FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby DrEvil » Tue Oct 30, 2018 3:36 pm

Jerky » Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:50 pm wrote:Has anyone here watched The Haunting of Hill House?

It gets a little confusing in terms of all the different actors playing the same characters over different age ranges, but it sorts itself out fairly quickly. The first half is exceedingly potent.

Modern horror films/TV shows are getting so good about grief.

Hereditary was a symphony of grief sheering through a family like a scythe. The Haunting of Hill House contains some impressive meditations on the lingering impact of death & regret on those it touches.

With the exception of King's Pet Sematary (the novel), I can't recall the genre ever being so sophisticated about these topics. And I think it's definitely a good thing that it's evolving in this way.

Jerky


I finished The Haunting of Hill House last night. I loved most of it, but the last couple of episodes were really disappointing, especially the ending which was way too happy for my tastes.

There's a new Pet Sematary movie on the way btw. I guess the success of 'It' (which I thought was kinda meh) has something to do with it. But the Mr. Mercedes TV series is pretty good (first season at least. Only just started the second).
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Nov 02, 2018 4:35 pm

.

Okay, is this imminent release - already at the IFC in New York - a hoax or proof of God?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWHBUTHmf0
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Wed Nov 14, 2018 11:20 am

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Harvey » Fri Nov 16, 2018 7:26 pm

Much better than the trailer.

And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
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You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Nov 16, 2018 10:52 pm

.

This looks pretty damn cool and has someone I truly star-worship and adore and want to be my girlfriend, Cate B. Her or Tilda. So I'm curious and have procured for later. But I fear the trailer might give away too much. Not in terms of plot (I don't expect any, that would be silly) but in showing the set-up and mood for each of the tableaux, which is what it seems to be about, filmically. SO FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T WATCH THIS OR YOU'LL BE SPOILERED. Or not.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1HosLWM0o
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Nov 19, 2018 9:51 am

.

Watched Manifesto, recommend it highly.

Feared it would have the effect of flattening the many texts, making all seem equally inconsequential or valid, washing out meaning by privileging aesthetics: the beauty of the grand settings and presented tableaux, coupled with Blanchett's phenomenal woman of a thousand faces act. Not at all. The Berlin locations, the casting of roles, and the theatrical stagings are always on-point. The texts are genuinely brought into dialogues that highlight shared development, tensions, conflict. The use of familiar film tropes helps create a narrative with an arc. It has a plot, it gets exciting!

.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby chump » Thu Dec 06, 2018 2:46 pm

Both on Netflix:

This drama and this documentary, though possibly, most probably propaganda, both present a ‘true’ scenario and a decent discussion of the capabilities, and the motivational and moral issues of out of sight, video soldiers driving drones and dropping missiles - many, many, many miles away from home, and how ‘soldiers’ and ‘officers’ are actually ordered to - indiscriminately murder civilians - no due process - innocent women and children included, counting the casualties on their computer screen, then fussing they’re suffering from PTSD!!



https://youtu.be/JGGpSemB_hs

————————


https://youtu.be/A8hPK7G-5bw

———————-



https://www.rt.com/usa/444600-us-drone- ... leblowers/

Killers, drinkers & traumatized for life: What it means to be a US drone operator in ‘war on terror’
22 November, 2018

They sit in rooms resembling hi-tech shipping containers. Joysticks in hand, they spend hours watching grainy screens, displaying people in faraway lands going about their daily lives — and they hold life and death in their hands.

They are the men and women who operate the United States’ controversial drone warfare program — and they frequently get it disastrously wrong.

A newly-released report by the Associated Press claims that one third of people killed by US drones in Yemen this year were civilians with no association to terror groups like Al-Qaeda, the intended targets.

But intention and reality often diverge sharply when it comes to death by US drones — and the horror is not confined to Yemen. From Pakistan to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Syria and Somalia, US drone strikes — which are often hailed by the US military and government as “precise” and even “surgical” — have killed scores of innocent civilians.

