Movie Ticket Giveaway! ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’
Posted on January 5, 2012 at 4:23 pm
I have free tickets to give away to a January 17 Washington DC-area screening of a new movie based on Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Washingtonian Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated). Thomas Horn, winner of Teen Jeopardy, is outstanding in his first acting role as Oskar, a boy devastated by the loss of his father on 9/11. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks play his parents and Viola Davis and Max von Sydow are extraordinary as two of the people Oskar meets in his journey to try to make some sense of his loss.
For tickets: log onto gofobo (www.gofobo.com/rsvp) and input the following code: BLF83QD to download your tickets. Each ticket admits two and there are 20 available. REMINDER: Screening tickets do not guarantee admittance. Seating is first come, first served, so get there early.
The movie opens on Friday, January 20. It is rated PG-13 for emotional thematic material, some disturbing images, and language
And so, when the movie opens, showing us Salt/Jolie being tortured by North Koreans, wearing nothing but her scanties, all of that comes along with whatever we are learning about her character. She is fierce and brave and will do anything it takes to protect her home. Once she is rescued, she holds it together until she sees who it was who insisted on getting her out, not the CIA, which has strict procedures for calculating the greater good, but her German boyfriend Mike (August Diehl), a scientist specializing in spiders.
Five years later, she has a desk job at a CIA cover organization and is getting ready to celebrate her wedding anniversary when a Russian guy shows up with an offer to provide information. He says that Salt is a Russian spy and is about to kill the Russian president (yes, I know that does not seem to make much sense). Her long-time colleague Ted (Liev Schreiber) believes she is telling the truth when she says she is loyal to America. But another official named Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants her investigated. Salt runs. It could be because she thinks Mike is in danger or because she does not trust Peabody. Or it could be that the Russian was right.
The chase and fight scenes are well staged, especially when Salt leaps across the tops of trucks as they race along a highway. But the absurdity of the plot is made even harder to accept because Jolie’s dignified diligence seems so out of step with the film’s tone. The Jolie of “Tomb Raider” and even “Gone in 60 Seconds” knew how to have fun on screen. But the wild child era is over, and even in film these days, Jolie seems to want to go for the gravitas. If so, this is the wrong movie.
As print media crumbles and broadcast and cable media splinters, documentaries have become one of the most thorough and dependable formats for delivering long-form journalism. From the acid (in both metaphorical senses of the word)-tinged advocacy of Michael Moore and his imitators to the more straightforward, even-handed work of Irena Salina and Joe Berlinger, see-it-now, show-it-don’t-tell-it films, more widely available than ever before online and through Netflix, literally bring these stories home. Alex Gibney, whose brilliant work on “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side” (about interrogation abuses in Iran), once again uses one disaster to illuminate more fundamental structural flaws with “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”
The Jack Abramoff story is epic, even operatic, a classic story of the rise and fall of an ambitious man with a tragic flaw. He was an idealistic young man who became first corrupted and then a corrupter. It has the satisfying arc of a feature film (and is set to be one, with Kevin Spacey as Abramoff), but it is far more than a rise-and-fall or even a catch-the-crook film. It is entertaining but it is also a sober and sobering depiction that focuses less on the failures of the individuals than the failures of the system that did more than let it happen. This film argues that corruption is inevitable.
Abramoff was a college Republican whose passion and ability to attract supporters — political and financial — quickly brought him to the attention of party leaders. At some point, he surrendered principle to greed. He took more than $25 million in lobbying fees. And then what he didn’t keep he paid out illegally. Gibney does an excellent job of making a complicated story both clear and engrossing. He is even-handed, allowing participants like former Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio), who pled guilty to corruption charges and spent 17 months in prison, and Neil Volz, his former chief of staff, to tell their own stories.
