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The FBI started its case in June with a collection of five e-mails, a few hundred kilobytes of data at most.
By the time the probe exploded into public view earlier this month, the FBI was sitting on a mountain of data containing the private communications — and intimate secrets — of a CIA director and a U.S. war commander. What the bureau didn't have — and apparently still doesn't — is evidence of a crime.
How that happened and what it means for privacy and national security are questions that have induced shudders in Washington and a queasy new understanding of the FBI's comprehensive access to the digital trails left by even top officials.
FBI and Justice Department officials have vigorously defended their handling of the case. "What we did was conduct the investigation the way we normally conduct a criminal investigation," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday. "We follow the facts."
But in this case, the trail cut across a seemingly vast territory with no clear indication of the boundaries, if any, that the FBI imposed on itself. The thrust of the investigation changed direction repeatedly and expanded dramatically in scope.
A criminal inquiry into e-mail harassment morphed into a national security probe of whether CIA Director David H. Petraeus and the secrets he guarded were at risk. After uncovering an extramarital affair, investigators shifted to the question of whether Petraeus was guilty of a security breach.
When none of those paths bore results, investigators settled on the single target they are scrutinizing now: Paula Broadwell, the retired general's biographer and mistress, and what she was doing with a cache of classified but apparently inconsequential files.
On Capitol Hill, the case has drawn references to the era of J. Edgar Hoover, the founding director of the FBI, who was notorious for digging up dirt on Washington's elite long before the invention of e-mail and the Internet.
"The expansive data that is available electronically now means that when you're looking for one thing, the chances of finding a whole host of other things is exponentially greater," said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House intelligence committee and a former federal prosecutor.
In this case, Schiff said, the probe may have caused more harm than it uncovered. "It's very possible that the most significant damage done to national security was the loss of General Petraeus himself," Schiff said.
The investigation's profile has called attention to what legal and privacy experts say are the difficulties of applying constraints meant for gathering physical evidence to online detective work.
Law enforcement officers conducting a legal search have always been able to pursue evidence of other crimes sitting in "plain view." Investigators with a warrant to search a house for drugs can seize evidence of another crime, such as bombmaking. But the warrant does not allow them to barge into the house next door.
But what are the comparable boundaries online? Does a warrant to search an e-mail account expose the communications of anyone who exchanged messages with the target?
Similarly, FBI agents monitoring wiretaps have always been obligated to put down their headphones when the conversation is clearly not about a criminal enterprise. It's known as minimization, a process followed by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to protect the privacy of innocent people.
"It's harder to do with e-mails, because unlike a phone, you can't just turn it off once you figure out the conversation didn't relate to what you're investigating," said Michael DuBose, a former chief of the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section who now handles cyber-investigations for Kroll Advisory Solutions.
Some federal prosecutors have sought to establish a "wall" whereby one set of agents conducts a first review of material, disclosing to the investigating agents only what is relevant. But Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who consults on electronic surveillance issues, said he thinks "that's the exception rather than the rule."
It's unclear whether the FBI made any attempt to minimize its intrusion into the e-mails exchanged by Broadwell and Petraeus, both of whom are married, that provided a gaping view into their adulterous relationship.
Many details surrounding the case remain unclear. The FBI declined to respond to a list of questions submitted by The Washington Post on its handling of personal information in the course of the Petraeus investigation. The bureau also declined to discuss even the broad guidelines for safeguarding the privacy of ordinary citizens whose e-mails might surface in similarly inadvertent fashion.
The scope of the issue is considerable, because the exploding use of e-mail has created a new and potent investigative resource for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement demands for e-mail and other electronic communications from providers such as Google, Comcast and Yahoo are so routine that the companies employ teams of analysts to sort through thousands of requests a month. Very few are turned down.
Although the Petraeus-Broadwell investigation ensnared high-ranking officials and had potential national security implications, the way the FBI assembled evidence in the case was not extraordinary, according to several experts.
The probe was triggered when a Florida socialite with ties to Petraeus and Gen. John R. Allen, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, went to the FBI in June with menacing e-mails from an anonymous sender.
Schiff and others have questioned why the FBI even initiated the case. Law enforcement officials have explained that they were concerned because the earliest e-mails indicated that the sender had access to details of the personal schedules of Petraeus and Allen.
The FBI's first pile of data came from Jill Kelley, who got to know Petraeus and Allen when she worked as an unofficial social liaison at the military base in Tampa where both men were assigned.
In early summer, Kelley received several anonymous e-mails warning her to stay away from Allen and Petraeus. Kelley was alarmed and turned over her computer to the FBI; she may also have allowed access to her e-mail accounts.
The e-mails were eventually traced to Broadwell, who thought that Kelley was a threat to her relationship with Petraeus, law enforcement officials said. But the trail to Broadwell was convoluted.
Broadwell reportedly tried to cover her tracks by using as many as four anonymous e-mail accounts and sending the messages from computers in business centers at hotels where she was staying while on a nationwide tour promoting her biography of Petraeus. According to some accounts, the FBI traced the e-mails to those hotels, then examined registries for names of guests who were checked in at the time.
Once Broadwell was identified, FBI agents would have gone to Internet service providers with warrants for access to her accounts. Experts said companies typically comply by sending discs that contain a sender's entire collection of accounts, enabling the FBI to search the inbox, draft messages and even deleted correspondence not yet fully erased.
"You're asking them for e-mails relevant to the investigation, but as a practical matter, they let you look at everything," said a former federal prosecutor who, like many interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition on anonymity because the FBI inquiry is continuing.
FBI agents can then roam through every corner of the account as if it were their own.
The capability to scour e-mail accounts has expanded the bureau's investigative power dramatically, even in crimes previously seen as difficult to prosecute. For example, officials said, the ability to reconstruct communications between reporters and their sources helps explain why the Obama administration has been able to bring more leak prosecutions than all of its predecessors combined.
E-mail searches vary in scope and technique, from scanning contents for key words "to literally going through and opening every file and looking at what it says," a former Justice Department official said.
Law enforcement officials said the FBI never sought access to Allen's computer or accounts. It's unclear whether it did so with Petraeus. But through Kelley and Broadwell, the bureau had amassed an enormous amount of data on the two men — including sexually explicit e-mails between Petraeus and Broadwell and questionable communications between Allen and Kelley.
Petraeus and Broadwell had tried to conceal their communications by typing drafts of messages, hitting "save" but not "send," and then sharing passwords that provided access to the drafts. But experts said that ruse would have posed no obstacle for the FBI, because agents had full access to the e-mail accounts.
As they pore over data, FBI agents are not supposed to search for key words unrelated to the warrant under which the data were obtained. But if they are simply reading through document after document, they can pursue new leads that surface.
"Most times, if you found evidence of a second crime, you would stop and go back and get a second warrant" to avoid a courtroom fight over admissibility of evidence, a former prosecutor said. But in practical terms, there is no limit on the number of investigations that access to an e-mail account may spawn.
There is nothing illegal about the Petraeus-Broadwell affair under federal law. Were it not for Petraeus's prominent position, the probe might have ended with no consequence. But because of his job — and the concern that intelligence officers caught in compromising positions could be susceptible to blackmail — the probe wasn't shut down.
"If this had all started involving someone who was not the director of the CIA . . . they would have ignored it," said David Sobel, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. "A bell went off because of who it was."
That consideration triggered a cascade of additional quandaries for the Justice Department, including whether and when to notify Congress and the White House. The FBI finally did so on election night, Nov. 6, when Deputy Director Sean Joyce called Petraeus's boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.
After being confronted by Clapper, Petraeus agreed to resign.
President Obama said last week that there was "no evidence at this point, from what I've seen, that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security."
But the data assembled on Allen and Petraeus continue to reverberate. The FBI turned over its stockpile of material on Allen — said to contain as many as 30,000 pages of e-mail transcripts — to the Defense Department, prompting the Pentagon inspector general to start an investigation.
The CIA has also launched an inspector general investigation into Petraeus and his 14-month tenure at the agency, seeking to determine, among other things, whether he used the perks of the position to enable his affair with Broadwell.
If it follows its own protocols, the FBI will hold on to the data for decades. Former officials said the bureau retains records for 20 years for closed criminal investigations, and 30 years for closed national security probes.
Sari Horwitz and Julie Tate contributed to this report.


