Citizenfour (***)

Decades from now, will Edward Snowden be widely viewed as a patriot who fought to protect the privacy of Americans from an increasingly intrusive government? Or as a traitor who, by copying government files and revealing the data-collection methods of the National Security Agency, betrayed his government and compromised the ability of the United States to catch potential terrorists? Or, I suspect, both? This documentary by Laura Poitras does not attempt to give a definitive answer to that question, but allows Snowden to explain his motivations and his course of action.

Not that Poitras is trying to be an objective filmmaker. She was in fact, Snowden’s initial conduit for releasing the NSA files. (Citizenfour was how he identified himself initially.) He had already contacted journalist Glenn Greenwald, whom he corrected assumed would be sympathetic to his views on privacy, but was unable to establish a secure communication method. So instead he turned to Poitras, who had already poked at US “war on terror” policies in her documentaries My Country, My Country and The Oath. Poitras arranged for Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, both of the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, to interview Snowden in Hong Kong, and she and Greenwald were the conduit for the information the public got to hear. The filmed briefing sessions, over an eight-day period, form the heart of this film.

If nothing else, one is likely to conclude from the film that Snowden was at the very least, acting out of a sincere concern that the government was overreaching in its data-gathering, that he does not seem to be a crazy person, or even unusual in his demeanor, and that he acted cautiously. The caution was both in terms of how he released the data (only Poitras and Greenwald received all of the copied files) and how he arranged the release, including encrypting his conversations and not telling anyone he knew, including his girlfriend, of his plans.

But judging Snowden’s actions means assessing more than his good intentions and carefulness. It means also quantifying the seriousness of the threats to privacy, the value of the information that can be gained from searching millions of phone and internet records, and the effects of revealing the NSA’s activities. Poitras tells us some things about the first, virtually nothing about the second, and very little about the third. In her defense, these are all difficult to quantify, and doing so was probably not her intent. Rather, the film is best seen as explaining the types of activities the NSA (and, incidentally, and even more broadly, the British government) was engaged in, why Snowden saw that as a problem, and what he, assisted by Greenwald and other journalists, did about it. If you are only mildly interested in those questions, I’d avoid the movie. Snowden himself is articulate, and worth hearing, but not so colorful as to be a riveting personality. Visually, the film is unavoidably on the dull side, with the t-shirt wearing Snowden and his hotel room filling much screen time. And, because Poitras does not directly depict any of the government efforts to find Snowden, or prosecute him, or deal with the fallout of his revelations, the sense of tension is less than it might have been. Snowden’s relevations are a valuable piece of history, and it is good to have this record of what happened. But, as a movie, Citizenfour is merely worthwhile, not riveting.

IMDb link

viewed 11/19/14 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/21/14

Southland Tales (*1/2)

To give you an idea of how I felt after seeing this movie, I’m not even sure what genre to call it. There were funny moments, which accounts for most of why I’m not giving it my very bottom rating, but it couldn’t be called a comedy. The plot, set in the present, deals with the aftermath of a nuclear bomb attack, but it doesn’t feel like a sci-fi movie, and clearly it’s not positing a plausible “what if” scenario. The United States is involved in a third world war, and a semi-underground group of “neo-Marxists” is organizing a movement to oppose civil liberties restrictions that include taking over the Internet, but I'm not sure political commentary is what writer-director Richard Kelly was trying to achieve, though for all I know it’s an oblique satire of the Bush administration. The neo-Marxists have a scheme that involves having a policeman (Seann William Scott) impersonated by his twin brother. They’re not too sympathetic, but neither are the people they’re opposing, who include a right-wing presidential hopeful. Meanwhile, the senator’s son-in-law, a well-known actor named Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) has returned to Los Angeles from near the bomb site with amnesia, taken up with a porn star calling herself Krysta Now (Sarah Michell Gellar), and collaborated with her on a non-porn movie script that is, by all indications, terrible, but probably would have made more sense than the one this was based upon.

Oh, there is more, much more. I’ve not mentioned the kooky scientist who may or may not have invented a new source of cheap energy (Wallace Shawn, resembling a drag queen), or the narrator, a facially scarred Gulf War veteran who intones, reversing T.S. Eliot, that the world will end not with a whimper, but a bang, and recites verses of the biblical Revelations. Maybe the powerful senator is called Frost as an allusion to Robert Frost, whose equally famous poem wonders whether the world would end in fire or ice. Who knows? Obviously, a lot was on Kelly’s mind, but I don’t know what he was trying to say about those things. For ten minutes this movie seemed exhilarating with its mesh of news stories, reported by some Fox News knockoff, offbeat characters, and keen visual sensibility. For another half hour, I was still with Kelly, confident that he was going to tie all these disparate, sometimes humorous, threads into some devastating conclusion in which it would all make sense. It probably does to Kelly, whose previous film, the DVD cult hit Donnie Darko, featured a giant bunny rabbit. Maybe this will have its own cult. But by the end, I was just looking at my watch.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/16/07

Rendition (**3/4)

If you’re interested in seeing this movie, you likely already know about the recent policy, allegedly much favored by the Bush administration, of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects are spirited away to foreign countries for questioning. In this way, it is said, cumbersome internal prohibitions against torturing suspects can be evaded. This is a fictional tale of one such interrogation and the events surrounding it, told on two continents. Omar Metwally plays the Egyptian-born American who is detained while flying home from a conference in South Africa and flown to an unnamed Arab country. Meryl Streep plays the CIA head who orders this. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the operative who observes as the Arab secret police chief interrogates the American in connection with a deadly suicide bombing. Coincidentally, the Arab chief’s estranged daughter seems to have gotten herself involved with a radical of the sort he is trying to stop.

Meanwhile, in the US, the captive’s wife (Reese Witherspoon) uses a DC connection to try to figure out why her husband never returned from his trip. This part is somewhat less predictable than what happens to her husband, but in truth there is only one major twist in the way that the story is structured. The husband is suspected based on his nationality and one piece of circumstantial evidence. Either he’s completely innocent or the twist is that he’s an awesome liar. In any case, Gyllenhaal is put in the position that we are, trying to figure out which, but I think he’ll take longer.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/27/07