The stories are shocking. I don’t know which is worse, how much money was taken from the unsuspecting clients, mostly Indian tribes, or how little it took to get crucial support from key members of Congress. A golf outing, a free dinner, a $25,000 contribution could mean hundreds of millions of dollars from casino revenue, especially if the competition could be shut out. Sweatshops on Saipan were characterized as free enterprise. Favors were traded. Abramoff dubbed appropriations committee the called “the favor factory” and he was very good at finding ever more pockets to stuff favors in. He was also very good at creating more pockets of his own for receiving money. Ultimately, his office set up a phony think tank to receive contributions in excess of the money given to them for lobbying. It was run by a lifeguard out of a house on the beach. Needless to say, no thinking went on.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, invalidating much of John McCain’s campaign finance reforms and making it possible for unlimited corporate lobbying and other political expenditures — much of it undisclosed — makes this film even more timely and even more terrifying. Jack Abramoff will get out of prison at the end of this year and come back to a world filled with new opportunities.
This year, the Washington Jewish Film Festival opening here tomorrow looks especially enticing, with a wide range of films from a wide range of sources all with some relationship to the experience of Jewish culture and history. The festival, now in its 20th year, is presenting its visionary award to Michael Verhoeven, the director whose film, “The Nasty Girl,” led off the first festival two decades ago. Audiences will get a chance to see that film, based on the true story of a German student who uncovered that her community had suppressed the history of its involvement in Nazi atrocities, and hear Verhoeven in a conversation at the Goethe-Institut about the role of film in the ongoing denial and revelation of history. His latest film, “Human Failure,” will have its North American premiere at the festival. It is a documentary about the organized theft of assets from German Jews by Nazi tax officials, and it is presented in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Museum, The Generation After, and Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington, and sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Germany and the Goethe-Institute Washington.
Some of the other highlights of the festival include:
“Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist,” a documentary about the brilliantly influential comic artists and writer, creator of The Spirit and The Contract with God Trilogy,
“A Matter of Size,” an Israeli feature film about four overweight men who discover a place where being big is truly appreciated: the world of sumo wrestling,
“The Worst Company in the World,” a documentary about the film-maker’s father and his inept efforts to run an insurance business,
“Mary and Max,” a claymation feature, based on the true story of a 22-year correspondene between an Australian girl and a New York Jewish man with Asperger’s, featuring the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette,
“Hello Goodbye,” a French feature about a Parisian couple (Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant) who struggle to adjust when they decide to move to Israel,
“For Making Me a Woman,” a documentary about the search for equality in Orthodox observance and community, and
“The Imported Bridegroom,” a 1989 American feature film set in turn-of-the-20th century America, about a Jewish immigrant family whose daughter does not want to marry the man her father has selected for her.
I’ll be reporting more about the festival, so stay tuned.
You need six things for a successful Washington thriller: a reporter, a Congressman, a dead girl, a choleric editor, some ugly secrets, and, for some reason, a chase inside a parking garage, not so sure why that last one seems to be so indispensable. “State of Play” has them all. You don’t necessarily need authentic Washington locations, but “State of Play” has that, too, and it is a pleasure to see more than the monuments, with real-life Washington landmarks like Ben’s Chili Bowl and the Americana Hotel providing an extra layer of realism.
There may be some of-the-moment gloss on this sharp Washington thriller, with references to hard times for newspapers and boom times for outsourcing national security, but its essence is struggles between power and accountability and that are always at the intersection of politics, money, and journalism and of course the movies about them, too.
Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck play former roommates with a lot of baggage — Crowe is a reporter for the “Washington Globe” and we can tell he has integrity because his apartment, car, hair, and clothes are such a mess no one would otherwise keep him around. The traditional cub reporter with more spirit than experience but who will show surprising grit and ingenuity before the third act has evolved into a blogger (Rachel McAdams). The traditional handsome young Congressman who may have compromised his ideals and his disappointed wife are played by Ben Affleck (good) and Robin Wright Penn (better). And the traditional peppery newspaper editor who wants copy NOW because every hour we delay print costs some astronomical sum and we’re losing our readers, dammit! (yes, that tradition stretches back to the movies of the 1930’s) is played with frosty fury by Helen Mirren.
There are chase scenes, including one in a parking lot, another standard for Washington thrillers. But the up to the minute details, sharp talk, smooth performances, and a couple of surprising twists hold the interest and keep us engaged.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
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