It was sold weeks in advance as the sure-thing controversy of the Tribeca Film Festival. Outrage, Kirby Dick’s follow-up to This Film Has Not Been Rated, would surely apply that documentary’s tactics of unapologetically biased filmed detective work to a far more incendiary and potentially politically relevant collusion of power: the “brilliantly orchestrated conspiracy” of secretly gay Republican politicians, “self-hating gay people” all who secretly, shamefully practice the same acts for which they seek to punish others via discriminatory policy. But as it turns out, Outrage is less a work of original, intrepid muckraking than a ride-along with a few full-time muckrakers of the blog and satellite radio spheres, one that considers arguments for and against involuntary outing on the road to defending the responsibility of the public servants to practice what they preach.

The star of the piece is Michael Rogers of Blogactive, “the most feared man on Capital Hill”, who has dedicated his life to “exposing horrible people … traitors to their people.” Think of him as Perez Hilton, with heavily-researched evidence subbing for MS Paint penises. Most of the outings in Outrage happened first on Rogers blog, and/or under the watch and/or Washington Blade columnist Kevin Neff, and/or radio host Michelangelo Signorelli. If anything, Dick is too careful to avoid being the first to sling mud; avoiding the central role he took in his last feature, here the filmmaker mostly curates and illustrates. When it comes to the latter, Dick lays it on thick, juxtaposing testimony from witnesses with media clips of each outed man’s denials and their on-message campaign propaganda. This is not a film which requires a viewer to engage in much independent thought: all of the ironies are easy, and each point is hammered beyond necessity.

Set to be rushed into release on May 8 by Magnolia, one imagines that Outrage will, as it did at Friday night’s premiere in Chelsea, mostly play to the choir while enjoying free advertising via the ire of its targets and their media sympathizers. But being that Dick digs up little new dirt, Outrage’s detractors will likely be practiced at rebutting its revelations. To those without secrets to protect, it’s hard to argue with former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey (who did not “storm out” of the premiere, but was in fact spotted by me shaking hands with fans during a slow file out to the street), who declares in the film, “the right value is honesty.” In advocating honesty in politics but also concerning itself with the finer points of debate over the politics of honesty, Outrage thoughtfully persuades, but never shocks.

Even more topical and far less vital in terms of its construction, American Casino intends to explain the subprime mortgage mess, the implicit racism behind it and the sociological collatarel damage currently following it, in as plain language as possible. At that, it fails — it’s a film full of ominously-scored slow zooms into data on computer monitors, all of which reads as inscrutable code, even as voiceover attempts to relate what it all means. Maybe this is the point — if we, as intelligent, film-savvy audiences haven’t the foggiest idea how to read the concept of home loan risk as translated into stock market numerics, what hope could there have been for the victims of the system? Squarely taking the blame off the playas (ie: those who took on subprime loans without fully understanding how they worked) and placing it on the game (ie: the banks who targeted minority borrowers, skewed their applications to make it seem like they were qualified to take on the risk even when they weren’t, and then shoving their own risk onto the economy at large), Casino’s one solid relevation is that many of the home owners suffering from the collapse of the bad loan market are the kind of educated, middle-class heads of households who should by all rights be eligible for the American Dream, but who wouldn’t have been able to afford it without taking advantage of these “instruments” which ultimately left them bankrupt and raped the economy as a whole.

Still, at less than 90 minutes, it lags, often further complicating that which it should explicating whilst dragging out the human interest to the point of redundancy. The most interesting thing about American Casino is the never stated implication of its title. Yes, it’s about unregulated gambles that brought our economy down, but as director Lesley Cockburn piles on the evidence that the credit derivatives catastrophe is actually a civil rights crisis, leaving predominantly black neighborhoods “set back four steps,” the “casino” reference equally calls to mind the fate of so many Native American communities, left entraped and even less empowered by the economic force that was supposed to level their playing field.