Sitting in an empty house with a dog from the Mexican Circus! O Daisy, embrace is my only pleasure. Holding and hugging my friends. Education. A wave of eucalyptus. Warm granite. These are the things I have in my heart. Heart and skills, there’s nothing else.
I usually don’t like small dogs but you like midwestern women take over the air. You leap into the air and pivot a diver going up! You are known to open the fridge and eat when you wish you can roll down car windows and step out you know when to get off the elevator.
I always wanted to be a dog but I hesitated for I thought they lacked certain skills. Now I want to be a dog.
Hi, my name is Scott Bowles, and I am a Dallas Cowboys fan.
If you’re even a casual observer of the NFL, you know this is no easy admission. I’m from Detroit. An out-of-towner pulling for the Cowboys is like a non-resident pulling for the Boston Celtics (which I do) or the New York Yankees (which I do not).
The Celtics are easy to explain; that’s an inheritance from Dad. The Cowboys, though, are harder to explain. Dad hated the Cowboys. Maybe it was teen rebellion, maybe it was canny teen marketing, maybe it was the Roger Staubach-signed pennant Dad got me when I was in the hospital contracting diabetes. Whatever the reason, the bond was sealed.
I know this union is morally wrong. Sometimes, I feel like Melania Trump. No matter how much cult fans chant I’m doing the right thing in the marriage, sometimes I’ve got to admit I’m with a loathsome creep.
Or was. I’m officially switching allegiances this season. This year I’m rooting for the Baltimore Ravens to win the Super Bowl. And you should, too.
I know I know. It’s heresy to switch bandwagons, especially mid-season. But hear me out. Dallas has always been known as “America’s Team,” thanks to the organization’s slick and ubiquitous self-promotion. But I suggest the Ravens best represent this country, both in toughness and underdog-ness.
Consider:
Miracle turnaround. No one thought the Ravens a serious contender in 2019 — particularly when the hapless Cleveland Browns shelled them early in the year. But a turnaround came primarily thanks to Lamar Jackson, a 22-year-old quarterback who has set the team on fire. Half quarterback, half running back, Jackson was considered a bust of a draft pick last year. This year, he’s led the Ravens to a record of 10-2, the best in the NFL. He’s also the first quarterback in history to pass for more than 250 yards and run for 120 in one game.
Teltow Dethroned a king. Last month, the Ravens played the vaunted New England Patriots, home to Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady and head coach Bill Belichick. The Patriots, who many consider Super Bowl favorites, were undefeated at the time and expected to roll over the young Ravens. The Ravens shellacked them 37-20.
The political intrigue. This is reason enough to pull for the Ravens. Traditionally, the victorious Super Bowl team gets a trip to the White House and a visit with the president. Last year, the Patriots and owner Robert Kraft happily took up the invitation. (Side note: Kraft, 78, was later arrested for asking a young masseuse to give him a happy ending. Trump is a true ally of pederasts; he doesn’t drain the swamp so much as dunk people in it.)
You remember Trump and “Charm City,” as the state has nicknamed it. Baltimore was targeted by Trump in July, when the president lashed out at Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat whose district included parts of Baltimore city and Baltimore County.
Cummings’ “district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” Trump said of the city and the Representative. “If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
Cummings later died, but not the city’s memory of him. When Melania Trump — whose single platform as First Lady is an anti-bullying campaign — showed up in Baltimore for a photo op, the irony was not lost on residents. They swamped the appearance, delayed it for minutes with protest chants and loudly chatted among themselves during Melania’s speech. Charming? Not at all. Of course, neither is taking shots at the dead and dying (insert McCain citation here). Be best!
What theater that would make! Will he invite the team? Will the team accept? How long before Trump mistakes the team for the help?
Whether it was Trump’s diss, Cummings’ death or simply fatigue from marginalization, the Ravens have been a team possessed. Two weeks ago, when the Ravens were making a rare appearance on national television (Monday Night Football), a commentator made a brilliant observation as Baltimore dismantled the glitzy Los Angeles Rams, who hosted the game with stars in the stands and sporting flashy yellow uniforms. As the Ravens mashed the Los Angeles’ uniforms from lemon to dirt-stained coffee brown, the analyst noted “This is The Wire going up against Dancing with the Stars,” a reference to the gritty Baltimore-set crime drama considered one of the greatest shows of all-time. “And the Ravens don’t feel like dancing.”