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Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell spoke to a group of more than 100 people at Radnor Middle School on Tuesday night to discuss why the United States has become, 'a nation of wusses,' which is also the title of his 2010 memoir, 'A Nation of Wusses: How America's Leaders Lost the Guts to Make us Great.'
'It is not the people of this country that are the wusses,' the former governor of Pennsylvania and a former Philadelphia mayor said. 'It is the legislators and people in government that have become the wusses. That is why when discussing my book you have to add the subtitle with it-How America's Leaders Lost the Guts to Make Us Great.'
Rendell spoke candidly, with jokes mixed in about how we, as a nation, are not the same people as we used to be. He explained how the United States used to take risks, referencing such historical feats as the building of the Erie Canal and the risks that came along with it, as well as when Dwight D. Eisenhower chose to spend the money to build the highway system that we have today.
'Our government should not be afraid to spend money,' Rendell said candidly.
'There is no greater example of the wussification of America than the growing neglect of our nation's infrastructure. Talk to a young man today, and he'll marvel at the way his father's and grandfathers' generations knew how to make and fix things. That doesn't just mean oil changes and water heaters; that goes for bridges and roads, too. When we were a young nation, we were imbued with that pioneer spirit-we would try to accomplish anything, no matter how daunting a challenge, if it was necessary to grow our country or expand our economy,' Rendell wrote in his memoir-which he explained he wrote longhand, so he could show people that he wrote the book himself and it wasn't the work of someone else.
Along with discussing the wussification of the nation, he also spoke of the reasons why he wrote the book. A main reason why he penned the words in his 256-page memoir is to encourage the youth of the United States to get involved in public service.
'I don't mean public service in the sense that they have to try and be mayor,' he said. 'I mean, I want them to serve the public. I think public service is a wonderful way to live your life and I wanted to inspire people to do it.'
When speaking about the current state of the U.S. government, Rendell criticized both Democrats and Republicans equally and spoke freely about what steps he believes should be made to better the government, without ever thinking about what people think of him.
'What you have to do is be real,' Rendell said. 'People wonder why Chris Christie is so popular; it's simple - it is because he is always real.'
After 34 years of public service, including 24 years as an elected official, Rendell continues to pursue many of the same issues he was passionate about while serving.
'I have no interest in being a congressman, or a senator,' Rendell said. 'They don't do much. They vote on occasion, but they don't really do much. I like to get things done.'
The only executive job left that Rendell has not held is president of the United States. When he was posed the question of whether he would be interested in running for president, he responded with the sense of humor that he had held throughout his hour-long presentation.
'I do not have the slightest desire to spend three years of my life in Iowa and New Hampshire,' he joked.

subset: commoncrawl


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... and a recipe for Simple Buttercream.
Yay! Just less than a month until Christmas!
If you've been following me for a while, you'll know that Christmas is my favourite time of year. The tree goes up just after my birthday (mid November :P) so that I can enjoy the lights and colour for as long as possible.
To spread the festive cheer I thought I'd make these Christmas tree cupcakes as gifts. I saw these one or two years back and finally got around to trying them out. And, I've made a video for you to see the piping in action.
They're actually quite simple to make, all you need is a little bit of skill and confidence in the piping department. And if you're not sure you do, make a batch of frosting, and if you're scared you're going to mess up your cupcakes, practice piping your trees on a plate or the counter top. Once you get the hang of the swirl & lift motion, pipe away!
I recommend a fairly firm frosting. I used simple buttercream for these, but Swiss or Italian Meringue would work just as well. I wouldn't recommend cream cheese frosting as I find that it's never as firm as I'd like.
I hope you enjoy the video (the first Mandy Made video on my site!) and Merry Christmas 2012!
What you'll need:
- Cupcakes (or a cake)
- Firm frosting (simple, Italian or Swiss Meringue)
- Green gel or paste colour (I used Wilton's "Green Leaf")
- Piping bag
- Large star tip (I used Wilton's 1M)
- Tree "decorations" like dragees, sprinkles, edible glitter and stars
How to:
- Fit the star tip to your piping bag (either with a coupler, or simply snip the end of the bag and drop the tip inside and push out the end until it fits snuggly)
- Fill your piping bag with green frosting
- Make sure all the frosting is pushed down near the end, then twist the top of the bag where you'll be holding and squeezing the bag
- Tip: I find it best to be able to hold the cupcake still with one hand and squeeze the piping bag with one hand, so don't overfill the bag so that you have good control of it. Otherwise, if you're not yet confident enough to pipe with one hand, you can "stick" the cupcake down to your counter with a little bit of frosting to keep it from moving/twisting while you pipe
- Pipe as you would a normal cupcake swirl, but not from the outer edge of the cupcake, about halfway in
- Pipe the frosting round, then up and round on itself, about 4 or 5 swirls, piping the circles tighter as your near the top
- Once piped, decorate and top with little gumpaste stars
Background music by www.RoyaltyFreeKings.com
Simple Buttercream
(Enough to pipe 12 Christmas trees with the Wilton 1M tip)
115g Unsalted Butter, room temperature (1/2 cup)
2 cups Powdered / Confectioners Sugar
2 Tbsp Milk
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
Pinch of Salt
- With an electric beater / stand mixer, beat the butter until smooth
- Sift in half the powdered sugar and mix until combined with the butter and it looks creamy
- Sift in remaining powdered sugar beat until thoroughly combined
- Beat in milk, vanilla and salt
- If colouring, add a small bit of colouring at a time until you reach desired shade
- Tip: Paste colour is stronger than gel, which is stronger than liquid, so it depends on the type of colouring you use as well as brand, so it's best to add a small amount at a time
- Pipe, smear, decorate with frosting as desired!
- Tip: Simple buttercream forms a crust when exposed to air, so if making ahead, cover bowl with clingfilm, then give frosting a quick mixing before using
Other Tips:
Follow this link for the how-to on making your own fondant stars
I painted my stars with edible gold lustre paint


text: 0122181438.jpg March 22, 2018 autumnreeder Published by autumnreeder I like dessert and I am a busy lady. With so many irons in the fire I thought I might as well document the chaos. I also think I am pretty good at teaching home-ec. So I am blogging about my super-DIY life. View all posts by autumnreeder


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I've never heard of an API test.
Apparently it's a California thing.
Academic Performance Index (API) (CA Dept of Education)
If this is what you are talking about, it's a measure of state law intended to measure the performance of public schools.
The SAT is the standard test used throughout the US by colleges to assess the academic achievement of prospective students.
Student or Learner


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Review: Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese's soberest, most vivaciously thrilling vision of how hollow (and short) the fast lives of mafios really are.4.0
As a visual stylist, Martin Scorsese is at once an impressionist and expressionist. His bold, old-school use of color and lighting turns the world around his characters into reflections of their personalities, his active, perspective-locked camera movements and editing schemes placing the lens completely within the point of view of his protagonists. In Goodfellas, the director immediately jumps into the nostalgic recollections of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a low-level mobster in a small New York neighborhood who nonetheless felt like he lived on top of the world. Overlit flashbacks of Henry's youth spent running errands for local gangsters present the wiseguy's turf as the boy sees it: all gleaming Cadillac chrome and folded $100 bills that seem to spring out of the very ground where criminals walk. As a man, Henry feels no less awestruck by the power afforded to him by the Family, with the areas he frequents for work and relaxation regularly lit through bronze and red filters that stress at once the history of order and hierarchy that keeps the mafia composed and the wellsprings of passion and fury that wiseguys typically unleash on anyone who crosses them.
Scorsese's camera, backed by Nicholas Pileggi's episodic script, never lingers too long on any of Henry's memories. As such, the film initially rides high on Henry's fond recollections of big scores and unpunished violence. When, for example, Henry helps his friends Tommy (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) kill one of their old rivals, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker favor low-angle shots of the men kicking their prostrate target, using split-second glimpses of his increasingly bloodied face as a cathartic punctuation. They're pitiless shots, for Henry feels no pity toward the man. Gradually, however, the repetitiveness of the sequences can't be ignored, but Scorsese uses that repetition to thematic effect, emphasizing the lack of power these egotistical men truly wield within the organization. Henry may have more money than he can spend, but that's a testament to his unimaginative consumerist desires, not his placement among the Lucchese elite. Even the film's most spectacular visual achievement, that long take that winds through the Copacabana as Henry woos his girlfriend, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), uses the rigid formalism required of any extended take to communicate how banal and unspontaneous Henry's power truly is. The camera movement and the obsequiousness shown to Henry create the illusion of total access, but in the end the man is just worming his way through bustling kitchens to get a front-row seat to watch Henny Youngman, a once-revered comic now used as a shorthand for hacky punchline humor.
