The Crippled Corner

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH Paula Haggisa, u sklopu pripreme za ZERO DARK THIRTY. IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH je baziran na priči koju su osmislili zajedno scenarista HURT LOCKERa i ZERO DARK THIRTYja Mark Boal i oskarovac Paul Haggis. Ovaj film spada u Haggisovu fazu "upozoravajućih" filmova od kojih je CRASH uspeo da ga proslavi na "oskarima". ELAH je daleko jednostavniji i bolji film od CRASHa, upravo zbog toga što je i strukturalno i na nivou priče prigušeniji,  Haggis kao scenarista ima potrebu da se više izražava u pojnmovima nego u pokretnim slikama - ELAH je uz to vrlo pismeno koncipiran, u duhu arty krimića sedamdesetih, ali to ne znači da u pojedinim slučajevima Haggis ne oseća potrebu da "zakuce" poentu. Uostalom, ipak je Haggis scenarista koji je uspeo da u autorskom pogledu ubije Clinta Eastwooda što nikome nije pošplo za rukom. Međutim, da ovaj film nije ideološki neprihvatljiv Clintu, i da ga je on režirao, čini mi se da bi neka od Haggisovih poentiranja bila izbegnuta.

Uprkos svemu tome, ELAH ostaje fino kontemplativan film koji ima osnovu i strukturu krimića, ali i efekat koji nadilazi žanrovski koncept. Poenta je proučavanje obolelog društvenog tkiva kroz mali slučaj koji otkriva veću priču - u ovom slučaju deformacije izazvane američkim angažmanom u Iraku koji je drugačiji od drugih ratova koji su vođeni. Suočeni sa neobičnim protivnikom, Amerikanci su svesno i zvanično odustali od pravila ratovanja i pretvorili svoje vojnike na terenu u monstrume i sada to počinju da osećaju i građani na tlu SAD.

Haggis ovo pitanje otvara na jedan vrlo zanimljiv način, kreirajući žanrovski prilično čistu misteriju koja potom prerasta u zataškavanje, raskrinkavanje onoga što se zataškava i poražavajućeg otkrića šta je zapravo zataškavano.

Jedan od problema Haggisovog filma jeste All-Star podela u kojoj su se Tommy Lee Jones i Charlize Theron jasno izdvojili kao glavni likovi, ali epizode igraju neki prilično poznati glumci poput Josha Brolina što stvara lažni utisak kao da će se taj lik dalje razraditi a neće i opterećuje gledalaca suvišnim detaljima.

Roger Deakins kao DP odlično savladava pitoreksne ambijente Novog Meksika, i američke provincije, bezbrojne ćumeze, barove, motele i vojne objekte ui Haggis u sdaradnji sa njim uspeva da kreira solidan i atmosferičan identitet filma.

U pojedinim scenama, Haggis usporava filmski izraz ne naročito inspirisanim rešenjima u dijaloškim scenama, ali film uspeva da ostvari inttegritet na nivou izraza. Otud je šteta što na samom kraju, Haggis iskoračuje previše u pravcu "poentiranja" koje možda čak i nije suvišno, ako imamo u vidu o kome govori i kome se obraća, i koje je čak možda i na nivou živorne uverljivosti korektno, ali remeti jednu solidnu celinu.

Film je baziran na istinitoj priči. I ovo je primer dobro odabrane istinite priče koja na kraju ima svoje značenje a nudi prostor za razvoj drame. U tom smislu Haggis je scenaristički odlično proizveo uzbuđenje u antiklimaksu i razrešenju misterije.

ELAH je imao već u onome što je snimio Haggis nešto bolji film, ali i ovakav kakav je, stoji kao najzrelije ostvarenje u njegovoj karijeri.

* * * / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Deciphering the Tools of Nature's Zombies
By CARL ZIMMER
Published: December 5, 2012
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
GOOGLE+
SAVE
E-MAIL
SHARE
PRINT
SINGLE PAGE
REPRINTS

In the rain forests of Costa Rica lives Anelosimus octavius, a species of spider that sometimes displays a strange and ghoulish habit.
Enlarge This Image

Biogeoscience
When infected by thorny-headed worms (the orange spot), gammarids swim toward light. At the water's surface they become easy prey for birds, the next creature the worm needs to infect to complete its life cycle.

Connect With Us on Social Media
@nytimesscience on Twitter.
Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter
Like the science desk on Facebook.
From time to time these spiders abandon their own web and build a radically different one, a home not for the spider but for a parasitic wasp that has been living inside it. Then the spider dies — a zombie architect, its brain hijacked by its parasitic invader — and out of its body crawls the wasp's larva, which has been growing inside it all this time.

The current issue of the prestigious Journal of Experimental Biology is entirely dedicated to such examples of zombies in nature. They are far from rare. Viruses, fungi, protozoans, wasps, tapeworms and a vast number of other parasites can control the brains of their hosts and get them to do their bidding. But only recently have scientists started to work out the sophisticated biochemistry that the parasites use.

"The knowledge that parasites can manipulate their hosts is old. The new part is how they do it," said Shelley Adamo of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, a co-editor of the new issue. "The last 5 to 10 years have really been exciting."

In the case of the Costa Rican spider, the new web is splendidly suited to its wasp invader. Unlike the spider's normal web, mostly a tangle of threads, this one has a platform topped by a thick sheet that protects it from the rain. The wasp larva crawls to the edge of the platform and spins a cocoon that hangs down through an opening that the spider has kindly provided for the parasite.

To manipulate the spiders, the wasp must have genes that produce proteins that alter spider behavior, and in some species, scientists are now pinpointing this type of gene. Such is the case with the baculovirus, a virus sprinkled liberally on leaves in forests and gardens. (The cabbage in a serving of coleslaw carries 100 million baculoviruses.)

Human diners need not worry, because the virus is harmful only to caterpillars of insect species, like gypsy moths. When a caterpillar bites a baculovirus-laden leaf, the parasite invades its cells and begins to replicate, sending the command "climb high." The hosts end up high in trees, which has earned this infection the name treetop disease. The bodies of the caterpillars then dissolve, releasing a rain of viruses on unsuspecting hosts below.

David P. Hughes of Penn State University and his colleagues have found that a single gene, known as egt, is responsible for driving the caterpillars up trees. The gene encodes an enzyme. When the enzyme is released inside the caterpillar, it destroys a hormone that signals a caterpillar to stop feeding and molt.

Dr. Hughes suspects that the virus goads the caterpillar into a feeding frenzy. Normally, gypsy moth caterpillars come out at night to feed and then return to crevices near the bottom of trees to hide from predators. The zombie caterpillars, on the other hand, cannot stop searching for food.

"The infected individuals are out there, just eating and eating," Dr. Hughes said. "They're stuck in a loop."

Other parasites manipulate their hosts by altering the neurotransmitters in their brains. This kind of psychopharmacology is how thorny-headed worms send their hosts to their doom.

Their host is a shrimplike crustacean called a gammarid. Gammarids, which live in ponds, typically respond to disturbances by diving down into the mud. An infected gammarid, by contrast, races up to the surface of the pond. It then scoots across the water until it finds a stem, a rock or some other object it can cling to.

The gammarid's odd swimming behavior allows the parasite to take the next step in its life cycle. Unlike baculoviruses, which go from caterpillar to caterpillar, thorny-headed worms need to live in two species: a gammarid and then a bird. Hiding in the pond mud keeps a gammarid safe from predators. By forcing it to swim to the surface, the thorny-headed worm makes it an easy target.

Simone Helluy of Wellesley College studies this suicidal reversal. Her research indicates that the parasites manipulate the gammarid's brain through its immune system.

The invader provokes a strong response from the gammarid's immune cells, which unleash chemicals to kill the parasite. But the parasite fends off these attacks, and the host's immune system instead produces an inflammation that infiltrates its own brain. There, it disrupts the brain's chemistry — in particular, causing it to produce copious amounts of the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Serotonin influences how neurons transmit signals. Dr. Helluy proposes that the rush of serotonin triggered by the thorny-headed worms corrupts the signals traveling from the eyes to the brain. Normally, an escape reflex causes the gammarid to be attracted to the darkness at the bottom of its pond. Thorny-headed worms may cause their host to perceive sunlight as darkness, and thus swim up instead of down.

Connect With Us on Social Media
@nytimesscience on Twitter.
Science Reporters and Editors on Twitter
Like the science desk on Facebook.
Whether humans are susceptible to this sort of zombie invasion is less clear. It is challenging enough to figure out how parasites manipulate invertebrates, which have a few hundred thousand neurons in their nervous systems. Vertebrates, including humans, have millions or billions of neurons, and so scientists have made fewer advances in studying their zombification.

Most of the research on vertebrate zombies has been carried on a single-celled parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. Like thorny-headed worms, it moves between predators and their prey. Toxoplasma reproduces in the guts of cats, which shed it in their feces.

Mammals and birds can pick up the parasite, which invade their brain cells and form cysts. When cats eat these infected animals, Toxoplasma completes its cycle. Scientists have found that Toxoplasma-infected rats lose their fear of cat odor — potentially making them easier prey to catch.

Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds and his colleagues have found a possible explanation for how Toxoplasma wreaks this change. It produces an enzyme that speeds the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which influences mammals' motivation and how they value rewards. Adding extra dopamine might make Toxoplasma's hosts more curious and less fearful.

But Ajai Vyas of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has found evidence that Toxoplasma simultaneously manipulates its hosts in other ways. Infected male rats, he found, make extra testosterone. This change makes the males more attractive to females, and when they mate the males spread the parasite to females.

By causing male rats to make more testosterone, Toxoplasma may do more than spread itself to other rats. Testosterone also tamps down fear. The infected rats may thus become even less concerned when they pick up the scent of a cat.

This research could potentially provide important clues about human behavior. In the case of Toxoplasma, for example, humans can become hosts if they handle contaminated cat litter or eat parasite-laden meat. Some studies have linked Toxoplasma infection with subtle changes in personality, as well as with a higher risk of schizophrenia.

Dr. Adamo, the co-editor of the journal's new issue, thinks this new science of "neuroparasitology" can offer inspiration to pharmaceutical companies that are struggling to find effective drugs for mental disorders. "A number of the big companies have given up on their neuroscience labs," she said. "Maybe the parasites can teach us something."

She points out that the way parasites manipulate brains is profoundly different from drugs like Prozac. "The way that a parasite goes about changing behavior is not the way a neurobiologist would do it," she said.

A typical drug focuses on just one type of molecule in the brain. Parasites, on the other hand, often launch a much broader attack that still manages to cause a specific change in their host. "Perhaps tweaking several systems simultaneously might give better results than trying to hit one particular system with a sledgehammer," Dr. Adamo said.

But she added that she and other parasitologists barely understand those zombifying tweaks. "All we know now," she said, "is they have their own ways.

[crippled_avenger]

"Drive" helmer Nicolas Winding Refn has signed on to direct the $50 million big screen reboot of "The Equalizer" franchise at Sony Pictures.

Edward Woodward starred in the classic CBS television series about Robert McCall, a former operative of a covert intelligence organisation who seeks redemption for his dark past via offering his services to those being persecuted and in need of help.

The film keeps the basic premise, but then goes off on its own tangent with Denzel Washington attached to play a "solitary, monastic figure who hates injustice and devotes himself to helping people who are being victimized."

Richard Wenk ("The Expendables 2") penned the latest draft of the script and shooting kicks off in the Spring.

Speaking of Refn, a release date has finally been set for his recently completed Thai boxing film "Only God Forgives." It is scheduled to open May 23rd.

Source: Variety

[crippled_avenger]

Podneo sam rediteljski debi u kome je RZA sa petnaest godina zakašnjenja sabrao svoju fascinaciju kung fu filmom, i THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS i izgleda kao nešto što bi u ono vreme diskografska kuća finansirala kako bi podmirila apetite Wu Tang Clanu. Ako imamo u vidu da je ovaj film prezentacija Quentina Tarantina, što u principu ne mora biti garancija kvaliteta, očekivanje je ipak odmaknuto od vanity projecta. Doduše, RZA je na nivou karijere izašao iz visokotiražnih okvira ali se nametnuo kao ugledna figura, kompozitor filmske muzike i guru opšte prakse, pa ovo ostaje vanity project.

THE MAN WITH THE IRON FIST izgleda kao nevešto sažeta verzija nekog ne naročito zanimljivog dužeg filma. Ne znam da li bi ovo bilo znatno bolje u formi dužeg ostvarenja, a RZA i Eli Roth su imali dosta prolema da ga skrate, ali bi sigurno više ličilo na film. Ovako deluje kao svojevrsna salata scena, sa prilično jednostavnim i istovremeno konfuznim narativom i scenama borbe koje su značajne samo po tome što RZA pokušava da na velika vrata vrati gore fu, odnosno da pomeša gore fu sa nekim wireworkom kakav smo sretali u filmovima poput CROUCHING TIGERa. Ovaj film po senzibilitetu nema puno veze sa starim wuxia radovima koje bi RZA trebalo da poznaje dobro,  što naravno nije prepreka užitku, naročito jer RZA ima neprikriveno oskidentalni pristup pripovedanju.

Međutim, u ovako napabirčenoj priči, sa samim sobom u glavnoj ulozi što je naročito apsurdno ako imamo u vidu da postoje vitalni crnci koji znaju da se biju ali i da glume kao recimo Michael Jai White, i Russell Croweom u jednoj mičamovskoj ulozi lutanja kroz kadrove, sve se mora prepustiti azijskom delu podele koji čine moj favorit, povratnik Byron Mann, zatim Rick Yune, Lucy Liu i čovek iz "Shaolin Chambersa" Gordon Liu. Tako da eto, bar su se sreli RZA i Liu.

RZA je nažalost drvo javorovo, neubedljiv je i kao glumac i kao borac, i u principu deluje kao da je prilično zalutao u glavnu ulogu.

Šteta je što RZA nije našao bolji način da prenese svoju fascinaciju kung fu filmova u vlastito delo. Premda, RZA je u suštini na kraju krajeva samo snimio film koji nije dobar, ne može se reći da se u bilo kom smislu ogrešio o svoj status uglednog prvoborca.

* 1/2 / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam dosta skrpljen TV rad Briana Trenchard-Smitha TIDES OF WAR koji je u kritikama prikazan kao podnošljiv podmornički film, ali u suštini reč je o delu koje je ispod DTV standarda i efektima koji deluju kao da su pravljeni na kućnom računaru i ostavljeni nedovršeni i razvojem priče koji tek delimično uspeva da se pokrije nekom vrstom Trenchard-Smitohove rutine u rešavanju scena na setu komandnog mosta u podmornici. Uprkos tome što je u svojim TV i DTV radovima uspeo da sporadično zadrži kvalitete koji su ga krasili, u svojoj poznoj fazi, on očigledno nije ni imao pristup projektima koji bi ga mogli zaintrigirati i podstaći da uradi nešto od stvari koje zna...

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam DOOMSDAY BOOK južnokorejsku antologiju filmova o kraju sveta, što je zanimljivo ako imamo u vidu da je istog dana Severna Koreja probala svoju interkontinentalnu raketu. Reč je o izvanredno zanimljivom, jako raskošno realizovanom omnibusu u kome je uvodnu i završni priču režirao Yim Pil Sung a središnju Kim Ji Woon.

