Our Brand is Crisis

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 5:38 pm

As we gear up for one of the most improbable and even outlandish Presidential campaigns in US history, we get a movie based on a real-life Presidential campaign in Bolivia, with imported American political consultants transplanting the media-savvy, scorched-earth, mud-slinging “expertise” that won elections in the US. What could go wrong?

The name of the film is “Our Brand is Crisis,” also the name of the 2006 documentary about what happened when James Carville, an architect of the Clinton campaign, went to Bolivia with his group of consultants and strategists to help elect the Bolivian-born, American-raised Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Actually they went to help re-elect him. He had served as President from 1993-97. He was trying to regain the Presidency, and who better to help than the team who helped the young governor of Arkansas beat a sitting President, George H.W. Bush?

Sandra Bullock, taking a part based on Carville and originally written for George Clooney, plays a consultant known as “Calamity” Jane. She is burned out and living in a remote rural area when she gets a visit from two former colleagues.

Nell (Ann Dowd) and Ben (Anthony Mackie) want her for two reasons. First, she is good at what she does. Second, she is “disposable, expendable, and deniable.” If their candidate (named Castillo in this film and played by Joaquim de Almeida) wins, they get the glory. If he loses, they can blame “Calamity” Jane. Win win, and a good introduction to the small-p politics of the world of strategists and consultants who work on campaigns.

Jane is not interested, even though she needs the money, until she learns that Castillo’s opponent is being advised by her arch rival, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton), a man who has been on the other side “three or four times” and beaten her “three or four times.” Much more interested in trouncing anyone Candy is advising than in any of the issues or the quality of the candidates, she agrees to fly to Bolivia, where she spends the first few days breathing oxygen from a tank and throwing up due to the altitude.

Finally she begins to wake up and her fiercely competitive spirit takes over. She brings in a secret weapon, a young woman with crackerjack online research skills known only as LeBlanc (Zoe Kazan), a sort of Lisbeth Salander who looks like a sophomore at Yale. And she starts barking orders, telling her candidate to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves and to turn toward the camera if he feels a tear in his eye. “We are the syringe that injects the people’s voice into your campaign,” she barks. He is so far behind in the polls that he has no alternative.

Jane’s short-term goal: to humanize her candidate, who is seen by the electorate as imperious and out of touch. Her medium term goal: to persuade the electorate that there is a crisis and only his experienced hand can guide them through. Her ultimate goal: complete annihilation of Pat Candy, with a side order of public humiliation.

The political sophistication of the screenplay is below the level of an AP history class, with a lot of scorched earth posturing and the inevitable idealistic youngster to provide contrast to all the superficial cynics. A reference to Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand is there for a gloss of political sophistication, but the aphorisms are tired (“If you fight with monsters for too long, you become a monster”) and the film is almost as cynical as its characters. The reason to see it is Bullock, who gives one of the best performances of the year, as complex, nuanced, savvy, and honest as the film would like to be. She’s got my vote.

Parents should know that this film includes very strong and crude language, vulgar sexual references, smoking, drinking, and some violence including riots, tear gas, and guns.

Family discussion: Why did Jane take the job? What will she do next?

If you like this, try: the documentary of the same name that inspired this film and “No,” starring Gael Garcia Bernal, based on the 1988 election in Chile

Related Tags:

Suffragette

Posted on October 29, 2015 at 5:30 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some intense violence, thematic elements, brief strong language and partial nudity
Profanity:	Brief strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some intense violence including bombs, police brutality, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 30, 2015
Date Released to DVD:	February 1, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B017Y01GOM

How do you persuade politicians to give you the vote when you do not have the capacity to vote them out if they deny it? That was the problem faced by women in later 19th and early 20th century Great Britain and the US. While Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” in setting up the US government, the Constitution did not give them the right to vote. Nor did the 15th amendment to the Constitution adopted after the Civil War to give the vote to all men, regardless of race. Efforts to give “universal suffrage” in the UK led to reforms over the 19th century, but none of them granted any voting rights to women.

As this film begins, women in the UK had been fighting for the right to vote for 30 years. They concluded that they had exhausted all peaceful means of sending their message and were resorting to what today we might consider terrorism, throwing rocks at store windows and planting bombs in mailboxes. They were careful to destroy property only. No one was hurt through their protests, except for the protesters themselves, who were subjected to extreme brutality from the police, including torturous forced feeding for those who participated in hunger strikes when they were imprisoned.