The spectacular visual style masks the banality of what it documents, an approach mirrored in the acting. De Niro's naturally laconic delivery and body language codes Jimmy as a shrewd planner and man of few words, but even when he pulls off one of the largest heists in U.S. history, Jimmy never rises above the bottom rung of the mob ladder. Liotta clues in on the nostalgia in the real Hill's feelings for his old life and adds a childish streak to his portrayal of Henry, a petulance that undermines his sense of self-confidence. Pesci epitomizes the film, regularly exploding in mushroom clouds of expletives and finding the mordant humor in unchecked psychopathy. But he also plays Tommy like a former high school football star in middle age, someone who never made anything of his life, but believes himself to still be the center of the world.
Even Bracco gets a chance to join in the frenzy. Actresses in Scorsese films tend to get stuck in the role of the tut-tutting conscience struggling to make itself heard over the din of the guys. But if Karen is the film's heart, then she only proves that the movie doesn't have one. She falls in love with Henry when he viciously beats a neighbor who sexually assaulted her, and Henry's opulent lifestyle clearly attracts her. One of the most memorable close-ups in the film is the punch-drunk euphoria in her slack face at her wedding, as happy to enter into this world as Henry was as a child. In her own way, Karen matches her husband's hypocrisy and shifting priorities, initially balking at the tackiness of other mob wives only to eventually preside over the gaudiest house in creation, decorated with loud wallpaper, bars behind fake walls, and enough gold plating to fill a casino lobby.
Bracco plays Karen with a nervousness that the woman can't hide, but in reality she's no more paranoid or scared than the men in her life. A recurring tic of the film is a keen focus on eyes and glances. As Henry sinks into coke-addled depravity, his sallow eyes start to move back and forth metronomically as they scan for threats, be they his disapproving captains or F.B.I. helicopters. But even the ranking members of the Lucchese family behave like caged animals. Paul Sorvino gives the closest thing the movie has to a naturalistic performance as the neighborhood boss Paulie; befitting a man who only answers to people the average wiseguy never even sees in a lifetime, Paulie only moves and speaks when he pleases, and only to those he deems worthy. Yet as Scorsese's camera bobs between the meaningful stares and nods that Paulie sends out to inferiors via a gestural relay, it betrays the boss's fear of being caught saying anything incriminating, indeed anything at all. Scorsese broke out with street crime movies that critiqued their protagonists while indulging in their vices, yet it's Goodfellas, the most vicariously thrilling of the lot, that ultimately presents the soberest vision of how hollow (and short) these fast lives really are.
Cast: Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent Director: Martin Scorsese Screenwriter: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese Distributor: Warner Bros. Running Time: 145 min Rating: R Year: 1990 Buy: Video, Soundtrack
Robert Forster: Winning in the Late Innings
The Oscar-nominated actor brought a sense of honor and dignity to every role he played.
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive opens with a nighttime ride into oblivion. A limo drifts through the lightless void of the Hollywood Hills, red taillights burning in the blackness. An enigmatic woman, ebony hair and curvaceous red lips lending her the air of a tragic beauty, sits in the back by herself. The limo pulls over, and after the woman says, "We don't stop here," the driver aims a gun at her, but a gaggle of joyriding kids comes speeding around the curve and crashes into the vehicle. The woman climbs out of the wreckage stupefied and traipses into the hills, leaving behind the mangled metal and bodies.
Soon, a stoic detective arrives on the scene. He looks like a lawman, serious, a little sad, his face etched with the wrinkles of time. He examines the cars, offers a few terse observations, gazes out at the nocturnal city sprawling before him. It's Robert Forster's only scene in the film, and it's an indelible one, imbued with mystery and menace, an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Saying fewer than 20 words and appearing in only a handful of shots, he exudes an air of wisdom and weariness—that of an indolent man who's seen some shit and knows the horrors lurking ahead. In a film of dreamy logic and ineffaceable images, Forster's taciturn detective acts as the final glimpse of reality before we slip into a world of Hollywood hopes and fantasy.
Forster, who died of brain cancer at the age of 78 this past Friday, was a prolific actor who experienced a remarkable second act in his mid-50s after giving a deeply empathetic and vulnerable performance as a love-struck bail bondsman in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, a film populated by wounded characters leading unamazing lives, and who aspire to transcend mediocrity. "My career by then was dead," Forster told the AV Club's Will Harris in a 2011 interview. "No agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing…I could not believe that he [Tarantino] was talking about the Max Cherry role."
Like so many of Tarantino's films, Jackie Brown is replete with colorful, loquacious characters whose banter is clever, trenchant, and self-referential, but Forster's Max Cherry is reserved and crestfallen, a man who's settled into complacency and finds in Pam Grier's flight attendant an unexpected inspiration. It's one of American cinema's great unconsummated love stories. Forster is a subtle actor, playing Max as an Everyman who chases people for a living but never seems to find what he's looking for, and who willingly embroils himself in a dangerous situation because of love. He's smart, self-sufficient, a decent guy, and yet for Jackie Brown he's willing to risk his life, or whatever mundane existence he calls a life.
Forster was one of those great actors who appeared in far too few great films. His filmography is rife with bad films, though he was invariably a dependable presence in everything he did. He began his career promisingly, with a supporting role in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye, and earned renown for his turn as an ambitious and ill-fated news cameraman in Haskell Wexler's incandescent Medium Cool. He played a private eye in 1930s Hollywood in the show Banyon (his role in Mulholland Drive almost feels like a brief homage to the short-lived series) and appeared in a slew of genre movies for the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. Of note is Lewis Teague's Alligator, in which a gargantuan reptile terrorizes a city, William Lustig's nihilistic grindhouse flick Vigilante, and a rare villainous turn in Delta Force, opposite the indefatigable Chuck Norris.
It wasn't until Jackie Brown and his subsequent Oscar nomination that Forster reentered the public consciousness. The way Tarantino exhumes old, often "trash" films when crafting his paeans to moving pictures, he also has a preternatural skill for resurrecting the careers of forgotten or faded actors. Tarantino fought for Forster to get the part. When news of Forster's death went public, the director said in a statement:
"Today the world is left with one less gentlemen. One less square shooter. One less good man. One less wonderful father. One less marvelous actor. I remember all the breakfasts we had at silver spoons. All the stories. All the kind words. All the support. Casting Robert Forster in Jackie Brown was one of the best choices I've ever made in my life. I will miss you dearly my old friend."
Forster appeared in a panoply of listless films and television programs throughout the 2000s (his appearance in Alexander Payne's The Descendants in 2011 being an exception) but became a household face again in 2018, when he took on the role of Sheriff Frank Truman, Harry S. Truman's brother, on the third season of Lynch's Twin Peaks. Whereas Michael Ontkean exuded a mercurial youthfulness on the original series, that of a warm-hearted, just man capable of fiery spontaneity, Forster plays the elder Sheriff Truman rather pensively, sagacious and serene. Which is to say, he acts with the wisdom accrued by experience.
Forster also appeared in a season five episode of Breaking Bad, as a vacuum store owner and "disappearer" named Ed who helps Bryan Cranston's Walt change identities. A stable presence amid the histrionic theatrics that defined the show's approach to acting, Forster gives an understated performance and a sense of the real-world left behind by Vince Gilligan's increasingly combustible melodrama. Forster reprised the part this year in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, the actor's final screen credit. In a film-stealing scene, Forster stands steadfast and stoical against Aaron Paul's desperate, bedraggled Jesse Pinkman, refusing to perform his disappearing service over a $1,800 discrepancy. The viewer is, of course, rooting for Jesse, yet one can't help but respect the conviction of Forster's unruffled professional. The actor brings a sense of honor and dignity to the role, as he did with every role. Forster was a safe, reliable presence, someone you trusted, unflustered, earnest, whether he was fighting monstrous alligators or swooning after air stewardesses.
