The Movie Club

REVIEW-FLIGHT

Flight is a drama directed and co-produced by Robert Zemeckis (of Back to the Future, Forrest Gump and Cast Away fame), and has been nominated for 2 Academy Awards:

Best Original Screenplay; and
Best Actor

Plot

We are introduced to Airline captain William "Whip" Whitaker (played by Denzel Washington) as he wakes up in a messy hotel room. Empty bottles of motel-provided alcohol litter the floor, complete with the naked form of fellow team-member flight attendant Katerina Márquez (played by the Nadine Velazquez). Snorting a few lines of cocaine, Whip is good to go and boards his SouthJet flight 227 to Atlanta. Asking for a cup of coffee, Whip groggily introduces himself to his copilot Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty of The Hurt Locker fame), and expertly proceeds to take the plane up, expertly avoiding some chaotic disturbance along the way. While sneakily mixing vodka into some orange-juice, Whip informs the cabin that, due to the turbulence, drinks and food services will be suspended, and then promptly takes a nap in the pilot’s seat. Crash to Whip awakening to find the plane in a steep dive, where wackiness ensues!

Review

After a brilliantly executed introduction, we see, and can assume, the lifestyle of a pro-pilot: a life of travel, sex, drugs and alcohol. We are then thrust into a brilliantly staged and thrilling plane take-off and spectacular crash, half-way expecting Superman to come out of no-where to save the day.

From Whip’s hospital bed then does the movie begin proper, and we are slowly introduced to the stakeholders should it be found that the pilot had any alcohol in his system at the time of the crash: the Airline’s owners, employees and Whip himself, possibly being liable for the passengers killed.

While Whip’s predicament continues, we are also slowly introduced to a seemingly random female heroin-addict. I thought the character would be introduced as the pilot’s estranged wife; however it is a character that serves as a mirror to the Pilot, and an unnecessary one at that. We can see that Whip has a very serious alcohol dependency problem as evidenced by his ex-wife, estranged son, the fantastic introduction and the many scenes of Whip buying, drinking/dumping alcohol and the disposal of many bottles and cans. Heck, Whip even takes it upon himself to travel to his families’ old farm in an effort to dry out.

Very soon the movie concentrates solely on a man coming to terms with his alcohol addiction and the moral dilemma it sets up. It would have been much more interesting if the movie delved deeper into this character. Rather than looking at the symptom, it would have been brilliant to look at the cause of the problem.

A good trick with story titles is choosing one that encompasses the key theme, and therefore point, of the movie. The title The Silence of the Lambs is explained in a key scene where the protagonist confesses her very motivation to the antagonist in the form of a character-defining child-hood event. With Flight, it could be argued that the character is ‘Flying away from his addiction” but it would have been far more satisfying to discover what problem he was ‘flying away from’ using the very methods to do so: alcohol, drugs, his current lifestyle and of being a pilot itself. What draws someone to spend so many hours of every day flying around the world when they have a family at home?

The son in a scene asks: “who are you?” We have just had an entire film concentrating on one character’s drinking. We should have a clear picture of ‘who’ this character is after that time.

A 1980 movie titled, The Pilot was directed by its star Cliff Robertson and based on the novel of the same name by Robert P. Davis and dealt with a passenger service pilot during his candidacy for Best Pilot of the Year. We follow the pilot as he struggles, however, to keep his worsening alcohol addiction under his control. Perhaps then, Flight should simply have been a remake of The Pilot, with the title intact.

As it stands, it is a remarkably well done film with great performances by Don Cheadle as Whip’s long suffering defense attorney, and Whip’s drug-dealer and enabler played by John Goodman. The movie does go some way to enable us to empathies with the high that Whip enjoys and so desperately craves, forming an energy and humour that quickly dissipates as soon as the character reflects on his reality: his addiction and those that he is responsible for. The story however is pedestrian with a single theme that runs like a day-time television movie, complete with dated font at film’s end.

2 out of 5 flights

Luke McWilliams 2013

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REVIEW-ZERO DARK THIRTY

Zero Dark Thirty is a historical, drama, political thriller written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow of The Hurt Locker fame, a movie about a grossly irresponsible, reckless, rogue sociopathic leader of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit who, in reality, would never have been allowed in the military in the first place.

The movie has been nominated for 5 Academy Awards:

Best Picture
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Best Writing – Original Screenplay,
Best Sound Editing; and
Best Film Editing.

Plot

We are reminded of the events of Sept 11, 2001, as we are greeted with a black screen with accompanying sound effects of the disaster and phone-calls made from people within and surrounding the twin towers to emergency services. Flash forward to 2003, and we are introduced to CIA operative ‘Dan’ at a black site in Pakistan, as he goes about his job, routinely performing intimidation and humiliation tactics, including ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods such as torture, on a detainee who is suspected to have links to several Saudi terrorists.

Going outside for a break, one of Dan’s teammates removes their balaclava and reveals themselves to us as Maya (played by Jessica Chastain of Lawless fame) a young and very beautiful CIA officer specialising in intelligence related to Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda. Maya has recently been reassigned to the U.S. embassy in Pakistan to work with Dan.

Soon, thanks to interrogation methods such as water torture and positive reinforcement, the pair trick the detainee into sharing details of an old acquaintance who works as a personal courier for the world’s most dangerous and wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, where wackiness ensues!