Tribesmen stand on the rubble of a building destroyed by a U.S. drone air strike, that targeted suspected al Qaeda militants in Azan of the southeastern Yemeni province of Shabwa February 3, 2013. © Reuters / Khaled Abdullah

In recent years, multiple whistleblowers — former drone technicians, camera operators and image analysts —  have come forward to shed light on the horror and reality of what US drone bombing really entails. Perhaps an indicator of the level of stress involved, the people who do these jobs also quit them in record numbers. In 2015, an internal Air Force memo published by the Daily Beast revealed that there was a serious “outflow” problem with drone pilots due to the “unrelenting pace of operations.” Even when the Air Force began to offer six-figure salaries, it did not stem the outflow from the program.

But long, arduous shifts and high pressure are just the “official” explanations for the outflow problem, Laurie Calhoun, the author of ‘We Kill Because We Can’, an in-depth look at the US’ drone war, told RT.  

Apostate operators and sensors have become disenchanted with the profession and are plagued by feelings of regret and guilt for having agreed to kill on command people who never threatened them personally with death.

In the drone age, Calhoun says, while the operators risk no physical harm, the explanation for their PTSD must derive from “moral factors.”

‘Killing fellow humans on the other side of the planet’

It’s easy to assume that the men and women operating drones are entirely detached and unfeeling maniacs, but often they are ordinary men and women who are lured with high salaries and assured by the military that they will be part of something morally good and justifiable.

READ MORE: Life in fear: Report says 1 in 3 US drone-strike deaths in Yemen are civilians, including children

Christopher Aaron, a former image analyst, who worked at the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Centre in Langley, Virginia and in Afghanistan as an intelligence liaison, told RT that he began to have second thoughts about the work during his first deployment in 2006 when he noticed how the military would celebrate successful kills, but the next day he would see “more than the intended number of targets” in funeral processions on the screens in front of him.

Afghan men pray near the coffins of civilians, who according to the provincial government, were killed in a NATO air strike, on the outskirts of Jalalabad province, October 5, 2013. © Reuters / Parwiz

Some of Aaron’s colleagues also began to doubt what they were doing, but did not know how to express their concerns to senior management, he said. “We kept it internal. The military itself did not want to hear dissenting voices, only the intelligence they required.”

When he finished his second deployment in 2009, Aaron became extremely ill, physically and emotionally. It took five years for him to regain his health, through a combination of self-care and being able to speak out publicly about what he had experienced.

The cognitive dissonance amongst those who work in an office killing people on the other side of the planet remotely, and then leave work and go to the grocery store, the gym, or to their families, can only be suppressed for so long.


While many, like Aaron, experienced mental anguish over the drone kills, it is certainly true, Calhoun said, that the military at least tries to select candidates for the job “who are unlikely to experience compunction upon killing their fellow human beings.”

Potential candidates can sometimes be “vetted” by testing them on video games and exposing them to “kill TV” in which they view footage of people being incinerated by drone strikes. Anyone who balks or raises questions could be removed from consideration for the program, she said. Even more disturbingly, she explained, people who are already inclined toward criminal behavior can now command lofty salaries for killing people without any risk of death or incarceration for doing so.

‘Everyone drank’

In ‘National Bird’, a 2016 documentary about the devastating impacts of US drone wars, investigative journalist Sonia Kennebeck spoke to three other whistleblowers who have been trying to expose the dark realities of the drone program.

One man, identified only as Daniel, was a homeless teen whose male family members were in prison for petty crimes. Another, Heather Linebaugh, was a high-school graduate looking for a way out of rural Pennsylvania — not the kind of callous psychopaths you might imagine are drawn to a job that involves treating human beings, who often cannot be accurately identified, like video-game targets.

“I was under the impression that America was saving the world, like, that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out,” Linebaugh told Kennebeck.

But reality eventually hit.

“It’s so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. It’s not a joke,” she said.

You see someone die because you said it was okay to kill them. I was always shaking. Sometimes I would just go to the bathroom and just sit on the toilet. I mean just sit there in my uniform and just cry.


For Linebaugh, after three years on the job, the psychological trauma proved too much and she was diagnosed as suicidal. Two of her colleagues committed suicide and many others relied heavily on alcohol.

