Showing posts with label Film Reviews and Features. Show all posts

Facing up to what we did in interrogations

By George F. Will, Friday, January 11, 8:33 PM

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

— Col. Nathan Jessep to Lt. Daniel Kaffee
“A Few Good Men” (1992)

“You,” said Jack Nicholson’s Jessep to Tom Cruise’s Kaffee, “have the luxury of not knowing what I know.” Viewers of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” will, according to some informed persons, lose the luxury of not knowing about hard but morally defensible things done on their behalf. Other informed persons, however, say that viewers will be misled because the movie intimates (actually it is ambiguous about this) a crucial role of “enhanced interrogation” in extracting information useful to tracking Osama bin Laden.

In “A Few Good Men,” Col. Jessep insists that a harsh — and proscribed — training method (”Code Red”) saves lives: “You [expletive] people . . .you have no idea how to defend a nation.” “Zero Dark Thirty” explores the boundaries of the permissible when defending not a nation but this nation. Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, “When you lie to me I hurt you,” and proceed to do so.

The movie, which is primarily about CIA operatives, probably will make at least a cameo appearance in the confirmation hearings for Barack Obama’s nominee as the next CIA director, John Brennan. His 25 years with the CIA included the years when “enhanced interrogation” was used to squeeze crucial information from suspected terrorists.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the intelligence committee, and two colleagues have denounced the movie as “grossly inaccurate and misleading” for its “suggestion” that torture produced information that led to locating bin Laden. But former CIA director Michael Hayden, while saying “there is no way to confirm” that information obtained by “enhanced interrogation” was the “decisive” intelligence in locating bin Laden, insists that such information “helped” lead to bin Laden.

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey goes further: Khalid Sheik Mohammed “broke like a dam” under harsh techniques, including waterboarding, and his “torrent of information” included “the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden,” perhaps the one central to the movie’s narrative.
In 2007, Hayden ended the use of half the “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including waterboarding, because U.S. law, our understanding of the threat and our sources of information had changed. He also says, however, that such interrogations produced half our knowledge of al-Qaeda’s structure and activities.

“In the end, everybody breaks, bro — it’s biology,” says the CIA man in the movie, tactically but inaccurately, to the detainee undergoing “enhanced interrogation.” This too familiar term has lost its capacity for making us uneasy. America’s Vietnam failure was foretold when U.S. officials began calling air attacks on North Vietnam “protective reaction strikes,” a semantic obfuscation that revealed moral queasiness. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, who warned about governments resorting to “long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” can decide whether or which “enhanced interrogation” measures depicted — slaps, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding — constitute, in plain English, torture. And they can ponder whether any or all of them would be wrong even if effective.
Mukasey says the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” is “so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.” Such “harsh techniques” were, he says, used against fewer than one-third of the fewer than 100 “hard-core prisoners” in CIA custody.

The government properly cooperated with the making of this movie because the public needs realism about the world we live in. “We live,” says Col. Jessep, “in a world that has walls. . . . You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.” Regarding terrorism, the problem is that we live in a world without walls, without ramparts that can be manned for the purpose of repelling an invasion by a massed enemy.
When the CIA woman who drives the pursuit of bin Laden is about to enter, for the first time, the room where “enhanced interrogation” is administered, the CIA man who administers it tells her, “There’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor.” She, however, knows, and viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” will understand, it is best to look facts, including choices, in the face.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive.

A CIA veteran on what ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ gets wrong about the bin Laden manhunt

By Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
January 3, 2012

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a 31-year veteran of the CIA. He is the author of “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” written with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, who also contributed to this essay.