Sve tri priče su zanimljive, baziraju se na SF premisama s tim što je prva zapravo više horor jer govori o zombija proisteklim iz netradicionalne infestacije izazvane zagađenjem i zanimljva je između ostalog i po tome što u njoj igra Bong Joon Ho, reditelj monster moviea THE HOST koji ima sličnu premisu samo u creature feature žanru. Bong Joon Ho igra jednog od upečatljivih gostiju u televizijskoj diskusiji na temu zombi infestacije.

U prvoj priči Yim Pil Sung uspeva vrlo dobro da razvije likove sa identitetom i da prikaže veliku zombi apokalipsu u Južnoj Koreji sa prilično ambicioznim dimenzijama, uvodeći usput nešto biblijske simbolike koja ne igra suštinsku mulogu ali fino zaokružuje stvar. Ova priča je besprekorno realizovana, sa visokom vizuelnom pismenošću kakva se od Yim Pil Sunga i očekuje.

U drugoj priči Kim Ji Woon snima svoj možda najintrigantniji film. Ovo nije blockbuster, nije crowdpleaser, ali je zabavna priča o robotu koji doživljava "prosvetljenje" i u budističkom hramu počinju da ga posmatraju kao Budinu inkarnaciju. Međutim, korporacija koja je proizvela robota smatra da je to početak formiranja veštačke inteligencije koja bi mogla ugroziti čovečanstvo i šalje tehničara da interveniše. Bong Joon Ho je na sličan način prepleo visoku tehnologiju i intimističku priču u svojoj priči u omnibusu TOKYO koja meni ipak ostaje draža ali po prvi put pokazuje Kim Ji Woona kao nešto sofisticiranijeg reditelja. Takođe, ova priča deluje jako vešto u vizuelnom pogledu sa zanimljivim CGI tretmanom robota.

Treću priču o vanzemaljskom nebeskom telu koje ide prema zemlji, režirao je Yim Pil Sung i čini mi se da je ova priča wild card celog omnibusa. Apsurdna je, u sebi ima najizraženiju arty dimenziju i čini mi se da ona možda i ponajviše prodaje ovaj omnibus na Zapadu. Međutim, i ona se uklapa u viziju jer nudi treće viđenje teme koje ne čini film nekonzistentnim već bogatijim.

Neobična struktura DOOMSDAY BOOKa sa tri priče i dva reditelja čini mi se proizilazi iz produkcionih teškoća na koje je naišao ovaj film čije je snimanje počelo još 2006. godine. Srećom, to se ne oseća u krajnjem proizvodu koji deluje bogato i krajnje reprezentativno. Yim Pil Sung je ovog puta imao dve prilike da se pokaže da ima i supstancu a ne samo stil, što je nagovestio u ANTARCTIC JOURNALu ali nije potvrdio u HANSEL AND GRETEL, i rekao bih da u ovim pričama nije suštinski preokrenuo sliku o sebi ali je našao materijal u kome njegove rediteljske osobine nisu problem.

* * * / * * * *

[Meho Krljic]

Fino, našo sam i 720p rip, uživaće se!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ghoul]

Fino, našo sam i 720p rip, uživaće se!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

izuzev središnje priče, koja jeste natprosečno dobra, good luck sa užitkom u prvoj i trećoj! 

[Meho Krljic]

Hajde, videćemo, ja sam ipak niskih prohteva.

[crippled_avenger]

New U.S. Release
Django Unchained
By Peter Debruge
django unchained

Leonardo DiCaprio co-stars in the spaghetti-Western.
A Weinstein Co. (in U.S.)/Sony Pictures Entertainment (international) release of a Weinstein Co./Columbia Pictures presentation of a Band Apart production. Produced by Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, Pilar Savone. Executive producers, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Shannon McIntosh, Michael Shamberg, James W. Skotchdople. Directed, written by Quentin Tarantino.
Django - Jamie Foxx
Dr. King Schultz - Christoph Waltz
Calvin Candie - Leonardo DiCaprio
Broomhilda von Shaft - Kerry Washington
Stephen - Samuel L. Jackson
Billy Crash - Walton Goggins
Leonide Moguy - Dennis Christopher
Ace Remar - James Remar
Mr. Stonesipher - David Steen
Cora - Dana Gourrier
Sheba - Nichole Galicia
Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly - Laura Cayouette
Rodney - Sammi Rotibi
Clay - Donahue Fontenot
Big Fred - Escalante Lundy
Betina - Miriam F. Glover
Big Daddy - Don Johnson
Curtis Carrucan - Bruce Dern
The "D" is silent, though the name of "Django Unchained's" eponymous gunslinger sounds like a retaliatory whip across the face of white slaveholders, offering an immensely satisfying taste of antebellum empowerment packaged as spaghetti-Western homage. Christened after a coffin-toting Sergio Corbucci character who metes out bloody justice below the Mason-Dixon line, Django joins a too-short list of slaves-turned-heroes in American cinema, as this zeitgeist-shaping romp cleverly upgrades the mysterious Man in Black archetype to a formidable Black Man. Once again, Quentin Tarantino rides to the Weinsteins' rescue, delivering a bloody hilarious (and hilariously bloody) Christmas counter-programmer, which Sony will unleash abroad.

After "Inglourious Basterds" and "Kill Bill," it would be reasonable to assume that "Django Unchained" is yet another of Tarantino's elaborate revenge fantasies, when in fact, the film represents the writer-director's first real love story (not counting his "Badlands"-inspired screenplays for "True Romance" and "Natural Born Killers"). At its core is a slave marriage between Django (Jamie Foxx) and Hildi (Kerry Washington), torn asunder after the couple attempt to escape a spiteful plantation owner (Bruce Dern, blink and you miss him).

Brutally whipped and then resold to separate bidders on the Greenville, Miss., auction block, Django and his bride -- whose outrageous full name, Broomhilda von Shaft, blends epic German legend with the greatest of blaxploitation heroes -- possess a love too great to be shackled by slavery. But getting even with Dern's character doesn't feature on Django's agenda. After settling the score with his former overseers early in the film, he cares only about reuniting with his wife.

"Django Unchained" could also qualify as a buddy movie -- an odd twist, considering that Corbucci's original Django was a loner (as played by Franco Nero, who cameos in this film). Liberally reinventing a character bastardized in more than 30 unofficial sequels, Tarantino pairs this new black Django with a bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Posing as a dentist, Waltz's charming figure first emerges in the dead of night driving an absurd-looking carriage with a giant tooth bobbing on top -- the first indication of how funny the film is going to be.

As in "Basterds," Waltz's genteel manner masks a startling capacity for ruthlessness. This time, however, he's undeniably one of the good guys. Though he tracks and kills men for a living, the doctor is fundamentally fair, shooting only when provoked or justified. Happening upon Django's chain gang, Schultz offers to buy the slave from his redneck escorts. When they decline, he leaves the traders for dead and liberates their "property," enlisting Django in his bounty-hunting business.

Tarantino's on sensitive turf here, and he knows it, using these early scenes not only to establish the cruelty shown toward slaves in the South, but also to deliver the same sort of revisionist comeuppance Jewish soldiers took upon Hitler in his last picture. Ironically, as a well-read and clearly more enlightened German, Schultz is disapproving of Americans' claims to racial superiority, which positions him as the story's moral conscience. When the time comes, he will accompany Django to Candyland, the plantation where Hildi now resides under the thumb of the unctuous Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

But the film seems to be in no hurry to get there, focusing on Django's most unusual education -- killing white men -- for the first 90 minutes of the director's longest feature yet. Tarantino freely quotes from his favorite stylistic sources, whether oaters or otherwise, featuring lightning-quick zooms, an insert of unpicked cotton drenched in blood and a shot of Django riding into town framed through a hangman's noose. Early on, Foxx appears to be following Waltz's lead, but once the snow melts on the bounty-hunting subplot (an extended homage to Corbucci's "The Great Silence"), all traces of subservience disappear and Foxx steps forth, guiding this triumphant folk hero through a stunning transformation.

True to its spaghetti-Western roots, the pic reveals most of its stoic hero's unspoken motivations through garishly colored flashbacks, though Tarantino and editor Fred Raskin (stepping in for the late Sally Menke) seem to realize that limited glimpses of such white-on-black sadism go a long way. Filmmakers who choose to portray this shameful chapter of America's past bear a certain responsibility not to sanitize it. But here, even as it lays the groundwork for "Django's" vengeance, dwelling on such brutality can verge on exploitation. To wit, the film problematically features no fewer than 109 instances of the "N word," most of them deployed either for laughs or alliteration.

While good taste doesn't necessarily apply, comedy seems to be the key that distinguishes "Django Unchained" from a risible film like "Mandingo." Both take a certain horror-pleasure in watching bare-chested black men wrestle to the death -- the sick sport at which Candie prides himself an expert -- but what better way to inoculate the power of a Klan rally than by turning it into a Mel Brooks routine, reducing bigots to buffoons as they argue about their ill-fitting white hoods?

Using rap and other cheeky music cues to similar effect, the script repeatedly finds ways to use the characters' racism against them, most ingeniously in its somewhat protracted second half. According to Schultz, if he and Django were to show up at Candyland and offer to buy Hildi directly, they'd be laughed off the plantation, so they hatch a plan to pose as men looking to buy a mandingo fighter. But there's a flaw to their logic, since the direct-request approach worked fine with Don Johnson's "Big Daddy" earlier, it allows the film to explore the complex caste system among slaves.

There are two things Tarantino, as a director, has virtually perfected -- staging Mexican standoffs and spinning dialogue for delayed gratification -- and expert examples of both await at Candyland. Seductively revealing a dark side auds have never seen before, DiCaprio plays Candie as a self-entitled brat, spewing the character's white-supremacy theories through tobacco-stained teeth. Like a Southern despot, he surrounds himself with menacing cohorts, none more dangerous than old Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who runs the affairs of Candie's household and represents a form of toxic black-on-black rivalry still smoldering in American culture today.

Gorgeously lit and lensed by Robert Richardson against authentic American landscapes (as opposed to the Italian soil Corbucci used), the film pays breathtaking respect not just to Tarantino's many cinematic influences, but to the country itself, envisioning a way out of the slavery mess it depicts. In sheer formal terms, "Django Unchained" is rich enough to reward multiple viewings, while thematics will make this thorny "southern" -- as the director aptly dubs it -- perhaps his most closely studied work. Of particular interest will be Tarantino's two cameos, one delivered with an Australian accent, and the other alongside Jonah Hill in the "baghead" scene.

Camera (color, widescreen), Robert Richardson; editor, Fred Raskin; music supervisor, Mary Ramos; production designer, J. Michael Riva; supervising art director, David Klassen; art directors, Mara Schloop, Page Buckner; set decorator, Leslie Pope; costume designer, Sharen Davis; sound (Dolby Digital/SDDS/Datasat), Mark Ulano; supervising sound editor, Wylie Stateman; re-recording mixers, Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti; special effects supervisor, John McLeod; visual effects supervisor, Greg Steele; visual effects, Rhythm & Hues Studios; special makeup effects, KNB EFX Group; special makeup effects supervisor, Gregory Nicotero; associate producer, William Paul Clark; assistant director, William Paul; casting, Victoria Thomas. Reviewed at Sony Studios, Culver City, Calif., Dec. 2, 2012. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 165 MIN.
With: Franco Nero, James Russo, Tom Wopat, Don Stroud, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, Doc Duhame, Jonah Hill, Lee Horsley, Zoe Bell, Michael Bowen, Robert Carradine, Jake Garber, Ted Neeley, James Parks, Tom Savini, Ato Essandoh, Omar J. Dorsey, Michael Parks, John Jarratt, Quentin Tarantino. (English, German, French dialogue)

[Meho Krljic]

Dobija dobre kritike al ja se samo plašim da ne bude opet ko sa Inglorious Basterds... Mnogo ljepote ali humor generalno ispod prihvatljivih granica ukusa.

[crippled_avenger]

Stari Kadar i Nadrealna Televizija

http://www.agitpop.me/?04B3E8D5

[Meho Krljic]

Mi smo uvek znali da je Snup proročka figura, ali za neverne Tome, evo valjda neoborivog dokaza:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kRAKXFrYQ4

[crippled_avenger]

Mislim da je dosta konzistentno sa novim pesmama Snoop Liona.

[crippled_avenger]

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and "Wild Things" director John McNaughton is returning to film, after more than a decade's absence, by signing on to helm the sub-$10 million psychological horror thriller "The Harvest."

Michael Shannon and Samantha Morton play a married couple with medical backgrounds. Their sick son (Charlie Tahan) lives in a controlled and secluded environment, until a young girl (Natasha Calis) moves in next door and gives him hope of a better life.

As the teens grow closer, the tight-knit world his over-protective mother has created begins to unravel. Stephen Lancellotti penned the script, while Leslie Lyles and Meadow Williams also star.

Williams, Kim Jose, David Robinson and Steven A. Jones are producing and shooting is currently under way in New York.

Source: Variety

[crippled_avenger]

Filmmaker Kim Jee-woon ("The Last Stand") is reportedly in the early planning stages of a live action adaptation of the 1999 anime feature "Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade" which will be titled "Inrang."

Okiura Hiroyuki helmed the original, described as a spin on Red Riding Hood that is set in a parallel reality in which the Nazis won World War II and Japan now exists as an oppressive military state.

One of the heavily armored state police builds a relationship with a young girl who is part of a violent protest movement. "Ghost in the Shell director Oshii Mamoru wrote the original Jin-Roh script.

[crippled_avenger]

U završnom trejleru, ZERO DARK THIRTY ima malo SOCIAL NETWORK začina.

http://dobanevinosti.blogspot.com/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-pred-premijeru.html

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam ekranizaciju romana MRTVACIMA ULAZ ZABRANJEN Nenada Brixija urađenu u Čehoslovačkoj pod naslovom CTYRI VRAZDI STACI, DRAHOUSKU u režiji čuvenog Oldricha Lipskog. Odlrich Lipsky je jedan od najčuvenijih čehoslovačkih reditelja i naši književnici nisu imali ovako prestižne ekranizacije u inostranstvu. Naravno, Čehioslovačka u to vreme nije bila dovoljno "prestižno" inostranstvo, ali ova ekranizacija je sama po sebi veliki uspeh. Brixijev roman je bio preveden na više jezika, prodat u četvrt miliona primeraka a veliki uspeh je postigao upravo u ČSSR.

CTZRI VRAZDI se smatra jednom od najpopularnijih čehoslovačkih komedija i bez ikakve sumnje reč je o filmu koji je neobičan, uvodi dosta zanimljivih i ekskluzivnih rešenja iz vizure nečega što bismo zamislili da nastaje iza Gvozdene Zavese. Međutim, imajući u vidu da je ovo film iz 1970. a da je 1966. Vaclav Vorlicek snimio film KDO CHCE ZABIT JESSII? koji je u određenim postupcima još radikalniji, ne možemo reći da je ovo najekscentričniji čehoslovački repetoarski film.

Kao i u JESSI i CTYRI VRAZDI, osnovna postavka je preplitanje fikcije i stvarnosti, u JESSI snovi postaju stvarnost a inspirisani su pulp literaturom dočim kod Lipskog se stalno ostavlja pitanje da li je sve zapravo mentalna slika stripa koji junaci čitaju u jednom svojevrsnom koncentričnom krugu. Dok se JESSI dešava u Čehoslovačkoj, CTYRI VRAZDI se dešava u jednoj stilizovanoj Americi kako bi se opravdalo pojavljivanje klišetiziranih tipskih junaka iz gangsterskog filma koje roman i film parodiraju. U prikazu te "pseudo-Amerike" dominiraju klišei iz popularne kulture i nema nikakvih ideoloških zahvata i političkih poenti.