Another former imagery analyst, Michael Haas, told Rolling Stone, that he and his colleagues would call alcohol “drone fuel” because it essentially “kept the program going.”

“Everyone drank. There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing,” Haas said. “If the higher ups knew, then they didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere.”

READ MORE: Trump’s military drops a bomb every 12 minutes, and no one is talking about it - Lee Camp

Could it be the case that the higher ups turn a blind eye to this substance abuse because it produces the necessary results? Whistleblower Brandon Bryant told Rolling Stone that when he first arrived at the Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas, Metallica heavy metal music was played to get new recruits prepared for the job. “Gentlemen! Welcome to Creech,” an officer announced. “While here, it will be your job to blow shit up and kill people!”

‘Attempt to silence whistleblowers’

There is a common misconception that the use of drones minimizes civilian casualties, but the facts and figures do not back up that claim. In a shocking 2014 figure on Pakistan, US drones killed an estimated 1,147 people while attempting to take out 41 men with links to terror groups.

Targets are chosen based on intelligence which comes from informants, but strikes can also be carried out based on observations of suspicious patterns of behavior in potential targets. Operators technically have “no way of knowing whether the analysis on which an order to kill rests is sound,” Calhoun said, who explained that while the execution of an unarmed and unthreatening person is considered a war crime when committed by a soldier on the ground, it is deemed acceptable if done from the air. “Those who ponder this question are likely to abandon the profession,” she said.


Former senior airmen Stephen Lewis (L), Michael Haas (2nd R) and Cian Westmoreland (R) together with lawyer Jesselyn Radack (2nd L) and Staff Sergeant Brandon Bryant speak to former US military drone operators in New York November 19, 2015. © Reuters / Stephanie Keith

And those who go further and blow the whistle have already faced government intimidation. The man identified as Daniel in Kennebeck’s documentary estimated that as many as 50 FBI agents were involved in a raid on his home, during which documents and electronics were seized. “To me, that’s simply an attempt to silence whistleblowers,” his lawyer, Jesselyn Radack said.

READ MORE: Remote controlled killing: Drone warfare reduces horrors of conflict for those who can afford it

In 2015, hours after Bryant testified before the German parliament about the “essential” role played in the US’ drone war by the Ramstein air base, the whistleblower’s mother was confronted at her home in Montana by two air force officers who told her she was on Islamic State’s (IS, formerly ISIS) “hit list” — another clear case of intimidation according to Radack, who also represents Bryant.

But for people like Aaron, moral questions prevail, because it seems like the killings only lead to more violence and radicalization on the ground. For Islamist militants and radical preachers, the US drone war has become a rallying cry for more recruits in their insurgency, and each of the innocent casualties only adds to their numbers.

How many more ‘terrorists’ have we now created, from those impressionable boys who see the prophecy of their teacher come true?


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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby guruilla » Sun Dec 09, 2018 2:23 pm




Analysis. (Spoiler alert)

It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:28 pm

.

VICE was shockingly good. Artistically, you can't complain, it's really fucking good. What everyone's telling you about Bale's method-stunt transformation into Cheney is true. You forget it's him and you also forget that Rumsfeld is just chummy old Steve Carrell.

Add 38 caveats for those of us who know and live this shit daily in our minds and in our readings and writings. One can poke holes and decry omissions, but this is a villain story through and through: the story of a villain committing mass atrocities in serial manner. True to the reality, as it should be. It hits most of the necessary stories relating to the life of Cheney, often with good historic context provided. The humanizing works really well, and not to create sympathies. The McKayish diversions into brief explanatory skits and images are all perfect.

The focus in terms of crimes is on Iraq, torture, the triumph of domestic right-wing politics, and the development of unitary executive doctrine as it comes to fruition under the Dubya regime. Cheney is placed in the PEOC at the right time (there's a sentence you can't write just anywhere and have it be understood). In a good bit of agitprop his announcement of the shootdown order is still-screened for a moment and captioned as "UNITARY EXECUTIVE," the climax of a long effort. Of course I believe this is accurate in ways the filmmakers may not agree with. (No, they do not go there with 9/11, what did you think? But there is no explicit ruling out of it either.)

