Movie Reviews #23…
[One flop and one surprise today—not bad for Hollywood. The first review contains my second published poem! You should boycott the Oscars. Chris Rock will be the only black face on stage. The Golden Globes are much more honest about assessing films and actors. I wonder if Hillary Clinton will have anything to say about that—she’s married to the “first black president,” after all!]
Joy. David O. Russell, dir & screenplay. Summary: A major flop about a mop turns you sour wastin’ star power. I could blame the director and his terrible screenplay, but what were these talented actors thinking when they signed up to make this loser? Jennifer Lawrence shone in Silver Linings Playbook, but not much anywhere else, including Hunger Games, where she was tiresome and boring. She should choose films more wisely. (Situations and language more appropriate for adults, but nothing more than what you might see on cable).
13 Hours. Michael Bay, dir. Like Concussion, this movie is probably one the NY Times will NOT promote in its mission to coddle moneyed and political interests. Trump, in his cheap-beer, effervescent elan and true to his dirty political persona, handed out enough tickets to the movie to fill a theater. Where the Times is coming from, of course, is that they’re pro-Hillary, this movie reflects poorly on her, and Trump knows it. Whether the blame rests squarely on her shoulders, as SecState during the Benghazi fiasco, she’s tainted by the events you’ll see in this movie.
So, what’s the story? A few contractors took it upon themselves to buck the CIA and try to save Chris Stevens, who was sent with only two bodyguards to the consulate in hotbed Benghazi (or did he initiate the trip?—it doesn’t matter, and we’ll probably never know the truth). Consulates are notoriously unprotected while embassies are usually fortresses (the one in Bogota only lacks moats to be a medieval castle). The CIA station head working in Benghazi, according to the film, resisted sending the contractors to the consulate to bail out the ambassador because that CIA station was top secret. In order to ensure that the secrecy was maintained, the U.S. government left the job of protecting the facility to the contractors.
The story is really about their frustration as their government abandons them. In the end, they are saved by Libyan forces, and the remaining CIA personnel and contractors left alive are flown out on Libyan airplanes. Even with F-15’s twenty minutes away and a Predator drone overhead (Bay shows the aerial view many times with the clock readouts from the drone), no support was offered by either the CIA or the Pentagon. I’m sure that decision went above them. To Obama? To Clinton? To SecDef? Whoever created this no-support disaster was never held accountable. Remember, all this appeared in a book as a first-hand account by some of the participants (not the CIA station chief, of course, who received a medal for his ineptitude).
“Based on a true story” allows Hollywood to mold the facts, of course, in order to make a film more visually attractive (read marketable). The basic story is probably true here, though—the U.S. government abandoned these people so the CIA could save face and not be caught illegally in another foreign country (that only works when no one finds out about it, of course). There are clear Michael Bay embellishments—he’s known for blowing things up, car chases, blood spattering from head shots, and other clichéd features of action films, so the film won’t disappoint in that sense. I thought the drone pictured was only a reconnaissance drone, not an attack drone, but I might be wrong. Scif was spelled wrong—it’s an acronym for “special compartmented information facility.” (Remember, I write about this stuff.)
There were some nice touches. In the farewell scene to Amal, the interpreter who decides at the end to stay to help his country, one of the contractors suggests that Amal could do a good turn there because the Libyan people have a lot of work to do in that regard (it’s now considered a failed democracy resulting from the Arab Spring and is currently controlled by ISIS for the most part). The scene where the Libyan women and children are finding their terrorist husbands, lovers, and fathers dead in Zombieland, a barren zone close the CIA compound, is a visual testament to the horrific consequences of war. Even the credits are moving when we learn that one of the contractors, after all this time, is still trying to recover the use of his arm he almost lost defending the CIA compound.
You’ll probably find many other moving moments mixed among the fighting scenes (unusual for Bay), so don’t let the Times and the establishment convince you to bypass this movie. It’s more evidence why we should distrust the current establishment in general and Hillary Clinton in particular—the other two Dem candidates are not tainted by events like these. Like Concussion, 13 Hours is a movie for our times because, as depressing as they are, they make you think about important issues. (The R rating is deserved for foul language and violence.)
In libris libertas….