Lipsky u ovom filmu udara svim silama i ovo je istovremeno parodija, farsa i vodvilj što rezultira prenatrpanošću filma i u pojedinim fazama nemoguće je pratiti dešavanja na ekranu što ipak ne može biti rediteljski cilj.

Ovaj Brixijev roman je prethodno ekranizovan u SFRJ (spada među retke jugoslovenske romane koji su imali dve ekranizacije, a ja trenutno mogu da se setim samo GOLUŽE kao primera za jugoslovensku i stranu ekranizaciju) i postigao je kultni status i mesto u lektiri.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

[milan]

Brixi je inace poznatiji kod nas kao prevodilac Alan Forda - negde osamdesetih, u Super stripu, ediciji koja je izdavala Alan Forda, pokusano je sa domacim serijalom, zaboravio sam mu naziv, ali se secam da je Brixi pisao scenario, a da se prva epizoda zvala upravo "Mrtvacima ulaz zabranjen".

[crippled_avenger]

Da, da, ja sam, iskren da budem, znao za Brixija samo po Alanu Fordu i znao sam da je pisac, ali nisam ni slutio da je imao toliko uspeha. Ovaj čehoslovački film je ozbiljan poduhvat, ne snima se koješta tako ozbiljno. Kratko je živeo, ali imao je prilike da doživi ove filmove...

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ne uzbuđuj se. I ja sam dugo mislio da je Timothy Tatcher američki pisac... 

[Mica Milovanovic]

Ja nemam tačne podatke, ali verujem da su romani o Timothy Tatcheru imali jako velike tiraže.
Nisam ih skoro čitao - verovatno 25 godina, ali su mi ostali u veoma lepoj uspomeni.
U vreme kada sam ih čitao smatrao sam da su prilično duhoviti.

[Alexdelarge]

http://www.znaksagite.com/diskusije/index.php/topic,6270.0.html

[crippled_avenger]

Našao sam negde na internetu da je ovaj roman otišao u 250 000 primeraka i da je ušao u lektiru, a to je bio neki predgovor romanu na scribdu, dakle podatak deluje verodostojno. Zanimljivo je da se našao u lektiri? Nisam čitao ali mi je teško da pretpostavim u kontekstu bi se mogao izučavati. Kao primer žanrovske literature? Ne baš. Kao primer parodije? Eventualno, ali zašto onda baš paroda pulp žanra?

[crippled_avenger]

Mehmete, vrlo zanimljiva lista!

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-50-greatest-hip-hop-songs-of-all-time-20121205

[Meho Krljic]

Bah, čim je  Džej Zi na listi, to je dovodi u sumnju!

Ali, da, zanimljivo!

Edit: pošto je ovo roling stoun, lista nije rđava. Mada, naravno da se kmica u meni buni što nema baš ni jedne pesme MF Dooma, što je Nas prisutan samo jednom, što Snup fičruje samo kroz Drea i što su jedini belci predvidivi likovi kao Eminem i Bisti Bojz, iako je El-P što solo, što uz Kompeni Flou zaslužio barem jedno mesto na listi...

[crippled_avenger]

Eminem je svakako previše prisutan na ovoj listi. Ne kažem da on nije bitan fenomen i da njegov rad nije važan, ali je jedna pesma sasvim dovoljna jer je LOSE YOURSELF bitnija za "transformaciju" Eminema nego celog žanra.

[Джон Рейнольдс]

Jump Around уопште није на листи? Пфффт... Важно је да онај 50 сентов песмичуљак јесте.

[tomat]

Bah, čim je  Džej Zi na listi, to je dovodi u sumnju!

ne samo da je na listi, nego je ispred EPMD,  A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, KRS One je zastupljen samo kroz BDP... a kamo Whoodini, Stetsasonic, Doug E Fresh, The Pharcyde, Digital Underground, Jungle Brothers, Blackalicious, Jurassic 5, Too $hort, Scarface... ova lista je blasfemija!

[ginger toxiqo 2 gafotas]

...ipak se mora na umu imati medij koji ovu listu plasira, srednjačenje i po cenu namernog slepila je važna odlika RS-a...

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam zanimljiv južnokorejski film katastrofe YEON-GA-SI Jeong Woo-Parka koji je snimio nekoliko filmova pre ovoga, ali se nisam susretao sa tim naslovima. U svakom slučaju, Jeong Woo-Park ni ne režira kao debitant i YEON-GA-SI je zanimljivo postavljena i realizovana priča o zarazi mutiranim parazitom koja dobije ogromne razmere i ima fatalan ishod ukoliko se brzo ne pronađe lek. Osnovni problem filma je u čudnom spoju A-produkcionih ambicija i B-senzibiliteta priče. Naime, Jeong Woo-Park relativno dobro postavlja epidemiju nacionalnih razmera u odnosu na borbu glavnog junaka i tenziju koja iz nje proističe. Međutim, ceo zaplet sa tim junakom iako počinje dobro kasnije dobija senzibilitet dosta naivnog B-filma, smenjuju se vrlo složene i neuverljivo dosadne situacije, zavera koja je istovremeno ingeniozna i ekstremno naivna, i usled tih nekonzistentnosti YEON-GA-SI kasnije ima ozbiljne probleme kako da održi svoj tonus.

Ipak, to ne umanjuje relativno prijatne iskustvo gledanja ovog filma koji uprkos raznim nekonzistentnostima i tankom razrešenju, ima u sebi nešto jednostavnosti dobrog američkog repertoarskog filma, kao i zanatske solidnosti i originalnosti korejske kinematografije.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

 17 December 2012 Last updated at 01:57 GMT
Share this page

    Email
    Print

278

    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter

Paedophile net: Did Operation Ore change British society?
By Jon Kelly & Tom de Castella BBC News Magazine
Man and computer - illustration by Nick Lowndes
Continue reading the main story   
In today's Magazine

    A new city rising from the jungle
    The football team sponsored by a brothel
    New York, a graveyard for languages
    Can Newtown change US gun debate?

It was the UK's biggest ever computer crime investigation. Thousands of people were accused of downloading images of child abuse - some were found to be innocent. The legacy is controversial. Ten years after the raids began, has Operation Ore really changed the UK?

On a cold, cloudy December day in 2002, Jonathan was about to take his class of children to chapel. His life as he knew it was about to end.

His headmaster appeared at the door and asked him to go with him. "There are two policemen who want to talk to you," he said.

The school where Jonathan taught geography was an unlikely place for police officers to turn up. A private prep school set in extensive grounds, it offered education to boys and girls from nursery age to 13.

Jonathan had a secret life. Living alone, he didn't think he would be unmasked. "I'd been trying to be as private and quiet as possible. I had two separate lives."

His dark side was about to be exposed. The waiting police told him they had found online payment records linking him to child abuse websites.

"I admitted it straight away," he recalls. "Once the game was up there was no point trying to hide it."

He was stunned at being exposed. He had heard about paedophiles being arrested but thought he was different. "I thought everything was very personal, all kept in my own mind and computer. It was a devastating shock to see I had been found out."

That afternoon he watched as a team of officers searched his home, a prefabricated building in a secluded spot in the school grounds. They took away his computer and VHS cassettes to a police van. "I was blank. I remember feeling cold. The front door was open and they were moving stuff in and out."

He was taken to his local police station, where he was arrested and put in a cell. The news was beginning to sink in. "I thought, 'My life is at an end, what is the point?'"

Jonathan, 57, recalls being released on bail late that night and taken home by the headmaster: "He was tight-lipped. For him it must've been awful." Over the next few days, he wished he would die.

The teacher's capture was repeated in different ways thousands of times across the UK during the first decade of the 21st Century. This was Operation Ore.
Continue reading the main story   
Operation Ore timeline

    2002: Operation Ore launched after US authorities hand over to British police details of 7,272 alleged subscribers to child pornography site
    2003: 1,300 arrested in first year of Ore, 95% with no previous criminal record
    2007: High-profile conviction of actor Chris Langham
    2010: Potential landmark challenge to safety of Ore convictions turned down by Court of Appeal

Details of 7,272 Britons whose credit cards had apparently been used to purchase child abuse images were passed to officers by their counterparts in the US.

The seriousness of the allegations, the fear that children were at risk, and the sheer number of leads put huge pressure on the authorities to act quickly.

What followed was the largest investigation of its kind.

It put under scrutiny the intimate online browsing habits of individuals from all walks of life. The suspects included police officers, doctors, teachers and celebrities.

Household names like rock star Pete Townshend and actor Chris Langham were among those implicated.

Local newspapers, too, began to fill up with reports about normal-looking men who, in the privacy of their own home, were allegedly browsing obscene images of children. In the worst cases, children were shown being raped.

By the time the Ore prosecutions concluded, 1,837 convictions had been secured and 710 cautions handed out, according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

The sheer scale of the operation had tested the police. "In the early days there was a feeling of being overwhelmed," admits Jim Gamble, former chief executive of Ceop.

The countless headlines these raids generated, experts believe, transformed popular perceptions of what a sex offender looked like and did.
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    You can't look at someone and say they are a paedophile. They really do come from every section of society"

Peter Sommer De Montfort University

As the reports of court cases proliferated, the public increasingly became familiar with hitherto obscure terms from the world of child protection. The Sentencing Advisory Panel scale, used to categorise indecent images for seriousness according to grades one to five, is now a regular part of newspaper court reports.

The raids coincided with mounting public concern about the amount of sexual material accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

For those behind it, the investigation was a success. It raised awareness of exploitation and led to 154 children being protected from abuse, according to Ceop.

"People thought they could go online and wouldn't be held to account," says Gamble. "They believed the internet was a labyrinth that was too difficult for the police."

Critics, however, raised questions about the police's handling of the inquiry. Some said potential credit card fraud had not been properly investigated and the reputations of innocent men had been destroyed as a result. Others feared the inquiry had contributed to an atmosphere of moral panic in which paedophiles, or potential paedophiles, lurked in every corner.

What is clear is that Ore helped define Britain's relationship with the internet at a time when its use in people's homes was exploding. As recently as March 2003 just 15.3% of people had broadband, according to the Office for National Statistics. By this year, Ofcom put the figure at 76%.
Man and computer - illustration by Nick Lowndes

The raw material of Operation Ore came from the US.

In August 1999, dozens of US law enforcement agents raided an office and a house in Fort Worth, Texas. They belonged to Thomas and Janice Reedy.

Thomas Reedy, a nurse turned self-taught computer programmer, had set up an online pornography operation called Landslide Productions. His wife was his book-keeper.

The company provided a portal to about 3,000 sites as well as online payment services. Among those using its systems were a number of third-party sites, typically hosted outside the US, offering images of child abuse.
Continue reading the main story   
Operation Avalanche timeline
reedys

    1997: Thomas and Janice Reedy (pictured) set up Landslide.com, providing payment services to adult websites
    1999: Investigation into child pornography on Landslide site leads to raid by US law officials on Reedys' home, arrests and seizure of hard drives
    2000: Thomas Reedy convicted of trafficking indecent images of children
    2001: US attorney general reveals that Landslide's database contains details of 35,000 US subscribers - 100 arrests made, many following sting operations

One site connected with Landslide was called Child Rape. A series of pictures linked to from the site showed fathers having sex with their own children.

A jury found Thomas Reedy guilty of trafficking indecent images of children in January 2000. He was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison - later reduced to 180 on appeal - and Janice Reedy to 14.

In the wake of the raids, US authorities set up an investigation called Operation Avalanche to examine the 35,000 names on Landslide's database. The Federal Bureau of Investigation then shared the details of subscribers from overseas with law enforcement agencies in the relevant countries.

There was Operation Snowball in Canada, Operation Pecunia in Germany, Operation Amethyst in Ireland and Operation Genesis in Switzerland.

When more than 7,000 names of British suspects were passed to UK authorities, it quickly became apparent that investigating them would be a huge undertaking.

With home internet use expanding, there had been warnings in the media that the internet could be a dangerous place.

There had been a few high-profile convictions for downloading indecent footage and pictures of children - such as that of Gary Glitter, jailed in 1999 after thousands of images were discovered on his laptop.

In the media and the popular imagination paedophiles were portrayed as outsiders, one of society's most frightening manifestations of the dangerous other.
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    My sexual feelings were completely bottled up and internalised"

Jonathan

Never before had there been a suggestion that so many ordinary individuals from across the country were regularly viewing this kind of material. Ordinary people like Jonathan.

Today he is filled with remorse. "Hardly a day goes by without me looking back and regretting what I did."

In the early stages of his teaching career he had rented adult pornographic videos. But with the internet his habit became more and more warped. "It got more and more addictive and developed into child pornography. It was mainly pre-teen girls. The longer it went on the worse it got," he says.

Looking back he says that he was extremely lonely. "My sexual feelings were completely bottled up and internalised. I never felt I could develop proper relationships among [people] my own age. My thoughts then became, 'What if they were sexually immature?' It was that kind of disastrous attitude that led to my downfall."

At his trial he admitted downloading more than 5,000 images and pleaded guilty to making and possessing indecent photographs. The judge described his activities as "evil and sordid".
Continue reading the main story   
Policing online abuse

    Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) set up in 2006 to bring online child sex offenders to court
    Combination of police powers with expertise from business and specialist charities
    Plan to absorb Ceop into National Crime Agency led to resignation of chief executive Jim Gamble in 2010

He was sentenced to two years in jail and ordered to sign the sex offenders register for 10 years.

In August 2003 he was in prison, in a wing for sex offenders and drug addicts. He could hear the threats and insults from prisoners in other parts of the jail. "Any chance the other prisoners got to shout at us they would. I was crying most nights."

In November that year he was transferred to HMP Whatton, a prison dedicated to treating sex offenders. He found the atmosphere less threatening and attempted to change his life. "I joined the choir and got involved in the Bible study group. I was trying to identify what I felt before and how the victims would have felt."

Previously, the largest UK investigation of online child abuse material had been Operation Cathedral, an inquiry into a paedophile ring called the Wonderland Club which resulted in the convictions of seven British-based men.

Dealing with cases such as Jonathan's and the sheer volume of Operation Ore was a task of an altogether different magnitude.

"It's an irony that this was called Landslide because it provided the police with an avalanche of data," says David Wall, professor of criminology at the University of Durham.
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    Suddenly the British police were given a whole lot of data which looked like quite conclusive evidence of wrongdoing"

David Wall, criminologist

"Very suddenly the British police were given a whole lot of data which looked like quite conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. They had to respond, but I'm not sure they had the full response capability."

Realising quickly they would have to prioritise suspects, the National Crime Squad began by dividing them into three categories. The top priority group - of about 1,200 names - included convicted paedophiles and those with access to children.

The second category was made up of those in positions of authority, such as police officers, and the third was those neither in authority nor involved with children.

Once identified, details of the "phase ones" were sent out first to local constabularies who took on responsibility for conducting the investigations. The Fraud Squad assumed the task in some forces where it was judged to have the greatest online expertise.

After months of preparation, the raids began in May 2002. Some 36 people were arrested in the initial swoop. At first it attracted little attention.