Review: Cyrano, My Love Thinks Art Is Only Born of Romantic Passion
The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.1.5
Alexis Michalik's Cyrano, My Love wears its fondness for Shakespeare in Love very much on its sleeve. Though it serves up nuggets of truth, its take on Edmond Rostand (Thomas Solivérès) and the turbulent circumstances surrounding his creation of Cyrano de Bergerac is an outlandish one, imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls John Madden's Oscar winner. And while Michalik positions Rostand as the story's triumphant artist, the French dramatist is often reduced to a skittish ninny—as opposed to the pompous ass that Joseph Fiennes's Shakespeare was positioned as—whose great art emanates not from the mind, but the cockles of the heart.
For a film so hellbent on the notion that Cyrano de Bergerac was inspired not only by actual events, but real emotions, there's surprisingly little effort made to articulate with any specificity the conflicted feelings behind Rostand's penning of what would become the most famous French play of all time. The initial catalyst for his play's central conceit occurs when he steps in to help an actor friend, Léonidas (Tom Leeb), struggling to find the words to woo a costume designer, Jeanne (Lucie Boujenah), on whom he has a crush. Rostand, in one of the film's many blatant nods to Cyrano de Bergerac, begins to feed his friend a barrage of romantic lines and relish the secrecy with which he can play out a love affair without disturbing his marriage with his endlessly patient and supportive wife, Rosemonde (Alice de Lencquesaing).
Yet, rather than teasing out the ample psychosexual baggage that should arise from the cognitive dissonance of Rostand writing daily love letters to Jeanne, his unknowing muse, while still professing, with complete honesty, that his only true love is his wife, Michalik pivots his focus to the swirling chaos of Cyrano de Bergerac's production. With Rostand's emotional conflict left fairly nebulous, Cyrano, My Love never quite gets to the root of the author's inspiration, leaving its familiar theatrical farce about the troubles of mounting a stage play grounded in neither genuine emotion nor any palpable stakes.
As the hurdles that Rostand and company face in staging Cyrano de Bergerac grow bigger and Rostand writes pages to be rehearsed before the ink dries, the film introduces a parade of quirky, ostentatious characters. From the historical, such as Sarah Bernhardt (Clémentine Célarié) and Anton Chekhov (Misha Leskot), to the imagined, such as a prostitute (Mathilde Seigner) who's foisted into the lead role of Roxane, each one is more thinly conceived than the next, with eccentricities dialed up to 11. The most egregious of these larger-than-life characterizations, however, is Monsieur Honoré (Jean-Michel Martial), the black café owner whose sole purpose is to repeatedly tap into his struggles as a minority as a means to galvanize the all-white cast and crew, who he then cheers on from the sidelines.
Cyrano, My Love's lone performative bright spot comes in the form of a surprisingly nimble turn by Olivier Gourmet, known primarily for his dour turns in many of the Dardenne brothers' films. Gourmet lends both humor and pathos to the play's famous but desperate lead actor, Constant Coquelin. But while Coquelin steals the spotlight in a number of scenes, Rostand remains little more than a perpetually anxiety-ridden artist who virtually stumbles into writing a masterpiece during a helter-skelter production. And with little care given to rendering the intense emotional tumult that spurred his artistic process, all the pandemonium of Cyrano, My Love proves to be much ado about nothing.
Cast: Thomas Solivérès, Olivier Gourmet, Mathilde Seigner, Tom Leeb, Lucie Boujenah, Alice de Lencquesaing, Clémentine Célarié, Igor Gotesman, Dominique Pinon, Simon Abkarian, Marc Andréoni, Jean-Michel Martial, Olivier Lejeune, Antoine Dulery, Alexis Michalik Director: Alexis Michalik Screenwriter: Alexis Michalik Distributor: Roadside Attractions Running Time: 112 min Rating: R Year: 2018
Review: In Greener Grass, White Picket Fences Cast Shadows Like Tendrils
In the film's world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.3
The opening credits of Greener Grass linger on a twitching, toothy smile covered in braces. Everyone in the film wears braces. Everyone drives a golf cart, too, and dresses in gentle pinks and blues. The lighting is soft and sun-drenched, an effect that's most pronounced during the film's soccer matches. In the opening of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, the camera creeps through a suburb's pleasant veneer to reveal the rot that festers beneath. But for Greener Grass co-directors, co-writers, and co-stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, the very surface is the thing that's so unsettling, a place populated by slithering, rictus-grinning meat puppets penned in by white picket fences and their own crippling need to conform.
The trouble, if you could call it that, begins when Jill (DeBoer) abruptly gifts Lisa (Luebbe) with her newborn baby as they watch their other children play soccer. This isn't, in the film's bizarre conception of suburbia, a particularly outrageous act. At worst, it's overly generous, like giving someone a gift more expensive than they're comfortable accepting; another neighbor, Kim Ann (Mary Holland), later laments that she wasn't given the child instead. The children in Greener Grass are essentially property, status symbols to reflect upon their owners in their pristine homes and yards, all of which feeds into an undercurrent of pervasive competition that nonetheless reinforces conformity and simply not rocking the boat.
Everything is seemingly interchangeable in Greener Grass. At a cookout, it takes a full conversation for Jill and Lisa to notice that they're smooching and hanging on the arms of the wrong husbands, Dennis (Neil Casey and Nick (Beck Bennett), respectively. And when Jill's young son, Julian (Julian Hilliard), inexplicably transforms into a dog, she's horrified, but Nick, the boy's father, seems pleased: Julian may no longer be able to take the advanced math class, but he's now a prodigy when it comes to playing catch in the backyard.
There isn't much of a traditional plot to the film, which plays more as a recurring series of sketches that subtly further Jill's downward spiral. DeBoer and Luebbe let their scenes linger long past the point of discomfort, both in the length of mannered dialogue exchanges and the amount of time they hold a shot without cutting; the camera gingerly pulls out or pushes in while characters perform odd actions in the background, like perpetually folding tighty-whities or fishing out a seemingly infinite supply of pocket change. It feels voyeuristic, and sometimes it is: In one scene, a hand appears to reveal that we're watching a POV shot, and in another, an off-screen voice begins breathing heavily and starts mock-repeating dialogue.
A schoolteacher, Miss Human (D'Arcy Carden), fixates on the deaths of American pioneers making their way to the West. In pursuit of "a better life," they lost things along the way, as the people of Greener Grass have lost themselves in their migration to the suburbs. The film is more unsettling for its lack of an ordinary plot structure where, say, Jill might break out of her suburban funk or get everything to explode with violence in a revolt against conformity. In the film's world, there can be no real resistance. Here, the burbs have already won, having already sent out the white picket fences like tendrils as far as the eye can see. There is no escape.
Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Beck Bennett, Neil Casey, Mary Holland, D'Arcy Carden, Janicza Bravo, Dot-Marie Jones, Lauren Adams, Julian Hillard, Asher Miles Fallica Director: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe Screenwriter: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe Distributor: IFC Midnight Running Time: 100 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Cave Pays Wrenching Tribute to the Doctors Saving Lives in Syria
Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave's doctors have left Ghouta.3
Feras Fayyad's documentary The Cave concludes with what almost seems like a non sequitur: After the staff at a Syrian underground hospital are finally forced to evacuate their war-torn city, the film fades to a low-angle shot of a submerged World War II bomber plane. Wade Muller's camera tracks slowly past the moss-covered plane and an unexploded shell that lies nearby. Yes, it's a 1940s bomber, and The Cave is about Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, that's subjected to constant bombardment from contemporary warplanes, but what does this image have to do with the ongoing Syrian Civil War?
Given how instantly recognizable this bomber is despite decades of degradation and overgrowth speaks to how familiar we are with the massive political and moral sins of the 20th century. Fayyad's point would appear to be that these sins are being recapitulated today in the Middle East. It's not only the relentless bombing and devastating chemical weapon attacks captured in the film that evoke images of Europe during the West's greatest conflict, but also the treatment of people attempting to escape the horrors of the Syrian Civil War.
Over the image of the bomber plane, Fayyad places statistics about the tens of thousands of refugees who've drowned fleeing the conflict. As in the omnipresent WWII stories we repeatedly tell ourselves are warnings against ever letting such things happen again, thousands of people in the Middle East are trapped, starving, and suffocating, their homes and livelihoods destroyed by a global war being carried out over their heads.
