Kill the Messenger

Posted on October 9, 2014 at 5:59 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and drug content
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, including teen drinking, drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Gangster-style violence, sad death, suicide
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	October 10, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00KSPL01K

Sometimes an honest, crusading, investigative reporter uncovers corruption and deceit and the result is triumph, a Pulitzer Prize, humiliating resignations and criminal convictions of the guilty and an Oscar-winning movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. And sometimes, instead, the result is killing the messenger. Gary Webb was a passionate, dedicated journalist at the San Jose Mercury News who managed to infuriate not only the CIA but his far bigger journalistic rivals. He uncovered a story no one much wanted told and no one much wanted to hear. Jeremy Renner plays Webb in this effort to give him his due.

Although it is set in the mid-90’s, director Michael Cuesta gives the film a 70’s paranoia, one man against The Man vibe that harks back to “The Parallax View,” “All the President’s Men,” “Z,” and “Serpico.” Renner, who also co-produced, brings his coiled energy and electric physicality to Webb, making journalism seem like a full-contact sport. His Webb is a guy who runs up the courthouse steps like Rocky. We see him early on, walking to his desk in the paper’s outpost near the state capital, going past the grand, imposing signs marking the areas occupied by the big national daily papers to his modest little corner. He’s a small fish in a very big ocean. But he has enormous determination, integrity, a sense of something to prove, and a healthy ego.

And then he gets the lead of a lifetime. A beautiful woman (Paz Vega), the girlfriend of a drug dealer, has some information for him that sounds preposterous. She says he “sold drugs for the government.” Seven tons worth. And it leads to the discovery that the government, specifically the CIA, is funneling money to the Contras in Nicaragua by underwriting the drug trade that is pouring crack into the poorest areas in the inner cities. “National security and crack cocaine in the same sentence — does that not sound strange to you?” And there’s a warning. “My friend, some stories are just too true to tell.”

The problem with writing about bad things done by powerful people is that they will use their power to attack whoever is trying to expose them. “Good investigative reporting ruffles feathers.” Sometimes the creature sporting those feathers will use its claws. To use a neologism from the movie, they will “controversialize” whoever is putting their reputations at risk. Webb was not perfect. He had enemies. At first, his newspaper celebrates his journalistic coup. But when his bosses are put under pressure, they buckle. Soon the once-superstar reporter is exiled to Cupertino. Without the support of his family and the chance to do the work that defines him, he has nothing to hold onto.

The story is still a murky and complicated one, despite post-credit updates on revelations confirming Webb’s reporting. Renner is a magnetic presence and he makes Webb’s passion for telling the story honestly and exposing the dishonesty of others almost palpable. Webb’s scenes with his children are especially touching, though it is too bad to see the talented Rosemary DeWitt relegated to a dull “don’t work so hard, don’t take risks” role. A scene near the end at an awards dinner has an emotional punch. Renner’s performance has enormous integrity, illuminating the murky compromises and betrayals he exposes and the ones that get the better of him as well.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, drugs, drug dealing, and gangster violence, as well as tense family confrontations.

Family discussion: Who is doing the work that Gary Webb did today? Has the CIA become more accountable as a result of his work? Do we still kill the messenger?

If you like this, try: “Serpico” and Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion and more of the work of real-life reporter Gary Webb

The Equalizer

Posted on September 25, 2014 at 5:59 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drugs and drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended and very graphic violence, with many characters injured and killed and graphic and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	September 26, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	December 29, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00NX6WZIS

THE-EQUALIZER — Copyright 2014 Columbia Pictures

The only thing nicer than having a real-life friend who could circumvent any obstacle of power or law or, you know, logic to deliver the roughest but most just of rough justice would be to have that friend be Denzel Washington. And that’s the story of “The Equalizer,” very loosely based on television series starring Edward Woodward, but in theme and character closer to a superhero saga.

Washington plays Bob McCall, a kind and quiet inventory clerk at a big box store, but we can tell right away that he has seen some stuff and knows even more stuff. His alarm clock goes off in a room so spare it might be occupied by a monk. But the bed has not been slept in. Bob prepares for the day, serious, precise, and methodical. He does one thing at a time. At work, he eats his bag lunch and gently but firmly coaches his young colleague Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis) on losing weight and working on the skills he will need to pass the test for security guard. And at night, he brings a book to the diner (Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea), sits at a table, unwrapping the tea bag he brought with him, and exchanges a few words with Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young “escort.” “The old man met his adversary just when he thought that part of his life was over,” Bob tells Teri. “The old man got to be the old man. The fish got to be the fish. Got to be what you are in this world.” But what is Bob? And what is Teri?