It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than 2¹ / ₂hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
When I was head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession.
I must say, I agree with both the film critics who love “Zero Dark Thirty” as entertainment and the administration officials and prominent senatorswho hate the movie for the message it sends — although my reasons are entirely opposite theirs.
Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight.
First, my reasons for repulsion. “Zero Dark Thirty,” which will open for Washington audiences Friday, inaccurately links torture with intelligence success and mischaracterizes how America’s enemies have been treated in the fight against terrorism. Many others object to the film, however, because they think that the depiction of torture by the CIA is accurate but that the movie is wrong to imply that our interrogation techniques worked.
They are wrong on both counts. I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked — but that it was not torture.
One of the advantages of inhabiting the world of Hollywood is that you can have things both ways. In the publicity campaign for the movie, the director and the screenwriter have stressed that “Zero Dark Thirty” was carefully researched and is fact-based. When discussing the so-called torture scenes, director Kathryn Bigelow has said: “I wish it was not part of our history, but it was.” Yet when pressed about inaccuracies, screenwriter Mark Boal has been quick to remind everyone: “This is not a documentary.”
What I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge is that the interrogation scenes torture the truth. Despite popular fiction — and the fiction that often masquerades as unbiased reporting — the enhanced interrogation program was carefully monitored and conducted. It bore little resemblance to what is shown on the screen.
The film shows CIA officers brutalizing detainees — beating them mercilessly, suspending them from the ceiling with chains, leading them around in dog collars and, on the spur of the moment, throwing them on the floor, grabbing a large bucket and administering a vicious ad hoc waterboarding. The movie implies that such treatment went on for years.
The truth is that no one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007. Most detainees received no enhanced interrogation techniques, and the relative few who did faced harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention. To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington. No one was hung from ceilings. The filmmakers stole the dog-collar scenes from the abuses committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. No such thing was ever done at CIA “black sites.”
The CIA did waterboard three of the worst terrorists on the planet — Abu Zubaida, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — in an effort to get them to cooperate. Instead of a large bucket, small plastic water bottles were used on the three men, who were on medical gurneys. The procedure was totally unlike the one seen in the movie but was consistent with the same tactic used, without physical or psychological damage, on tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel as part of their training.
Most Americans probably think waterboarding was stopped by President Obama once he took office in 2009. Few know that the technique was last used in 2003, when Obama was still an unknown state senator in Illinois.
Inspired perhaps more by past movies than first-hand accounts, “Zero Dark Thirty” shows detainees being asked a question, tortured a little, asked another question and then tortured some more. That did not happen. Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive — with Washington’s approval — some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.
Some of those objecting to the movie are doing so not because of how the interrogations are depicted, but because of what the movie implies came out of them. The film suggests that waterboarding directly contributed to obtaining vital information about bin Laden’s courier — a break that eventually led to the al-Qaeda leader. Opponents of the CIA are quick to insist that waterboarding played no role in tracking him down. Both the movie and those critics are wrong.
The first substantive information about the courier came in 2004 from a detainee who received some enhanced interrogation techniques but was not waterboarded. Although we had heard the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, until that time we were unaware of the central role he played in bin Laden’s communications. Subsequently, as we always did, we checked out this information with other detainees. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who had been waterboarded, was by then cooperating with us to some extent. He denied any knowledge of the courier, but so adamantly that we knew we were on to something. We then intercepted secret messages that Mohammed was sending to other detainees, ordering them to say nothing about al-Kuwaiti.
After obtaining this essential lead on the courier, years of meticulous intelligence work followed. Having the black sites and compliant terrorists allowed us to repeatedly go back to the detainees to check leads, ask follow-up questions and clarify information. Without that capacity, we would have been lost.
“Zero Dark Thirty” has some minor flaws that will be laughable to CIA veterans. For example, early in the film, the agency’s chief of station in Islamabad walks around with a CIA lapel pin — not the best of tradecraft. Agency officers talk openly in hotels and restaurants about ongoing operations, and a junior officer threatens to have her boss hauled in front of a congressional oversight committee. (Now that would be torture.)
But Bigelow and Boal get a lot of things right, too. They portray the hunt for bin Laden as a 10-year marathon, rather than a sprint ordered by a new president. The film gives a glimpse of the extraordinary cooperation between the CIA and the U.S. military, a relationship that has only deepened in the years since Sept. 11, 2001.
And, if you pay close attention, “Zero Dark Thirty” also concedes that it was a matrix of intelligence capabilities — including interrogation, other human intelligence, expert analysis, signals intelligence and imagery analysis — that came together to lead the SEALs to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. I say “if you pay close attention” because the intelligence tradecraft is overwhelmed by the intense and misleading interrogation scenes at the start of the movie.
I had to smile at one scene in which a White House official demands more information from the CIA, only to be asked how the agency is supposed to obtain it when the detention and interrogation program has been taken away. The screenwriter seemed to catch the nuance that the administration has made the CIA’s job much harder.
No doubt, the filmmakers had a very difficult task. They had to boil down a decade of grueling work into a few hours — and make it entertaining. It is impossible for even the most skilled filmmakers to fully capture the context of the times. During the first few years after Sept. 11, the CIA was under enormous pressure, fearing an imminent and deadlier reprise of the attacks. There were credible reports of al-Qaeda seeking fissile nuclear material. Those who say we should have taken a more cautious and deliberate approach to finding out what men like Mohammed knew never stood in our shoes.
It is hard to accurately tell a story that spans more than a decade and involves a real-world cast of thousands. So Bigelow and Boal develop their narrative through the eyes of a small number of characters, such as a CIA officer they call Maya. I do not want to diminish the contributions of any individual. Indeed, I have often said that a handful of officers, mainly women, in the Counterterrorism Center deserve a disproportionately large share of the credit for the relentless focus that eventually brought bin Laden to his well-deserved demise. But, while there are real-world equivalents of Maya and her colleagues in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the successes and the failures in this mission were the work of many, not a few.
The film includes another female character, unnamed in the movie but clearly based on CIA officer Jennifer Matthews, who tragically was killed in the 2009 suicide bombing at an agency base in Khost, Afghanistan. Perhaps to build up the Maya character, the filmmakers wrongly portray this other woman as overly ambitious and less than serious. The real person was an exceptionally talented officer who was responsible for some enormous intelligence successes, including playing a prominent role in the capture of al-Qaeda logistics expert Abu Zubaida in 2002. Her true story and memory deserve much better.
According to recent news reports, the Senate Intelligence Committee is investigating whether the CIA inappropriately cooperated with the filmmakers. I saw nothing in “Zero Dark Thirty” that I believed to be classified — unless one considers secret the notion that enhanced interrogation techniques played a role in getting bin Laden. The Senate committee seems to want to punish the agency for telling that truth.
Inevitably, films like this come to be seen by the public as a sort of proxy for reality. Even those who should know better get caught up in false arguments, debating, for example, “Can torture (as shown in the film) be justified?” rather than “Are harsh but legal measures (as not shown in the film) sometimes necessary?”
Despite its flaws, inaccuracies and shortcuts, I do believe this film is well worth seeing. Like the real hunt for bin Laden, it goes on way too long, but there is value in the end. Theatergoers should understand, however, that “Zero Dark Thirty” is more than a movie and less than the literal truth. This is especially apparent in the final scene, with Maya in tears, drained, not sure where to go or what to do next.
Her real-world counterparts have no doubt: The battle against al-Qaeda is far from over.