Operation Ore began to generate national headlines the following September when it led to the arrest of Det Con Brian Stevens, who had been a family liaison officer to the parents of Jessica Chapman, a 10-year-old murdered along with friend Holly Wells by Soham killer Ian Huntley.

Stevens was acquitted of possessing and distributing indecent images, although he was later jailed for providing a false alibi.

Subsequent raids attracted huge publicity. The arrests of professionals such as teachers, police officers and doctors were splashed across the national press. Newspapers began to speculate about how high up in society the inquiry would reach.

And then in January 2003 came the arrest of Pete Townshend. The Who guitarist said he had given his credit card details to a paedophile website because he was researching a book and insisted he had not downloaded any images. He accepted a police caution, and Ore claimed its first celebrity.

Others followed. In 2007, actor Chris Langham was jailed after the Ore investigation led officers to search his computer, where they found images of child abuse. Actor Adam Barker, son of comedian Ronnie Barker, was jailed for 12 months in October 2012. He had spent eight years on the run after his initial arrest.
Chris Langham    Pete Townshend
chris langham    pete townshend

Bafta-winning comedy star of People Like Us, The Thick of It and Not The Nine O'Clock News
   

Rock guitarist with The Who, writer of hits such as Pinball Wizard, Substitute and Won't Get Fooled Again

Found guilty in 2007 on 15 charges of downloading child pornography, and sentenced to 10 months in jail, reduced to six on appeal
   

Accepted a police caution in 2003 and was put on sex offenders

register for limited period, after admitting using his credit card to access a child pornography website

Langham has struggled to find work since his release: "Everyone wants to see me working again, but nobody wants to hire me," he told the Guardian last year
   

Townshend has never denied looking at the site but in his recent memoirs, he says he was researching child abuse online: "What I did was wrong and stupid... but my innocence is absolute"

By and large these men did not fit the profile of sex offenders hitherto portrayed in the media. Those who attracted the most attention tended to be successful and socially secure. A majority lived with a partner or were in a relationship.

"You can't look at someone and say they are a paedophile," says computer forensics expert Peter Sommer, visiting professor at De Montfort University's Cyber Security Centre and a witness in numerous Operation Ore trials. "They really do come from every section of society.

"But one of the effects of the internet is that it's far easier for paedophiles to meet in hidden places. Whereas before the paedophile might have been socially isolated, they are able to meet people like them so they think it's more normal."

Despite the high profile the investigation was attracting, there was evidence that the huge weight of cases was a problem for the authorities.

In May 2004, a report by the IPPR think tank found that just 1,000 of the UK's 140,000 police officers were trained to handle digital evidence at the basic level. Later the same year, Scotland's Chief Inspector of Constabulary warned the sheer scale of Ore was causing "significant" difficulties for forces.

"Police have accepted they were premature in publicising the existence of the Landslide database," Sommer says. "They were finding people were deleting stuff. In subsequent cases they have been much more careful."

Ministers provided extra funding. In April 2006, Ceop was launched and given responsibility for co-ordinating the inquiry. Under the leadership of Gamble, Ceop agreed a system whereby forces could share the burden of investigating cases with each other.

But for those working on it, the toll taken by the investigation was not purely about workload.

For many, the disturbing nature of the material they were investigating left deep scars.
Continue reading the main story   
A difficult job

    2009 study by University of New Hampshire looked at effect on US law enforcement officers of viewing child pornography
    Many reported experiencing personal, marital and work-related problems
    Issues included insomnia, stress, depression and weight gain
    40% of respondents thought they needed more mental health support

    Law Enforcement Work Exposure to child pornography (pdf file)

Every time a child cried out in the street, one detective would be reminded of the screams of victims in footage seized from offenders' computers. Civilian experts were also affected.

"There were times when I had to stop and go for a walk and clear my head because the material was fairly distressing," says Sommer.

"I became inured to the fact that there are people who look at this stuff. If I had got emotionally involved I would have ended up in a loony bin."

For some of those arrested, the shame of being labelled a paedophile, a sex offender - society's most reviled groups - was too much to bear.

In 2009, it was reported that the number of men who took their own lives was as high as 39.

There was much coverage of Commodore David White, who was stripped of his command of British forces in Gibraltar in January 2005 after he came under investigation. The following day he was found drowned in a swimming pool at his home. A coroner recorded an open verdict.

Many would have little sympathy for those accused of viewing images of children being abused. But it became clear that not all those caught up in the initial sweep were guilty.

On 25 February 2003, Robert Del Naja of the band Massive Attack was arrested. His home in Bristol was searched and his computer seized. The story was covered extensively in the British press. Exactly one month later, the charges against him were dropped.

Del Naja's details were on the Landslide database, but the musician was innocent. He had been the victim of credit card fraud. The issue of identity theft became the biggest controversy to dog Operation Ore.
Continue reading the main story   
The falsely accused
Jeremy and Faith Clifford

    Jeremy Clifford - pictured with his wife Faith - successfully sued the police for wrongful arrest
    He says he was a victim of identity theft
    A fraudulent credit card issued in his name had been used to pay Landslide

It was 06:40 on 30 October 2003 when Jeremy Clifford was woken by a knock on the door.

On his front step in Watford were three police officers. They had a warrant to search the house. They wanted to know where his computers were kept.

Shaken, he led them inside. The search team quickly began to open every drawer, cupboard and box. They rifled through all his photographs. The house was turned upside down.

The detectives did not say why he was being raided. But his wife spotted a sheet of paper carried by one of the officers. It said they were looking for indecent images of children.

She recalls her shock at seeing the phrase. "I just wanted to score right through it," she says.

There were no computers in the house. But at Clifford's wedding photography and camera equipment firm, computers, photographs and videotapes were seized.

Eventually he was taken to the police station and told he was accused of purchasing child abuse images. At first he felt indignant. But then the enormity of the charges facing him began to sink in.

"The shock hit me after they'd finished with me," Clifford, now 52, says. "I was in a very bad state by the time I got home. But it got worse and worse over the next few months."

His credit card had been used five times to pay Landslide. But Clifford claimed he was a victim of identity theft.

The case against him would be dropped before it came to trial, but not for another 18 months.

Detectives had found 10 thumbnail images of children - classed as category one, the lowest level on the scale - in the temporary internet files folder of a computer he had sold to a former business associate. A forensic expert later concluded these images had probably appeared as pop-up adverts without Clifford requesting them or even being aware they were stored on the machine.
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    It's the worst thing a man can be accused of - it's worse than murder"

Jeremy Clifford

In the time it took for the prosecution to come to a halt, however, Clifford spiralled into depression. He would lie in bed all day with the curtains closed. Eventually, his business failed.

Throughout, his greatest terror was that the allegations against him would be reported in the media. After each pre-trial court appearance, he and his wife - who never doubted his innocence - would scour the local papers to make sure nothing had been written about the case.

"That would have been the final straw," he says. "It's the worst thing a man can be accused of. It's worse than murder."

Eventually, in 2010, Clifford won £30,000 in damages and costs in excess of £750,000 at the High Court from Hertfordshire Constabulary for malicious prosecution.

"With regards to the matter of the constabulary being sued by Mr Clifford for malicious prosecution, we took legal advice to defend the action and went to court," a spokeswoman for Hertfordshire Constabulary says. "We were successful at the first trial - however the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial which we lost."

Since then Clifford has built up a new business and left his ordeal behind. His wife has written a book about the couple's brush with Operation Ore.

The issue of credit card fraud was the subject of a series of articles by the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell.

Campbell found evidence that the hosts of third-party webpages linked to from Landslide had used the portal to process payments to themselves from stolen cards.

When someone signed up to one of these sites via Landslide, the owners were passed 65% of the fee. But crucially, in the event of fraudulent credit card use being detected, Thomas Reedy was liable for any penalties.

In other words, if a credit card company tried to recoup funds from a fraudulent transaction, Reedy would have to pay rather than the fraudsters operating the third-party sites. Landslide became a magnet for fraud.

Indeed, Reedy's company had gone out of business in the weeks prior to the initial US raid because of the extent of suspicious payments.

Critics of Operation Ore argued that police had been too gung-ho in raiding so many properties without checking first whether images of abuse had actually been purchased. In contrast to Ore, the US Operation Avalanche resulted in around 100 arrests following 144 searches from a database of 35,000 transactions.

It is a charge vigorously contested by Ceop. Gamble calls the operation a "huge success" and blames a "nonsense conspiracy" theory for tarnishing its reputation. "I'm proud of Operation Ore today. And I'll be proud of it on the day I die."

Colleagues in the US point to the UK arrest figures with admiration, he argues. "They are puzzled why we were not applauded for what we did."
Continue reading the main story   
How should we treat offenders?

Convicted internet child abuse offenders tend to be referred to i-SOTP (internet sex offenders treatment programme), which involves six to nine months of group sessions. The stated purpose is to "increase the offenders' understanding of the impact of their offending".

Psychologist Dr Alison White told the Independent in 2010 that i-SOTP concentrated on the symptoms rather than the cause of internet child abuse: "People with personality dysfunction are notoriously difficult to treat and you are often looking at years of therapy."

In 2008, Libby Brooks in the Guardian commented on the lack of help for would-be offenders. "You can find whatever you want on the internet, apart from the help you need," she was told by one offender.

The websites Croga and Stop it now! offer help to people who are worried by their use of the internet, and for concerned friends and relatives.

In a 2007 statement to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, Gamble said that of more than 2,450 people "successfully held to account", 93% had admitted their guilt.

Where an individual's credit card details were found on the Landslide database but no child abuse pictures could be found on a suspect's computer, they were prosecuted on the lesser charge of inciting the Reedys to distribute indecent images.

There have been only 161 such cases, Gamble notes, and in 68% of these guilt had been admitted. He said that to the best of his knowledge, in all incitement cases "additional evidence beyond simple single credit card details have supported the prosecution".

Additionally, according to Sommer, the legal barriers to an unfair conviction were high.

"There could have been miscarriages," he says. "But essentially every case had to be put together by a police officer, it had to be agreed by the CPS."

Those critical of the inquiry questioned how many innocent men may have accepted cautions to avoid the trauma and publicity of a trial. It's a proposition that's impossible to quantify.

It could be said that Operation Ore's most significant achievement was drawing unprecedented attention to the variety of people who downloaded abuse images.

Certainly, claims about a wave of abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile have brought back memories of an earlier era - the 1960s and the 1970s - in which child abuse could flourish because it was so little discussed.

By the time Operation Ore was launched, paedophiles were arguably the UK's most feared and reviled group. In 2000, the News of the World's decision to name and shame convicted child sex abusers had been a landmark.

"Before Ore, we knew about child abuse," says Julia Davidson, professor of criminology at Kingston University and co-director of the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies.

"But we had these ideas about what perpetrators were like. The media had tended to focus on cases like Sarah Payne or Brady and Hindley."

As the Ore arrests mounted, the country began to confront the idea that vast numbers of paedophiles were not fringe outsiders like Roy Whiting and Sidney Cooke - child killers who conformed to the pre-Ore media template of the paedophile as a shabbily dressed oddball.

Instead, many of the Ore cases which attracted the most publicity involved outwardly respectable, ordinary-looking men with families, jobs and friends.
Continue reading the main story   
"Start Quote

    Instead of pay-per-view sites as with Ore, what you are seeing is a lot more informal networks"

Julia Davidson Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies

If anything, the notion that those with an unhealthy interest in children could not be pigeonholed and identified by sight was a more terrifying notion.

In the early 2000s, the very phrase "child pornography" was increasingly shunned by experts in the fields of social work and child protection.

Instead, professionals preferred blunter terms - "child abuse images" or "images of child abuse" - to deny it the legitimacy of association with adult material which, like it or not, was being consumed by millions every day.

"There's been a shift in language," Davidson adds. "Previously, there was the attitude that it's just a photograph.

"Now there's a recognition that these pictures involve a child being brutalised, raped, exploited - and I think Ore was a catalyst for that."

Within the space of a few years, thousands of case studies have emerged of individuals who were inclined to look at indecent images of children.

"You have several categories of offender," Sommer says. "There are those also involved in physical offending, who might have thousands of these images on their computer.

"Then you have those people who are curious about it. These are the people who might also look for pictures of Princess Diana in Paris after the accident. But at the end of the day, every image is a child being abused and creates a market for further abuse."
Man and computer - illustration by Nick Lowndes

Nonetheless, it is not only the authorities who have learned lessons.

Those with an interest in viewing the kind of material targeted by Ore began to adapt their behaviour too.

The investigation made paedophiles more circumspect about their behaviour, Davidson says.

"Instead of pay-per-view sites as with Ore, what you are seeing is a lot more informal networks," she adds.

"They are producing home-made images, sometimes of their own children. They're conscious that if they use credit cards it's far more traceable."

Then there are the paedophiles like Jonathan who got caught in Operation Ore. "It cost me my life, really. Everything I held dear was utterly devastated."

When he got out of prison he was not allowed to work with children, a role that he enjoyed and valued. Today he teaches English as a foreign language to adults. He says his colleagues know about his past and have given him a second chance.

The condition of his licence means he is still not allowed to download anything from a computer that is not directly connected with his job.

He is glad he got caught. He had tried to stop looking at images of children many times and always gone back to the sites. They were addictive, he says.
Continue reading the main story   
What the law says

    Protection of Children Act 1978 makes it an offence to take, or permit to be taken, any indecent image of a child, or to distribute or show such an image
    And Section 160 of Criminal Justice Act 1988 states it is an offence to have any indecent photo of a child in one's possession
    Similar provisions are made in Section 52 of Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982
    And Protection of Children (Northern Ireland) Order 1978

"In that sense I was quite grateful the arrest happened. I would have stayed like that. I wouldn't have been able to break free."

He says he hasn't been seriously tempted to look at images of children since his release. "I've been in the clear for 10 years."

The odd temptation comes up when watching a film, but he says he prays and can control it.

He sometimes wonders what his life would have been like if he'd been able to continue in his old job. But the rupture in his life has led to healing. He says he will always feel regret and remorse for what he did. But the shame has mostly gone.

"I know I'm in a better place. I'm not earning nearly as much money but I don't have all that guilt."

He is thankful for the support people have given him. His parents have stuck by him.

Jonathan puts his ability to turn things around down to his religious faith. "Without Christ in my life I would've probably ended up like many men in my situation and taken my life."

Operation Ore was a unique event. The chain of circumstances that caused the Landslide data to fall into the hands of the British police will almost certainly never be repeated.

It was a product of an earlier internet age, one whose frontier spirit was liberating for its early adopters and yet in which child abusers and their enablers assumed they were untouchable.

While it made British parents more aware of the web's dangers, it also fuelled a widespread cultural paranoia about the supposed dark side of the new digital age.

Operation Ore may be over. But its legacy persists. It was the event above all others that robbed British society of its innocence about the internet.