We do not know Bob’s past, but we know he has one (especially if we’ve seen the trailer). If, as Spider-Man learns, with great power comes great responsibility, then with great power come some wrenching conflicts as well. When Ralphie and Terri get in trouble, Bob will step in, risking escalation, retribution, and blowing whatever cover he has worked very hard to create. On the other hand, if he does not step in, it will not be much of a movie. And if you have any question, his next choice of classic literature will make it clear: Don Quixote, who “lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.” In his own way, Bob is a Knight of Rueful Countenance. But unlike Don Quixote, Bob does not tilt at windmills. He takes on very bad people and he is very, very good at it. “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why,” the film tells us at the beginning, quoting Mark Twain. Bob was not born to haul sacks of gravel.

A superhero movie has to have a character with power, whether it is money plus gymnastics and cool toys (Batman) or extra strength and speed (pretty much all of the Avengers). But we usually like them to have a secret or at least downtime identity — Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Tony Stark. There’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing them take down the bad guys. But there is even more satisfaction in what I call the “who is that chef?” moments (a reference to Under Siege). It’s not enough to kick the butt of the bad guy, you have to have the vast, immense, profound satisfaction of letting him know just how massively he has underestimated you. I mean Bob.

We get a lot of both in this film as Bob takes on bigger, meaner, and tougher bad guys in bigger, meaner, tougher confrontations. Bob likes to set his stopwatch so we know he is setting himself against more than the bad guys; he is still in some competition with, what? His abilities when he was younger? Or, as he says, “progress, not perfection” — is he moving toward some goal that is still just out of his reach?

Basically, this is a slow burn movie, with a build-up to introduce us to the characters and then a series of action sequences, all well staged but very, very violent, as to be expected from director Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”). The bad guys are very, very, very bad. The good guy is very, very, very, very good. Denzel Washington is as good as it gets.

And a sequel is in the works.

Parents should know that this movie is extremely violent, with many characters injured and killed and many explicit and disturbing images. Characters use strong language. Bad guys use every possible kind of weapon and engage in every possible kind of criminal behavior including sex trafficking, extortion and arson, and drug dealing.

Family discussion: Why did Bob go to see his former colleague? What did he learn from the classic books he read?

If you like this, try: “Training Day”

The Drop

Posted on September 11, 2014 at 6:00 pm

Author Dennis Lehane writes about a world of desperation, fear, and damaged people inflicting further damage. His novels have been filmed as “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone.” And now his short story, “Animal Rescue,” has been turned into “The Drop,” about a “drop bar,” a dingy place with dingy regulars, a bitter former owner still resentful of the thugs who took it over, a soft-hearted bartender and the dog he rescues from a garbage can, and lots of cash, dropped at the bar by racketeers to be picked up by bigger, tougher, racketeers. You know what that means: colorful, highly euphemistic dialog said by top-notch actors doing their best to play hard, hard men. Very little is said in this world but a lot is understood.

Fortunately, here that means we get James Gandolfini in a beautifully nuanced performance that makes us miss him even more sharply. He plays “Cousin Marv,” whose name is still on the bar, but no longer on the deed. Now he’s just the manager, and he quietly but meaningfully tells Bob (Tom Hardy), the bartender, to take down the Christmas decorations (“It’s December 27th!”) and stop running a tab for the flowsy barfly at the end of the counter. Oh, and no more rounds for the boys at the bar, even though they are observing the 10th anniversary of a friend’s death. We will learn later that there is more significance to the last two items than losing the revenue on a few drinks.

On his way home, Bob hears a noise in a neighbor’s garbage can. It is a badly injured puppy. The wary neighbor is Nadia (Noomi Rapace), who insists on taking a picture of Bob’s driver’s license on her cell phone and sending it to four friends before she will even talk to him about the puppy. She helps him clean it up and reluctantly agrees to care for it for a couple of days so he can decide what to do. He adopts the puppy and names it Rocco. And she offers to care for the puppy while he is at work to make some extra money.

For a moment, things are looking up for the lonely Bob. But not for Cousin Marv’s or for Cousin Marv. Marv and Bob are held up at gunpoint by two guys in masks who may not be entirely unknown to them. The owners are tough Chechen gangsters who expect them to get the money back and who give them a glimpse of some guys they are in the middle of torturing just to make sure the message is received. And Cousin Marv’s is set to be the drop bar for the biggest betting night of the year, the Super Bowl. A cop (John Ortiz of “Silver Linings Playbook”) is nosing around. And there is pressure on Bob as well. A very unstable guy in the neighborhood, reputed to have killed a guy, says he is Rocco’s owner and he may have some feelings of ownership toward Nadia as well. Also, there is a body part formerly belonging to someone who was formerly alive, and it will need to be disposed of.

The storyline is all right, but what matters here is the mood, and that is excellent, with Gandolfini, as always, a master class in acting. There are so many layers to his performance, whether he is answering his sister’s question about dinner or refusing to look inside a bag that clearly cannot contain any good news. His expression in his very last scene of the film is particularly compelling.

