Saturday, December 13, 2014

HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY, PART ONE




 
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen
Hunger Games, Mockingjay, Part I, directed by Francis Lawrence, with Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Liam Hemsworth.

The Revolution Will Be Televised *

How to build a revolution:  Start with a tyrannical, revengeful president with a well-armed military; add a charismatic, self-effacing, yet heroic persona whose homeland was destroyed by his government; enhance with a wise, capable rebel president of the people, mix well with a savvy production team whose producer is asked by said president to create a revolutionary leader from a reluctant hero. 
 
 Mockingjay starts where Catching Fire ended.  Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) had been rescued by rebels.  Her boyfriend, Peeta, her partner and co-winner in the first Games, was captured.  There is an ongoing war now between Panem (the country of the rebels) and the Capital.  The people who escaped and defected from the Capital have gone underground, literally, way, way underground, like in an inverted hi-rise building, in a maze of highly technical, well-lighted “cities” or enclaves, which are reached by banks of descending elevators.  Everything is dimly lit, the color palette- dull greys, browns, and black- even clothing, mainly jumpsuits, which most everyone seems to prefer.
Capital President Snow (Donald Sutherland), had fabricated a food and water shortage under the guise of population control, which, of course does not affect the rich (call them the 1 percenters),but kills thousands of 99%ers. Snow seeks revenge when the accidental hero, Katniss, who bends rules to the delight of the wealthy viewers, totally destroyed the President’s and the rich’s Survivor-like super-popular reality TV show, Hunger Games with a well-aimed arrow (the end of Catching Fire.  That act reminded me of when Toto pulled the veil revealing the sham Wizard.)   So he retaliates by bombing cities and districts, killing, wounding and disappearing the people of Panem.  He tries to quash the ongoing, violent, armed protest.

Katniss meets the president of Panem, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, in Democracy Now's Amy Goodman hair style) and her advisor, Plutarch (the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman)  Coin wants her to start a revolution.  Katniss only wants to rescue Peeta.  A trip to District 12, her home, destroyed by the Capital, changes her mind.  It looks as bombed out as current news clips show of cities in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  She finds herself walking through an entire area strewn with human skulls,  skeletons, like the scene from the film The Killing Fields.   In her miraculously spared home, she finds a white rose bud, a symbol for Peeta.  (Through Lawrence’s acting, she allows us to experience her emotions.)  It’s a propaganda war, much like the one conjured up in Wag the Dog, with Katniss as the secret weapon.  As an Entertainment Weekly writer put it, “a Che Guevara T-shirt made flesh.”

Snow makes a phony, echoing speech on huge outdoor screens, promising order and security.   The people are the “beating heart of Panem,” he intones.  Anyone who threatens this will be executed on the spot.  Distressing examples are graphically depicted.  As in many hostage situations, some of the captured are “turned,” as is Peeta.  He broadcasts from the Capital, advising Katniss to “Stop the killing and cease fire.”

 Plutarch works on the propaganda film.   Katniss agrees to play along- with conditions.  Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) who had worn the most outrageous wigs, colorful costumes and makeup in the previous Hunger Games films, is relegated to charcoal grey jumpsuits.  She vows to make Katniss the “best-dressed rebel in history.”  Katniss must put fire into propaganda speeches to rally passive Panem citizens.  So Plutarch, with the now-sober Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), films her in the midst of a real battle with bombs going off, buildings burning, and aircraft streaming overhead.  She delivers a passionate, fiery, rallying speech.  During one harrowing scene, Plutarch says, to the cameramen, Castor and Pollux, “Make sure you get that on camera.” 
 
At one point, Director Lawrence includes a telling scene relevant to any film about war- a morgue/hospital situated in a cavern-like space teeming with the wounded and dying.  A doctor tells Katniss, “Just let them see your face.”  When they see their rebel leader, those who can stand and salute her in solidarity.   President Snow views the hospital by remote camera and orders it bombed.   As a devastating scene unfolds, Katniss, via the same camera, delivers a warning to Snow, while the citizens from every district cheer.  The rebel army, watching, shouts the military “Hoo Rah!”  
Thankfully, we’re relieved from the claustrophobic underground and bleak war zones by a quiet, bucolic scene above ground with Katniss and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), near a river.  Later, there’s another by a lake.  It’s quiet.  One can hear a Mockingjay singing.  Katniss creates a ballad which becomes the rebel propaganda song.  Peeta, on TV, now gaunt, sickly, and shaky-voiced, implores Katniss to stop the war.  Gale confronts him, on video (like Skype), describes to Peeta in an impassioned delivery what the Capital did to his district, to his family.  “Stay with Gale,“ director Plutarch tells the cameraman.