My main content complaint: I would have never, ever, flied over the Bush Sr. years without even mentioning the first Gulf War, the original and possibly even greater high crime and atrocity in the U.S. catalogue of crimes against Iraq. Bush Sr. (and a few secondary characters like Condoleezza Rice) is not at all given passes, but let off in especially vexing ways by the choice of what to omit so as to fit anything into a 2-hour feature format.

The 90s get short shrift. I would have wanted some Halliburton scenes since their role prior to being broken up into separate corporations was unique and telling: the premier all-purpose oil extraction services corporation that is also the premier all-purpose military services contractor going back at least to the 1960s (as Brown and Root). And I am just going to have to presume McKay missed the part where Rumsfeld and Cheney continued meeting in bunker conferences during the Clinton administration to run Continuity of Government exercises. Since a scene on that would have fit into this film perfectly.

Lynne doesn't get short shrift, but more of her action on the ideological front was needed. She and Lieberman teamed up for the McCarthy 8.0 effort to identify ideological fifth columnists right after 9/11, you may remember. And her children's books, so damn odious.

Hope that's not too much in the way of spoilers. After all, you remember this shit too, right? The only real narrative spoiler, which I won't tell you here, relates to the identity of the film's narrator character, a regular American white-guy schlub who does some military tours but who never meets Cheney or plays any role in the proceedings, and whom you will probably believe is played by Matt Damon. Actually, as I found out after I looked it up, he's played by that guy from the final season of Breaking Bad who looks just like Matt Damon (and whose nickname on set in the series was apparently Fat Damon). Anyway, how he fits in is the film's one narrative revelation, which he teases in his narration, saying it will eventually become clear why he's present.

.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby Cordelia » Mon Feb 25, 2019 11:49 am

I haven’t seen Vice yet so don’t know its ratio of 'biopic' to satire (the art of which may simply be lost on the writer of the Op-Ed below), but I found his take in Friday’s WaPo a hoot. The film's at the top of my list when it comes out on dvd.

Opinions

‘Vice’ isn’t the Best Picture of the year. The Academy would be crazy to vote for it.


Henry Olsen, Columnist

February 22 at 9:55 PM

I usually don’t follow the Oscars, but this year I am, mostly so I can root against “Vice.”

“Vice” poses as a biopic about former vice president Dick Cheney. In fact, it is something much more insidious — a propaganda flick.

Propaganda is a weighty word to use, but what else can you call a movie that from its very title — “Vice” is both a glancing reference to Cheney’s office and, more provocatively, a word that means “immoral or wicked behavior” — discredits a political figure, a set of political views and the people who hold them? From its unnecessarily invented scenes and dialogue to its obviously partisan final scene, where a Donald Trump backer in a focus group gets into a fight with a “libtard,” the film has no other impact other than to persuade the viewer to oppose and perhaps even despise conservatives and Republicans.

Biopics are known for embellishing their subjects or creating scenes for dramatic effect, but “Vice” does so to create an unfair picture of Cheney (Christian Bale) and his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), as immoral, power-hungry monsters.

Take the scene where a young Cheney attends an orientation session for congressional interns. The film is mute on whether Cheney is a Republican or a Democrat until this point, and only has Cheney declare himself a Republican after a blunt and profane speech by Republican Rep. Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carrell) disparaging the internship program and the idealism that drives many young people to apply for it. In fact, Cheney interned for conservative Republican Rep. William Steiger, moving to work for Rumsfeld only when Rumsfeld joined the Nixon administration. The movie seems to suggest that Cheney is attracted to Rumsfeld’s crudely amoral pursuit of power, not to the chance to pursue a specific political program.

There’s another scene shortly thereafter that tries to make this clear, in case you missed the argument the first time around. Rumsfeld takes his young charge to the White House, where Nixon is meeting national security adviser Henry Kissinger to plan the bombing of Cambodia in April 1970. Rumsfeld extols the raw, and possibly illegal, exercise of power to an awestruck Cheney. The naive young hick from Wyoming then asks Rumsfeld, “What do we believe?” Rumsfeld stares at him as if he were a talking ant and breaks down in laughter at the absurdity of the question. The implication is clear — we believe in power for its own sake.

