"Tom Hanks plus Zero Dark Thirty equals Oscar," I imagine a studio executive saying right before asking if there was a part for Amanda Seyfried. Yet, for a film that seems engineered to win Academy Awards, it's surprisingly interesting. Whatever cynical calculations were made in the early stages of its production, Captain Phillips is a solid film and an epic look at the high seas (c. 2009). Rather than taking the Zero Dark Thirty route of following one character's obsessive efforts with their duty, the filmmakers focus the story around the fascinating dynamic between Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) and Muse (Barkhad Abdi). The two men are competent captains and products of their circumstances. We empathize with both captains as they carry out their jobs, Phillips by protecting his ship with every available tactic and Muse by trying to hold his fracturing crew together. Director Paul Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray show us Phillips's and Muse's common humanity as well as the differences in their leadership techniques. Neither is loved by their crew, but Phillips commands respect through his knowledge, discipline, and sacrifice, while Muse rules through force. While incurring their crew's wrath, they care for them the best they can (read: trying to keep them alive). The dual focus also manages to make Phillips and Muse pawns in a larger struggle rather than reducing the story to a tale of heroes and villains.
Viewing Priority: High
"Tom Hanks plus Zero Dark Thirty equals Oscar," I imagine a studio executive saying right before asking if there was a part for Amanda Seyfried. Yet, for a film that seems engineered to win Academy Awards, it's surprisingly interesting. Whatever cynical calculations were made in the early stages of its production, Captain Phillips is a solid film and an epic look at the high seas (c. 2009). Rather than taking the Zero Dark Thirty route of following one character's obsessive efforts with their duty, the filmmakers focus the story around the fascinating dynamic between Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) and Muse (Barkhad Abdi). The two men are competent captains and products of their circumstances. We empathize with both captains as they carry out their jobs, Phillips by protecting his ship with every available tactic and Muse by trying to hold his fracturing crew together. Director Paul Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray show us Phillips's and Muse's common humanity as well as the differences in their leadership techniques. Neither is loved by their crew, but Phillips commands respect through his knowledge, discipline, and sacrifice, while Muse rules through force. While incurring their crew's wrath, they care for them the best they can (read: trying to keep them alive). The dual focus also manages to make Phillips and Muse pawns in a larger struggle rather than reducing the story to a tale of heroes and villains.
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Viewing Priority: Low
Since 2007, Wikileaks has been the subject of political rhetoric, water cooler debate, and journalistic scrutiny. In 2013, documentarian Alex Gibey (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) put his lens on the organization - and leaking in general - through the film We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. With a topic that's already spawned countless think pieces and trolling comments, the question becomes: apart from memorializing these highly-publicized events, what new information or perspective does this documentary offer? We Steal Secrets doesn't escape the usual "Assange is evil/hypocritical" or "Assange is a martyr" Wikileaks angles, but it does find a focus around the faces behind the organization's 2010 leaks: Julian Assange (Wikileaks head/former hacker) and Bradley Manning (a US Army intelligence analyst who leaked documents related to US diplomacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Interspersed with commentary about competing ideologies and journalistic standards is the story of two people who have been branded as martyrs or traitors. Assange and Manning's lives are dissected, with friends, associates, former allies, and alleged victims contributing their interpretations of the leakers. Interestingly, the documentary's most powerful material comes from stories by those who played a role in their downfalls. An ex-hacker who turned Manning in (after befriending him and promising confidentiality) highlights Manning's tortured psyche and humanity. An interview with one of the women who alleges that Assange sexually assaulted her changes the context of Assange's crime from CIA conspiracy to personal degradation and the marginalization of a woman's suffering. These interviewees define the leakers as fallible humans, pulling them out of sensational headlines and into (a somewhat) real life. Gibney does an admirable job attempting to flesh out these lives and how their personalities contributed to leaking activities, but the film's attitude towards the leakers comes down to a comment made by ex-Wikileaks employee Daniel Domscheit-Berg. "..... We see Julian as the saviour, as some noble guru, as some new hero or some new pop star or whatever that's going to change all of it. The credit is undue - everybody celebrating Julian as a whistleblower - he is not - Bradley Manning might have been a whistleblower. And if he was, he is the courageous guy." While Gibney temporarily ignores simple condemnation or praise, he ultimately passes judgment and removes a bit of these characters' complexity. Viewing Priority: High