By the time the submerged bomber appears on screen, those schooled in the history of occupied Europe (or who are simply avid tourists) may have already drawn another parallel, as The Cave, the name given to the underground hospital in Ghouta, evokes the Hospital in the Rock, the Budapest hospital built within a bunker under a hill in the leadup to WWII. From inside The Cave, where the camera keeps us for almost the entirety of the documentary, the sound of bombs is muffled, but their consequences are unavoidable. After every raid, the hospital's dimly lit underground hallway fills up with desperate families carting the wounded, weeping mothers shoving others out of the way to check on their dying sons, and orchestral music streaming on Dr. Salim's smartphone. The Mozart helps him focus and, he explains, replaces anesthetic, to which the hospital doesn't have access.
Heading the small staff that operates The Cave during the years-long siege of eastern Ghouta is pediatrician Dr. Amani, a physician so superhumanly dedicated that she'd come off as an idealized abstraction in a fiction film. Fayyad doesn't delve into her backstory, but Amani appears to come from a relatively privileged background: Her family, whom she speaks to regularly on the phone, seems to be in a safe place, and she's well-educated and a feminist, an inclination she expresses strategically to the camera and, when necessary, to defend her occupation against overtly misogynist patients. Despite her presumed access to avenues of flight, she's stayed behind to treat juvenile victims of bombing campaigns and malnourishment, even paying dangerous house visits to diagnose the children of women who can't leave their homes. Though brave and generous, she's no saintly paragon of modesty; on occasion, she rages against the regime and their allies, and the 30-year-old outwardly longs for a regular day-to-day life in which she might be permitted to wear mascara.
Fayyad saves its most graphic depiction of the consequences of the siege for the latter part of the documentary, as a chemical weapon attack perpetrated by the regime and its Russian allies sends dozens of choking people—many children—rushing to The Cave for help. Fayyad ratchets up the suspense with a booming score that crescendos as the staff gradually realizes they're handling patients who are choking rather than bleeding, and recognizes the smell of chlorine beginning to permeate the halls. Despite the real human suffering on screen, the whiff of rhetorical construction supplied by the score and the accelerating pace of the editing makes the scene feel a bit too much like a Hollywood trope, crafting suspense out of pain.
Perhaps, on the other hand, that moment of tension could be said to effectively convey some aspect of the events as the doctors felt it. Other excessively stylistic elements in The Cave, however, that work against the urgency of its messaging. The handheld, intimate format of the bulk of the documentary is preceded by a languid opening drone shot of the skyline of Al Ghouta, in which missiles are shown gliding into the mass of buildings and erupting into slowly moving dust and smoke. Ironically, this shot almost beautifies or poeticizes the ongoing destruction of the city, its cool and distanced perspective conflicting sharply with the later embodied close-ups of the suffering victims of the bombings.
As the film goes on, the bombings draw closer to The Cave, part of which is actually destroyed by one raid. Samaher, the doctor put in charge of preparing the hospital's meager rations, cooks in fits and starts, running away from the stove whenever the sound of a plane rattles the nearby wall. Many of the male members of the team chide her for her skittish, sometimes nervously playful behavior, but candid shots pick up even the even-keeled Salim crying after a rare and brief Skype call with his family. The film's depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after Amani, Salim, and Samaher have left Ghouta.
Director: Feras Fayyad Distributor: National Geographic Documentary Films Running Time: 96 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: The Addams Family Is an Ooky Show of Confused Messaging
Throughout, the film tirelessly hammers home the point of being true to yourself.1.5
The Addams family has always proudly embraced its otherness with a mix of confidence and indifference to the opinions of judgy neighbors. And Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan's animated The Addams Family is no different in that regard, setting up its fish-out-of-water scenario as soon as Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez (Oscar Isaac) take off to New Jersey and settle into the Goth mansion where they'll raise their two children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). All, of course, with the help of their loopy Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) and loyal servant, Lurch (Conrad Vernon), whose rocking out on the mansion's giant pipe organ constitutes the majority of the film's score.
With the family's strict adherence to ceremonies steeped in their vaguely Eastern European roots, particularly the saber dance that Pugsley prepares for throughout the film, the metaphor for the immigrant experience writes itself. But The Addams Family's targets are ultimately not the seemingly resentful bigots who fear the Addamses' presence in their neighborhood, but an outmoded notion of suburban conformity that harks back to the 1950s. MAGA-esque indignation, which occasionally creeps in through a comment spewed from within an angry mob, is dwarfed by a distaste for, of all things, tract housing and HGTV-esque renovations.
In fact, the film's villain, Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), doesn't fear the Addamses for their cultural differences, but rather for the devaluing affect their eyesore of a house, perched on a hill, will have on the community of homes she's building nearby and planning to market on her hugely popular television show. While Margaux's town is called Assimilation, the lockstep conformity demanded here isn't one that requires the Addamses to reject any deeply held beliefs or cultural norms, merely to apply a quick slap of paint to their home and endure a wardrobe change or two. This leaves The Addams Family feeling pretty toothless, even for a family film, as it's unwilling to even pinpoint the true roots of the townspeople's fears. Its eventual forgiveness of their thinly veiled jingoism, passing the enraged residents off as otherwise friendly, well-meaning people who simply fell victim to the manipulations of the greedy Margaux, only further dilutes any potentially relevant commentary.
In a subplot involving Wednesday's venturing into Assimilation Middle School and befriending Margaux's daughter, Parker (Elsie Fisher), The Addams Family offers an intriguing twist on the idea of the Addamses as a perfect family. When Wednesday shows signs of accepting Parker's fashion advice, she finds in her family, particularly Morticia, the very same intolerance they're confronted with around town. But this nugget of wisdom is soon lost in the wind when Wednesday returns home to protect her family in their hour of need. Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point. You be you, but eventually everyone wants to fit in one way or another, so maybe change just a bit?
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler, Allison Janney, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, Elsie Fisher, Tituss Burgess Director: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan Screenwriter: Matt Lieberman, Pamela Pettler Distributor: United Artists Releasing Running Time: 87 min Rating: PG Year: 2019 Buy: Soundtrack
Review: Mister America Is an Essential Addition to the On Cinema Universe
The long and circuitous narrative history of the so-called OCU weighs heavily on Eric Notarnicola's film.3
Equal parts absurdist satire and ambitious serialized melodrama, Tim Heidecker, Gregg Turkington, and Eric Notarnicola's online comedy series On Cinema and its extended universe—including Decker and The Trial miniseries—together comprise one of the brilliant multimedia projects of the decade. Originated in 2011 as a rambling podcast featuring the inane and unenlightening movie chatter of fictional amateur reviewers also named Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, the show has since blossomed into an elaborate Siskel and Ebert-style pastiche that has increasingly focused on the ongoing drama playing out between the hosts at the expense of any critical insight, all while intersecting with and commenting on the real world in ever-elaborate ways. As a self-contained enterprise completely produced and financed by the fictional simulacrum of Heidecker, the various twists and turns of the show's content over the course of its now 11 seasons come as a direct extension of the showrunner's ego and overreach, with Turkington, the self-described "expert," more often than not a misery-ridden victim of his tyrannical partner's outrageous whims.
The long and circuitous narrative history of the so-called On Cinema universe (or OCU)—far too head-spinning a metafiction to summarize in a few sentences—weighs heavily on Mister America, the first theatrical release to emerge from the Adult Swim-sponsored fictional world. But Heidecker and company have taken steps to extend the subject matter beyond its niche audience. In a shrewd maneuver that marks a first within the OCU, Mister America is framed as the work of an outside creator: Josh Lorton, a documentary filmmaker (played by series director Notarnicola) drawn to the peculiar case of Tim's run for district attorney of San Bernardino county—a bit carried out for several months this year on Heidecker's real Twitter account. In presenting itself as an unbiased, third-party view, Mister America allows itself the luxury of recapping critical pieces of the fictional timeline without coming across as monotonous filler for the devoted fans, since Lorton's position as a neutral observer simply curious about a local eccentric brings a new angle on familiar absurdities.
Playing journalist, Lorton fills in the context behind Tim's district attorney campaign with clips from recent seasons, ersatz local news clippings, and social media posts. As part of season nine, Tim ran the Electric Sun Desert Music Festival, an EDM bacchanalia funded by scam money and fueled by suspicious vape oil that left 20 teenagers dead and put Tim on trial, facing a life sentence. This string of events led to the OCU's most challenging and formally audacious experiment yet: the aesthetically exacting five-hour mock-broadcast, courtesy of the fictional Apple Valley News, of this weeklong trial (the judge of which, Curtis Webster's Edward Szymczyk, appears in Mister America to provide shell-shocked commentary). One mystery member of the jury was responsible for the trial's inconclusive verdict, and Mister America picks up with Tim having hired this person, a reactionary single woman named Toni (Terri Parks), as his campaign assistant on the basis of her dubious former ad experience.
