It's always fascinating to go back and watch movies made in a specific political climate and see if they both hold up as movies and examine them as artifacts of the era in which they were made. When I watched Sidney Lumet's
Network for the first time last month, that was the exact experience I went through as the film very much served as an encapsulation of 1970's politics while also resonating on its own timeless merits. In the first decade of the 21st century, plenty of pieces of pop culture emerged critical of the George W. Bush administration, one of which was Al Gore's 2006 documentary
An Inconvenient Truth, a film that does make reference to real world political events occurring in the W. Bush era, but is mostly concentrated on the timeless horrors of global warming.