At the beginning of Olivier Assayas's film, Illich "Carlos" Ramírez Sánchez (Édgar Ramirez) proclaims himself the resistance to the imperialist forces of capitalism. Communism needs a fighter rather than more rhetoric, he argues. Throughout the film, we see his vain attempts to fight the established western way of life by killing police and snitches, tossing bombs, taking hostages, and playing up his boogeyman status. It's an epic record of two decades, but Assayas makes it unique by chronicling it impartially. What I've come to expect from a multi-hour crime epic is something along the lines of Goodfellas or Casino - shots that celebrate the criminal's peaks and nadirs, bloody climactic montages, and a rocking soundtrack (although maybe I'm thinking more of Scorsese knockoffs and Vinny Chase's "Medellin"). Three hours goes relatively quickly and it's well-soundtracked, but there's not the now-cliche montages that underline the crime lord's dramatic moments. Assaya's lens is more objective, but he also signals Ramirez Sanchez's vitality through a few recurring images/locations. As he exits the plane in Lebanon, when he's coming up as a key terrorist operative, he looks confident but he's still just another passenger. After taking members of the OPEC meeting hostage, he controls the plane, deciding its course. When he's captured by the Sudanese/French, he's lying bound on the floor of the French plane. The last shot is of a French policeman telling him that on the plane, he's in French territory (where he will ultimately be tried for his crimes). Viewing Priority: High
The Gatekeepers uses a simple device - interviews with six former heads of the Israeli internal security service (Shin Bet) - but manages to inform on domestic and international history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, offer general insight into leadership, and reflect on complex moral issues. By focusing on the Shin Bet, which acts as "the unseen shield" protecting Israel from both Israeli and Palestinian attacks, director Dror Moreh is able to touch on some major incidents in the establishment of Israel as a regional power. The Six-Day War, occupation of Palestinian territories, Bus 300 affair (in which the Shin Bet executed Palestinian bus hijackers after they were captured), the Jewish Underground's plots, the Oslo Accords, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the assassination of Hamas leaders are all covered and we see what these events mean to the Shin Bet, Israel, and the world. While I was familiar with some of this history, there are a fair amount of revelatory moments here and seeing the reaction of the heads of the Shin Bet makes for fascinating viewing. It's a sprawling, tragic story, but Moreh somehow makes it relatively simple to digest and understand. Viewing Priority: Low
There was a time when people thought that James Carville (Clinton '92 Lead Strategist) and George Stephanopoulous (Clinton '92 Communications Director) needed more of the spotlight. Through their key spots in the Clinton '92 campaign, these two pushed a campaign style that was markedly different from James Baker's and accommodated the new media omnipresence by responding and spinning every bit of news to every journalist who would listen. The problem is that, while husband-wife documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus had access to Carville, Stephanopoulous, and sometimes Clinton, their access to actually-important conversations seems to be lacking. Pennebaker and Hegedus capture the events of the '92 campaign (the Gennifer Flowers scandal, Ross Perot's campaign, the Carville-Matalin relationship), but they add little new original information to what's already known. It's understandable to want to create a fly-on-the-wall document of an important election, but when the media began relatively-nonstop coverage, what differentiates this documentary from a collection of CNN clips? The only potential differences are access and editing, but their clearance is not high enough to capture any truly unique moments and the scenes that they do have aren't edited in any particularly revelatory way. Viewing Priority: Low