The shady and ill-advised people Tim aligns himself with on the show—including Axiom and Manuel, the members of Tim's nü-metal band Dekkar, and Dr. San, the spiritual guru responsible for the Electric Sun's lethal vape oil—provide ludicrous counterpoint to the ongoing toxicity of Tim and Gregg's relationship. Likewise, the Tim-Toni dynamic proves to be Mister America's richest vein, as Toni's guileless support, which verges on idol worship, if not romantic interest, periodically softens Tim's autocratic harshness, and the scenes between the two in Tim's Best Western "office" offer a compelling push-pull between dictatorial behavior and collaborative stupidity. In the film's funniest scene, a boozed-up Tim tries to dictate an impromptu social media press release about his D.A. opponent, Vincent Rosetti (Don Pecchia), while Toni struggles to open a Word document, with Tim's sudden rhetorical adrenaline gradually yielding to a resignation over his partner's incompetence.
The wishy-washy campaign run by Tim and Toni suggests the kind of misguided political adventure many impassioned Trump supporters might theoretically embark upon in the wake of their leader's success: an emphasis on eradicating crime, getting things back to the way they used to be, and leveraging personal vendettas for political gain. In this case, the outsized target is "Rosetti the Rat," Tim's moniker for the prosecutor who went after him in court, for whom he harbors such hatred that it leads to the campaign slogan, "We Have a Rat Problem."
An uproarious montage follows Tim, fancied up in a bargain-basement beige suit and wraparound shades, as he plants signs with this slogan throughout his community, and the film's trajectory hinges on an imagined showdown with Rosetti that's almost guaranteed to never happen. Rather than going toe-to-toe with Rosetti on the campaign trail, Tim must instead contend with Gregg, whose participation in Lorton's documentary throws Tim into one of his tantrums, as his On Cinema co-host knows the truth and wants nothing more than to spoil the bogus campaign—at least when not showering Lorton with unwanted movie trivia.
Just as it's intriguing to watch Tim present himself for Lorton's camera, outside the usual venues over which he exerts control, Gregg, too, winds up a more complex character by virtue of being observed in the film's real-life setting. Already established within the OCU as a deeply troubled figure who medicates his loneliness via a fetishistic collector mentality, the neurotic ambassador of the rinky-dink Victorville Film Archive comes across even more sad and socially inept in Lorton's presence. Several times, spurned by the camera crew, Gregg wanders off into the strip-mall anonymity of San Bernardino with no destination in mind. These shots, simultaneously haunting and amusing, color Gregg's involvement in Tim's personal affairs as the compulsions of a man with no other prospects in life beyond his cardboard boxes of useless VHS tapes—an impression created in On Cinema but given palpable heft in Mister America.
All of this may seem preposterously overcomplicated to the uninitiated, but the film is actually rather safe and inclusive in its comedic approach, leaning toward upbeat cutting and broad punchlines at the occasional expense of the drier, thornier documentation of psychological warfare on display in The Trial and On Cinema. The film's streamlined form is justified by the journalistic framing device, of course, but Heidecker and Turkington's combined improvisational genius is best served in the more open formats of the shows, when they have the free reign to be long-winded and dig into their characters' respective pathologies.
That's not to say that Mister America entirely lacks such antics—the climactic town hall meeting, which rapidly escalates toward hysteria, plays out in a convincing approximation of real time—but that it retrofits the pricklier excesses of Heidecker and Turkington's comedy into a more recognizable mockumentary shape. In any case, what's so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America's universe-specific innovations, including the introduction of Lorton's outside observer, renders the film indispensable in context.
Cast: Tim Heidecker, Gregg Turkington, Terri Parks, Don Pecchia, Curtis Webster Director: Eric Notarnicola Screenwriter: Tim Heidecker, Gregg Turkington, Eric Notarnicola Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 89 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Gemini Man Erects a Cardboard World Around Its Special Effects
Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.1.5
In centering its action melodrama around the confrontation between its main character and a duplicated version of himself, Ang Lee's Gemini Man joins some dubious company: the forgotten Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Replicant, the late-pre-governor-era Arnold Schwarzenegger film The Sixth Day, and Richard Lester's abortive superhero sequel Superman 3. These films relied on split-screen techniques and misleading cuts to split their respective heroes in two—tricks that had, in essence, existed since Georges Méliés. New digital technologies appear to have spurred this old Hollywood hobbyhorse back into action, as Gemini Man's preternaturally gifted, recently retired secret agent Henry Brogan (Will Smith) confronts not just a clone, but a younger clone, logically dubbed Junior and also played by Smith, de-aged via facial scanning and semi-automated digital animation.
If the special effects industry has devised some new tricks, however, Gemini Man is hardly evidence that Hollywood screenwriters have. Co-written by Billy Ray, Darren Lemke, and David Benioff, the film never successfully redirects our attention from its naked exhibition of advanced CG and toward some sort of meaningful conflict. The broadly sketched attributes that define Brogan are either totally utilitarian (he has a bee allergy, which comes into play in a manner so haphazard that one suspects that the payoff was added at the last minute) or completely unexplored (such as his insomnia). Sometimes, the script's sense of characterization also betrays its undercooked thinking about its ostensible main subject. To wit, the film dwells both on how Brogan's traumatic upbringing shaped his psychology and on how different Junior's youth has been, but then it has Brogan assemble a precise and specific psychological profile of Junior based on his own mind. Nature or nurture? Whichever one, apparently, is convenient to producing a teary-eyed Will Smith in a given scene.
Given Benioff's writing credit here, it's also hard not to draw a connection between the phony female badassery of HBO's Game of Thrones and how Gemini Man treats Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the agent sent to surveil Brogan in his retirement. When Brogan, attempting to relax and do some boating, outs the attractive young woman working at the dock as an undercover D.I.A. agent (definitely not C.I.A., for whatever reason), he observes, ostensibly impressed, her distinguished record: how she never received a single demerit despite her expansive resume of operations throughout the globe. Brogan then spends the remainder of Gemini Man explaining standard spy procedures to her, like going on the lam, as if she were a rookie. (Lee, Benioff, and company also stage an egregious scene that sees Danielle the seasoned spy strip for an awkward pat-down from Junior.)
Junior has been sent to kill Brogan by Clay Verris (Clive Owen, doing his best to menacingly hit those American diphthongs), Junior's surrogate father and the head of Gemini, a private military contractor. Brogan, it seems, constitutes a proverbial loose end for both the D.I.A. and Gemini, which cloned him in 1995 and now has his replacement ready to go. The seeming arbitrariness of Verris choosing Junior to assassinate Brogan is hardly accounted for by the film's explanation, which has something to do with Brogan being Junior's "darkness" that he must vanquish in order to…become a real man? It's unclear, particularly as it appears that Verris didn't want Junior to discover that they were actually the same man.
Perhaps appropriately, Gemini Man suggests a hybrid clone of Bourne, 007, and Terminator flicks. An internecine conflict between shifty agency types divided over what to do about Brogan plays out in dry cellphone exchanges, a pursuit through mostly random places around the globe provides the film with exotic backgrounds for motorcycle chases and extended fisticuffs, and a late-film revelation about Gemini's ultimate goals raises the specter of a post-human world. Throughout, the action is underwhelming, as Lee uses rapid cuts and tight angles to disguise faulty CG—but to no avail. The problem is less Junior's digitally altered face—which, while not perfect, can actually emote—and more the rubber bodies that bounce around the frame, rolling out of car accidents and flipping into karate kicks.
Gemini Man is an action movie whose attempt to carry emotional weight is betrayed by the utter weightlessness of both its spectacle and its narrative. There's a story here about middle age and the loss of youth, the uncanniness of knowing you were once a person you no longer are—the existential discomfort of looking in a mirror and seeing someone else looking back. Occasionally one gets a glimpse of the film Lee thinks he's making: Brogan avoids mirrors, as he avers on a few occasions, and interestingly, Lee frames close-ups almost frontally, the actors nearly staring into the camera, as in a mirror (or a Yasujirō Ozu film). There's a self-reflexive element to Gemini Man, concerning the illusory preservation of youth in the cinema and the way Hollywood reflects ideal selves back to us. But Lee can't do much with this idea, and even a soulful pair of performances from Smith can't enliven the cardboard world erected around the special effects at the heart of the film. In the end, whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, Gemini Man is just another assembly-line reproduction.