Illustrations by Nick Lowndes

[crippled_avenger]

Bigelow's mesmerizing post-9/11 nightmare
Pick of the week: No, the riveting "Zero Dark Thirty" doesn't glorify torture — its real agenda may be darker still
By Andrew O'Hehir

    more

Topics: Movies, Torture, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow, Action movies, Thrillers, Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies, Editor's Pick, Entertainment News
Pick of the week: Kathryn Bigelow's mesmerizing post-9/11 nightmareJessica Chastain in "Zero Dark Thirty"

I do not believe that Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's mesmerizing, operatic and profoundly troubling "Zero Dark Thirty" offers any apology or justification for torture, and certainly does not "glorify" it, to use Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald's term. But it's important to recognize that the people who think it does are responding to the moral ambiguity of the movie, which pervades not just the question of torture as an instrument of American policy but its entire portrayal of the CIA's obsessive and insanely expensive hunt for Osama bin Laden. Here's the sense in which they're not wrong: What "Zero Dark Thirty" has to say about torture and many other things is not entirely clear, and what you see in it depends on what you bring with you. That moral ambiguity will drive some viewers nuts, but in my view it is also the quality that makes "Zero Dark Thirty" something close to a masterpiece.

Bigelow and Boal show us "what happened" in the secret history of spycraft that led from Sept. 11, 2001, to the bin Laden raid on May 1, 2011 – meaning their selective interpretation and dramatization of what happened, to be sure – without offering any explicit commentary or steering us toward a clear moral verdict. In our fractious political climate that makes people jumpy and anxious, and often overeager to proclaim that such a work can have a dangerous effect on weaker-minded viewers (but presumably not themselves). Indeed, one can argue that the mode of studied objectivity in both "Zero Dark Thirty" and the previous Boal-Bigelow film, the Oscar-winning "Hurt Locker," is both a philosophical stance and a narrative tactic, calculated to fuel debate and controversy. I am not proposing, by the way, that Boal and Bigelow are actually "neutral" and have no politics or no opinions, since I don't believe that's likely or even possible. It's just that those things are not written, Oliver Stone-style, on the surface of the work.

Despite all the recent headlines and largely uninformed controversy, only a small portion of "Zero Dark Thirty" concerns the black-site interrogations where torture was used. That looms large in discussions of the film partly because Bigelow throws us, and the driven young CIA redhead named Maya (Jessica Chastain) who will be the protagonist, into the deep end right away. After a haunting prologue in which we hear audiotapes from the collapsing World Trade Center over a black screen, the first thing we actually see is Maya's arrival at a secret Pakistani facility where an interrogator named Dan (Jason Clarke) from the CIA's "Saudi group" (i.e., the al-Qaida specialists) is working over an Arab detainee named Ammar (Reda Kateb), who may have been a mid-level al-Qaida moneyman.

Ammar gets pretty close to the full monty: He is beaten, sexually humiliated, deprived of sleep, locked in a tiny cabinet, subjected to hours of heavy metal cranked to 11 and, when they really want to break him, repeatedly waterboarded (albeit without a board). It's dreadful to watch, even in dramatic form, and it poses the film's central moral challenge right at the outset: One atrocity (meaning the 9/11 attacks) has provoked another. We have taken Dick Cheney's famous taxi ride to the dark side, in search of justice or vengeance or whatever payback term you like. How has that worked out for us? What are the consequences of embracing not just the enemy's tactics but the enemy's essentially nihilistic worldview, in which the standards of universal morality that supposedly formed the basis of the Western world's liberal revolutions simply do not matter?

Bigelow and Boal did not invent this problem out of nothing, people, and it's not limited to the 9/11 era or the United States of America. Every single powerful nation throughout history, whether Western and supposedly enlightened or not, has used torture and brutality and state terror as instruments of policy, pretty much whenever it convinced itself it needed to. What has changed since, say, the end of the 18th century is that the great powers are now compelled to pay lip service to higher ideals and pretend that they never do such things, or to explain them away as aberrations perpetrated by rogue elements. When all else fails, there's always the appeal to patriotism, still the last refuge of scoundrels, as it was to Samuel Johnson. We had to break the rules to "protect the homeland," as characters repeatedly say in "Zero Dark Thirty," which was approximately the rhetoric used to justify British torture in Northern Ireland, French torture in Algeria, American torture in Latin America and the Philippines, and on and on. Not an uplifting perspective on the topic, I know.

Back to the movie: Whether Ammar offers up any useful new information pointing toward Osama bin Laden, and what exactly Dan gets out of him through torture, are deliberately murky plot points. Some commentators have made it sound as though "Zero Dark Thirty" offers a clear cause-and-effect relationship, like an outtake episode of Fox's odious "24": They torture the hell out of some guy, he gives up Osama, the Navy SEALs bring death from above to that now legendary compound in Abbottabad, and it's rah-rah USA! But the story this movie spins isn't anything like that, and we're a long way from idiotic ticking-bomb scenarios.

At most, Boal's screenplay suggests that one detail emerged from this interrogation that would become important a long way down the line – but that it was actually information the CIA already possessed from other sources. Even that vague connection is contentious, since virtually everything about this story is. I suspect Boal's intention is more like this: Torture was absolutely employed by CIA interrogators on presumed al-Qaida detainees, and the people who practiced it apparently believed it was working. Therefore it's an important part of the story whether or not it really produced "actionable intel." "Zero Dark Thirty" absolutely does not imply that torture interrogations led directly to the shadowy bin Laden contact who in turn led the CIA to "the Sheik's" Pakistani hiding place. It's just as plausible to say that "Zero Dark Thirty" suggests that torture became a grotesque and unproductive sideshow that gummed up the works and slowed down the more normal forms of surveillance, coercion and subterfuge that constitute intelligence-gathering.

What I haven't said until now is that "Zero Dark Thirty" is a sweeping and magnificent work of cinematic craft, by far the best film of Bigelow's career. I'm not suggesting that the moral and ethical deconstruction doesn't matter, but the movie is much bigger than that, and while you're watching it you'll be too swept up in the moody, absorbing, doom-haunted narrative to focus on the picayune details. Although Chastain's Maya remains at or near the center throughout – an intense, obsessive-compulsive woman with no known boyfriend or family or hometown — this is a kaleidoscopic voyage with many strands and many characters, which moves from remote Afghan military bases to a hotel bombing in Islamabad to a freighter docked in Poland to the corridors of CIA headquarters in Virginia to a luxury car dealership in Kuwait City. (Standouts in the large cast include Jennifer Ehle as a more senior CIA woman, Mark Duplass as a surveillance technician, Joel Edgerton as the SEAL squadron leader and James Gandolfini as then-CIA head Leon Panetta, almost the only character with a known public identity.)

This movie reminds me, more than anything else, of Olivier Assayas' tremendous miniseries "Carlos," which is also a semi-journalistic epic of recent history with many interlocking real-life pieces, as well as a story about a worldwide manhunt. (The presence of Édgar Ramírez, who played the eponymous terrorist for Assayas, in a supporting role here as a military-intelligence tough guy, feels like an explicit nod.) It's not surprising but at least a little ironic that "Carlos" too was attacked for withholding moral judgment, but from the other side. I remember numerous angry comments from readers who clearly hadn't seen it, most of them presuming that if a French director had made a film about a famous '70s terrorist it must be a radical-chic hagiography.

In this case – well, in both "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Carlos," actually – the moral dimension is woven into the story all the way along, and whether you want to respond to the film as a jingoistic celebration or an indictment of America's role in the world is up to you. I would argue that along this journey and right up to its end point, Bigelow and Boal compel us to engage a series of difficult questions about the tactics, strategy, morality and larger meaning of both the search for bin Laden and the overall American response to 9/11. Certainly the issue of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques under the Bush administration, in violation of both international law and basic standards of human decency, is central to that discussion.

But so, in fact, is the Osama raid itself (which arguably got Barack Obama reelected). Bigelow, cinematographer Greig Fraser and the production design team of Jeremy Hindle stage the Abbottabad raid, in the last half-hour or so of the film, as a supremely tense and exciting mini-masterwork of action cinema. I have no doubt that many or most American audience members will respond with enthusiasm, cheering and so on. Whether that's really the appropriate response is another matter; I've heard audience members cheering the killings in "Dirty Harry" or "The Godfather" or "Unforgiven" too. As Open Salon blogger and critic Scott Mendelson pointed out in a pair of recent tweets, if the commentary-free depiction of torture in "Zero Dark Thirty" introduces a degree of moral instability, so too does the depiction of American troops staging a night raid on a private home in a sovereign nation with which we're not at war, and shooting a bunch of apparent civilians who put up little or no resistance.

But as I've made clear by now, I believe that engaging with "Zero Dark Thirty" on narrow, quasi-legalistic grounds – asking whether it depicts torture as "useful," and then debating whether such a depiction amounts to an endorsement – is missing the forest for the trees. (Does Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" endorse political assassination? It's a tactic that's known to "work," and the conspirators had generally good intentions.) Whether or not they ever expressed it in these terms, Bigelow and Boal have tried to measure the hidden moral dimensions of an existential crisis that has eaten away at the American soul, and at the larger transatlantic liberal consensus that has governed the world since the Cold War. I would suggest that while Islamic fundamentalism is a dangerous force in many places in the world, the real enemy in this crisis is our own fear, along with our paranoid, quasi-religious sense of our mission in the world. Look at Fraser's last shots of Maya, alone and uncertain, at the end of "Zero Dark Thirty," and then come back and tell me this movie is hyper-patriotic torture porn.

Every viewer will react to this film's conundrums in his or her own way: It is not merely possible but certain that people who do want to apologize for torture will conclude that the film supports their view. I believe those people are wrong, but then, I believe they're wrong about lots of other things too. We're coming to the movie from different places, and will leave that way too. "Zero Dark Thirty" holds a dark mirror before us; if what we see when we stare into it looks distorted and monstrous, it should also look familiar.

"Zero Dark Thirty" opens Dec. 19 in limited release, with wider national release to follow in January.

[crippled_avenger]

Two Cheers for Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Scenes

    By Spencer Ackerman
    12.10.12
    5:49 PM

Jessica Chastain plays the CIA's "Maya" in Zero Dark Thirty, a film unfairly maligned as pro-torture. Photo courtesy Sony/Columbia Pictures

Updated 8:58 a.m., December 11

One scene features a bloodied, disoriented and humiliated man strapped to a wall with his pants around his ankles. A second scene depicts the same man having liquid forcibly poured down his throat; later, he's shoved into a box that could barely hold your stereo. And all of this takes place in the first 45 minutes or so of Zero Dark Thirty, the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It's enough to make you wretch. It's arguably the best and most important part of the movie.

Kathryn Bigelow's new film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden begins with an unsparing, nauseating and frighteningly realistic look at how the CIA tortured many people and reaped very little intelligence. Never before has a movie grappled with post-9/11 torture the way Zero Dark Thirty does. The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden's downfall occurs after the torture has ended.

You wouldn't know this from the avalanche of commentary greeting the film. Bigelow is being presented as a torture apologist, and it's a bum rap. David Edelstein of New York says her movie borders on the "morally reprehensible" for presenting "a case for the efficacy of torture." The New York Times' Frank Bruni suspects that Dick Cheney will give the film two thumbs up. Bruni is probably right, since defenders of torture have been known to latch onto any evidence they suspect will vindicate them as American heroes. But that's not Zero Dark Thirty.

Bigelow instead presents a graphic depiction of what declassified CIA documents indicate the torture program really was. (A caveat: The CIA has actively blocked disclosure into that program, going so far as to destroy video recordings of it.) The first detainee we meet, in 2003, is a bruised and mentally unstable man forced to stay awake by having his arms strapped to thick ropes suspended from the walls of his undisclosed torture chamber. Or, in the bureaucratic language of former Justice Department official Steven Bradbury: "The primary method of sleep deprivation involves the use of shackling to keep the detainee awake."

Later, the detainee — apparently Amar al-Baluchi, nephew of 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or based on him — is shown to be kept hooded in that position, in a dark room while deafening music blasts. (Specifically, "Pavlov's Dogs" by cerebral early-'90s New York hardcore band Rorschach.) He is interrupted by his captor, CIA agent "Dan," who informs him: "When you lie to me, I hurt you" and that "partial information" will be treated as a lie. The detainee is stripped from the waist down to be humiliated in front of a woman CIA agent — the film's protagonist, Maya; more on her in a second — before being stuffed into a wooden box the size of a child's dresser. That would be the "confinement box," one of the earliest torture techniques the CIA used on an al-Qaida detainee known as Abu Zubaydah. (The agency wanted to put insects in it, to heighten Abu Zubaydah's fear levels.)

The film goes on like this for about 45 brutal minutes. "Uncooperative" detainees are held down by large men and doused through a towel with water until they spew it up. (There's no "boarding" in this "waterboarding.) Helpless detainees are shown with rheumy eyes, desperate for the torture to stop, while their captors promise them nourishment and keep their promises by forcing Ensure down their throats through a funnel. Amar al-Baluchi, mocked for defecating on himself, is stripped and forced to wear a dog collar while Dan rides him, to alert the detainee to his helplessness.

These are not "enhanced interrogation techniques," as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, "Maya," a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn't possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier's mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it's a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

Nor does Bigelow let the CIA off the hook for the torture. "You agency people are sick," a special operator tells Dan. Dan, the chief torturer of the movie, is shown as not only a sadist but a careerist. "You don't want to be the last one holding the dog collar when the oversight committee comes," he tells Maya before decamping to Washington. Other CIA bureaucrats are shown sneering at the idea of canceling the torture program — more fearful of congressional accountability than of losing bin Laden. Maya is more of a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn't object to it — "This is not a normal prison. You choose how you will be treated," she tells a detainee — and Maya is the hero of the film.

"It's a movie, not a documentary," screenwriter Mark Boal told The New Yorker. "We're trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the C.I.A. program." That quote has electrified the internet as a statement of intent to gussy up the importance of torture. But the fact is torture was part of the CIA's post-9/11 agenda: dispassionate journalists like Mark Bowden presents it as such in his excellent recent book.

Zero Dark Thirty does not present torture as a silver bullet that led to bin Laden; it presents torture as the ignorant alternative to that silver bullet. Were a documentarian making the film, there would surely be less torture in the movie: CNN's Peter Bergen considered an early cut of those scenes overwrought in their gruesomeness and reminds that senators who have investigated the CIA torture program reject the idea that torture led to bin Laden.

At the same time, the film makes viewers come to grips with what Dick Cheney euphemistically called the "dark side" of post-9/11 counterterrorism. Meanwhile, former Bush administration aide Philip Zelikow, who termed the torture a "war crime" in a recent Danger Room interview, will probably find the movie more amenable than Cheney will. What endures on the screen are scenes that can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American.

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam HOWLING, policijski triler koji je režirao Yu Ha sa čijim radovima do sada nisam imao većih iskustava ali spada među iskusnije reditelje. HOWLING je zanimljiv film na liniji američkih krimića kao što su WHITE DOG i THEY ONLY KILL THEIR MASTERS u kojima se životinje koriste kao dresirane ubice.

U ovom filmu, imamo priču o iskusnom detektivu kog igra Kang-ho Song koji donosi svoju već standardnu personu u lik več potrošenog i frustriranog detektiva koji mora da radi sa mladom inspektorkom na seriji misterioznih ubistava. U seksističkim okolnostima odeljenja za ubistva u kome se on već oseća izostavljeno i preskočeno jer nije napredovao u skladu sa svojim ambicijama, novi partner samo podiže tenziju.

