The Movie:

Even though I'm Turkish and I lived the first twenty-three years of my life in Turkey, I never felt a sense of cultural kinship to my heritage. I now hold a dual citizenship, but I consider myself to be more of an American than a Turk. Even though I deliberately distanced myself from my native culture gradually over the last three decades, it's still hard for me not to feel at least a modicum of pride upon seeing other Turks succeed in the States.

Sure, we have media stars like Doctor Oz, who's been in a bit of trouble lately for endorsing natural healthcare products that do jack squat. But if there's one Turkish-American media figure that I identify the most with, it's Cenk Uygur, the founder of the online news and political commentary channel The Young Turks and liberal blowhard extraordinaire.

I first stumbled upon The Young Turks when it was still in its YouTube infancy during the late 2000s. Here was a guy who looked like me, was essentially a part of my culture, talking passionately about issues that I cared about. Of course the fact that we were both liberals with very similar political and cultural viewpoints helped matters. I don't think I'd be a much of a proud follower if he were a commentator on Fox News.

Mad As Hell, an informative and a little bit partisan documentary about the rise of Uygur and The Young Turks on the American political media scene, showcases a lot of interviews with Uygur's friends stating that even though his intentions are to legitimately change people's minds, he usually ends up preaching to the choir. That may be the case, which is the case with almost any political commentator if you think about it, but his intentions of bringing about real change feels genuine, and sometimes that's all that matters.

Andrew Napier's doc follows a fairly chronological structure without feeling episodic. It has a brisk pace and almost always employs a dynamic forward momentum. It starts with the meager beginnings of Uygur's show, then called The Young Turk, on a cable access station in the 90s. During his YouTube show, Uygur occasionally references his youth as a republican, but I had no idea how much of a rabid conservative he used to be. For proof, Napier doesn't shy away from showing clips from The Young Turk, full of pro-republican comments that I'm fairly certain Uygur's embarrassed about these days.

If there's one quality about Uygur that Mad As Hell adamantly tries to get across, it's that he's not a loyal partisan who follows his political team blindly. So when he observes the ugly ploys employed by the GOP after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he switches sides and becomes a liberal, which still doesn't stop him from criticizing the left if also they act like a bunch of hypocrites.

As Mad As Hell delves into the beginnings of Uygur's The Young Turks empire, the doc's momentum begins to stumble a bit as the focus shifts to a procedural about Uygur's attempts at selling his show to MSNBC. While learning about the ins and outs of the news pundit world, which is rather interesting in its own right, I couldn't help but crave more of a study on the political and philosophical evolution of The Young Turks, the way the documentary dealt with Uygur's cable access days.

I'm sure Uygur and his team has a lot of passionate dissenters, who don't get much space in the doc, hence the slight accusation of partisanship. The Young Turks obviously approves of this doc, since they were advertising it for weeks when it came out on VOD. That being said, it's not an "Everything is Awesome" level propaganda one can expect from a right-wing source. There are enough comments from interview subjects about Uygur being annoying and abrasive to keep it from being a typical love letter to Uygur's work.

The DVD:

Video:

The contemporary HD footage, which is mostly handheld, looks clean and crisp without much aliasing or other video noise issues, which usually occur when upconverting from a standard definition source. There's a lot of footage from Uygur's early days, which looks exactly the way you'd expect from a 90s cable access show, as well footage from his first years on YouTube. You can imagine the 240p pixel city that comes out of there. Of course, all of these issues are understandable, since the doc merely utilizes these sources.

Audio:

Two Dolby Digital tracks are offered, both are of course lossy: 5.1 surround and 2.0 stereo. The documentary is focused mostly on interviews, which sound clean and are mixed well. It shouldn't come as surprising that the cable access and early YouTube footage sports some pretty murky sound work. If you don't have a surround system, you wouldn't miss much by watching Mad As Hell in stereo.

Extras:

Episodes From Mad As Hell: These are five clips, about 6-10 minutes in length from Napier's original series. A lot of the information from the feature is repeated here, so it's not essential.

The Oldies: A series of very short segments directed by Napier for The Young Turks. Some interesting stuff here, but again, nothing essential.

TYT Cribs: This one is interesting and fun, as Napier takes us through Uygur's homes and offices in Cribs style. Uygur's tour of his childhood home was especially nostalgic to me as a Turk.

Final Thoughts:

Mad As Hell is not a groundbreaking documentary about political media, but it definitely gets the job done as a profile on a polarizing and passionate media figure. At the very least, it shows how hard it is to hold onto one's integrity if one wants to become a political media star, at least on cable news. The Internet, that's another story.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com