Tonight's guests on The Daily Show are Kirby Dick, and Amy Ziering and the panelists on The Nightly Show are Tyrese, Regina King, Sabrina Jalees, and Jordan Carlos.
Kirby Dick is a film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor. He is best known for directing documentary films. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Feature for directing Twist of Faith (2005) and The Invisible War (2012).
Amy Ziering is a film producer and director. In 2013, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature for producing The Invisible War. They are on tonight to discuss their latest film
The Hunting Ground
From the makers of "The Invisible War" comes a startling expose of rape crimes on U.S. college campuses, their institutional cover-ups and the devastating toll they take on students and their families. Weaving together verite footage and first person testimonies, the film follows the lives of several undergraduate assault survivors as they attempt to pursue - despite incredible push back, harassment and traumatic aftermath - both their education and justice.
Reviews, overall, seem positive about the documentary.
'Hunting Ground' a searing look at college rape culture
I had to stop watching Kirby Dick's documentary "The Hunting Ground" two or three times just to vent some momentary rage: rage against an American college campus rape culture that appears to be flourishing, rage against the institutions that place profits and reputation above justice, rage against the soulless shills who protect those institutions and rage against a system that assassinates truth and "protects" sexual assault victims -- our friends, our daughters, our sons, our sisters and our brothers -- by raping them all over again, betraying their trust, their hopes, their dreams and their dignity.
The most disturbing part of "Hunting Ground" is the circling-wagons mentality of universities and colleges. Adopting a favorite device of "The Daily Show," Dick stitches together an alarming montage of official spokesmen all saying the exact same sentence: "We take these charges seriously!" (PR flaks in Robert Kenner's commendable documentary "Merchants of Doubt" could learn something here.)
There is the standard push back from the Red Pill types which I won't be linking to (and if you have no idea who or what the Red Pill are, consider yourself lucky.) There is a well written more negative review of the documentary at Slate
The Hunting Ground : The failures of a new documentary about rape on college campuses.
The Hunting Ground opens like a horror movie: We meet a suite of innocents who have no idea they’re heading off to hell. This documentary about sexual assault on college campuses begins with YouTube videos of high school girls reacting with tearful joy to their acceptance letters. Lambs to the slaughter, we’re supposed to think. The film that follows portrays college as so dangerous for young women that the viewer is left with the sense that these students would have been better off posting college rejection videos and staying home.
A range of voices—among them journalists and law professors—has raised concerns that the systems being put in place at schools to adjudicate these cases are grossly unfair to the accused. What a perfect time for a film that addresses all this, and illuminates a way forward.
Unfortunately, The Hunting Ground is not that movie. It is a polemic that—as its title suggests—portrays young women as prey, frequently assaulted and frequently ignored by their universities and law enforcement when they try to bring charges. The movie, from director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, features numerous interviews with women who describe horrific experiences, and their testimony has raw, emotional power. But good policy about the lives of young people—female and male—needs to be based on prudent assessment. The film traffics in alarmist statistics and terrifying assertions, but fails to acknowledge both the recent changes in the way the government and universities approach sexual assault charges and the critiques that those changes go too far. By refusing to engage the current conversation about this issue, the film does its subjects—and us all—a disservice.
I think it is worth reading the whole piece even if you disagree with it.
Rape on campus is a serious problem. When I was attending college, I had a late class, running 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm. There were other late classes on the same floor, however the professors in those classes usually let students go early whereas my Environmental Law professor liked to utilize as much of the class time as possible. This led to females from other classes sitting in the hall waiting for our class to exit. One night one of the other guys in my class asked why they were waiting. The answer was simple, the women waited to walk to their cars in a group. It was a well lit path from the door, past the campus police station and to the parking lot, but to be safe women felt they had to do that. As a guy, I never felt even the slightest bit unsafe. It is really unfair to women that they have to think like, that they should have to think about the safest way to get their car.
Tyrese
is an American Grammy-nominated R&B singer-songwriter, actor, author, television producer, former fashion model and MTV VJ. He is best known for his roles as Joseph "Jody" Summers in Baby Boy and as Roman Pearce in the The Fast and the Furious series.
Regina King
is an American film and television actress. She played Brenda Jenkins on the NBC sitcom 227 and had a supporting role in the feature film Jerry Maguire. King in her later career became widely known for her leading roles in two Peabody award winning television shows The Boondocks where she provided the voices Huey and Riley Freeman and Southland where she portrayed Detective Lydia Adams. The latter role earned her two nominations for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2012 and 2013.
Sabrina Jalees
is a Canadian comedian, dancer, actor, host and writer from Toronto, Ontario, now based in New York City, who writes a weekly column in the Toronto Star's ID section. Most recently, she was a writer for Canada's Got Talent.
Jordan Carlos
is an American stand-up comedian who played a recurring character on The Colbert Report and is a co-host on the Nickelodeon kids' show "Me TV.
On The Colbert Report, Carlos plays Alan, host Stephen Colbert's "black friend". Whenever Colbert discusses racial issues, he often asks that a picture of him and his African-American co-worker Alan be shown on screen. Colbert sometimes refers to Alan as "Alan, my black friend, Alan". He first appeared on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day when Colbert was complaining about having to work on that holiday, assuming that Alan was angry about it as well, which he wasn't.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Th 3/26: John Hargrove
Next week will be repeats after being pre-empted Monday. New episodes begin again Mo 4/6.