Yu Ha ima dobro postavljenu priču koja ne donosi puno iznenađenja ali donosi dosta pošten odnos prema već uspostavljenim konvencijama police procedurala i nudi sasvim dovoljne svežine da nađe svoje mesto u globalnoj ponudi ove vrste filmova. Problem je samo u režiji koju Yu Ha u mnogim aspektima bazora na poentiranju i infodumpovanju već očigldnih stvari po čemu HOWLING često zaliči na televiziju i čini se ostaje lokalan bez perspektive za crossover na zapadnim tržištima što je šteta jer ovo je film koji možda ne spada u sam krem južnokorejskog repertoarskog filma ali je u samom materijalu zarobio jedno mnogo bolje ostvarenje koje je Yu Ha nije uspeo da plasira.

Čini mi se da HOWLING ima jako velike perspektive za rimejk.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

[Meho Krljic]

Kriple, mrzi me da pretražujem, jesi li ti odgledao ove dve sezone koje postoje serije Episodes? Mislim, ne verujem da gajiš istu nježnu emociju prema Mattu LeBlancu kao ja, ali pošto je postavka serije interesantna (serija o snimanju serije) i ima jednu bartonfinkovsku đavaosku crtu razotrkivanja holivuckog tamnog andrbelija, mislim da bi bilo prilično up your alley.

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam prvu sezonu. Ne volim Le Blanca ali volim Mangana. Ipak, nije mi se dopalo. Od tih serija o serijama ova mi je najslabija jer je previse iskarikirana, pa mi samim tim nije bile dovoljno zanimljiva.

[Meho Krljic]

Oh, u drugoj se vidi LeBlanc skoro potpuno nag. Ja sam raspamećen.

[Meho Krljic]

Senators call 'Zero Dark Thirty' 'grossly inaccurate' 

A torture scene takes place at the outset of "Zero Dark Thirty" as audiences are first introduced to Maya, a CIA operative played by Jessica Chastain. As the scene plays out in the film -- already nominated for four Golden Globes -- an uncooperative, hungry, beaten-up detainee is eventually forced to withstand water being poured over his face as it is muffled by a thick cloth, causing him to gargle and choke. Maya administers the water as her male colleagues hold the man in place.
The scene depicts a tactic formerly employed by the U.S. to get detainees with suspected links to terrorism to talk -- known as waterboarding. The film, which covers an array of methods used by the CIA to hunt down terrorists, does make several references to the government's use of torture as a tool. The film also covers the changing political climate as President Obama took office and banned waterboarding. At one point Maya indicates the ban seriously thwarted efforts to hunt down the bad guys, including, Osama bin Laden.
The film's seeming endorsement of the practice and its depiction of the widespread torturing of detainees has three senators in Washington expressing their "deep disappointment," calling for Sony to state that the film is a work of fiction. As of now, Sony isn't budging.
[Related: Jessica Chastain's Maya is the toughest female character of 2012]
The chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, along with Senate Armed Service committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain wrote a letter to Sony, calling "Zero Dark Thirty" a "fictional" film that is "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden." The letter goes on to urge the movie studio to state that the film is, in fact, a work of fiction, then later bullets out where they say the movie got it wrong.
From the senators:

We understand that the film is fiction, but it opens with the words "based on first-hand accounts of actual events" and there has been significant media coverage of the CIA's cooperation with the screenwriters. As you know, the film graphically depicts CIA officers repeatedly torturing detainees and then credits these detainees with providing critical lead information on the courier that led to the Usama Bin Laden. Regardless of what message the filmmakers intended to convey, the movie clearly implies that the CIA's coercive interrogation techniques were effective in eliciting important information related to a courier for Usama Bin Laden. We have reviewed CIA records and know that this is incorrect.

[Related: 'Zero Dark Thirty' presents an unflinching look at the mission to find bin Laden]
Here are specific bones the senators have to pick with the film:

   
• The CIA did not first learn about the existence of the Usama Bin Laden courier from CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the CIA discover the courier's identity from detainees subjected to coercive techniques. No detainee reported on the courier's full name or specific whereabouts, and no detainee identified the compound in which Usama Bin Laden was hidden. Instead, the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.
• Information to support this operation was obtained from a wide variety of intelligence sources and methods. CIA officers and their colleagues throughout the Intelligence Community sifted through massive amounts of information, identified possible leads, tracked them down, and made considered judgments based on all of the available intelligence.
• The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.

Sony's reply has simply been to refer the senators to a prior statement issued by "Zero Dark Thirty" director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. But the statement fails to address any of the specifics the senators have raised. It reads:

The film shows that no single method was necessarily responsible for solving the manhunt, nor can any single scene taken in isolation fairly capture the totality of efforts the film dramatizes. One thing is clear: the single greatest factor in finding the world's most dangerous man was the hard work and dedication of the intelligence professionals who spent years working on this global effort. We encourage people to see the film before characterizing it.

 

The filmmakers also make mention of "a variety of controversial practices and intelligence methods that were used in the name of finding bin Laden," via Sony.
While Maya does express her frustration over the waterboarding ban in the film, at the end of the day, she was ultimately successful in her mission to hunt down bin Laden in spite of it.
The senators are not the only ones criticizing Bigelow and Boal for taking artistic license. CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen, essentially agreeing with the senators, says the film "distorts the story" and is a "misleading picture that coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al Qaeda detainees - such as waterboarding, physical abuse and sleep deprivation - were essential to finding bin Laden." Other journalists have raised similar questions and have predicted the debate will only amplify as the film opens wide in January. It is out now in limited release and came close to breaking box office records -- indicating the torture debate around the film isn't going away any time soon.

[crippled_avenger]

To je dosta velika polemika, narocito je zakuvao onaj tekst u Guardianu koji je je pisao tip bez gledanja filma ali na osnovu analize medijskih reakcija. Mada, vidim da moj dobrotvor Spencer Ackerman u Wiredu hvali preciznost filma...

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam WOOCHI Dong Hoon-Choija, juznokorejskog specijaliste za repertoarske spektakle razlicitog profila, ali mahom lokalnog dometa. WOOCHI je film koji je u nekoliko navrata nadomak da zavredi crossover van Juzne Koreje, ali upravo greske samog Dong Hoona ga vracaju u lokalne okvire. Ovaj svojevrsni rip-off francuskog spektakla LES VISITEURS smesten je u milje taoistickih bogova, goblina i carobnjaka koji intrigu iz proslosti prenose u sadasnjost, u svet u kome se tesko snalaze jer su vekovima bili zatoceni.

WOOCHI je u nekoliko navrata i u velikom broju resenje prilicno svez, ako imamo u vidu da se oslanja na vec dosta trosenu premisu, medjutim Dong Hoon-Choi u prelomnim momentima pokazuje nesigurnost. Ona se iskazuje ne samo kroz neka zbunjujuca rediteljska resenja na nivou montaze i vodjenja price vec i na planu uticaja koje Dong Hoon uvodi u svoj film. Jedna od zanimljivih karakteristika juznokorejskog repertoarskog filma je to sto reditelji mahom rade u nekoliko zanrova i mali broj se profilise za samo jedan zanr. Moguce je da takva situacija navodi reditelje da se trude i skupe sve sto znaju i misle da treba da pokazu na jdnom mestu. WOOCHI je bez sumnje bio prilicno ambiciozan film ali Dong Hoon ga je odveo predaleko u svom showcaseu.

To je steta, jer u fazama kada je fokusiran, Dong Hoon nudi jedan prilicno dobar film, ali sa trajanjem od 135 minuta i dosta lutanja, WOOCHI nije uspeo da u dovoljnoj meri zavredi paznju van lokalnih okvira i ostavi neki znacajniji trag.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam MORTELLE RANDONNEE Clauda Millera, adaptaciju romana Marc Boehma koju su napisali otac i sin Audiard. Sudeći po špici, otac Michel je imao veću ulogu u nastanku ovog scenarija nego sin Jacques pa ipak ne može se izbeći jedno "autorsko" poređenje ovog scenarija upravo sa kasnijim Jacquesovim režijama. Naime, sličan karakter opsesivnog "detektiva" koji prati trag zločina iz intimnih razloga, Audiard ima u filmu REGARDE LES HOMMES TOMBER, s tim što u tom filmu postoji znatno radikalniji tretman filmskog vremena i odnos među likovima je baziran na homoerotizmu koji ima više veze sa Jean Genetom nego Stuartom Kaminskym.  Zatim, slična potreba junaka da komentariše radnju prisutna je u još nekim literarnim adaptacijama koje je radio Jacques Audiard od kojih je ona sa psom u BAXTERu najradikalnija i najfunkcionalnija. Claude Miller preuzima klasične noir monologe, kojima pisci daju atmosferu priči i dopunjuju informacije i plasira ih kao replike koje junak izgovara u kadru, bez jasne motivacije. Uz još neke "specifičnosti", MORTELLE RANDONNEE se uklapa u pretpostavku Davida Bordwella iz seminalnog eseja o poetici art-house filma u kojoj zastupa tezu da autori sa umetničkim ambicijama često iskoračuju iz konvencija repertoarskog filma koji krase pravilna inscenacija, uverljivost, funckionalnost priče i likova itd. ukoliko je to izraz njihove poetike i specifičnog odnosa prema svetu, odnosno da postoje "loši filmovi koji su umetnički vredni". I tom tezom, Bordwell svakako da objašnjava sve one autore koji su "umetničku snagu" svojih filmova bazirali na pretpostavci da je samo u umetnosti greška, odnosno odstupanje od uspostavljenih konvencija, dozvoljena i može rezultirati uspešnim delom, čak i nečim od vrednijima od onoga što se radi po postulatima.

Claude Miller vrlo očigledno svojim "odstupanjima" od uverljiviosti situacija i likova pokušava da se nametne kao "umetnik" u odnosu na ovu priču, ali je samo deo tih intervencija uspešan, a one koje nisu stvaraju utisak da je reč o delu koje je pretenciozno bez pokrića. Naravno, imajući u vidu Chabrola i njegove brojne filmove, sasvim je sigurno da je Claude Miller imao tradiciju na koju je mogao da se osloni.

Michel Serrault igra detektiva koji postaje opsednut mladom femme fatale koja zavodi muškarce a potom ih ubija i nalazi nove. U njoj on prepoznaje svoju kćer sa kojom je odavno izgubio kontakt, a vremenom počinje da veruje kako bi ta mlada žena zapravo zaista mogla biti njegova ćerka. Devojku igra Isabelle Adjani koja Milleru više služi kao lutka nego kao karakterna glumica i Serrault nosi pretežni "glumački" teret.

MORTELLE RANDONNEE je vrlo intrigantan film, ali Millerova iskliznuča u pretenziju ga devalviraju i čine nekonzistentnim. Savršeno uverljive i čak istinski napete scene se smenjuju sa trapavom ironijom koje nema puno ali je ima sasvim dovoljno da poremeti ravnotežu filma.

Čini se da postoje neki slojevi priče koji ni Miller ni scenaristi nisu u dovoljnoj meri razradili, kao što je recimo biseksualnost glavne junakinje koja se jednom pojavi ali ne zaigra značajnu ulogu.

Čini mi se da je Audiard u rediteljskom opusu na mnogo zreliji način oporavio francuski krimić, vraćajući da realističkim korenima i dodajući mu mistiku umesto ironije kao nadogradnju, naročito insistirajući na snažnim seksualnim impulsima koji vezuju likove i koji su stalno na finoj liniji između Kaminskog i Geneta. Istorijski progres unutaž žanra se stoga može prepoznati upravo u njegovom radu i čini mi se da neke od stvari koje su ostale nerazrađene poput tog dosta snažno biseksualnog motiva deluju kao nešto što bi Jacques mnogo bolje iskoristio od "matoraca" koji sa tim nisu znali šta da rade.

MORTELLE RANDONNEE je prepun devjacija u odnosu na evoluciju žanra i donosi dosta ćorsokaka, ipak ovaj rad iz 1983. godine je bitan film za žanr i značajan scenaristički doprinos Audiardovom opusu iako bi se po špici reklo da je on na ovom filmu bio sporedni pisac.

* * * / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Alex Gibney

Filmmaker
GET UPDATES FROM Alex Gibney

Like
2
Zero Dark Thirty's Wrong and Dangerous Conclusion
Posted: 12/21/2012 10:21 am
React
Inspiring
Funny
Hot
Scary
Outrageous
Amazing
Weird
Crazy
Follow
Osama bin Laden , Torture , Harsh Interrogations , Kathryn Bigelow , Mark Boal , CIA , Zero Dark Thirty , Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow , Zero Dark Thirty Osama Bin Laden , Zero Dark Thirty Torture , Entertainment News

share this story
63
74
8
Submit this story

It's difficult for one filmmaker to criticize another. That's a job best left to critics. However, in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film -- torture -- is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film. I am not alone in that view. Yesterday, Senators Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein and John McCain wrote a letter to Michael Lynton, the Chairman of Sony Pictures, accusing the studio of misrepresenting the facts and "perpetuating the myth that torture is effective," and asking for the studio to correct the false impression created by the film. The film conveys the unmistakable conclusion that torture led to the death of bin Laden. That's wrong and dangerously so, precisely because the film is so well made.

Let me say, as many others have, that the film is a stylistic masterwork, an inspiration in terms of technique from the lighting, camera, acting and viscerally realistic production and costume design. Also, as a screen story, it is admirable for its refusal to funnel the hunt for bin Laden into a series of movie clichés -- love interests, David versus Goliath struggles, etc. More than that, the film does an admirable job of showing how complex was the detective work that led to the death of bin Laden: a combination of tips from foreign intelligence, sleuthing through old files, monitoring signals from emails and cell phones (SIGINT) and mining human intelligence on the ground (HUMINT). It's all the more infuriating therefore, because the film is so attentive to the accuracy of details -- including the mechanism of brutal interrogations -- that it is so sloppy when it comes to portraying the efficacy of torture. That may seem like a small thing but it is not. Because when we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture "got" bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good "end" can justify brutal "means."

But torture did not lead us to bin Laden. For other analyses of the way the factual record diverges from Boal/Bigelow version, I recommend pieces by Jane Mayer and Peter Bergen, who are far more experienced journalists than I. In addition, one can also refer to the press release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, which concludes that, following the examination of more than six million pages of records from the Intelligence Community, the CIA did not obtain its first clues about the identity of bin Laden's courier from "CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques."

I want to focus my concern on the way in which the film is fundamentally reckless when it comes to the subject of torture. It's skillful, but not profound. The reason for this is threefold.

1) The very style of the film

Beautifully lit, the film often shot with a handheld camera to emphasize the cinematic urgency of a cinema verite documentary, which lends a false sense of "truthiness" to the narrative. This is one of the reasons I bristled when Mark Boal told Dexter Filkins that he shouldn't be held responsible for the content of the film because ZD30 is "a movie not a documentary." Well, if the notion of a documentary is so distasteful, why shoot it like one?

There are other mistakes in that careless remark. It implies that because "movies" (unlike Boal, I would include documentaries, for better and for worse, in that category) have an obligation to entertain, they don't have to be nitpickers for accuracy. Yet, on the other hand, Bigelow says that this film is a "journalistic account." So which one is it? You can't have it both ways. After all, ZD30 is being promoted as a riveting and truthful account of the killing of UBL. Would it be as appealing to viewers if it were "just a movie" about the hunt for fictional terrorist named "Osama bin Bad Guy?"

