The Laura Poitras documentary film about Edward Snowden is having a staggered release. The list of dates when it will be released can be seen here. It is having its US premiere in four US cities today but not in Cleveland where I will have to wait until November 7th.
Via Andrea James I learned that they have issued a new trailer for this film that many of us have seen more than once, to commemorate the re-release of the film in the UK. I hope they show it in a wide-screen theater locally since I would definitely go and see it again for the fourth (?) time.
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I am insatiably curious about what goes on behind the scenes in the production of films, TV, and radio shows. The mechanics of how these things are put together fascinate me because unlike the products of largely solo creative processes like a book or painting or sculpture, these involve a lot of people.
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I saw this yesterday and it was excellent. The filmmakers wisely decided to make the entire film cover the two year period 1996-1997 which saw Gary Webb break the series of stories titled Dark Alliance for the San Jose Mercury News that exposed the shady links between the US-backed Contras in Nicaragua, the CIA, and the drug dealers who were ravaging the black communities in the inner cities of the US by flooding them with crack cocaine. (See my earlier posts on this story and film here and here.)
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The actor who plays journalist Gary Webb appeared on The Daily Show to talk about his film Kill the Messenger which deals with his expose of how the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras it supported were involved in the spread of the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities. (I wrote about it here.)
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Award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras has just released her new film Citizenfour about Edward Snowden. (The title of the film is taken from one of the aliases he used in his initial communications with her.) Spencer Ackerman provides a review of the film while George Packer provides a lengthy profile of the notoriously publicity-shy Poitras and also discusses the film which he saw in Berlin before its release.
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When a mainstream media organization describes someone as their ‘national security reporter’, I immediately pigeonhole them as basically public relations flacks for the agencies they cover because often their main method of ‘news gathering’ is to cultivate sources at high levels within the agencies who will feed them self-serving leaks that these reporters then pass on to us. There are some good reporters on this beat, one being Jane Meyer for the New Yorker magazine and James Bamford who writes for a number of publications, but they tend to be the exception.
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This brilliant but strange and fascinating film by director Lindsay Anderson stars Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren and a raft of first-rate British character actors. It is a biting satire on the ruthlessness of the capitalist system in which McDowell plays a naïf who thinks that he can become rich by doing the will of wealthy people and thinks that they will show their gratitude by taking care of him and rewarding him, and ends up in one mess after another. It is an illusion shared by many today. I liked one gag where the graffiti on a wall has the message “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals”.
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I recently wrote about the controversy over the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Those who have seen the film may recall a funny but puzzling episode near the very end, involving a uniformed ‘suicide squad’ of soldiers who appear at the scene of Brian’s crucifixion.
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Anyone who has seen a James Bond film will likely remember the iconic opening sequence in which Bond, viewed through a gun barrel, strides from right to left of the screen and halfway through whips out his gun and shoots in the direction of the viewer, accompanied all the while by the familiar theme music with its memorable guitar riff.
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