Weiner

There will always be people who say the moral here is about politicians who betray the public's trust, but the real lesson is for the famous: never trust the public, because there will always be those among them for whom you are merely the stepping stone in their own desperate hunt for celebrity and fortune. That said, Weiner's attention-loving shamelessness is also the source of his peculiar kind of honesty, even though he clearly comes across as the professional, cynical politician type.

It's comparable to being unable to look away from the car crash, but there was something absolutely fascinating to watch this obviously passionate public servant utterly self destruct, several times over, and allow it all to happen on film. Gripping stuff.

With behind-the-scenes political intrigue and candid moments from a marriage on the verge of collapse, this should've been spectacular. Sometimes it is: Huma and Weiner silently looking at each other for what feels like minutes following revelations of his further infidelities is quite intense. But its canned sound effects (applause, boos, cheers, etc.) are inelegant to the point of being distracting, and its editing is reality TV-esque.

A can't-look-away trainwreck caught beautifully by the filmmakers.

I expected this to play out like a 90-minute gif with the Benny Hill theme playing on top of it, but I was shocked at the level to which the film humanizes its subjects. Having only read about the controversies, I had this narrative in my head of Wiener and his wife being sad, repressed wallflowers, which was clearly way off the mark. In a way, them being relatively vibrant people makes the awkward moments even harder to sit through, and at the end I had sympathy for everyone except Pineapple.

While it didn't always resonate there are some fascinating looks at marriage, politics, the publics voracious appetite for salacious details (without a regard for platform or who can actually do them some good).

This is absolutely phenomenal, from the slow campaign trainwreck, the marriage in crisis, Huma's fierce glares and despondence ("it's like living a nightmare"), the shrewd interview calculations, and rookie campaign operatives trying to make a name for themselves. This is like a Greek tragedy that no writer could come up with because the material is often too surreal to be believable.

Weiner is a fun guy to be around for a full-length documentary. The most interesting part of this for me is a look at how incredibly focused the American society is on sexual deviancy and family values. Throughout no one even connects the dots to make the point that Weiner never really did anything wrong, except deceive his wife to some extent. Unbelievable; none of this should even matter.

Of all the lies politicians tell, Anthony Weiner's attempt to get people out of his private life is, to me, the easiest to forgive. If voters worried more about their own well-being than others' sexting, perhaps they would have deserved him as a mayor. Good documentary.

I'm a sucker for documentaries, and this had some delicious moments. It was particularly good when it focused on Don Weiner Quixote relentlessly tilting at those damn windmills while his wife, a.k.a. the saddest woman in the history of the world, is left disappearing in the distance and over the horizon. But that could have been condensed into a half hour. For me it just didn't entertain enough for 2 hours, and if it didn't entertain, it better damn well inform or make me think, and it failed.

Huma Abedin being quietly pissed at her husband - the movie.

An exhilarating, fascinating portrait of a complicated, passionate, and committed man, horrifically mistreated woman, and the media jackal beast we've all been feeding. Luckily, thanks to documentaries like this, we can see the fuller picture, and stop feeding the jackal beast. Really, Weiner probably would've been a good mayor of New York; it's too bad he shot himself in the foot, and then we consented to media smearing the City's garbage in the wound.

Combative people being combative esp when it's not in their best interests to do so is generally inherently compelling stuff - if not, many reality shows would go by the way side. What gives this doc more dimensions is how it makes clear that it's Weiner's stubborn refusal to give up and accept how others really see him (or the world) that's the very thing that might have proved useful to many. For his wife, it's "the very thing that made you marry, is the thing you will come to hate" writ large

This is one of my favourite documentary films. Such a fascinating character to follow. So incredibly brilliant and charismatic, yet so freakin' messed up, he just can't help himself. I think he himself sums it up perfectly when he says towards the end, something along the lines that he has "this ability to F things up". And oh how true it is. The team get almost an unprecedented access to the campaign, which even has them asking "why?"

günümüzde artık infotainment'ın nasıl siyaseti yönlendirebildiğini, tekil "ofis sahiplerinin" hatalarının nasıl o politikacı grubuna dair bir algı oluşturduğu net biçimde gösterirken yönetilme fikriyle olan ilişkimize dair de sorular sorduruyor aslında. ama bugünün abd başkanlık seçimleri sahnesi düşünülünce weiner sadece marjinal değil ama daha farklı bir seksüel zevki olan savunmasız bir adammış gibi sadece.

Truly not unlike a real-life episode of Veep as directed by the Maysles because, for all of the laugh-out-loud moments that littered Anthony Weiner's disastrous time on the campaign trail (And there are tons, some intentional and others decidedly accidental), directors Josh Kreigman and Elyse Steinberg never lose sight of the fact that Weiner, his family and everyone he worked with were all real people.

A fantastic combination of chaotic trainwrecks and filmmakers who know how to piece a scene together. That scene where Weiner has a satellite interview with MSNBC is a perfect use of contrast.

A damning look at the old "showbiz for ugly people" where by the end it was clear even the film-makers had fallen for this -admittedly charismatic- bullshitter.

The documentary makers lucked out with the new revelations coming out mid-campaign. The cynic in me almost thinks it was a plant, by them. From there the campaign becomes a fiasco & the editing takes a note out of reality TV's book, focusing on tabloid media excerpts and strained glares from Huma. The real loser here is policy, the message stayed the same over the campaign, the only variable that changed was Weiner's image being dragged through the mud & so died one kind of future for NYC.

The fact that he just let the camera keep filming, even at the point when the guy behind it asks him 'why let me film this?', really seems to be the element redeeming what would otherwise have come off as sensationalism.

The Lamest Showman

The dick that got Trump elected.

Who do we want elected? And to what standards can we reasonably hold them? That Weiner tackles those questions at all makes this frisky doc a potent provocation and no small accomplishment.

Fascinerande inblick i en politisk kampanj som faller sönder inifrån. Filmmakarna får närvara vid diskussioner och situationer som ingen utomstående normalt skulle få filma. Det är roligt på ett ganska sorgligt sätt och fullständigt makabert. Någon egentlig förklaring till katastrofen presenteras dock aldrig.

Why are there so many campaign documentaries? I mean, they make great subjects, but politician's seek to control how others perceive themselves, and the documentarian following you around is a serious potential loose cannon. Or as one of the filmmakers here queries his subjects: "Why did you let us film this?" Weiner is a devastating portrait of a monster ego inhabiting the body of a total goofball.

After resigning from Congress over a sexting scandal, Anthony Weiner decides to run for mayor of NYC, and makes a promising start...but there are more skeletons in his closet than he let on. Fantastic fly-on-the-wall look at modern politics and how scandals can and do obscure the real issues at play...and at a fascinating character in Weiner himself, charismatic and seemingly devoted to his constituents, but unable or unwilling to truly own up to his own faults as a human being.

"Why did you let me film this?" One of the best questions ever asked in a documentary.

schadenfreude.avi

If Donald Trump can become President, then Anthony Weiner can become DICKtaor!

"Don't. The written word is dead", Weiner laughingly tells a little boy who wants to look him up on Wikipedia. Weiner seems to be the sort of politician they couldn't get away with on The Wire or even on Veep without looking like a too-clumsy satire of what sort of politicians float to the top in the modern media landscape; passionate, media-savvy in the short term, and completely devoid of any sense of self-distance. All the film makers have to do is stand by and let him dig.