Even the way the film treats Cheney’s attitude toward his lesbian daughter, Mary (Alison Pill), ultimately depicts him as amoral. Cheney is initially presented as accepting and supportive of his daughter’s orientation, going so far as to protect her and risk losing the thing he purportedly craved, power, if it meant exposing or hurting her. Yet by film’s end, when Mary’s sexual orientation threatens to derail the nascent political career of his other daughter, Liz (Lily Rabe), we are treated to a wholly invented scene where Dick and Lynne nod assent to Liz’s tearful request to save herself by opposing same-sex marriage and throwing Mary under the bus. In the end, “Vice” tells us, Dick Cheney exiles his own daughter to continue his family’s pursuit of power.

The film has nonetheless garnered five important Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Supporting Actor. This rarely happens; no film since “American Hustle” in 2013 has received nominations in all five major categories. But at least “American Hustle” was widely well-regarded, receiving more than 90 percent scores on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. “Vice” has provoked a much more uneven response: The Post’s Ann Hornaday gave the film only 1.5 stars out of 4, calling it “an absurd mess,” and many other critics agreed. “Vice” received only a 66 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a paltry 61 percent on Metacritic. Should it win Best Picture, it would be the worst reviewed Best Picture winner since Sydney Pollack’s gauzy “Out of Africa” in 1985.

I’m rooting against “Vice,” because I would like to believe that Hollywood doesn’t hate half the country so much as to give a substandard propaganda film its highest honors. I would like to believe that we can set partisan differences aside when it comes to art, and that even viscerally liberal Hollywood would know that to shower praise on this weak offering would be a figurative declaration of war on half of American moviegoers. But we shall see.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... 81f81fcf99


It's not surprising it didn't win any of its nominated Oscars because, of course, The Academy never rewards propaganda films or performances. :roll:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIbFvqFYRT4


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8nD2KB0a_E


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxBrTvLbBM

....etc., etc......



I missed seeing both Argo and Michelle O's introduction to the presentation of its award. :shock:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzagUypsrBg
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby RocketMan » Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:03 pm

I thought Vice was overrated and rote, despite its supposedly fanciful stylistic tricks, which felt forced and not in the least inspired or joyful. The first mistake was to structure it like a fairly traditional biopic, hitting major life events in a basically chronological order with some jumping back and forth. Christian Bale is undoubtedly spectacular as Cheney, but there is no real insight gained, no matter how well Bale underplays Cheney's banality of evil.

There was one thing that made me sit straight and take notice, though. The way the flick insisted on the official timeline of 9/11, complete with officially sanctioned, exact timestamps regarding Cheney's entry to PEOC which have been strongly questioned by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 and others. There was something in the way it was presented that just jumped out at me. A bit of "she doth protest too much" or something.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:17 pm

RocketMan » Mon Feb 25, 2019 12:03 pm wrote:There was one thing that made me sit straight and take notice, though. The way the flick insisted on the official timeline of 9/11, complete with officially sanctioned, exact timestamps regarding Cheney's entry to PEOC which have been strongly questioned by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 and others. There was something in the way it was presented that just jumped out at me. A bit of "she doth protest too much" or something.


Did I get that wrong? Obviously I don't have the film handy online to check, but I thought it presented Cheney clearly entering the PEOC and issuing the shoot-down by 9:38 am, well in time to make a UA93 shootdown possible, at which point there is a freezeframe and the title, "UNITARY EXECUTIVE." We will have to check this.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby RocketMan » Mon Feb 25, 2019 1:35 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:17 pm wrote:
RocketMan » Mon Feb 25, 2019 12:03 pm wrote:There was one thing that made me sit straight and take notice, though. The way the flick insisted on the official timeline of 9/11, complete with officially sanctioned, exact timestamps regarding Cheney's entry to PEOC which have been strongly questioned by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 and others. There was something in the way it was presented that just jumped out at me. A bit of "she doth protest too much" or something.


Did I get that wrong? Obviously I don't have the film handy online to check, but I thought it presented Cheney clearly entering the PEOC and issuing the shoot-down by 9:38 am, well in time to make a UA93 shootdown possible, at which point there is a freezeframe and the title, "UNITARY EXECUTIVE." We will have to check this.


