Best of Enemies
- sombre
- brisk
- cold
- twisty
Sombre, kinetic, measured documentary / history, grounded in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →A documentary about the legendary series of nationally televised debates in 1968 between two great public intellectuals, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Intended as commentary on the issues of their day, these vitriolic and explosive encounters came to define the modern era of public discourse in the media, marking the big bang moment of our contemporary media landscape when spectacle trumped content and argument replaced substance. Best of Enemies delves into the entangled biographies of these two great thinkers, and luxuriates in the language and the theater of their debates, begging the question, "What has television done to the way we discuss politics in our democracy today?"
Our read · Best of Enemies (2015) reads as a sombre, kinetic, grounded documentary · history · political entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
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The shape of Best of Enemies
What watching it is actually like.
“You want riveting 1968 debate footage that still explains today's cable-news circus.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if televised political shouting and archival talking heads will bore you tonight.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
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