Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

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Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...
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From Airplane! to The Naked Gun, Jim Abrahams was a pioneer of spoof comedy

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The writer and director, who died this week, helped to define what big screen spoofs would look like in the decades after

Very few people can honestly claim to have changed the direction of comedy, but Jim Abrahams – who died this week – is one of them. Thanks to the procession of spoof movies he made, both alone and with his fellow writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker, Abrahams helped to carve out a brand new genre of comedy, equal parts straight-faced and scattergun.

The most enduring Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ) film remains Airplane! After leveraging the show they honed at University of Wisconsin–Madison into the entertaining if directionless sketch film The Kentucky Fried Movie, the trio came across the 1957 aviation thriller Zero Hour! on television. They were so taken by the silly plot and wooden acting that they decided to parody the whole thing, by hewing so closely to the original that they ended up buying the rights to avoid a lawsuit.

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