Those who have studied the history of women’s suffrage may be familiar with the names of the leaders, like Emmeline Pankhurst (played in this film by Meryl Streep). But as so often happens with history, the stories of the everyday women who played a vital role in the movement are not well known, and this film wisely focuses on them. Pankhurst is on screen for less than ten minutes. The movie’s main character is a composite who is representative of the working women who became a part of the cause. Maud (Carey Mulligan) works in a laundry as does her husband (Ben Wishaw) and as did her mother, until she was killed in an industrial accident. She began working there as a child and will work there as long as she can, though she knows that the likelihood of injury or illness caused by the working conditions is very high. That is not the only problem. As her friend’s young daughter comes to work in the laundry, we can see from Maud’s reaction to the sexual assaults by a predatory boss are something she recognizes from her own experience.

Maud is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is assumed to be working with the protesters. Instead of denying it or, when she has the opportunity to help her situation by spying on them and reporting what she learns back to the police, she begins to think for the first time that there could be a chance to create a better life for herself and for the next generation, and she becomes involved, though she risks losing her job, her husband, and her child.

The movie, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, is somber in tone but it is effective at showing the harsh conditions of Maud’s life and the always-watchable Mulligan gives her character a developing ferocity that is more of a surprise to her than it is to us. It also is effective at showing us the class divisions and how women across class lines worked together. But 21st century audiences well-versed in the narratives of later protests like the civil rights, women’s equality, environmental and and anti-war movements may find it difficult to sympathize with the literally incendiary tactics of these women. There are so many characters in a very limited time period with very little progress that its good intentions are not enough to make it a strong narrative.

Text at the end of the film provides sobering statistics about how long it has taken — and is still taking — for women to get the right to vote. Here’s hoping it will not take explosives for these women to have a say in the laws that govern them.

Parents should know that this film features protest violence including destruction of property and explosives by activists and police brutality by law enforcement. Characters are injured and killed and there is domestic violence, sexual abuse, a parent permanently separated from a child, brief strong language, and non-sexual nudity.

Family discussion: If you were advising the activists on behalf of women’s right to vote, what would you suggest? How did later political movements learn from their example?

If you like this, try: the documentaries “One Woman, One Vote” and “Not For Ourselves Alone“

Truth

Posted on October 22, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Often a movie “based on a true story” confirms and extends our understanding of what happened. This film, based on the “true story” that led to the departure of one of the most respected newsmen of all time, Dan Rather, from CBS, asserts its ambitions with its title and goes on to explore the very nature of truth and our willingness or ability to uncover and recognize it. I did not have strong views about what happened in 2004, just a recollection of the incident as a turning point, with the most respected broadcast journalist in the country being brought down by bloggers, who were able to determine that documents relied on in a story about President George W. Bush were forgeries. In my mind, the story was about the shift from old to new media, where the Davids of the blogosphere could challenge the powerful Goliaths of CBS News.

But in this movie, based on the book by Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett, blazingly intelligent and forceful), we see another side of the story, written by James Vanderbilt. This is her version (if there is such a thing as versions) of the truth.

No matter which version of the story you believe, lesson number one of this movie is that you are at your most vulnerable when you feel most powerful. Mapes has just come off the greatest triumph of her career, the Peabody award-winning story about the horrific abuse of prisoners by the US military at Abu Ghraib. She is looking for another great scoop, and as the Presidential election approaches, it looks like she has one. Rumors about special treatment for George W. Bush, both in being allowed to serve in the National Guard and during his time there, have circulated for years, and now there seems to be substantiation, including on-the-record statements by the former Lieutenant Governor and some memos from the younger Bush’s commanding officer. Four document experts were called in by Mapes to authenticate the documents and, with the proviso that as photocopies there was no way to test the ink or paper of the originals to verify them completely, the experts signed off. The other steps taken by Mapes and the staff of reporters, including research expert Mike Smith (Topher Grace, who should be in more movies) and former military officer Dennis Quaid (ditto), are impressive. But it is possible that their supervisors did not ask enough questions and it is certain that moving up the broadcast date at the last minute cut off their ability to lock down all of the story.

And then it all fell apart. Bloggers identified problems with the memos’ fonts that indicated they were created on a computer, not a typewriter, and thus could not have been written in the 1970’s. CBS convened a commission led by a former (Republican) Attorney General to review the story. Their focus was not as much on whether the story was true or not (the memos were just one small part of the story) but whether the reporters had a political agenda.