No, the Ravens aren’t here to dance. They’re here to follow the wisdom of Omar Little, the anti-hero of The Wire: to walk with some swagger; whistle The Farmer in the Dell; and send dope boys scrambling.
Let’s get confirmation biases out of the way straight off: The Report is a political southpaw of a film. But it clearly worked meticulously on the pitch.
Of all the statistics involving the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s post–9/11 detention and interrogation program — better known as the “Torture Report” — let’s focus on this for a second: It had 38,000 footnotes.
This mammoth piece of work, which ran 6,700 pages and took years of toil by Senate staffer Daniel L. Jones, examining millions of classified documents in a windowless basement, was never fully released; only a 525–page summary was published, in 2014. Well, now it’s getting its own Hollywood film, at least. It seems only fair, in a cosmic sense.
It should go without saying that it’s a challenge to produce exciting cinema from a dense document like a Senate report. Unlike, say, classic films about investigative journalism, there’s no grizzled editor yelling out: “Stop the presses!” (Whether anyone has ever actually yelled that in real life remains unclear, but it’s great in the movies.)
Still, The Report, written and directed with brisk efficiency and a clear sense of outrage by Scott Z. Burns, does its level best to make us understand the importance of this document, which at once revealed the extent of CIA “enhanced interrogation” in the wake of 9/11 and showed that it didn’t work — discrediting, along the way, the idea that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. And yes, the film takes more intellectual energy and patience from the viewer than most. And that’s fine. It deserves the effort.
In that regard, The Report (the missing word “Torture” is cleverly “redacted” in the film’s graphics) should be greatly helped by the fact that it happens to star one of the most popular actors in Hollywood.
Does it suddenly seem like Adam Driver is in everything? Already, Oscar predictions are circulating for his performance in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, an intimate meditation on divorce. Soon, he reprises his role as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars franchise. He also scorched the Broadway stage earlier this year in Burn This, earning a Tony nod.
All those roles presented radically different challenges than Driver’s task here. This is the story of a report, not a man. No attempt is made to explore Jones’ psyche. We never see him at home, with family or with friends. We barely even see him outside.
Still, with a controlled intensity that gradually increases, Driver makes it work. His partner here is a terrific Annette Bening as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, his boss. Only an actress as precise and restrained as Bening could capture the no–nonsense persona of Feinstein, the California Democrat who assigned Jones the report, without ever seeming to imitate her — although the coiffed hair and the glasses are pretty on–point.
The real “action” in this film occurs in flashback, with nausea–inducing scenes of terror techniques used on detainees at black sites, or secret CIA prisons. These techniques — developed by two psychologists, contractors who were given millions of dollars and huge latitude — include sleep deprivation, forced nudity, so–called “rectal rehydration,” and mock burials in coffins, sometimes filled with insects.
They also include waterboarding, the technique of simulated drowning that one secret informant who approaches Jones — a physician’s aide — tells him came pretty close to the actual thing. We also see detainees stripped and chained to floors. One of them dies, after having freezing water poured onto him. Driver, as Jones, rails: “They (expletive) killed a guy, and nobody was held accountable?”
It’s important to note here that many will see The Report as a cinematic rebuttal, seven years later, to Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar–nominated film that implied a connection between CIA torture and intelligence that led to the bin Laden raid. They will certainly not miss the brief but pointed reference to that movie, a quick mention from a TV screen that provides the film with its slight levity.
The Report is not nearly as action–packed as Zero Dark Thirty, and it doesn’t even have the dark–garage scenes like those with Deep Throat in All the President’s Men — except one quick exchange with an informant.
But the issues it addresses are, to say the least, crucial ones, and even though it trusts its audience to soldier through some dense material, the audience should repay that trust. Here’s hoping it will.