New ‘Man of Steel’ trailer explores Superman’s childhood and features first looks at Zod, Jor-El and Lois Lane

By Bryan Enk
Yahoo! Movies
Movie Talk
December 11, 2012

Michael Shannon as Zod and Amy Adams as Lois Lane (Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures)This week just got a lot more super as Warner Bros. has unveiled the first full-length trailer for what might now be the most anticipated film of next summer, "Man of Steel."

The trailer continues and expands on the contemplative, mysterious tone of this past summer's teaser trailer, with director Zack Snyder channeling Terrence Malick (who ever would've thought?) in telling the story of an alien stranded on our planet, one struggling with a mighty identity crisis as he comes to terms with his extraordinary abilities -- "super powers" with which he can choose to do either good or evil. Watch the trailer below:

Indeed, it looks like a good portion of "Man of Steel" is going to focus on, well, the man as much as it does the superhero, spending a good amount of screen time on Clark Kent's childhood as he first discovers his gifts (or his curse), with a melancholy Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) concerned that his foster son's acts of super-heroism could make him an outcast -- or worse.

Years later, we see a bearded Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) traveling to the Fortress of Solitude, searching for answers about who he is and where he comes from. He emerges from the structure wearing a certain costume, his back to the camera -- it's a shot that will give you chills, and not just because it takes place in the Arctic (or whatever snowbound location the filmmakers have decided to place Superman's crash pad).

Superman in the Arctic (Photo: Warner Bros)

From there, the Last Son of Krypton takes to the skies, and the trailer's pacing follows suit with a rapid-fire series of images, promising us that "Man of Steel" will have plenty of action sequences to go along with all the existential crises. A lot of things blow up in this movie, and a lot of buildings crumble -- it looks like there are most definitely plenty of jobs for Superman.

Russell Crowe as Jor-El (Photo: Warner Bros)

We also -- finally -- get a look at some of the major players of the supporting cast. There's Russell Crowe as a bearded Jor-El, embracing Lara Lor-Van (Ayelet Zurer) as Krypton crumbles around them. There's Amy Adams, as Lois Lane, with her baby blues filled with awe and wonder as the greatest scoop of her career takes her hand. And there's a glimpse of General Zod (Michael Shannon), sporting villainous chin fuzz and a military haircut, no doubt in the midst of some dastardly deed.

Michael Shannon as General Zod (Photo: Warner Bros)

The trailer closes on something of a cliffhanger, as the Man of Steel is taken prisoner by the military (a harrowing image recently released as a new poster for the film) and left wondering whether his foster father was right about the world not being ready for the likes of him. Oh, we most certainly are, Superman.

Amy Adams as Lois Lane (Photo: Warner Bros)

It's a terrific trailer. Yes, you could say Snyder's "Watchmen" also had a terrific trailer but the film itself came up short. But Snyder truly seems to be trying something new with this film, abandoning the hyperstylized action and artificial-looking production design of a lot of his previous efforts in favor of what original "Superman" director Richard Donner once referred to as "verisimilitude." It looks like, for the first time in a very long time, we'll once again believe a man can fly.

"Man of Steel" opens June 14, 2013.

See the teaser trailer to 'Man of Steel':

'Zero Dark Thirty': One of the Best Films of the Year

By John Boot
PJ Media
December 20, 2012

Zero Dark Thirty marks a cinematic breakthrough into the realm of journalism. Just a year and a half after the Navy SEAL assault that brought Osama bin Laden’s life to a bloody conclusion, The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow has brought the story to the screen, using extensive research and aid from the White House. President Obama evidently thought this film, which has a gripping documentary feel, would be released before the election and make him look good, but it turns out he was wrong on both counts. Zero Dark Thirty (military slang for the wee hours of the morning when the attack took place) makes Obama appear somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive in the intelligence mission that led to Bin Laden’s demise.

Young star Jessica Chastain, who last year got an Oscar nomination for The Help, gives another awards-caliber performance as a 30-year-old CIA agent named Maya who has spent 12 years tracking Bin Laden, ever since she was recruited out of high school. At CIA black sites in Pakistan and Afghanistan, she actively participates in brutal interrogation techniques including forced sleep deprivation, beatings and waterboarding. These procedures are shown as essential to learning of the existence of a courier, Abu Ahmed, whose trail would eventually lead to Bin Laden’s fortress-like lair in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

President Obama is referred to obliquely as someone who demands factual certainty (without which, it is implied, he won’t give the go-ahead for the assault, which is worrisome enough) but doesn’t appear in the film except in a clip from a real-life news program. In the clip, Obama is shown disavowing torture, which would seem to pose a major obstacle to the CIA agents watching him on television. They know too well that meddling from politicians who have no idea how difficult it is to obtain intelligence from career terrorists could easily nullify their efforts. Obama comes off looking like a weak, oblivious fool who places his own preening above the national interest. Like I said: This movie is practically a documentary.