Every film is faced with the enemy of time. Only so much story can fit into the 90-150 minutes of time that moviegoers are willing to stay in their seats. Naturally, compression is necessary. So are the exclusion and amalgamation of characters so that the viewer does not become bewildered. To paraphrase Werner Herzog, filmmakers don't need to pursue a bookkeeper's truth in which every figure is accounted for. Rather they can seek a "poetic truth" is which essential meaning is revealed to viewers. But it's a cop-out for Boal and Bigelow to say they shouldn't be held to account for the meaning of their film because "it's just a movie," and/or because it's a "journalistic account." In the context of the final result, neither statement is credible. When it comes to torture, the film fails the truth test for both accountants and poets.

2) The Truth of the Matter

ZD30 opens in darkness, with the soundtrack haunted by the voices of victims and rescue workers on 9/11. Then the film cuts to a CIA "black site," where a man named Ammar is being tortured by a CIA agent named Dan (played by Jason Clarke) while another agent, Maya (well acted by Jessica Chastain) looks on. For me, along with the very ending, this was one of the best moments in the film. The juxtaposition of the agony of 9/11 with the payback that followed -- waterboarding detainees, walking them around in dog collars (recall Lyndie England) and stuffing them in small plywood boxes -- perfectly captured a bitter poetic truth about how members of the Bush Administration responded to tragedy. They built a hard-hearted and soft-headed program of state-sanctioned torture that was likely motivated by revenge, rather than legal precedents, moral principles and well-tested, tough-minded lawful techniques.

So give points to Boal and Bigelow for not pussyfooting around. They make it clear that the CIA tortured people as part of a "detainee program." But what's distressing -- given that tough-minded beginning -- is that the filmmakers don't ever question the efficacy of torture. We don't see how corrupting it was, how many mistakes were made. Instead, the narrative engine of Boal's detective story is kick-started by torture. In the film Dan uses a trick and the implied threat of torture to force "Ammar" to reveal the nickname of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a man who ultimately helped lead investigators to bin Laden.

Mark Boal has responded to critics by saying that, in the film, the actionable intelligence from Ammar, was obtained "over the civilized setting of a lunch." But that's disingenuous. Because the conversation occurs after brutal torture, the implication is that Ammar provides information because he doesn't want to trade his hummus for a wet washcloth and a sojourn in a plywood box.

"Ammar" is a composite character likely modeled after two characters. The first was probably Hassan Ghul, who was interrogated by the CIA in 2004 with coercive techniques (NOT including waterboarding) and who did provide some details about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But according to Senator Dianne Feinstein (who has access to all of the classified files) all of the vital information was provided prior to the rough stuff. The first clues about al-Kuwaiti were obtained in 2002 through the use of traditional interrogation methods.

The other possible source for the discovery of the name of al-Kuwaiti was Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker, who was captured in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo, where he was interrogated first by the FBI and then by the military, who were given special permission by Donald Rumsfeld to use more aggressive techniques set out in the so-called "First Special Interrogation Plan." According to documents revealed by WikiLeaks, al-Qahtani did mention the name of al-Kuwaiti. But according to the FBI, Al-Qahtani provided all his useful information prior to his "special interrogation." Al-Qahtani was never waterboarded but he was subjected to a brutal and often bizarre 49-day interrogation at Gitmo, that was documented in logs revealed by Adam Zagorin in Time Magazine. (We portrayed portions of this interrogation in my film, "Taxi to the Dark Side.")

Many writers have focused on the brutality of the al-Qahtani interrogation. They were right to do so. After all, even Susan Crawford, a Bush Administration official, ultimately admitted that his treatment was, in fact, "torture." Using techniques loosely based on the CIA's Kubark Interrogation Manual, and influenced by CIA's loony new playbook for questioning prisoners in the global war on terror, interrogators kept al-Qahtani from sleeping, force fed him liquids which caused him to urinate on himself and came close to killing him. But what many have overlooked is what happened to the interrogators during the al-Qahtani interrogation. They fell victim to what is called "force drift" (a tendency for interrogators to increase brutality when they don't get answers) and resorted to increasingly bizarre techniques. What are we to make of the fact that interrogators tried to get al-Qahtani to crack by using authorized "techniques" such as "invasion of space by female"; putting panties on his head, making him wear a "smiley-face" mask (I'm not making this up) and giving him dance lessons; making him watch puppet shows of him having sex with Osama bin Laden, administering forced enemas and making him crawl around like a dog.

The point I'm making is that, when the full history of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" is told we will see that it was not only brutal and counterproductive but ridiculous. The CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. Considering the repetition, just how effective were those techniques? And how good does the CIA look for insisting on mindless repetition of useless tactics?

But in ZD30, Boal and Bigelow have a problem. In the logic of a "movie," it's difficult for viewers root for people who are making terrible mistakes, have become corrupted or who are showcasing needless brutality. As a result, while the filmmakers do showcase American brutality, they suggest that it was necessary. Over and over again, Maya watches DVDs of interrogations using waterboarding and other forms of torture as if these were useful techniques which provided actionable intelligence. She herself uses a fellow operative to be her "muscle," punching a detainee when she does not get the answer she's looking for. Absent any other kind of interrogation, viewers of this film must conclude that beating the hell out of people is the only way to get answers. As one detainee says in the film, "I have no wish to be tortured again. Ask me a question and I will answer it." Sounds like torture works, right? But as we know from the Senate and former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who wrote McCain in May 2011, that EITs did not play any more than an incidental role in the discovery of UBL.

No main characters in the film ever question the efficacy or corrupting effects of torture. Just the opposite. When Barack Obama appears -- on television in a CIA conference room -- he remarks that prohibiting torture is "part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world." In the foreground, another female CIA agent, Jessica (played by Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head in disgust.

Later, a CIA figure nicknamed "the Wolf" makes a speech on how his efforts to get bin Laden have been undermined by the sissies in Congress. "As you know," he says, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo fucked us. The detainee program is now flat. We've got Senators jumping out of our asses..."

This line not wrong, in the sense that, in the context of a movie, it conveys the views of a particular character and, further, accurately represents those in the CIA -- and there were many -- who defended EITs. But what is pernicious about it is that the statement exists in a vacuum, as if, for the tough-minded folks who had "boots on the ground," to use the expression Bigelow likes so much, there was no other possible point of view. But that's wrong.

3) What is Missing

When it comes to torture, what is irresponsible about ZD30 is what it excludes.

The FBI and a great many CIA agents vigorously opposed the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" introduced by the CIA at the behest of the Bush Administration. These techniques were derived from the SERE program (SERE stands for "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) in which soldiers who are at risk of capture are administered "harsh techniques" they are likely to face at the hands of the enemy, including waterboarding. Originally, many of these "techniques" were derived from brutal interrogations used by Chinese and Soviet Communists who most frequently used them to obtain false confessions for political purposes. As part of this CIA "program," three individuals were waterboarded: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Advocates of the CIA program like to cite Abu Zubaydah as an example of how waterboarding worked. But in fact, before Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, he was interrogated by an FBI agent named Ali Soufan. After Soufan read Abu Zubaydah his Miranda rights, he used lawful interrogation techniques to get all the valuable information he had to offer, including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. More relevant to this film is the fact that KSM, during his waterboarding program, vigorously denied the importance of al-Kuwaiti. So confident was the CIA in the effectiveness of waterboarding -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- that the CIA actually assumed that KSM was telling the truth about the unimportance of al-Kuwaiti, when he was actually lying. The CIA's unjustified confidence in waterboarding likely derailed the hunt for bin Laden until the interrogation of Ghul.

ZB30 also withholds how much damage was done by the false information obtained by waterboarding. Ibn al-Sheik al Libi was being interrogated successfully by the FBI when an impatient Bush Administration demanded that the CIA take over. The CIA wrapped him in duct tape and packed him in a wooden box to be shipped to Cairo where he was waterboarded. As a result he offered up information linking al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein which was used by Colin Powell when he gave his famous speech before the UN. Partially as a result, we invaded Iraq. Later on, the CIA admitted that al-Libi had given false information. But by then we already had "boots on the ground" in Iraq.

Kathryn Bigelow must have been delighted when she discovered a female CIA agent was at the heart of the hunt for bin Laden. But compare Maya's infallibility in the film with the case of another female CIA agent -- a redhead like Jessica Chastain -- who was such a fan of waterboarding that she asked to "sit in" on the slow motion drowning of KSM. (As Jane Mayer notes in her book, "The Dark Side," she was rebuffed by a superior who told her that waterboarding is not a spectator sport.) She supervised the kidnapping and torture of a man named Khaled el-Masri in the CIA's "Salt Pit," a black site in Afghanistan. Despite a valid German passport, the agent insisted on his continued torment and incarceration (despite the protests of Condelezza Rice) until it was finally revealed that the agent had mixed him up with another man named al-Masri. (Whoops, we tortured a man over a spelling mistake!) Without apology, he was then dropped on a lonely road in Albania to try to pick up the pieces of his life. Just this month, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg declared his treatment at the hands of the CIA to have been torture -- the first time this has happened. Where did we see this kind of cruel incompetence treated in ZD30?

If I am veering a bit far from the plot of the movie, I am doing so to make a point about a missed dramatic opportunity. Shaw once said that an argument between a right and a wrong is melodrama but that an argument between two rights is drama. When it came to the subject of torture in ZD30, there was no argument at all. And so a great dramatic opportunity was missed.

Manhola Dargis of the NY Times defends the accounts of torture in the film because they serve "as a claim -- one made cinematically rather than with speeches -- that these interrogation methods are unreliable when it comes to producing actionable information." Then she says that to "omit [scenes of torture] from ZD30 would have been a reprehensible act of moral cowardice." Whoa! I haven't heard anyone argue that the scenes themselves should have been omitted. But despite Dargis' vivid imagination, there is no cinematic evidence in the film that EITs led to false information -- lies that were swallowed whole because of the misplaced confidence in the efficacy of torture. Most students of this subject admit that torture can lead to the truth. But what Boal/Bigelow fail to show is how often the CIA deluded itself into believing that torture was a magic bullet, with disastrous results.

That raises a key question: With so much evidence of so many failures -- practical, legal and moral -- of the CIA's "detainee program," why did Boal and Bigelow fail to include it in the film?

My theory -- and it is just a theory -- is that Boal and Bigelow were seduced by their sources. It's a common problem. When a writer or filmmaker gets extraordinary access, one is inclined to believe the person(s) granting the access. There is a significant constituency at the CIA which would like to defend its use of EITs in the War on Terror. This group is exemplified by Jose Rodriguez, the man who was responsible for destroying the videotapes of the CIA's interrogations -- which included waterboarding -- of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. There are many, including me, who believe that Rodriguez should have been prosecuted for destroying evidence of possible crimes. (The DOJ declined to prosecute him.) Instead, he is now promoting his book in which he claims that waterboarding worked.

Many have been won over by the views of Rodriguez and those like him who suggest that what the CIA did was tough, but necessary and smart. It was none of those things. Yet by immersing us only in the world of the CIA, Boal and Bigelow don't show us the perspective we need as viewers to see the lunacy of the CIA's "detainee program." If you want to reveal how tall a man is, you don't shoot him in limbo; you must show him in relation to others. Likewise, how can viewers of ZD30 judge the CIA's record if they can't see how others were shocked by its cruelty, cowardice and stupidity of EITs. In the film, long after the torture of "Ammar," an agent hands Maya a file folder with the real name of al-Kuwaiti. "If only I had this years ago," says Maya. Because Maya is the glamorous heroine of the film, we identify with her and wonder about the inefficiency of her colleagues. But where is the character who wonders if Maya had spent less time slapping detainees around and more time scanning actual evidence -- as the FBI did -- she might have got to bin Laden's courier much sooner.

I suspect that Boal and Bigelow's sources at the CIA shared some of the views of Rodriguez. Of course, without knowing who those sources are, it's impossible to say. What we do know, from correspondence that has been released, is that the CIA did grant extraordinary access to Boal and Bigelow.

While there is nothing wrong with access per se, what is concerning is the way that the CIA -- and other military agencies -- grant selective access. Sometimes that's because of the star status of the project. The letters show how much the agency loved Hurt Locker (one of the rare times I agree with the perspective of the CIA). Other times, it's because the agency is satisfied that the filmmakers have a vision that is "consistent" with that of the CIA. Whatever the reason, this will become a bigger and bigger concern for movies based on factual events (be they films with actors or documentaries). Why not give all American citizens to declassified information?

Whatever happened on ZD30, we can be sure of one thing. The CIA PR team must be delighted, particularly those who were supporters of the EIT "Program." As former CIA director Michael Hayden noted, "I was happy the film was in the hands of such talent."

Boal and Bigelow, by all accounts, are frustrated that the discussion of their film has been bogged down in a political debate that they want no part of. I would say, in response, that the debate is not political at all. The subject of torture is one of the great moral issues of our time. Boal and Bigelow shouldn't run from it. They should engage it.

After all, the goal of Osama bin Laden was to provoke Americans to undermine our most fundamental values. Why is it not important -- in a film about the hunt for bin Laden -- to confront whether we, as Americans, allowed ourselves, in our lust for revenge, to lose our moral, legal and political bearings instead of trying, as Tony Lagouranis, an Army interrogator, told me, "to be as good as we can be."

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam DREDD Pete Travisa, jedan od svakako najgorih a hvaljenih filmova ove godine. Iako ne dostiže užas nedostižnog PROMETHEUSa u disproporciji užasa na ekranu i samilosti kritike i fanboyeva, nije ni mnogo daleko od toga. DREDD je još jedan primer filma u kome je fanboy community diktirao producentima šta želi da oni naprave i reč je o prilično bukvalnom prevodu svih onih uobrazilja koje su fanboyevi imali vezano za to kako treba da se prave ekranizacije stripova, i naročito DREDDa. Međutim, slično kao što se ideološki ostrašćeni političari loše pokazuju u direktnoj političkoj praksi, tako su i fanboyevi dobra publika ali loš naručilac posla.

Ceo exploitation film se bazira na ideji podilaženja publici, ali u ranijim instancama, filmovi su podilazili nekim fundamentalnim nagonima, interesovanjima i raspoložnjeima publike poput prikaza seksa i nasilja, društvenih razlika koje marginalci uspevaju da prevaziđu često uzimajući pravdu u svoje ruke itd. Danas zahvaljujući Internetu, filmska scena se u svom jednom značajnom segmentu pretvorila u krčmu u kojoj publika može maltene do detalja da kostumizuje film koji hoće da gleda.

Tako je i fanboy scena zahvačjujući svojoj velikoj "težini" na Internetu uspela da stvori utisak kako je reč o ogromnoj publici koja može da iznese komercijalni uspeh iako se od SCOTT PILGRIMa videlo da ta publika zapravo nema sposobnost da konvertuje aktivnost sa tastatura u rezultate na blagajnama. Međutim, uprkos tome što se u međuvremenu industrija malo opametila u pojedinim žanrovima je ostala odana postulatima koje joj nameću fannboyevi.