A lot of people got fired. Smith makes a speech on the way out the door that identifies a culprit more insidious than partisan politics — corporate conflicts of interest. There are times when protection of shareholder value is not consistent with getting the story. The most important question this movie asks is what that means for democracy and for, well, truth.

Parents should know that this movie has very strong language and brief nudity in a photograph. Characters drink and take medicine to deal with stress. There are references to torture and child abuse and there are tense confrontations.

Family discussion: What should Mary have done differently? How did her childhood experiences affect her relationship with Rather and her response to her father? Should she have followed her lawyer’s advice?

If you like this, try two other fact-based films about journalists fighting to expose the truth about powerful people: “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight“

Related Tags:

Based on a true story Drama Journalism

Steve Jobs

Posted on October 22, 2015 at 5:01 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	References to drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Tense and angry confrontations
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 23, 2014
Date Released to DVD:	February 15, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0168UF2PS

If you want a straightforward, fact-checked biography of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, watch Alex Gibney’s documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man In the Machine, or the Ashton Kutcher biopic (better than its reputation), simply titled Jobs. You can read the meticulously researched biography biography by Walter Isaacson. This film, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, does to the traditional biographical movie what Jobs himself did to traditional ideas about computers. A lot of people won’t like that, but for me, after years of diligent, comprehensive and increasingly formulaic biographical films, my view is that of Patrick Henry (who might have been considered a candidate for Jobs’ “Think Different” ad campaign) — If this be revolution, make the most of it.

So, let’s get it straight from the outset. A lot of stuff in this movie didn’t happen or didn’t happen when and where it is shown here or between the characters who appear in the film. And no one in history, even Aaron Sorkin, can snap out dialog as dazzlingly crafted as this in normal conversation.

This is not a “and then this happened, and then there was this revelation, and then there was this setback, and then there was this triumph” sort of movie. This movie respects its audience enough to assume that either we already know the parameters of Jobs’ life or that if we do not know the details, we are more interested in the essence. Think of it this way. It is not a photograph of Steve Jobs; it is an abstract painting. Or, it is not Julie Andrews singing “My Favorite Things;” it is John Coltrane’s 14-minute meditation on the Richard Rodgers tune. This is pure cinema, and it is thrilling to watch.

The movie takes place in three acts, three moments in real time, as Jobs (Michael Fassbender, capturing the fury, magnetism, brilliance, and shocking selfishness of the man). Jobs is backstage, preparing for three product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, the Next computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998, after Jobs had been fired from Apple and then brought back in utter vindication to the company he co-founded. Each act is filmed (literally, mechanically shot) and scored to meld form and content.

Composer Daniel Pemberton wrote three entirely separate movie scores. The first was played exclusively on the technology of 1984. The second, reflecting the grand setting of the launch in San Francisco’s opera house and the operatic drama of the disastrous launch of a wildly overpriced product, is a full-scale symphonic piece with an Italian libretto (the lyrics are about machinery). And the third, with Jobs’ triumphant restoration to the role that meant everything to him, was composed entirely on Apple products.

Sorkin’s favorite tools are all here — hyper, rat-a-tat dialog as characters race around to meet a deadline, people who are superb at their jobs and lousy in their family and social relationships, and people who bring the trauma of their personal failures into the professional context (some vice versa as well). He moves people on and off stage at the pace of a door-slamming Feydeau farce. We see Jobs’ hyper-focus and grandiosity as he barks orders to (illegally) turn off the exit signs in the auditorium so the light won’t interfere with the total darkness he wants for the presentation and complains that he was not on the cover of TIME’s Man of the Year issue. He understands something important, not what people want because they do not know it exists, but what they will want. Computers are designed by engineers for engineers. He wants them to be not just tools but friends. He wants them — literally — to say “hello,” to be so “warm and playful” that English majors and bakers and fire fighters and musicians will want to use them. He wants an ad campaign that tells people they (all) can “think different” like Jim Henson (perfect for a generation that grew up on “Sesame Street”) and Cesar Chavez by using his products. And he wants to “make a dent in the universe.”

People who make a dent in the universe usually do serious damage to their relationships. We see that through the years as Jobs battles with his ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston), cruelly denying paternity of their daughter Lisa, with his longtime partner, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his programmer (Michael Stuhlbarg), and with the professional manager he brought in to run the company, Pepsi’s John Sculley (a very sympathetic Jeff Daniels). He agonizes over the double rejection of being put up for adoption and then being brought back by the first couple who tried to adopt him. He talks to Lisa about two versions of the song “Both Sides Now,” a double double. And, crucially, he knows going into the first two launches that both will be disasters.

