those dirty pictures? They were published in the magazine Erotique, which was published 1955- 1959. All issues of Erotique are scanned and uploaded online, available for free on the website retrojunkie. See for instance issue 23, picture 2, which is featured in this film as a picture of Ann Dunham. The copywrite year, 1958, is visible. Since people who believe this movie have maintained that those are probably photoshopped (the irony), Collins also made a video where he flips through the pages of "The Complete Erotique" and zooms in on each featured picture. He posted it on youtube and it's titled "Fever Dreams of My Father".There is of course much much more I could add, but I think that gives a pretty good idea of the quality of this film.

Just when you think the right-wing can't sink any deeper into the gutter, they surprise you. This "documentary" will take its place in history alongside every pseudo-scientific film Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis created to "prove" Jews were a sub-human species. The "plot" of "Dreams From My Real Father" is not worth discussing because it lacks any facts whatsoever. It is an election prompted piece of character assassination.The good news is that when screened to un-decided voters at various focus group gatherings in the swing states, the response was universal revulsion. The vast majority of Americans are decent people and were justifiably repelled by the blatant lies, racism and sexism that is on display here.It is interesting that Amazon and Netflix both categorize this film in the same genre as Dinesh D'Souza's laughable "2016" and docs about the mentally unbalanced Ayn Rand whose philosophy of greed and selfishness is a favorite of the Tea Party movement. If they included documentaries denying the Holocaust, it would be complete.