Bigelow’s film does have a few problematic aspects. Every so often the script (by Mark Boal) gives Maya some Rambo-like lines that ring false. At a high-level meeting with a senior-level intelligence executive played by James Gandolfini, she introduces herself to the suits by shouting, “I’m the motherf—er who found that,” meaning Bin Laden’s hideaway. At another point, she tells Navy SEAL Team Six that she has found Bin Laden and “You’re going to kill him for me.” If Maya, or a Maya-like figure, told the SEALS that in reality, I have a feeling they laughed in her face and said something like, “Thanks little lady, but we’re going to kill him for God and country, and for us, not for you.”

Another failing of the movie is that the SEALS don’t enter into it until the last 45 minutes. The raid is depicted viscerally, using the look of night-vision goggles that practically put us into the helmets of the assault squad, but the SEALS don’t receive their proper due. They come across as highly trained professionals, about whom we know next to nothing as individuals. Nor does Bigelow show the intensive training and preparation work that must have gone into the raid; she is far more interested in the Maya character than in the courageous men who actually took down Bin Laden. We’ll have to wait for another movie to give SEAL Team Six the starring role it deserves.

Still, the overall impact of Zero Dark Thirty renders its weaker points forgivable. Bigelow, who was an action-movie director before she ventured into Oscar bait movies, keeps the pace thrumming so that the two-and-a-half-hour running time doesn’t seem like a long sit. And she made a fairly courageous choice not to appease Hollywood’s left-wing Oscar voters by including any pious speeches about the morality behind the CIA’s rough interrogation procedures. What she shows is for the most part a totally believable recreation of how the CIA found out about the courier, how they tracked him down (using such clever schemes as obtaining his mother’s phone number in Kuwait from a degenerate Arab party boy who traded the number for a yellow Lamborghini) and how they found him (by tracing his cell phone in Pakistan). Each step of this procedural thriller is shown with the kind of you-are-there intensity that makes Zero Dark Thirty one of the best pictures of the year. That the story is true makes the movie even more essential.

How Ben Affleck's 'Argo' screws history

By Andrew Klavan
PJ Media
December 10, 2012

The Mission Was Real. The History was Malarkey.

One of the better movies I’ve seen this season is Argo, directed by and starring the talented and appealing Ben Affleck. The movie tells a fictionalized version of the true story of how a CIA operative helped six Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis of the Carter administration.

I, of course, had no problem with the filmmakers adding fictional dollops of drama, danger and adventure to the story. But I did object very strongly to the rewriting of history purely for purposes of pro-Democrat propaganda. The running gag in the movie concerns a make-believe sci-fi film called Argo that the CIA uses as a cover story. The battle cry of the good guys is, “Ar, go, f*** yourself.” But, as so often in Hollywood, it’s the political truth that gets f***ed.

Bad enough that the entire hostage crisis was subtly and not-so-subtly blamed on America in the movie. Even worse is the fact that the Democrat president’s idealistic incompetence in withdrawing American support for the Shah is completely passed over. It was this bone-headed Carter play that opened the floodgates of Islamo-fascism, allowing Ayatollah Khomeini to come to power — a bone-head move that Obama stupidly repeated when he withdrew support from Mubarak in Egypt and essentially handed the place over to the Muslim Brotherhood. As the Wall Street Journal’sBret Stephens recently said, “In the middle east there are two kinds of regimes — those that could be worse, and those that couldn’t be worse.” Carter and Obama both opted to abandon the former and allow the latter.

Also smoothed over in the movie is the president’s fatal incompetence in allowing a poorly planned rescue operation. At one point in the film, Affleck’s CIA agent is told to ditch his mission because the White House is mounting a rescue of its own. This is a suspenseful moment because we know Carter’s Eagle Claw plan will be a fatal failure, leaving eight U.S. servicemen dead in the desert. But the disaster is never mentioned in the film. Why not? Guess.

Finally, and most dishonestly, the picture ends with Carter’s voice telling us how all the hostages were eventually released and America came out of the incident with its values intact. Well, crap. The hostages were eventually released on the day Ronald Reagan took office, because the Iranians knew they could no longer depend on the puling, indecisive weakness of Carter, who let the humiliating hostage incident drag on for 444 days.

This sort of Democrats-do-no-wrong and Republicans-do-no-right propaganda is subtle but pervasive in Hollywood historical movies. Consider Charlie Wilson’s War, a strong Tom Hanks film that celebrated a Democrat’s role in the Cold War. In both the film and the book, the right wingers who made Wilson’s efforts possible are denigrated. And just the fact that Hollywood found practically the only 80′s Democrat who did anything to help Reagan defeat the Soviets — whereas they’ve never made a tribute to Reagan himself — is telling.

This is precisely what Conservatives have to learn to counter. The newspapers and history books may get it right — may — but it’s the movies people will remember. I’ve quoted him before, but I’ll do it again. When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had his questionable actions rewritten as heroism in the dishonest film Fair Game, he said, “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”

The imagination is the only nation where Democrats get it right. We need to conquer that country.

*****

A Big Name Fills Some Big Shoes

By Charles McGrath
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
December 9, 2012

JACK REACHER, the itinerant head-butting hero of Lee Child’s best-selling series of crime thrillers, has finally made it to the big screen. An adaptation of Mr. Child’s 2005 novel “One Shot,” retitled “Jack Reacher,” written and directed by Christopher McQuarrieand starring Tom Cruise, opens on Dec. 21.

