Last night, I saw The Revolution Will Not Be Televised at the Castro Theater. This documentary quite accidentally captured an insider's view of the failed military coup in Venezuela last year. It paints powerful portrait of Hugo Chavez as charismatic man-of-the-people who loses and regains his job in the space of three days. We are also shown in detail how privately-owned Venezuelan television networks were able to spin the coup as a peaceful and voluntary transition, even days after its failure.

It is striking to recall how muted the response to all of this was from the US government and in the US media. The film touches on this topic several times, but only in passing - it never stops to study the issue seriously.. It half-heartedly tries to connect the dots between Chavez' indifference to US oil interests and Bush's indifference to Chavez. It replays press conferences in which Ari Fleisher and Colin Powell soft-pedal the issue even as people are dying in the streets of Caracas. It also uncritically portrays several claims that the coup had been manufactured by the CIA.

These are all certainly provactive assertions, but it does frustratingly little to explore them. They seem to be here only to spice the film up a little, to ensure that all the angry little Chomskyites in the audience feel like they got their money's worth. These claims ring hollow because the film lacks a real critical assessment of how the Venezuelan media war played out in the international realm. I found myself wishing the film would do more here, but it never even bothers to ask obvious questions such as whether anyone in the US could have seen through the impenetrable smokescreen put up by the Venezuelan media.

Instead of asking the hard questions, it settles for cheap conspiracy theory. This would have been better left out - the central narrative is plenty compelling on it's own.