Category Archives: Reviews

The Soft-Spoken Jewel of Richard

 

Richard Jewell

As he’s morphed from movie star to star movie maker, Clint Eastwood’s late career has tended to two categories, as distinct as cowboys in black and white hats. There’s the deeper philosophical glimpses into human frailty (The 15:27 to Paris, Sully,  J. Edgar);  then there’s the hands-off-bystander director who shoots simpler stories (Gran Torino, The Mule, Unforgiven).  Thankfully, Richard Jewell belongs in the latter camp of complicated  heroes seeking simplicity.Image result for The 15:27 to Paris

The 89-year-old director brings his no-fuss persona to Jewell, and it proves an apt fit for Jewell’s story, allowing the brimming tension of Billy Ray’s script and a handful of strong performances to stand out. While the muted drama is familiar and likely won’t win Eastwood any new fans as a filmmaker, it won’t mar his reputation, either. The low-key approach feels at once timely and old-fashioned — a character study from another era designed to comment on our own, particularly along the media landscape.

Jewell explores the eponymous odyssey of its real-life character, in a cautionary tale of heroism gone awry on a very public stage: In 1996, the security guard happened upon a bomb at Centennial Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. The blast ultimately killed one person and injured more than 100, but could’ve been worse if it weren’t for Jewell successfully identifying the makeshift explosive tucked in a backpack under a bench just before detonation. But without a promising suspect, the FBI made Jewell its primary suspect, and mass hysteria ensued as the FBI combed through Jewell’s life to build a believable case.Image result for centennial park richard jewell

While Captain Phillips writer Ray adapts Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article into a sturdy scaffolding to retell those events, Eastwood’s veteran hand provides the tension: The harrowing explosion at Centennial Park — with bodies, limbs, and blood sprayed across the park — can’t help but think of the Boston Marathon and Vegas mass shootings. It may be set in the 1990’s, but Jewell‘s release timing was no accident. While the film is set in the mid-1990s, Eastwood chose to tell this story now for a reason.

At the cross hairs of a mayhem is Paul Walter Hauser’s Richard Jewell. A newcomer to leading roles, Hauser previously starred as one of the white-trash thugs in I, Tonya. Yet he delivers was one of most potent, retrained turns of 2019. Forget his dead-ringer likeness of the real man; despite Jewell‘s  macabre material, Hauser gives his character a cringe-worthy sincerity — you want to scream at the screen for him to tell the FBI off. But neither he nor the film are interested in Hollywood little-guy convention. Image result for paul walter hauser richard jewell

Even as Hauser’s performance lends the film a darkly comic edge, Eastwood’s solemn filmmaking never mocks his protagonist (Jewell died at 44 in 2007). The director even acknowledges those who still believe in Jewell’s involvement, and the movie manages to sidestep becoming a political screed about the inevitable injustices of power.

The stark exception would the role of Olivia Wilde, who plays real-life Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs. Eastwood holds back little fury at the press, which he accuses of sleeping with investigators to sell papers (the AJC has demanded a credit-roll-correction in the film, which Warner Bros. has not recognized). The media frenzy took on such a loathsome life of its own in the scandal, it seems odd to attack an individual journalist, and the side rant slows Jewell.

But not enough to undo it. Kathy Bates turns in her best performance in years as Jewell’s mother, Bobbi. And Sam Rockwell’s performance as Jewell’s attorney Watson Bryant gives Jewell its terrific moments of comeuppance.

Like predecessors Spotlight and Nightcrawler, Jewell is a story of what happens when what is reported as fact obscures the truth. It may have taken 13 years to tell the step-back story of Richard Jewell. But Eastwood makes a strong case that hearing all sides is worth the wait.

The Report on ‘Enhanced Interrogation’


(AP)

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. Image result for zero dark thirty

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. Image result for all the presidents men deep throat

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.

A Few Minutes Ago, in a Galaxy Down the Street

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The Force appears strong with this one.

Anchored by a solid debut of The Mandalorian, Star Wars‘ first live-action series, Disney entered the on-demand fray with a glitchy bang. And the splash may alter the future of Star Wars, Netflix and the streaming universe.

The company’s new streaming service, Disney+, has already seen 10 million sign-ups since launching Tuesday, the company announced Wednesday. Disney’s stock was up more than 7% on the news. Netflix shares were down more than 3%.

Even a technical bug didn’t dampen the debut. The launch Tuesday was beset with technical errors that prevented some users from connecting with the service (I was disconnected three times). But that didn’t stop customers from flooding the sign-up page.

At $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year, Disney+ is significantly cheaper than competitors such as Netflix, which charges $12.99 for its most popular standard HD plan.The membership fee for Amazon Prime is $119 per year, or $12.99 per month. That gap will likely narrow as Disney + lures more subscribers, but other changes seem inevitable in wake of the report:

buy disulfiram uk Disney will be your kids favorite channel in a month. Even a cursory glance through the studio’s immense catalog suggests this race is already over. The library alone will favor Disney+ in the youth and young parents market. And that doesn’t include it’s catalog under the Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars brands.Image result for bambi

Netflix will become the HBO of streamers. For the past two years Netflix has been in a headlong chase for a Best Picture Oscar, last year with Roma and this year with The Irishman. The service, which already excels at documentaries and horror films, may look to become the go-to streamer for adults.

Star Wars may be headed for a TV universe. Mandalorian was an unmitigated success with fans and critics, early reviews show. The series, the brainchild of Jon Favreau, is some of the best Star Wars material to hit screens, big or small, in decades. And at its heart, Star Wars was always a soap opera deep down. Mandalorian actually looks better on a smaller screen, which is more forgiving of the series’ reliance on digital effects.Image result for mandalorian

Measuring Disney’s splash is still up in the air. The studio is offering a seven-day free trial, so likely not all of the sign-ups represent customers who will continue to pay for the service. Verizon is also offering its customers a free year of Disney+, which could further boost its subscriber numbers.

But there’s no denying the impressive opener. Disney+ has already achieved huge sign-up numbers, while competitors such as Netflix and Hulu needed years to build their subscriber bases. Disney has already signed up more than 10% of the high end of its forecast of 60 million to 90 million subscribers by the end of 2024. And Disney+ has yet to roll out to many countries beyond the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands, which were included in Tuesday’s launch. The platform will be available in Australia and New Zealand on Nov. 19. More countries will get Disney+ in the coming months.

For comparison, it took CBS about five years to reach 8 million streaming subscribers combined for CBS All Access and Showtime. Disney-owned Hulu, which has an advertising-based streaming model, claimed more than 28 million subscribers in May. Of those subscribers, 26.8 million are monthly paying customers, while the remaining have promotional accounts. Netflix claimed more than 60 million paid domestic members in its third quarter of 2019 and more than 97 million international paid members.

In other words, the mouse came to brawl. And the battle could be cutthroat, Pat Esser, the president of Cox Communications, the nation’s third-largest cable carrier, told the New York Times.

“They’re about to enter a space where the consumer, with a click of a button, will decide to be your customer or not to be your customer,” he said.