What took them so long? The Reacher books have been appearing yearly since 1997, and if ever a literary property seemed a no-brainer for the movies, it’s this one. The books have a strong, original central character and taut, linear narratives, full of action and incident; they often feature strong female characters and are surprisingly popular among women; and there are lots of them — 17 titles so far, outnumbering even the original James Bond novels.

They are a franchise built around a former military policeman roaming the United States utterly without baggage, personal or otherwise, righting wrongs according to his own no-nonsense code of justice. Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called Reacher “one of the most enduring action heroes on the American landscape.”

Mr. McQuarrie, who has worked on several Cruise-related projects (including “Valkyrie,” which he wrote with Nathan Alexander and produced, and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” for which he did some revisions), knows his way around Hollywood and has a very simple explanation for why it took so long to get a Reacher film made. “There are no transforming robots,” he said in a telephone interview. “There is no paranormal activity.”

He added: “The problem is that Jack Reacher is not 22, and he doesn’t have superpowers. He appears in novels that are detective thrillers, and that’s a sort of movie they don’t make anymore. How do you market it?”

Mr. Child, who worked as a television director and producer in England before becoming a novelist, also knows his way around show business. Not long ago, stretching out his longs legs on a coffee table in the East Side apartment he uses as a writing studio, he leaned back in a chair, and, as if giving a PowerPoint presentation, suggested three reasons the Reacher books might be an awkward fit for the movies.

The first reason is — never mind, we’ll come back to the first reason. The second reason is that the books are less eventful — or less cinematically eventful — than they seem, because a lot of the action takes place inside Reacher’s head. “His thought processes, his quirks, his intuitions are what make him interesting,” Mr. Child said. “How do you get that out of his head and onto the screen?”

The third reason has to do with the stubborn nature of the character. “In Hollywood they have these unshakable conclusions,” he said. “And one of them is that a character must have an arc, must go for a journey and learn something, must be different at the end. But Reacher does none of that. He never changes. He doesn’t learn anything, because he knows it all from the beginning.”

Even so, there was no lack of Hollywood interest. The books have been under option to one studio or another since the first one was published 15 years ago. But nothing happened until Mr. Cruise and Paramount came along in 2005, after “One Shot” came out. Mr. Child said he was impressed by everyone involved, especially Mr. McQuarrie, whose screenplay he called “outstanding.” “I bet it’s the least altered first draft ever,” he said. “This is not starry eyes. I made my living amongst these wolves for years, and I can tell the good from the bad.”

Mr. McQuarrie pointed out that while he has had some success as a screenwriter (his script for “The Usual Suspects” won an Oscar in 1996), he was far from a sure bet as a director, and his budget was far from large. Until now he had made only one other film, “The Way of the Gun,” which came out in 2000 and, despite some good reviews, fizzled at the box office.

He began working on “Jack Reacher” without a lot of confidence that the movie would ever be made. “I didn’t think they were thinking, ‘Yes!’ ” he said. “I think they were thinking, ‘Good luck with that one.’ ”

He didn’t necessarily write the script with Mr. Cruise in mind, he added, but once Mr. Cruise decided to play Reacher, the project suddenly became “something they didn’t have a reason to say no to.”

This brings us back to Mr. Child’s Reason No. 1, which is the problem of casting a Reacher movie. As fictional characters go, Reacher is a little underspecified, which makes readers feel so proprietary about him: in our own heads, we help create the character. But the one thing everyone knows about Reacher is that he is big — 6 foot 5 and 250 pounds or so — and not bad looking, exactly, but a little intimidating. One of his many female friends in the books describes him as a condom stuffed with walnuts. When word got out that Mr. Cruise, who is neither tall nor walnutlike, had agreed to star in the movie, many of Mr. Child’s fans became apoplectic. “I know Jack Reacher, and Tom Cruise is no Jack Reacher,” one of them commented online.

Mr. Child said he understood his readers’ concerns and was grateful they cared so much. “That’s the gold standard for a writer — to create a character that inspires such passion,” he said, but he pointed out that Reacher wasn’t just about size. “There’s also the menace, the intelligence, the silent, contemplative nature,” he said. Mr. Child, whose real name is Jim Grant and who is himself 6 foot 5, laughed and added: “Besides, no one in Hollywood is tall. In that whole ZIP code they’re all small people. Even people you think are big are not big.”

Mr. McQuarrie agreed. “When has there ever been a 6-5, blond-haired, blue-eyed American actor?” he said. “He’s never existed, ever. So you’re out of the gate accepting compromise. There’s a very exclusive club of people who could play Jack Reacher, and a lot of them are playing characters like Jack Reacher.”

The list gets smaller, he went on, when you factor in some of Reacher’s other qualities, like his mental lightness and acuity, and narrows still more when you need an actor with the clout to get the movie made for a certain budget. “At the end there’s only one guy,” he said. “Without Tom you wouldn’t have the movie, and you wouldn’t have the movie the way you have it. Tom fiercely defended what makes Reacher Reacher, the brutality, the complexity — the things that usually fall victim in the first round of studio development.”

Speaking from England, where he was filming “All You Need Is Kill,” Mr. Cruise laughed when asked about his lack of resemblance to Reacher. “I just didn’t worry about it,” he said. “I looked at the book and I thought, ‘This is a character.’ What I liked is that he’s a sort of analog character in a digital world.”

He added: “The height, the size — those are characteristics, not a character. I was more worried about things like the fight scenes: How do we get the right style? How do I play that character?”