Cast: Will Smith, Clive Owen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Benedict Wong, Douglas Hodge, Theodora Miranne, Linda Emond, Ralph Brown Director: Ang Lee Screenwriter: David Benioff, Billy Ray, Darren Lemke Distributor: Paramount Pictures Running Time: 117 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
Review: The Dead Center Is an Atmospheric Study of Human Futility
The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.3
People who work in intense environments, such as police stations, social services offices, and hospitals, are familiar with the strain of needing to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity. Primarily set in a hospital over a few days, writer-director Billy Senese's The Dead Center, which follows a handful of medical professionals as they grapple with something that symbolizes their fear of succumbing to their patients' sickness, is profoundly in tune with this sense of strain.
Senese and cinematographer Andy Duensing capture the hard white and sickly yellow light of a hospital in the middle of the night, as well as the eerie alternation of droning white noise and silence that can define such a setting. The filmmakers allow this hospital, especially the psychiatric ward, to creep into our bones. (It certainly helps that the staff here isn't composed of actors who appear to be out of central casting, as they suggest truly harried and exhausted members of the working class.) Occasionally puncturing this nocturnal twilight are the piercing sounds of patients in crisis, and Senese expertly captures this ebb and flow between the expectation of violence and weathering it. At its best, The Dead Center exudes some of the concentrated lo-fi intensity of Steven Soderbergh's Unsane.
The Dead Center has a horror-movie hook, which often lingers at the narrative's margins and screams of Chekhov's gun. The film opens with an ambulance delivering to the hospital a John Doe (Jeremy Child) who sliced his wrists and chest. Senese films the ambulance's trip from a god's-eye view, suggesting a supernatural presence that might not be all that friendly. Later, after John Doe is toe-tagged and bagged, he sits up, and Senese springs an unforgettably creepy sound effect: the crinkling of the body bag, which suggests the crackling of electricity. And this effect is complemented by the poignant sight of the quivering John Doe rising from the bag and wandering the hospital and slipping into an empty bed for warmth. In this moment, Senese grounds resurrection in the textures of a very realistic setting.
John Doe is discovered by the hospital's staff, and psychiatrist Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth) is charged with discerning his identity and illness, though Forrester, a renegade with considerable emotional issues himself, doesn't get far with this endeavor. Carruth invests a familiar type—the hotdog professional with little personal life—with a haunting and unusually opaque vulnerability. He keys us into Forrester's desperation to hide his own weaknesses from his staff, though his pain is only partially explained. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative thread, medical investigator Edward Graham (Bill Feehely) investigates John Doe's origins. This trail leads him to a motel room drenched in blood, and, in another bone-chilling detail, Graham drains a tub of blood to reveal a spiral carved at the bottom. Uncovering John Doe's identity, Graham discovers a man marked by death, who has become a corporeal Grim Reaper.
The Dead Center is ultimately an atmospheric study of human futility. John Doe might be a monster, but he's also the ultimate incurable victim, who destroys any degree of control that Forrester and Graham fight to assume over their surroundings. Not unlike H.P. Lovecraft, Senese allows his audience to feel as if it's only seeing but a tip of a malign iceberg, and that ineffable impression of vastness is existentially frightening.
Cast: Shane Carruth, Poorna Jagannathan, Jeremy Childs, Bill Feehely Director: Billy Senese Screenwriter: Billy Senese Distributor: Arrow Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Mary Quickly Squanders Its Promising Horror-Movie Hook
Michael Goi's film comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.1.5
With Mary, whose title refers to an ancient ship with a history of drifting off course and losing its crews, director Michael Goi and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski have settled on a fertile setting for a haunting. This isn't a grand ship in the vein of either version of Ghost Ship, but a vessel that's intimate with seemingly little in the way of the sort of nooks and crannies that are integral to games of supernatural hide and seek.
As the latest doomed crew boards the Mary, with the purposes of turning her into a tourist boat along the Florida coast, Goi derives some suspense by implicitly prompting the audience to wonder where the bad stuff can happen, given the constriction of the setting. Intensifying this unease is the film's one unnerving image: of the boat's masthead, which is a wooden carving of a beautiful woman with wide, accusatory eyes—presumably Mary, a siren.
At first, it seems as if Mary is going to be a riff on Stephen King's Christine, in which a young man became romantically obsessed with a vintage vehicle, a 1957 Plymouth Fury. Just as Christine beckoned to its next victim from a junkyard, as a seemingly innocuous antique, the Mary calls to David (Gary Oldman), from a distance as he's scoping another boat at an auction. Like Christine, the Mary seems impractically beat up, which is a part of the seduction, as they both play into the hero complexes of emasculated men. In David's case, he's attempting to break free of a life as a captain for another man's business, and to help his family rebound from a domestic crisis that isn't revealed until late in the film. Which is to say that Mary has a promising hook to go with its setting: Initially, it appears that it will tell a story of David's undoing, of his obsession with a haunted ship that destroys him with promises of redemption.
Astonishingly, Goi and Jaswinski drop that hook immediately. David, who has the most invested in the ghost ship, is shunted off to the film's sidelines as the Mary works his family over in predictable ways. The man's wife, Sarah (Emily Mortimer, who's every bit as game as Oldman), is plagued by nightmares, while their little daughter, another Mary (Chloe Perrin), draws creepy pictures of a mystery woman. Tommy (Owen Teague), the boyfriend of David and Emily's older daughter, Lindsey (Stefanie Scott), is driven insane almost immediately, while Lindsey is batted around as a victim between various infected parties.
With Goi and Jaswinski unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats. The film's momentum is further stifled by a framing device—seemingly ported over from a generic cops-and-robbers television show—in which Sarah is interrogated about what happened aboard the Mary. The filmmakers are attempting, via this framing device, to impart a sense of mystery and inevitability upon the narrative, but it serves to make Mary feel as if it's half over before it even began.
Cast: Gary Oldman, Emily Mortimer, Owen Teague, Stefanie Scott, Chloe Perrin, Michael Landes, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Jennifer Esposito Director: Michael Goi Screenwriter: Anthony Jaswinski Distributor: RLJE Films Running Time: 84 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: First Cow Aims, and Often Strains, to Illuminate the American Experiment
Its themes are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.2.5
The best Kelly Reichardt films strike a sublime balance between character study and socioeconomic critique. First Cow—a mostly 19th-century-set drama co-written by Reichardt and frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, and based in part on his 2004 debut novel The Half-Life—is one of the director's shakier efforts. The film begins with an especially incisive William Blake quote ("The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship"), and its themes of systemic exploitation, the enduring vagaries of the free market, and the alternately tender and tempestuous bonds of male camaraderie are propped up by characters who come off as half-formed avatars rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.
That isn't to say Reichardt, who's edited all of her films since Old Joy, has lost the ability to create multilayered, gently provocative imagery. First Cow's opening scene, set in the present day, is particularly beautiful, visually and thematically. A young woman (Alia Shawkat) walking her dog uncovers a pair of skeletons beside an Oregon river. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt frames the bones in a steady, un-showy composition (the film is photographed in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio) so that it takes a few seconds to realize what you're looking at. The slow-dawning revelation of the moment epitomizes Reichardt's tendency in First Cow, as well as in many of her other films, to let drama emerge steadily and organically.
How did these bones get here? Reichardt is content to leisurely amble toward the answer to this question, and that approach does intrigue in the early going. In the Pacific Northwest wilderness of the 1820s, a cook named Otis "Cookie" Figowitz (John Magaro) accompanies an aggressive group of trappers as they head toward an Oregon Territory outpost. One night he discovers a Chinese immigrant, King-Lu (Orion Lee), hiding naked in the nearby brush. King-Lu is apparently on the run from some Russian ruffians, so Cookie hides him among the trappers' belongings. The pair reconnect again at the outpost, where they become drinking buddies and, eventually, partners in fortune-seeking crime.
The outpost's wealthiest resident, a haughty Englishman referred to only as Chief Factor (Toby Jones), has just brought in the first cow to grace the territory. Figowitz and King-Lu decide to steal the cow's milk—under cover of night, and as often as needed—which they then use as the key ingredient in artisanal pastries that become a lucrative staple of the outpost's thoroughfare. Their unwitting benefactor finds out about the treats (though not, at first, about their underhanded procuring methods) and offers them a handsome sum to bake pastries for him personally. And so the cycle of exploitation, righteous and not, continues—until it can't.