Primer za to je DREDD, drugi pokušaj da se ekranizuje strip 2000 AD koji je prvobitno snimio Danny Cannon sa Stalloneom i rezultirao jedim od slabijih filmova u Slyjevom karijeri. Međutim, DREDD sa Slyjem je vrhunsko ostvarenje u odnosu na ono što je sada snimio Pete Travis. Po diktatu publike, Travis je ostao odan kanonu stripa koji je neprevodiv u okvire filma i u spoju inače nedovoljno ekspresivnog Karla Urbana i kacige koja mu pokriva pola lica, stvorio je junaka koji je bukvalno neupotrebljiv. Dredd kao junak koji nema milosti i ne priča puno, a sve vreme nosi kacigu i ne vidimo mu lice, verovatno može da prođe u stripu, ali ne može da prođe u filmu - odnosno može, ako ga radi velemajstor kao u ROBOCOPu gde smo ipak upoznati sa licem glavnog junaka iako ga mahom gledamo ispod kacige, ili ako je pokrivena polovina lica koja je manje važna za glumačku ekspresiju, kao u slučaju Banea u DARK KNIGHT RISES. Travis nažalost nije majstor a Karl Urban je bezličan glumac i onda kada mu lice nije pokriveno tako da Dredd deluje kao praznina u centru filma koji nema puno toga da ponudi. Na sve to, Dredd na kraju zapravo uopšte nije nemilosrdan. Iako ubija masu ljudi, nije spreman da presudi tipu za kog je "samo" 99 posto siguran da je kriv a cop outuje se i onda kada naiđe na par dečaka koji pucaju na njega. Ne mislim da bi film suštinski bio bolji da je Dredd pobio decu i one u čiju krivicu nije 100% siguran (mada se kasnije ispostavi da je tog 99% krivog trebalo ubiti) ali bi barem bio konzistentan u svojim zabludama - ako već imamo neupotrebljivog filmskog heroja, barem su autori budale do kraja pa se to može donekle poštovati.

Zaplet filma je otprilike u rangu filma RAID, dakle ne bi se moglo reći da je ovaj film opterećen scenaristuičkim ambicijama uprkos tome što ga je pisao čuveni Alex Garland koji je pre ulaska u svet scenaristike bio književnik. Štaviše, prilično je tanko napisan, sa likom negativca koju igra Lena Headey koji se veći deo filma razvlači pasivno po svom gnezdu osmišljavajući krajnje predvidive prepreke za Dredda, sa raznim stupidnim konvencijama koje pokšavaju da zadrže DREDD u DIE HARD okvirima usamljenog pravednika u zgradi pod opsadom.

Lik Dreddove saradnice svakako ima manje cheesy interakcije nego u Cannonovom filmu, ali ima i sposobnost parapsihološke prirode koja se u koristi u seriji nebitnih konflikata sa nebitnim likovima i ni u jednom prelomnom trenutku filma. Između ostalog, nema pravog girl on girl fighta u kome bi to zaigralop već Dredd ubije Lenu.

Nasilja u filmu ima dosta, što je takođe bila jedna od želja fanova i ono je tu uglavnom bez nekog pokrića u brutalnim odnosima među likovima. Ta vrsta prenaglašenog naslja je imala niz simpatičnih instanci kao što je recimo PUNISHER: WAR ZONE ili CRANK ali ovde je sprovedena na jedan antipatičan način jer se od svake situacije pravi big deal. Uostalom jedan od završnih kadrova filma jesto slo-mo olupavanja glave Lene Headey, sa kojim Travis valjda želi da zaključi film, da nam pokaže kako je zapravo krvoproliće u slo-mou i 3Du zapravo bilo svojevrsna poetna ovog filma, s tim što mi nije jasno da li on to želi da parodira, prikaže nam tehničku veštinu ili šta već.

Pete Travis je štićenik Paul Greengrassa koji je za razliku od svog učitelja došao u Holivud i shvatio da tamošnji hleb ima sedam kora. Travis se posle OMAGHa odlučio za putanju sličnu Grengrassovoj sa smenjivanjem političkih i exploitation filmova ali na mnogo nižem nivou, i ne znam tačno šta je mislio da će postići DREDDom. Da li je on možda poverovao da će DREDD zahvaljujući prisustvu DNA Filmsa, Anthony Dod Mantlea i Alexa Garlanda biti njegov 28 DAYS LATER?

Svakako da je britanska produkcija ekranizacije britanskog propertyja bila mudar potez, mada u slučaju DNA Films ove godine smo imali film po SWEENEYu u kome se pokazalo da su oni jak brend samo kad je tu Danny Boyle ili barem Kevin Macdonald i da inače ne garantuju kvalitet. No, sve u svemu, DNA Films sa svojom ekipom jeste bio prava adresa za ovakav projekat.

Naravno, rezultat DREDDa u bioskopima je bio bedan. To nije neočekivano ako imamo u vidu kakav je film ali jeste ako se uzme u obzir da publika u principu voli čistu nepretencioznu akciju koja ne mora da se javlja u fomi dobrog filma. Očigledno da je snažno bavljenje zaostavštinom stripa u "stručnoj" javnosti stvorilo lažnu sliku o tome koliko ovakav film stvarno ikoga zanima. U svakom slučaju, sam strip opet nije dobio svoju "definitivnu" ekranizaciju, iako je ova hvaljenija od prethodne i ne bi bilo čudno da naiđe neka nova za petnaestak godina.

* 1/2 / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Ovo su pravi bećari. Moj favorit br. 14

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/most-dangerous-people/?cid=5019604&pid=1704&viewall=true

[Meho Krljic]

Da, velika je kontroverza u 2012. godini nastupila sa štampanjem oružja.

[crippled_avenger]

Assange's Christmas address from Ecuador embassy in London (FULL VERSION)

[crippled_avenger]

News/
Acting CIA Director Shoots Down Zero Dark Thirty's Accuracy

by Brandi Fowler Sat., Dec. 22, 2012 9:27 AM PST

Zero Dark Thirty Courtesy: Jonathan Olley/Columbia Pictures

Acting CIA Director Michael Morell is getting in on the Zero Dark Thirty controversy.

In the wake of criticism the film has faced in regards to the veracity of its content, Morell sent a letter to CIA personnel about the thriller-flick's accuracy, and then made it public.

Oscar buzz cheat sheet

"What I want you to know is that Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatization, not a realistic portrayal of the facts," Morell said in the letter posted on the CIA's website Friday. "CIA interacted with the filmmakers through our Office of Public Affairs but, as is true with any entertainment project with which we interact, we do not control the final product."

Zero Dark Thirty tells the tale of the decade-long pursuit and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Calling it a film that "departs from reality," Morell said Zero Dark Thirty had several fictional aspects in it, but emphasized the inaccuracy of three details of it.

"First, the hunt for Usama Bin Ladin was a decade-long effort that depended on the selfless commitment of hundreds of officers," Morell said. "The filmmakers attributed the actions of our entire Agency—and the broader Intelligence Community—to just a few individuals."

"Second, the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin," Morrell continued. "That impression is false."

Jessica Chastain responds to Zero Dark Thirty's pro-torture allegations

"Third, the film takes considerable liberties in its depiction of CIA personnel and their actions, including some who died while serving our country. We cannot allow a Hollywood film to cloud our memory of them."

Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin also criticized the film just days ago, calling it "grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information" that led to bin Laden's location.

Republican Sen. John McCain also slammed the film for the same reason.

[crippled_avenger]

Pogledao sam FLIGHT Roberta Zemeckisa. Pojavio se pristojan screener za ovo doba nagrada i osnovni utisak je da bi Zemeckisov film trebalo pogledati u bioskopu. Naprosto odavno nisam gledao film koji je u toj meri pravljen za bioskop, i to ne zbog čistog spektakla, kao što bi se pretpostavilo, već upravo zbog drame koju je Zemeckis realizovao u formatu koji se najbolje može percipirati u bioskopu.

FLIGHT počinje spektakularnom scenom pada aviona koja je u osnovi zamajac filma, uspostavljanje radikalne drame na početku koja se mora ponovo odigrati na kraju, samo u drugim uslovima, i slično CAST AWAYu, junak mora proći buru kako bi stradao i kako bi se spasao. Međutim, kao i u CAST AWAYu, pojam spasa je dosta relativan jer junak sa mračnog mesta na kome se nalazi u svojim redovnim aktivnostima, odlazi na naizgled mračnije poprište iskušenja i završava na novom mračnom mestu. Rekao bih da je sasvim sigurno jedan od osnovnih motiva za ovakvu egzekuciju scene pada aviona i Zemeckisov pokušaj da pokaže kako može da pomiri vrhunsku tehniku i dramu, da podseti da je i dalje Tata, i ova sekvenca će sama po sebi ostati kao primer za izučavanje kako se konstruiše bioskopska napetost. Međutim, ključna pitanja ovog filma nalaze se na drugom mestu.

FLIGHT je film za bioskop najpre zbog toga što je reč o drami koju u vrlo old school maniru, Zemeckis postavlja u nešto šire planove, sa krupnim planovima samo onda kada su potrebni, i FLIGHT gledan u kućnim uslovima ostavlja malo utisak Johna Forda, neke stvari se zbivaju u preširokim planovima u odnosu na ono što smo navikli, ali ti planovi su zapravo idealni za gledanje u bioskopu jer se na velikom ekranu u takvim planovima sve vidi kako treba.

U periodu kada studiji praktično više ne prave "ozbiljne" filmove o teškim temama, sa velikim zvezdama, FLIGHT stoji kao potpuni izuzetak - Denzel Washington nije morao da se okrene indie produkciji kako bi dobio izazovan lik i u tom pogledu FLIGHT odudara od načina na koji gledamo "ozbiljne" teme poslednjih godina a to je obično nekakvo indie ruho. FLIGHT nije skup film, recimo da je tek za trećinu skuplji od Audiardovog RUST AND BONE što je dosta zanimljiv podatak, ali bez ikakve sumnje ima sva obeležja studio-filma.

U tom smislu zanimljiv je i rasni aspekt. Naime, Denzel Washington u ovom filmu igra predstavnika više srednje klase koji je crnac i tek delimično izmiče ograničenjima sa kojima se crnci suočavaju. On u filmu ima dve žene, Meksikanku i belkinju narkomanku, obe koje su na neki način inferiorne u odnosu na njegov položaj. On ima prijatelje belce, čak mu je i narko diler belac, ali advokat mu je crnac, kao uostalom i bivša supruga. Rasni aspekt nije zaista važan u samoj priči, nigde se ni ne pominje, ali rekao bih da je pažljivo profilisano kome crnac može da bude šef i ljubavnik. Štaviše, jedini belac u posadi aviona je svojevrsni white trash.

Ono što je zapravo ključ ove priče jeste tema herojstva, priča o čoveku koji je svojevrsni odmetnik, erodirana ličnost koju je uništio alkohol, i društvu koje je je podjednako erodirano samo na jedan drugi način, i konačno publici koja je erodirana negde između njih. Na početku filma, junakov prvi herojski čin pokazuje da je on ona vrsta filmskog heroja koju smo navikli da gledamo u klasičnom Holivudu, junak koji krši pravila ali radi posao bolje od svih onih koji se drže pravila. Zatim, slično THE HURT LOCKERu počinje da preispituje tu vrstu neuroze u realističkom ključu, pokazujući kako sa jedne strane ta vrsta herojstva nije odlika mentalnog zdravlja, ali sa druge strane nalazi svoje mesto unutar sistema koji cinično ceni profesionalizam i efikasnost čak i kada proizilaze iz mentalne krize. Ono gde se HURT LOCKER i FLIGHT razilaze jeste tačka u kojoj Zemeckisov junak pokušava da se pokaže kao heroj iskoračujući izvan sistema, dočim junak Kathryn Bigelow odlazi nazad pod okrilje sistema koji mu najbolje omogućuje da se ispolji.

To nas dovodi do problema "kraja filma" u koji je scenarista John Gatins uspeo da sebe dovede, primoravši se da odgovori na "junakovu dilemu". U toj fazi su mnogi gledaoci i kritičari ušli u sukob sa FLIGHTom, i rekao bih da su Zemeckis i Gatins dosta rizikovali kada su se opredelili za ovaj kraj, u kome junak odlučuje da odstupi od cinizma kojim je dotle uspeo da veže publiku. U određenom smislu FLIGHT zaista jeste nastavak Zemeckisovog rada iz vremena crne komedije USED CARS koja je izučavala cinizam američkog društva i bavila se iskupljenjem njegovog najciničnijeg učesnika. FLIGHT nije komedija ali se bavi zaoštrenim, apsurdnim odnosima koji su dovedeni do paroksizma.

Scena na saslušanju u finalu filma FLIGHT zapravo je parafraza scene iz USED CARS u kojoj Kurt Russell neprestano šapuće i gestikulira junakinji koja svedoči da laže. Međutim,, ovog puta glavni junak nije pomatrač već je svedok, ali okolnosti su slične kao i odnos publike prema raspletu.

Ne ulazim u namere autora, koje možda, ili čak verovatno, nisu ovakve kako ja vidim ishod FLIGHTa, ali zapravo ključna transformacija junaka jeste u tome da on na kraju prestaje da biva cool, i na neki način postaje žrtva sistema na novi način. Sa ulaskom u AA kome se opirao pre toga, on u stvari priznaje svoj poraz, i prestaje da funkcioniše "izvan" sistema. Ako imamo u vidu snažan motiv vere u filmovima Roberta Zemeckisa, ovo je njegov prilično ateistički rad u kome je ishodište odlazak u AA, nešto od čega recimo junak odustaje u filmu CAST AWAY. Međutim, junak u filmu CAST AWAY nije alkoholičar, tako da je njegov put na mesto na kome neće biti srećan drugačiji jer Zemeckis u prikazu junakovog patetičnog ishodišta u AAu i zatvoru i artificijelnom ponovnom povezivanju sa porodicom, zapravo pokazuje moduse u kojima bivši zavisnici na kraju egzistiraju, a to su razni paternalistički i manipulativni konteksti.

Dakle, FLIGHT ne nudi suštinsko rešavanje junakovog problema, pomera ga samo iz jedne u drugu ravan visokofunkcionalne patologije. Ono što se tu postavlja kao pitanje jeste da li su Zemeckis i Gatins, kao ljudi koji su imali probleme sa alkoholom svesni mračne dimenzije samog AA i uopšte činjenice da je to nova adikcija koja smenjuje staru, ili je za njih to zaista horizont egzistencije za ljudi sa tim problemima. Međutim, to u krajnjoj liniji nije ni bitno.

FLIGHT je slično HURT LOCKERu ulazak u naličje junaka koji su okosnica Holivuda a to su otpadnici koji su veći profesionalci od onih koji su "lojalni" i "konvencionalni". Međutim, za razliku od starog Holivuda, ovde nema "ballbuster" šefova koji ne prihvataju njihovu nekonvencionalnost (ili su ballbusteri pod uticajem filmova o herojima promenili mišljenje) već žele da ih iscede do kraja. Otud je u stvari jedna od najefektnijih Roršahovih mrlja u ovom filmu to što će publika u puno navrata biti razočarana time šta junak radi samome sebi ali će se najviše "smoriti" onda kada on učini nešto zbog čega ipak jeste heroj.

Činjenica da je film uspeo da dovede gledaoce do tačke u kojoj se do kraja poistovećuje sa cinizmom i autodestrukcijom a onda im izmakao tlo pod nogama je zbog toga zapravo ključna mana tokom gledanja i ključni adut tokom razmišljanja potom.

* * * / * * * *

[crippled_avenger]

Doduše, rasprave na ovom topiku su otišle dalje od skromnih kapaciteta ove kolumne.

http://www.citymagazine.rs/u-vazduhu/urban-flash/4193/dimitrije-vojnov-u-pola-noci/