In the movie Mr. Child appears in a cameo as a police desk sergeant returning to Reacher his sole possession, a toothbrush, and he said he saw that scene as a symbolic passing of the baton — author handing off to actor. “You can say, ‘Oh you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ ” he said. “But I’m not that guy. If I didn’t like it, I would say so, loud and clear. If they screwed up, I would burn their house down.”

No one associated with “Jack Reacher” wants to talk too much about a sequel, for fear of jinxing things, but if this movie works, there will almost certainly be others, and Mr. Cruise said he was eager to appear in them.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Mr. McQuarrie said. “If it works, then they have to make more. Then we are the transforming robots.”

'Steel' this movie

By Reed Tucker
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
November 25, 2012

Consider the utterly messed-up cinematic world we live in. Superhero movies have become so popular that someone is actually considering remaking “Condorman.” Meanwhile, nobody has yet figured out how to launch a viable franchise featuring the granddaddy of the entire spandex scene: Superman.

This could all change this summer when “Man of Steel” lands on screens and attempts to KO pretenders with a big Kryptonian right hook.

Little is known about the plot. It will mostly follow the familiar origin story: A baby travels to Earth from a distant planet, lands in Middle America and grows up to become a costumed hero who fights baddies — in this case, General Zod, played by Michael Shannon, a character that appeared in “Superman II.”

The one thing that can be gleaned from the single teaser trailer that’s been released is that this could be a darker, more humanistic take on the character than movies past.

“We tried to approach this as though there’s never been a Superman movie before, but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology,” director Zack Snyder tells The Post in an exclusive interview. “There are the pillars that you have to respect, and I’m not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.”

Christopher Nolan, the director of the recent Batman movies, was brought in by Warner Bros. as producer and godfather of the project.

“There’s a logic and concreteness that has to exist with Chris,” Snyder says. “You can’t just do stuff because it’s cool. He demands that there be story and character behind all of it, which I’m a big fan of.”

Henry Cavill, who becomes the first Brit to play the character, says he’s also a fan of the more down-to-earth approach.

“I liked the idea of the realism immediately,” Cavill tells The Post in an exclusive on-set interview. “Traditional Superman fans know what it’s all about, and they will hopefully love and associate with the character anyway. But the people who aren’t die-hard Superman fans still need to associate with the character, and that needs to have some realism in today’s world, certainly, in sense of a science as opposed to mythology attached to it as well.”

One of the obvious changes is with Superman’s costume. Gone is the flimsy spandex in favor of a slightly metallic, more armored look.

“The costume was a big deal for me, and we played around for a long time,” Snyder says. “I tried like crazy to keep the red briefs on him. Everyone else said, ‘You can’t have the briefs on him.’ I looked at probably 1,500 versions of the costumes with the briefs on.”

The final version is a brief-free, all-blue unitard with red boots and a red cape.

“If you look at the costume, it’s very modern, but the relationship to the original costume is strong,” Snyder says.

“You come onto a project like this, and you hear about modernization and you hear about bringing things forward to today, and all you can do is hope that it’s going to look cool and different from

anything you’ve seen before,”

Cavill says of the suit, which takes him 15 to 25 minutes to put on. “And I’m pretty sure it does.”

To fill out the costume, Cavill worked out intensely for two hours each morning, and consumed as many as 5,000 calories a day.

“I have been put through the ringer big time,” Cavill says. “An example of the workouts we’ve been doing, it was 100 front squats of body weight. There are kettle-bell workouts. It’s very hard work.”

If “Man of Steel” pays off, it will have been worth it. The film is already saddled with gigantic expectations.

“I heard one time that the Superman glyph is the second or third most recognizable symbol on Earth after the Christian cross,” Snyder says. “It’s this crazy responsibility.”

The film will also be expected to launch a new franchise, which 2006’s lukewarmly received “Superman Returns” failed to do. Cavill confirms he is signed up for three films. Snyder is mum about directing more.

“We approach the film as a single endeavor,” he says. “There are a lot of gears that have to turn in the world of commerce and the world of the mythology we create to facilitate more adventures for this character. We’ll see what happens.”

What’s perhaps most interesting about “Man of Steel” is that it might serve as the launching point for a DC Comics universe of films in the same way 2008’s “Iron Man” inaugurated Marvel’s interconnected movie world.

Warner Bros. is reportedly plowing ahead with “Justice League,” a superteam movie featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and others, rumored to hit in 2015. Nolan’s Batman trilogy has concluded and bomb “Green Lantern” is likely to be disregarded, making “Man of Steel” the first film set in this new universe.

“I don’t know how ‘Justice League’ is going to be handled. Honestly, I don’t,” Snyder says. “But ‘The Man of Steel’ exists, and Superman is in it. I don’t know how you’d move forward without acknowledging that.”

When asked whether he had conversations with the studio about integrating “Man of Steel” into a larger superhero universe, Snyder treads carefully.

“Um, how can I answer that?” he wonders. “I can’t really say anything to that, because that’s a big spoiler. I will say, yeah, they trust me to keep them on course.”

Wildly speculating, it sounds entirely possible that “Man of Steel” will mention another costumed crime-fighter — maybe in a post-credits sequence — that leads into another superhero film. Universe launched.

For now, Cavill is focused on this one movie and trying to handle the expectations.