Hardy’s quiet power is beautifully restrained. Ann Dowd as Marv’s wistful sister and Matthias Schoenaerts as Eric, Rocco’s volatile former owner are also very good. In some ways, Eric is the most revealing character in the story. Asked what he wants, he isn’t sure, except that he doesn’t want Bob to think he has anything over on him. People want money, of course, and power, and to be left alone. But what drives them really nuts is the fear that someone has more than they do and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Parents should know that this plot concerns various crimes and attempted crimes including extortion, robbery, torture, and murder, with many characters injured and killed, as well as some graphic and disturbing images, drinking, smoking, and constant strong language.

Family discussion: The original title of the story this film was based on is “Animal Rescue.” Would that have been more appropriate for the film? Why did Bob stay at the bar?

If you like this, try: “Killing Them Softly” and “Get Shorty,” both featuring James Gandolfini

Related Tags:

Based on a book Crime Drama Thriller

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Posted on August 21, 2014 at 5:59 pm

If you want to not just see but hear an eyeball being pulverized, then see “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.” If you want to see and hear it in the company of an audience who thinks that’s funny, buy a ticket.

Like the first “Sin City,” this sequel is co-directed by Frank Miller, who created the comic book series that inspired it, and Robert Rodriguez, and they have again perfectly transferred the dark pulp sensibility and striking visuals from page to screen. Like the first film, it is in stark shades of black, white, and gray, with splashes of color — bright red lips, shining blonde hair, sleek blue satin — and, of course, blood.

Sin City is a place of corruption, betrayal, and decay, of haunted souls who can’t remember or who remember too much. “How did I get here? What have I done? And why?” Marv (Mickey Rourke) asks as the film opens and he finds himself with some dead and dying guys. He does remember “wishing I had an excuse to break somebody’s face.” When he gets an excuse, he says he feels like Christmas.

The interlocking stories center on a young gambler named Johnny who wants to bring down crooked Senator Roark (Powers Boothe), who controls just about everything and everyone in Sin City, a private detective named Dwight (Josh Brolin) who takes photos of indiscretions for his clients and who knows he should not trust the woman he loved and lost to a man who could afford her (Eva Green as Ava), and a stripper named Nancy (Jessica Alba), who cannot decide whether she should kill the man who murdered her lover or just drink herself into oblivion and hope she can forget him.

People say a lot of tough things to each other. “They’ll eat you alive,” someone tells Johnny. “I’m a pretty tough chew,” he answers. Everyone in this film is a pretty tough chew. “Death is just like life in Sin City,” another one says. “There’s nothing you can do and love don’t conquer anything.” There are monsters everywhere in Sin City, and some of the most painful struggles are with the monsters within.

But that doesn’t keep people from trying.

There is a lot of artistry in “Sin City,” but it is so stylized that it calls attention to itself instead of its story, characters, or themes. The artistry in visuals and storytelling is so self-conscious it is fetishistic. It always keeps us at arm’s length. Despite superb work from everyone in the cast, especially Brolin, Willis, and Gordon-Levitt, the visuals are more striking than the story and ultimately they overpower it.

Parents should know that this is an extremely violent movie with themes of corruption and betrayal. People are injured, maimed, mutilated, and killed by a wide variety of weapons including a sword, knives, guns, pliers, and arrows. There are graphic and disturbing images and sounds. It also includes explicit sexual references and situations and nudity and strong language. Characters smoke, drink, and use drugs.

Family discussion: How do Dwight, Johnny, and Marv define justice? What do we learn from stories of corruption and betrayal?

If you like this, try: “Sin City” and the Frank Miller comics

Interview: Joe Berlinger of “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”

Posted on July 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

Joe Berlinger is one of my favorite directors and it was a treat to talk to him about “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger,” his new documentary on the trial of the notorious gangster. We know Bulgar was a crook. What this movie explores is the manipulations and cover ups from the law enforcement that kept Bulgar from being prosecuted for decades.

If you had a chance to interview Whitey and he agreed to tell the truth, what would you ask him?

The most important question is the central assertion to his claim that he had on immunity deal with Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and the reason that’s such an important question is it goes to the heart of whether or not he was an informant and if he was not an informant the level of corruption and abuse of our institutions of justice is like significant.

The film raises the question of how much crime you can allow an informant to commit to hold on to his credibility. Presumably killing is over that line.