 One way to cripple your enemy is to destroy its power grid, which invites retaliation big time.  The citizens of Panem are warned.   Bombs penetrate down, close to their living quarters, which freaks out the usually controlled Plutarch.  Later, we are shown an aerial shot of the damage.  Among the rubble, Katniss discovers symbolic messages from Peeta that she reads as Snow’s intention to kill him.    Wheelchair-bound tech wiz Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) had hacked into the capital’s computers to find him.  Peeta had been brainwashed- as was done to Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate- to kill Katniss.   A crazed Katniss hustles through the labyrinth of underground passageways looking for Peeta.   Part One of Mockingjay ends when Katniss finds him- the once sweet, gentle guy is in a locked ward, gaunt and disheveled. Through a sound-proof window she watches her soul mate thrash violently against restraints, soundlessly screaming.
As Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly wrote: “Director Francis Lawrence and his writers deserve some credit for daring to sneak any political cheekiness into a movie this corporate,” yet  went on to say that their hands are tied too tightly.    We must wait a year to see the if indeed the revolution is televised in The Hunger Games, Mockingjay,  Part Two.

*Michael Shreiber, editor, Socialist Action News

An edited version of this review can be read at www,socialistaction.org 

Saturday, November 22, 2014

CITIZEN FOUR, a documentary film by Laura Poitras



It is chilling to know for a fact that since 9/11/2001, the U.S’s National Security Agency, NSA, has been and is tracking phone calls from ATT and Verizon, also bank activity, internet searches, and all social media sites used by every person in America.  It also tracks our credit card purchases- on the internet or from brick and mortar stores.  The information was revealed by Edward Snowden to filmmaker, documentarian Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald at a clandestine meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room over a period of eight days in May 2013.  How Greenwald was going to write it up is a huge part of Laura Poitras’s important, shocking, documentary film, “Citizen Four.” 
 
Edward Snowden (left) and Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong
Snowden was a contract employee for the consulting firm Booze Allen Hamilton in their Hawaii offices.  They lent his services to the NSA as a systems administrator/consultant.  Snowden is a young, slim, dark haired, 29 year-old, who had at first seen the importance of looking for data disclosing terrorist plots from militant groups like al Queda.  Instead, while advising superiors at the NSA on methods of developing security systems against hackers, he discovered files on  its domestic spying activities against US citizens.

Subsequently, Snowden downloaded into his computer (he had the highest security clearance because of his expertise and had unlimited access) many thousands of implicating files. Then, knowing of Poitras’s revelatory, documentary films, specifically one about the whistleblower, William Binney, he began emailing her using the code name Citizen Four, hinting at what he had in his possession.  Snowden also came to know Poitras from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald’s article about her mentioning to him that she was a “government target.”  Snowden had previously tried to interest Greenwald but Greenwald never followed through as he felt Snowden’s method of encrypting email too annoying.  He changed his mind when Snowden connected with Poitras. 

Writer Barton Gellman, then a journalist at the Washington Post, became involved in May 2013, when the Post declined to “guarantee publication within 72 hours of all the Power Point slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data mining program (which searched Google, Yahoo, etc.) and would eventually lead to a code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.  In the film he tells Poitras, he knew the wiretapping was wrong, unconstitutional- an infringement on the privacy of anyone living in the US.  He wanted it to be known, publicly, but how would be tricky.  He has said that he abides by the US Constitution’s 4th and 5th Amendments.  “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