Review

The war on terror is a nebulous one, battling against an ideology rather than a known and quantifiable threat. Terrorist cells and their activities are extremely difficult to engage and calculate. The enemy is unidentifiable and, should one bring a Terrorist Leader to Justice, what guarantee is there that that would deal a blow to a long held and religiously based belief?

Osama Bin Laden was promoted as Public Enemy Number One 2 or 3 days after September 11. His eventual death by a US Navy Seal’s Team during a night raid of the compound was publicised as necessary: at the time of his death he was living in seclusion within a compound with several children, and was reportedly wielding a weapon while at the same time hiding behind two women, who were also armed, treating them as human shields.

After being shot dead, an image of the dead body, captured by a digital camera, was thrown around the world. Very quickly his body was apparently adhered to by Osama’s custom and was buried at sea. It was only relatively recently that we found out that Osama was shot as he appeared around a bedroom door within a compound. Once the army personal opened the door did they find two women, with only one rifle present in the room, which was attached to an opposing wall.

A similar story was attempted to be spun at the end of hunt for Suddam Hussein: Once Saddam was revealed to be hiding in a crude dug-out, we were told that his long, shaggy greying hair and beard were fake, a deliberate spin to dissolve any sympathy we may have felt for such a character. Saddam was handed over to his former people for ‘justice’, and, after a trial for the atrocities that he was responsible for during the time of his dictatorship, Suddam was found guilty and hung.

We assumed that the search for Osama Bin Laden was to take him to justice, to humanely try him in a court of law, having him answer to the many charges of acts of terrorism ordered and executed by him. In a bid to capture Osama, it seemed that he was killed in self-defence: wielding a weapon while hiding behind a pair of gun-toting women. Where the new official story presents an order to kill Osama Bin Laden, the movie Zero Dark Thirty makes no bones about it.

Zero Dark Thirty presents the use of torture, especially water-boarding as a necessary, if not essential method for gaining the crucial information that lead to the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden, with the beautiful red-haired Jessica Chastain bought in to spear-head the mission to make absolutely sure that we buy it.

Jessica Chastain, last seen as the damsel in distress in Lawless, which attempted to have us empathise with a family of moonshine bootleggers, selling their wares to mobsters in Chicago, is used here to gain the audience’s empathy as she introduces us to the various torture methods that led to finding Osama Bin Laden. At first quietly affected by the depictions of torture in front of her, and us, we witness her arc from quiet, studious but dedicated researcher, warming up to the idea of using torture as an essential technique to find the one who is responsible not only for the atrocities of September 11 and countless other acts of terror, but out-of personal revenge for the killing of her close professional college. All this amongst the ‘irritating’ Obama administration banning the detainee program, allowing untapped detainees to become ‘lawyered up’ and annoyingly exercising their human-rights.

Jessica’s Maya is progressively shown to be a lone character of common-sense and great intelligence amongst a sea of incompetent, indecisive middle-aged bureaucratic men. Thank god for James Gandolfini’s character who flatly recognises and states to a college that “we are all smart”. Lines delivered by a frustrated Maya include stating in a high level meeting that “I’m the Mother F-er who found him”, and then proclaiming that she is “100% confident. Oh hell, I know how terrified you are of absolutes, 95% confident”. Such lines are a betrayal of any type of authenticity the movie had attempted at this point to have built.

Zero Dark Thirty would have worked adequately as a procedural thriller, a la Fair Game, which brought us the world of political meetings with shaky cam to liven everything up. Like Snowtown, the characters would have worked had they operated as their functions, representing the unfolding of actual, factual events, leaving it up to us to project their motivations and characters onto the dry slates, serving as our filmic cyphers: how would I feel in that situation? What would I be thinking if this happened to me? This may have been quite ‘dry’ when compared to traditional drama-actioners, however the political machinations themselves, if handled correctly, would have been quite fascinating to watch.

Zero however attempts to go further and attempts to flippantly inject unnecessary personality, vague backgrounds and characterisations to characters which up until a point, had served as functions as representative of the known facts. Now trying to have characters relationships suddenly intertwine to deliver emotional connections to cash-in-on later for the movie to also serve as a dramatic thriller, at this stage it is too late, and it doesn’t go deep enough. It is enough that Jessica Chastain’s character is motivated to find OBL after Sept 11, and to adequately fulfil her employment specifications rather than making it personal and henceforth, making ‘stuff get real’.

The finale however, which is used extensively in the movie’s trailer, is filmed brilliantly, and sticks pretty close to the new, official report – think a real-time war-zone Blair Witch Project.

After the events of September 11 a few films were released dramatizing the factual situations of those on-board the hi-jacked planes bound for the Twin Towers (United 93), the efforts of emergency crews in helping survivors (World Trade Centre) and even a controversial, arguably gratuitous cheap dramatisation involving Robert Pattinson (Remember Me). Whereas Jamie Foxx’s The Kingdom delved into the morality, motivation and circular vengeance in fighting the war on terror, none have so far really delved into the raw political context.

Reportedly, the director and screenwriter worked very closely with the CIA in regards to the ‘facts’ of the investigation, justifying the use of torture during the war on terror as a reliable method of extracting reliable data. A serious subject that should not have been given as much creative licence with the facts as allowed here, regardless if it is faithfully re-telling the story as told by the very self-interested CIA.

1 out of 5 buckets

Luke McWilliams, 2013

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