David Boeri is a WBUR Reporter who says that as long as informants are the mother’s milk of criminal investigations we have to be really careful because on the one hand you they can’t blow their cover but it doesn’t mean they should be killing people with institutional knowledge because that puts the government in the position of picking and choosing who should live and who should die and that’s not the role of government. You know to empower the Irish mob so that they can bring down the Italian Mafia; there’s something inherently wrong with that. And it wasn’t just limited to Boston. We see the same thing in Gregory Scarpa’s cas. There’s no question he was a major informant there to bring down the Colombo Crime family and over 50 people were killed under his watch. There’s something wrong with that system. One of our bedrock principles of our legal system is a defendant should be able to present whatever vigorous defense he wants with the presumption of innocence. Again this is not a wrongful conviction cases, but the guy should have been able to present his point of view.

I love the line in the movie from one of the witnesses: “Of course I lied; I’m a criminal.” What do you do when everybody that’s testifying is a liar by definition?

The three star witnesses for the government are murderous thugs. I mean could you imagine somebody going up for trial for 20 murders and getting 12 years? He’s a serial killer and yet the government treats him as a star witness, now how is that guy incentivised? It’s what I love about the movies, it is a true Rashomon experience and yet the truth rises to the top and something stinks. The real story has been swept under the rug because it’s just implausible on so many levels that all that murder and mayhem and bad behavior is solely the responsibility of one relatively low level agent and his corrupt supervisor, it’s just not plausible.

I really want to know how truthful is the claim that he had a deal of protection and frankly it’s an important question that is the major disappointment that I had in observing the trial because that was a question that was not allowed to be aired. Even before the trial began, the judge ruled that the immunity claim was not allowed to be brought up in trial so that was disallowed as a line of inquiry. It’s a complicated question but he should have been allowed to bring that up at trial because it’s a central question to the saga and I was disappointed that the judge would not allow because I think it was pretty clear that no matter what happened at trial Whitey Bulger was not going to walk out of that preceding a free man. Right from the start he admitted to being a drug dealer and loan shark.

I was really interested in the comments on the file by the woman who’s an expert on informants. Normally when someone gets immunity, isn’t that very well documented?

Well there are two levels, if there was a personal deal of protection like, “Hey, keep me from getting bumped off from the mob and I’ll keep you from being indicted”. That’s not going to be documented. That’s a personal deal of protection. There were were all these hallmarks of a fake file and in civil proceedings and in the proceedings against Connolly the government acknowledged that much of that informant file was faked by John Connolly. You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to say you faked the files in the proceedings against Connolly then let’s talk about where is the real file if he was an informant? And there are just so many things that don’t hold water. Again I don’t know whether he was or wasn’t but something stinks. If he was an informant then there’s some basic protocol that wasn’t being followed by like targeting the head of the gang, he was the head of the gang.

The first person we see in the film is a man who was threatened by Bulgar and is looking forward to testifying against him. But he was murdered before he could appear in court. At the end, the film tells us the murder was unrelated. Really?

I can see it’s a legitimate coincidence but to me the importance of it is that when Rick’s body was discovered on the news and that rippled through the courtroom, everyone — reporters, observers, family members — all were debating, almost like as if they were debating a horse race or a Red Sox game, they were debating with equal plausibility whether or not it was in the government interest to knock him off or in Bulger’s interest to knock him off. I was just kind of stunned by the fact that the government was even considered a possibility, which is demonstrative of the complete erosion of faith in their institutions that they would actually believe they might have a hand in it. That demonstrates why this trial should not have been so narrowly focus on confirming the obvious. The obvious is okay he’s crook, we know it let’s let Bulger talk about whatever he wanted to talk about.

This story has so many people and so many incidents and so many boundaries being crossed, how do you try to help people keep that straight? How do you address that is a filmmaker?

It’s a very challenging story and in addition to that there’s a certain subtlety that I hope the audience gets. I was very conscious that there is a certain amount of the conventional story that you need to tell to set the table and then you have to start picking that conventional story apart and do it in kind of a seamless way. I was so worried that some people would walk thinking, there’s no problem with the conventional story. So the challenge is you start with what everyone says is the truth and then you start showing what the issues are with while still maintaining that that’s still a possibility. You know, people expect to be told what to think and many filmmakers believe you have to have a very singular point of view. I’ve always in all of my work tried to embrace multiple points of view and then hope that the truth rises to the top. And look, I do want to say for the record I don’t think everyone in law enforcement or everyone in the FBI is rotten. I think the majority of people in law enforcement and the majority of people who are in persecution take their job seriously. And actually I think Wyshock and Kelly are the heroes of this story on a certain level because they came to town in the early 90s being sent from other places said, “what the **** is this?” And against the will of their own Justice Department they were fighting vociferously to bring about those indictments, the indictments that ultimately led to this proceeding. They fought tooth and nail for those against their institutions but at a certain point at this trial they now were put in the position of defending the institution that they once fought against in order to bring these indictments. And you can’t serve two masters; you can’t defend an institution that screwed up while you’re simultaneously trying to get to the root of the problem.

Related Tags:

Crime Directors Documentary Interview