“There have been a couple of times where people have been explaining all of these Superman cookies and ice creams . . . and there was a second where I went, ‘Wow, this is massive!’ ” Cavill says. “You’ve got to ignore that and not let it get it to you, otherwise you’ll be focusing so much on the pressure as opposed to dealing with the important thing of doing justice to the character.”

Justice will be served June 14.

reed.tucker@nypost.com

Film Review: 'Hitchock'

Id, Ego and I: Gervasi’s Hitchcock Opens a Rear Window Into the Madman Behind Psycho

Hopkins is well within his range as the terrifyingly brilliant and unabashedly selfish director

By Rex Reed 11/19 6:36pm

The New Yorker

The stars of Hitchcock.

There are many reasons why Alfred Hitchcock is the most famous and instantly recognizable film director of all time, and all of them are reliably, artistically realized in Hitchcock. With so much year-end junk polluting the market, it’s easy to see why this is one of the best movies of 2012. With rich performances, a riveting and articulate screenplay, meticulous direction and enough grounded emotional intensity to keep your pulse pounding, Hitchcock grabs you by the lapels like a suspense classic by Hitch himself—a knockout from start to finish.

This is turning into a Hitchcock year. In the recent, hugely disappointing HBO special The Girl,the Master of Thrills came off as a pompous, cruel, sex-obsessed and egomaniacal bully who inflicted physical and emotional pain on everyone around him during the filming of The Birds—especially his frosty blond star, Tippi Hedren. In the vastly superior and much more carefully researched Hitchcock, the action centers on the making of Psycho—his 47th feature andthe most controversial and successful film of his career—and the personal, professional and financial obstacles he faced to get it made at all. With blazing performances by Anthony Hopkins—who is no stranger to the dark side of human behavior—as the conflicted director, and the great Helen Mirren as his long-suffering, patient but quietly powerful wife Alma Reville, the creative faces of the complex man are neatly balanced with the driving forces of his private marriage and personal obsessions. The frustrations began as early as the 1959 Chicago premiere of North by Northwest, where one reporter stung him to the core asking “You’re the most famous director in the world, but you’re 60 years old—don’t you think you should quit while you’re ahead?” That was the flint that ignited the flame that led to Psycho.

Looking for something more shocking than anything he had ever attempted before, the Icon of Angst came across a novel by Robert Bloch called Psycho that was nasty, brutal, violent, fiendish and an assault on the senses—entirely original. Everyone objected, from agent Lew Wasserman and studio executive Barney Balaban, who opposed him every step of the way, to Alma herself. Paramount refused to finance it; the director used his own money, giving the studio only the distribution rights. He mortgaged his house. He bought up every copy of the book on the market so that nobody would know the ending. He hired an unproven scriptwriter named Joseph Stefano to pen the screenplay because he had problems with his own mother, like Norman Bates. He perversely chose lanky, all-American Tony Perkins (here in a sensitive, subtle performance by James D’Arcy) over hundreds of applicants with more of an edge to play Norman, the fictional mama’s-boy psycho, because of Perkins’ own real-life duplicity in hiding the fact that he was gay. It was Hitchcock’s biggest career gamble, and six decades later, the money is still rolling in. Psycho is the horror flick hundreds of others have imitated, none with anything close to the same terrifying flair.

The first half of the Hitchcock is concerned with the myriad details of how Hitch got this movie off the ground, and it overflows with the kind of gossip and information that give hardcore film buffs delirium tremens. Anthony Hopkins laces Hitch’s brittle sarcasm with droll asides destined to keep you entertained. The director, on first introductions: “You may call me Hitch—hold the cock!” Hitch on leading man John Gavin: “Good-looking chap—but plywood is more expressive.” To the Paramount production chief who warns the studio is not required to releasePsycho if it turns out to be embarrassing, Hitch bitingly retorts:“Unlike the last five Martin and Lewis films you’re so proud of?” He made the cast and crew swear not to divulge any of the film’s secrets. He kept scenes from the actors so they would react with horror, controlled the editing, the cutting of Bernard Herrmann’s music, and the personal lives of the participants behind the camera, and went so far as to write a manual addressed to theater managers and marketing directors that propelled the picture into a headline-making sensation. Based on an exhaustively researched book by Stephen Rebello, the movie never runs out of surprises. One is the way in which screenwriter John J. McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi introduce Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the twisted 1950s Wisconsin grave robber and serial killer who inspired the characters of both Norman Bates in Psycho and Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Then there’s the director’s relationships with his leading ladies. There was always a blonde around on every Hitchcock set to pick on. They were all victims, but they all came back for more (except Doris Day, who still considers The Man Who Knew Too Much one of the unhappiest experiences of her career). On Psycho, there were two. Hostility toward Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) began with her decision to drop out of Vertigo at the last minute to have a baby. Hitchcock was also enraged by her resistance to his sexual advances and his domineering, control-freak directing style. Meanwhile, Janet Leigh (wonderfully, amusingly played by Scarlett Johansson), happily married to Tony Curtis, was a total professional, and too adored by everyone on the set to antagonize. The shower scene brought more insight into Hitchcock’s demented visions.