None of that summary quite captures First Cow's gravelly ambience. The outpost itself is as vividly realized and lived-in a location as the mining town in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a film Reichardt nods to here via both Anthony Gasparro's mud-strewn production design and the presence of Rene Auberjonois as a scarecrow-thin eccentric with a crow always on his shoulder. The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it's unfortunate that Figowitz and King-Lu ultimately feel outside it all.
This isn't the fault of Magaro or Lee. Both performers have a pleasing and often very funny rapport, especially whenever they exchange conspiratorial glances over a shared bottle of whiskey. However, Reichardt sees Figowitz and King-Lu, first and foremost, as the bag of bones they will become (abusers and victims both of capitalist injustice), rather than the men they are in each given moment. Their all-too-apparent endpoint supersedes their tragically flawed existence, which has the adverse effect of diminishing their humanity, reducing them to paper-thin symbols. This wreaks havoc with a finale that grasps for a profound elementalism akin to one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's lushly ardent fantasias, but instead comes off with the contrived ambiguity and labored didacticism of lesser John Sayles.
There's more insight into economic, racial, and social inequities in the offhand, unsubtitled exchange that Reichardt captures between two Native American women (one played by Lily Gladstone, the breakout star of Certain Women) as they converse among themselves in Chief Factor's home. It's the supporting cast and the side details that really sing in First Cow, both giving a sense of the alternately hopeful and despairing qualities of the American experiment that Reichardt aims, and too often strains, to illuminate.
Cast: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner, Scott Shepherd, Gary Farmer, Lily Gladstone, Alia Shawkat, Rene Auberjonois, Jared Kasowski Director: Kelly Reichardt Screenwriter: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt Distributor: A24 Running Time: 121 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
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text:
Jamie Dimon, arguably the nation's most powerful banker, has navigated intense scrutiny from Congress, the White House and regulators around the globe.
But it's a federal prosecutor in Sacramento, far from the world's financial and political capitals, who pinned the chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. to the wall.
U.S. Atty. Benjamin B. Wagner led the investigators who forced JPMorgan into talks now widely expected to produce a $13-billion settlement of fraud allegations. His team delivered key evidence revealing how JPMorgan misled investors while peddling bonds backed by subprime and "liar" loans from the housing bubble.
Wagner's probe posed an additional threat that Dimon could not afford to ignore: criminal charges against the bank. Beyond fines and settlements, a conviction could batter the bank's business, sending institutional investors fleeing to competitors.
The Sacramento mortgage fraud team had grown organically from the Central Valley, at one point home to five of the 10 cities with the nation's highest foreclosure rates. The office launched a mortgage fraud task force in 2007, as the bottom fell out of home prices that had been inflated by Wall Street chicanery.
"The Valley was ground zero for the mortgage fraud meltdown," said McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney who preceded Wagner and launched the task force.
The team started small and local, targeting foreclosure-rescue scams and real estate insiders who ripped off lenders. In 2009, when Atty. Gen. Eric Holder called on prosecutors across the country to join Washington- and New York-based mortgage fraud probes, Wagner raised his hand. He was named co-chair of the department's Mortgage Fraud Working Group and would end up heading the JPMorgan probe.
"We sort of stepped up and volunteered," he said.
On Sept. 23, Wagner boarded a plane for Washington, headed for a Justice Department news conference to announce his office would file a civil lawsuit against the nation's largest bank. Charts were created to explain the financial alchemy used to turn subprime loans into supposedly high-quality securities. One-hundred copies of the JPMorgan suit had been printed for reporters.
Then Dimon blinked. He made an eleventh-hour call to the Justice Department offering to reopen settlement talks.
The impending deal marks a stunning comeuppance for a firm once seen as a white knight of the financial crisis. JPMorgan, at the urging of top U.S. regulators, had swallowed collapsing firms such as Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns in emergency acquisitions.
Dimon has since explained away many fraud allegations against JPMorgan as the inherited problems of lesser banks. But the allegations underpinning Wagner's case involve JPMorgan alone, operating at the height of the housing boom, packaging high-risk loans into securities that would later go sour.
Buyers of the bonds included the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the nation's largest pension fund, which says it handed JPMorgan $376 million for securities that would later plummet in value. JPMorgan, the government alleges, had neglected to tell investors just how shaky the underlying home loans were.
The threat of a Sacramento-based criminal prosecution — which could still proceed — played a crucial role in the negotiations for civil penalties. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett sized up the threat to a financial firm earlier this week.
"You have no ability to negotiate," he said Tuesday on Bloomberg Television. "Basically, you've got to be like a wolf that bares its throat, you know, when it gets to the end. You cannot win."
Appointed as a U.S. attorney by President Obama in November 2009, Wagner oversees federal law enforcement in the Eastern District of California from a 16-story citadel. Fortified against terrorists after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, it opened in Sacramento in 1999.
Such high-profile corporate probes might more typically be handled by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, or perhaps higher-profile California offices.
"We tend to be overshadowed by Los Angeles and San Francisco," Wagner said. "But this is a big office, and a sophisticated one."
The office employs 85 lawyers, mostly in Sacramento and Fresno. That compares with about 250 lawyers in the Central District of California, which has offices in Los Angeles, Santa Ana and Riverside. But numbers don't tell the whole story, Wagner said.
"One advantage is we tend to have less turnover than L.A.," he said. "We have a quite a cadre of experienced prosecutors."
The office has handled its share of high-profile cases. It was involved in the investigation of Theodore Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to the two-decade Unabomber spree that injured 23 people and killed three, including a timber industry lobbyist in Sacramento.
In the late 1980s, the office created a phony shrimp processing plant and used a Gulf Coast FBI agent to pose as a corrupt businessman offering cash bribes for passage of a special interest bill. The "Shrimp Scam" sting ended in the convictions of 12 public officials, including California legislators.
While the office is not particularly known for white-collar prosecutions, Wagner said that has always been among his priorities. After getting his law degree from New York University in 1986, he spent five years at the Wall Street firm Cahill, Gordon & Reindell, working on financial cases that included securities fraud. At the Eastern District, from 2000 through 2009, he headed a special prosecutions unit that took on corporate fraud and tax evasion, along with public corruption and cybercrimes.
Equally motivating was how the mortgage crisis devastated his district. It includes the most productive farmland in the country, though its 7 million inhabitants live mostly near the urban centers of Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton, Vallejo and Fairfield.
During the boom, families flocked to the Valley, buying new homes that gobbled farmland by the acre. The Central Valley's promise was simple: more space, a cheaper house and a family-friendly atmosphere.
That promise quickly soured. As the mortgage meltdown gripped Wall Street, prices tumbled and legions became saddled with bad debt, dimming the dream — promised in one town's motto — of a "bright future."
In Sacramento County, the median home price peaked at $387,000 in August 2005, then tumbled 60.5% to $152,750 in January 2012. In San Joaquin County, prices fell 67.7%, according to research firm DataQuick. From January 2008 to September of this year, more than 96,000 homes were lost to foreclosure in the two counties, according to research firm DataQuick.
As Wall Street awaits final word on the tentative $13-billion settlement, Wagner continues to pursue his criminal investigation of JPMorgan.
The bank had hoped to forestall any criminal prosecution as a condition of accepting massive civil penalties. But the Justice Department refused, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly. JPMorgan walked away from the talks — only to return hours before the planned Department of Justice news conference.
The tentative settlement covers JPMorgan's liability in certain cases besides Wagner's — losses on loans sold to government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, certain state investigations, and $4 billion in relief for foreclosure-ravaged areas.
In talks with the bank, Holder told JPMorgan that absolving the bank of any criminal liability would be a non-starter, said the person briefed on the negotiations. In an important twist, the civil settlement is expected to require non-criminal admissions of wrongdoing by JPMorgan.
A criminal prosecution would mark a "clear shift in attitude" at the Justice Department, said John Coffee, a securities law expert at Columbia University. Just months ago, the department caught heat for going easy on big Wall Street firms.
But if no top executives get charged, the federal government may miss an opportunity to satisfy public outrage and avert future misdeeds, said Arthur Wilmarth Jr., a law professor at George Washington University who advised the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
"One has to wonder how much deterrence there is if senior officials are not held responsible," he said.
Times staff writer Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.