Poitras’s film opens with a black screen with Snowden’s keystrokes appearing as though he’s typing his queries to her in real time.  Her answers appear below his messages in the same way.  After confirming his identity, and involving investigative journalist, Glen Greenwald of UK’s The Guardian.  The three agree to meet at a secure location in a Hong Kong hotel, in May 2103.  The film was shot almost entirely in Snowden’s small, no-frills room where everything is white: the bedding, walls, carpets, and window covering.  So it was a color shock when Snowden covered his head and laptop with a red cowl (he works propped up on his bed) so the camera couldn’t capture his keystrokes.  Scenes of the Hong Kong skyline and other outdoor sites give the audience a break from the room’s claustrophobic atmosphere.  At one point, the fire alarm goes off.  Paranoid, the three suspect that they’re being monitored.  The alarm sounds off-and-on three or four times.  They conclude that it’s a test and call the front desk and it is confirmed.  Only then did they relax. 
Snowden explains and demonstrate on his laptop how he accessed the information.  Much of which was conveyed using tech-talk.  To one unfamiliar with the jargon, it is extremely difficult to follow let alone understand.  At one point, Snowden insists that Poitras’s film not be about him, but what his files reveal about the NSA secret international and domestic spying activities in cahoots with the UK.  For example his files reveal that the NSA has been spying on Germany’s Angela Merkel since 2002.
   
Poitras includes in her film footage of the courtroom scene in the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco when ATT was sued for spying on its customers phone calls (discovered by an ATT employee.)  The people won the suit.  She also includes footage of former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where he denies that NSA collects data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.  When pressed, Clapper added: “Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”  Poitras shows a clip of Wikileaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange trying and failing to get asylum for Snowden in various countries after threats surfaced from the U.S government to Snowden’s life and liberty should he return voluntarily.  However the U.S. revoked his passport.
Edward Snowden ended up in Moscow after spending close to three months in limbo in the Moscow airport, first granted a one-year stay which was then renewed for three.  There, in January 2014, during an interview he was asked why he decided to blow the whistle, he replied: “Sort of the breaking point was seeing Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress . . . that really meant for me there was no going back.”
By his own words, backed up by extensive research, Snowden has not released his appropriated files by transfer of USB flash drives to any foreign governments.  He wanted only that the public be made aware of the matter through the media, reportage, and publication of the files.  As one critic noted, if Snowden is as willing to accept the consequences of his actions, i.e. jail time, why is he hiding out in Moscow?  When you have members of the US Congress labeling him a traitor and Senator Diane Feinstein all but calling for his head, does he or anyone believe he will get a fair trial?  And notable government figures as disparate as Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, plus the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Guardian, wonder why is NSA not on trial for illegal wiretapping which Snowden has proven in spades?  
When the film ended, we in the audience erupted with applause.  Someone shouted, “We are all on the list.” Another said, “Okay, so now what do we do?”   As the credits rolled and the lights came up, a voice was heard to say, “Revolution!”  If we weren’t on the list before, we certainly are now.

Note:  This review has been published in the November 2014 editions of Socialist Action News:  Go to www.socialistaction.org to check out other articles and editorial content.

Monday, August 25, 2014

LUCY- Not Only in the Sky, but Everywhere

Morgan Freeman and Scarlett Johansson in "LUCY"


"Lucy"directed by Luc Besson, starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman.

A MINI REVIEW

I'll come right out and say it.  I thought this film was stupid- but fun, in a way. Still, beneath the talents of the director and stars.

Trampy Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) in a denim jacket and miniskirt, becomes an unwilling drug mule carrying an illegal drug that looked to me to be a bag of blue crystal meth straight out of Breaking Bad's Walter White's lab.  The drug is sewn into her abdomen by compromised surgeons beholden to an Asian drug lord, and into other unwitting, duped, drugged foreigners.  A side effect of the drug is that it increases your brain capacity to 100%.  Seems the eminent neuro-biologist, Professor Norman (Morgan Freeman) is researching drugs that could do just that!  When her “package” starts leaking, and her brain starts revving up, the new Lucy is transformed into a sophisticated, worldly woman, wearing a skinny black dress and a better hairdo.  Lucy’s newly acquired brain-power allows her to wield heavy weapons and AK 47s  which she employs to blow away an army of well-dressed, identical-looking Asian mobsters involved in the drug deal while enjoying some heavy trippin'.  (Some special effects looked like 1970s light-shows, or scenes from Terrence Malick's  "Tree of Life.") In Professor Norman’s lab, she then mysteriously evolves into a gooey, crawling black kudzu that invades and appears to destroy all the computers, the furniture, the walls- everything but humans and her little black chair; she ends up a thumb-drive.  Yeah.  But Lucy, as thumb-drive now in the professors capable hands, contains all the information needed to increase the brain capacity of all human beings.  Yikes!