The film opens with archival footage of another visionary, Arthur C. Clarke, predicting the future of computers. A movie like this is what helps us understand the future of humanity.

Parents should know that one of the themes of this film is a disputed paternity test and failure to meet the financial or emotional obligations of a parent. There are references to neglect and drug usage and some tense and angry confrontations.

Family discussion: What did the revelation about the TIME cover mean to Steve Jobs? What was his most important contribution and what, at the end of his life, mattered most to him? Should he have thanked the Apple II team?

If you like this, try: the Gibney documentary, the Isaacson book, and “The Social Network”

Bridge of Spies

Posted on October 15, 2015 at 5:58 pm

Following World War II, Lord de l’Isle and Dudley was harshly criticized when he organized a legal defense fund for a Nazi general. He responded, “Had I met General Manstein during the war I would have shot him on sight. I am not concerned with whether von Manstein is guilty or not…I want Britain’s reputation upheld.”

Like the nobleman, American insurance lawyer Jim Donovan (Tom Hanks) understood that it means nothing to win a war against tyranny if we then become tyrants ourselves. Donovan, an assistant to future Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg Nazi war criminals trials who had been litigating insurance claims, was asked to defend an artist accused of spying for the Soviet Union. No one would have complained if he provided a less than vigorous defense. His wife (Amy Ryan) worries about the impact that his defense of an enemy spy will have on their family.

But Donovan had two fundamental principles. First, he recognized that the spy was doing for his country what others were doing for the US and he deserved to be treated as we would want our spies to be treated when they got captured. Second, he understood that if even one small rule was bent or one small step was skipped, it could do more damage to the essential principles of justice that define us than the theft of nuclear secrets.

Those secrets were hidden in a hollowed-out nickel. And the man who had them was a British artist named Rudolf Abel, superbly played by Broadway star Mark Rylance with wry resolve. There is a running joke in the film as he is repeatedly told he does not seem nervous or scared and he replies, “Would it help?” Donovan does his best to defend Abel, taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that the evidence against Abel was taken in violation of the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He is unsuccessful in the appeal but does manage to persuade the judge (in a dramatic but highly unlikely and completely illegal ex parte visit to the judge’s home) not to impose the death penalty.

That comes in handy a few years later when American pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down over the Soviet Union in what the United States calls a mistaken detour by a “weather plane.” But he was flying a spy plane outfitted with special cameras for the CIA. The US wants him back. So they call on Donovan.

Meanwhile, as the Berlin Wall is being constructed, an American PhD candidate named Pryor (Will Rogers) found himself on the wrong side and was captured and accused of spying by the East Germans. Donovan’s government contacts tell him not to worry about Pryor, but Donovan is determined to get both young men home.

Spielberg and Hanks are an unbeatable combination, and their work here, with an unironic and sincerely gripping screenplay by Matt Charman and the Coen brothers, is as good as it gets. Donovan’s time in Berlin, crossing back and forth over the dividing line as the wall is being built — and as people trying to escape are being shot — is so evocatively cold, physically and emotionally, you will want to button your coat and you will feel for Donovan, who loses his to thugs on the East German side. The nuclear age minuet of politics, statecraft, diplomacy, and ego is tense and compelling. As Donovan warns, any mistake they make could be the last one. Spielberg’s signature touches include scenes of American schoolchildren watching real-life “safety” movies telling them to duck and cover and a quick glimpse of a wrenching parallel as Donovan sees children at recess, climbing in a way that echoes the desperate escape attempts he had just seen. It is too bad to see Ryan underused in a “honey, I’m worried — maybe you better not go” role, with a superfluous coda scene at the end. But the movie is still one of the best of the year, with a stunning sequence when Powers is shot down and sheer masterful storytelling.

Parents should know that this is a cold war story of spies with threat of atomic bombs, shooting down a spy plane, and extensive tension and peril including guns and abuse of prisoners, drinking, smoking, and brief strong language.

Family discussion: What do we learn about Donovan from his negotiation over the insurance payout? Why did he insist on including Prior?

If you like this, try: “13 Days” and Donovan’s book about the negotiation, Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers

Related Tags:

Based on a true story Drama Spies