Director Gervasi cleverly blends the shooting of a difficult film with insights into the director’s unconventional marriage and habits after hours: midnight raids on the fridge, ice cream binges, his jealousy of everyone Alma knew, and his dependence on her help, opinion and approval, even though he never applauds anyone but himself. Alma kept a low profile, riding him about his weight, even counting the calories in his cocktails, and from the iron fist Helen Mirren uses to play her, it’s clear who always got the last word. Alma was the wife-mother-scriptwriter-editor-companion he never made a move without for 54 years of marriage. She put up with his flirtations, betrayals and sarcasm, but she knew the definition of long-term commitment better than any wife in Hollywood. She was the wind beneath his wings, and Helen Mirren plays her with a centrifugal force that is hypnotic. She and Anthony Hopkins are perfect bookends. When his egomania explodes, she uses her own brand of spit and paste to put the ceramics back together again. Some critics have groused that Hitchcock lapses occasionally into sentimentality and melodrama, but I can find evidence of neither. As a rare peek through the keyhole at some of the screen’s most durable legends, it’s a high-water mark in the annals of wit, charm and entertainment value.

rreed@observer.com

HITCHCOCK

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by John J. McLaughlin
(screenplay) and Stephen Rebello (book)

Directed by Sacha Gervasi

Starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren
and Scarlett Johansson

Film Review: 'Skyfall'

Director Mendes Revives 007 withSkyfall, Stripping Excessive Novelties from Tired Franchise

Mr. Bond, we didn't recognize you with your clothes on

By Rex Reed 11/06 4:46pm

The New Yorker

Craig and Bardem in Skyfall.

The big question the pessimists are asking about Skyfall, the 23rd entry in the James Bond franchise: Does 007 still have a license to keep an audience alert? The answer: And how! Some of the exhilaration faded when Sean Connery lost his hair and took a powder, but 50 years after Ian Fleming’s super-cool agent from Her Majesty’s Secret Service was shot from a cannon into movie history, Bond is back, and so is high-octane entertainment.

Skyfall may not reach the sophisticated heights of Casino Royale, but it’s better than the lollygagging Quantum of Solace.With buff, camera-ready Daniel Craig lending fresh fisticuffs to the role, and acclaimed director Sam Mendes adding more realism and fewer jokes than in most Bond pictures, it’s a satisfying entertainment that delivers a kangaroo kick from start to finish. Despite the less showy Saul Bass-inspired titles and a stupid theme song behind the credits screeched by Adele (“We will stand tall and face it all/You may have my number but you’ll never have my heart”) that reminds us all how much we owe to Shirley Bassey, Skyfallsignifies a new 007 style. The series is beyond gimmickry now. You just look at the toys, try to follow the plot and count the bikinis. But the best thing about Skyfall is the way it maximizes the great Judi Dench as M. It’s her best outing in the series to date, and she chews it like taffy. With six you get eggroll, but with vibrant, chromatic cinematography by Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption), anda distinguished assembly of supersonic talents headed by Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Albert Finney—you get box office platinum.

The film opens with the obligatory chase—007 wrecking an entire bazaar in Istanbul, scaling rooftops on a motorcycle and destroying as many civilians, buildings and moving vehicles as possible, cars that never run out of gasoline, on roads that never end, posing no threat to maintenance. Bond is knocked off the top of a speeding train into roaring rapids and plunges over a waterfall. When the dust settles, a plot emerges; M loses her computer hard-drive, and on it, a file containing the name of every NATO agent in the world’s terrorist zones. Hackers then unleash cyber attacks on secret service headquarters in London. Bond is believed dead, M is threatened with dismissal and the series seems in danger of grinding to a halt. When Bond resurfaces, M snarls through clenched teeth, “You know the rules of the game. You’ve been playing it long enough.” Which means no loyalty, no apologies and anything goes. While he was enjoying some badly needed R and R and taking a shower with sexy Bérénice Marlohe, the bombed-out secret service relocated its headquarters to an underground bunker used by Churchill during the Blitz. Bond’s unlikely new quartermaster is a wimpy fop named Q (Ben Whishaw) who dispatches him to Shanghai to locate and liquidate the thief who is using M’s files to destroy the world. The mega-villain is an epicene bottle-blond fiend played with exotic pansexual delight by Javier Bardem. A renegade agent who used to work for M, he’s droll, cynical and seductive. In the film’s funniest scene, he straps Bond to a chair, runs his hands lasciviously across his crotch and hisses “There’s a first time for everything.” Good ol’ 007, unfazed, counters with “How do you know it’s the first time?”

The movie moves from a casino in Macao, approachable only by boat and surrounded by giant man-eating Komodo dragons, to an endangered London tube station at rush hour, to a hunting lodge in Scotland where M gets a chance to show off some of her own operative training. Mr. Bardem munches a lot of whatever scenery is still standing and Dame Judi employs her icy blue eyes and matching steel reserve with terrifying authority. Bond is floppier and less buttoned-down than usual; he’s given up smoking, and the psychology of his traumatic background is explored for the first time. Bond relies less on naked girls and state-of-the-art gadgets than before, but as played by Daniel Craig, he’s both a teddy bear and as rugged as ever. So much so, in fact, that when his trusty old Aston Martin makes an appearance at last, the audience bursts into applause. Like the pieces of an elaborate jigsaw, everything falls perfectly into place, and there is overwhelming evidence that James Bond will rise again. Is there life after Skyfall? Stay tuned.

rreed@observer.com

Skyfall

Running Time 143 minutes

Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan

Directed by Sam Mendes

Starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem and Naomie Harris

3/4

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topics: Daniel Craig, James Bond, Javier Bardem, Movie Review, Sam Mendes, movies

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