Mr. Smith went to Washington, shut down a corrupt political machine, and went back home. But what if he stayed in Washington? He'd need to run for office again, he'd need to bring in campaign money, and he'd need to make compromises. In the opening scene of Bulworth, we see mementos of the titular senator's accomplishments spliced with his compromising current campaign ads that blame the have-nots for social problems. Bulworth (Warren Beatty) sits alone, crying, having reached a point where he's sick of compromising. After hiring a hitman to kill him, he finds himself speaking truth to power and going off the script. Adopting a street smart persona that we'll label Jay-B, he takes his message to the people through rhyme - with zany results. In a New York Times interview about the film, star/co-writer/director Beatty stated "… Any time you try to have a message in a movie, you sound like you're on C-Span. Listen, I have a lunatic in this movie who has a nervous breakdown, runs around in short pants, acts like an adolescent, talking in a voice that's not even his own. He oversimplifies the message pretty drastically, but he's funny. I tried to make it funny enough and move it quickly enough so they don't walk out." To his credit, Bulworth sounds nothing like C-Span. Unfortunately, it also doesn't look, sound, or feel like anything resembling reality, so the satire falls flat and the issues Beatty hopes to address (politics, business, race) are all treated in a ham-handed manner. The characterization of Bulworth might be the key problem in the film. We're never really introduced to his pre-conscience days (apart from the credit sequence showing his accolades), so we just see him vacillating between dazed/mopey depression and truthful rapping. The film ridicules him for his immoral past and fish out of water present, but it ultimately comes down firmly in favor of him and his new messages. We cringe and laugh at Bulworth's actions, but it comes more from a feeling of disbelief that Warren Beatty could possibly be doing this than from a connection with the film. We're supposed to agree with some of the messages that Bulworth/Beatty espouses ("Healthcare, Managed Care, HMOs / Ain't gonna work no sir not those / cause the thing that's the same in every one of these / is these motherfuckers there / the insurance companies"), but the method for their delivery is extremely flawed. We don't really see the character speaking to other people in the film, we see Warren Beatty essentially addressing the audience. The problem is, using the film for a soapbox comes off as self-righteous at best and tedious at worst. Working backwards from the message to the characters does the film a disservice. Viewing Priority: High
"You have to take this in the current social context," ad man René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal) warns his clients before showing them a fairly standard commercial for a newer, freer kind of soda. No Director Pablo Larraín takes a different approach to telling the story of the Chilean referendum that ousted dictator/General Augusto Pinochet in 1988. A monumental transition from dictatorship to democracy and a charismatic central character could make for a quirky reaffirmation of our principles, but Larraín doesn't settle for that. Instead, he and screenwriter Pedro Peirano focus their videocamera's lens on a complex man, a divided Chile, and a real political/philosophical debate. Saavedra, an advertising executive who is sucked into the "No" referendum campaign is not just a good salesman or an opponent of Pinochet, he's a man who's as divided as the country. He appreciates the promise of democracy while fearing the post-dictatorship upheaval that the more leftist elements could create. His ex-lover (and mother of his child), an aggressive opponent of the regime who he frequently bails out of jail, is one of the many causes (or manifestations) of Saavedra's relatively ambiguous stance. Putting her political agenda before her responsibilities as a mother, she only sees her son after stints of incarceration and insults Saavedra's bourgeois lifestyle. Saavedra must raise his child while still appearing childlike himself - he coasts around on a skateboard and plays with his son's toys more than his son does - likely caused by his exile stripping him of a normal childhood. Viewing Priority: Medium
(Author's Note: First two sentences are to be read in a 1940's announcer's voice. You are free to yell "News…… On the March" beforehand if you so choose). The 1948 primaries. America is uneasy as the Democrats have been in the White House for sixteen years, the Cold War is beginning, and President Truman has been labeled ineffective by the press. The Republicans (and Frank Capra) need a nominee that will appeal to the masses while maintaining their conservative ideology. In the midst of party machinations and press conspiracies, self-made industrialist Grant Matthews (Spencer Tracy) is talked into running for President. Despite his distrust of politicians, he is persuaded by scheming kingmaker wannabe Jim Conover (Adolphe Menjou) and press magnate/mistress Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury *). While Thorndyke wants Matthews for her own purposes, his estranged wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) also vies for his affections and demands that he speak for the common folk of America. So, the film becomes a romantic and ideological struggle. |