Coming soon to a theater near you....

(well, relatively, anyway: it opens in Boston on April 30)

If you're a Boston Globe reader, you may have caught Brad MacQuarrie's review of the recently-opened movie The Cartel. The Cartel (which in all of its press seems to be crying out for a voiceover by Don LaFontaine) presents teachers unions as being a greater threat to American civilization than terrorism.

No, I didn't make that up. It's in the film.

MacQuarrie says that this is a subject "familiar to countless parents, public officials, and even casual observers of the sausage-making of municipal government" or at least to regular readers of the Boston Globe, which has a pretty straight-across-the-board negative view of public education and provides plenty of positive spin to the so-called "ed reform" crowd. It may come as a bit of a shock to the rest of us.

The movie has been funded by The Moving Picture Institute, which presents itself as "promoting freedom through film." A quick perusal of past work cites "a range of feature-length films dealing with topics such as higher education's liberal bias, environmental activism's role in perpetuating Third World poverty, anti-communist humor's cultural history, and Hungary's and Estonia's revolutions against totalitarianism" (you can find the list here). The Reason Foundation has tagged them "the AV department for the vast libertarian conspiracy" and a list of those behind it is rather one sided.

You may want to read, as well, Jim Horn's analysis of the review.