Politics

Short film released about Weiner campaign

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
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In the tradition of Robert de Niro’s searing performance in Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ and Ossie Davis’ career-changing revelation in Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing,’ mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is now the star of a New York art film that touches on the nature of celebrity and figuratively turns the camera around to point an indicting finger…at us.

Chutzpah,’ a new short film produced by Stateless Media, provides a documentary account of the media firestorm surrounding chronic sexter Weiner’s ill-fated 2013 mayoral campaign. The film includes interviews with a rabbi and a former Weiner sexting partner and campaign-stop footage featuring Weiner and rivals Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson, among others.

“Here we go again. Another sex scandal,” a rabbi says in the film, regarding Weiner’s sexting with a young woman named Sydney Leathers. “Why is it that we love being voyeurs in this? What he did was obviously, you know, narcissistic and embarrassing and humiliating and, and, and, bad judgment. But what is it about us that so enjoys the scorning?”

The film also depicts Weiner volunteers declining to speak to the press after the Leathers scandal broke, as a matter of campaign policy.

It makes you wonder: in a city as diverse and eccentric, but quietly beautiful, as New York, how can one man’s tawdry personal habits cut across sociocultural barriers to provide a common referendum on human morality, a veritable reflection of….I don’t know. Just watch it. It’s well-made.

(The Daily Caller, it should be noted, beat Stateless Media to the punch with our own dramatic rendering of the Weiner saga.)

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