HMMM, did I trip on my own need to appear WITH IT. This indeed needs checking, but I remember that Cheney was shown entering too late. Maybe I remembered the times wrong at the time. And yeah, maybe the intention of the exact timecode was to implicate Cheney, after all.
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:20 am

JackRiddler » Mon Feb 25, 2019 12:17 pm wrote:
RocketMan » Mon Feb 25, 2019 12:03 pm wrote:There was one thing that made me sit straight and take notice, though. The way the flick insisted on the official timeline of 9/11, complete with officially sanctioned, exact timestamps regarding Cheney's entry to PEOC which have been strongly questioned by Peter Dale Scott in The Road to 9/11 and others. There was something in the way it was presented that just jumped out at me. A bit of "she doth protest too much" or something.


Did I get that wrong? Obviously I don't have the film handy online to check, but I thought it presented Cheney clearly entering the PEOC and issuing the shoot-down by 9:38 am, well in time to make a UA93 shootdown possible, at which point there is a freezeframe and the title, "UNITARY EXECUTIVE." We will have to check this.


I had, ahem, a chance to review VICE. Both of our recollections were wrong, or rather the film was confusing enough on this point to allow either to be projected in.

To review, according to the Complete 9/11 timeline,
http://www.historycommons.org/timeline. ... 1_timeline

Clarke said he was in Cheney's office right after the second WTC hit (9:03 am) and Cheney was hustled out soon after to the PEOC. (Clarke went to the WH situation room.) This syncs with several other accounts holding that the hustling happened right after the UA175 strike on WTC2.

Mineta says he was already in the PEOC when Cheney arrived around 9:20ish and a few minutes later said, "the orders still stand" (to the "young man"), in the minutes as AA77 was being tracked before it hit the Pentagon (9:37). This is understood in the 9/11 skeptical canon as the smoking gun of a "standdown order." In turn, Cheney could have reversed "the orders" and given the general shootdown order well before the UA93 crash in PA at 10:03 ("10:06"), allowing the idea that this plane was shot down, not caused to crash by the passengers. (I'm leaving out the no-planes and plane-swapping scenarios here.)

9/11 Commission revised all the different versions (listed at the 9/11 timeline) to the idea that everyone arrives in the PEOC much later than they "remembered," Cheney at 9:58ish when none of the above could have happened in time to have affected events in the air, thus contradicting everyone's versions (including Cheney's and Rove's).

Through editing, VICE either evades or shows no concern for any of this. The timeline insofar as it even matters is arranged in a way that would allow any of the versions. It is internally contradictory and not meant to be analyzed as I am doing so here, because it compresses the 9:03-10am hour into a couple of minutes and switches around when depicted events could have possibly happened. The film is concerned with no questions about the 9/11 events in any direction, but mainly with depicting the governing doctrine animating Cheney's actions.

It begins entirely consistent with the Clarke-Mineta stories. At 1:19 of the movie, Cheney and staff in his VP office watch on TV the second crash at the WTC (9:03), and immediately the SS men come in and grab him to go to the PEOC, claiming a plane might be coming in to the WH. This fits the Clarke version (happens even faster) and most other versions listed by the 9/11 Timeline.

But the next shot is of Lynne Cheney elsewhere, seeing the Pentagon smoking (i.e., after 9:37) and demanding to be "taken to Dick." This could be consistent with the Commission version! But I think for the film, it's just a device to recall the key events of the day.

Cut back to Cheney as though he's just arrived in the PEOC (and PDS does note calls were made and orders given from the tunnel on the way to it, so him arriving around 9:20 is the earliest even in the Clarke or Mineta versions). However, Lynne is already there, so if any physics applies within the film universe (it does not), it's at least just before 10 am or later.

But according to the 1:19 scene, he would have already been there about 30 minutes earlier and Mineta's on the phone talking about planes in the air, so it's mixing in both timeline extremes.

In quick succession, Cheney (Bale) gives a shootdown order to Rumsfeld (Carrell), whom we hear on the phone, and then Rice questions whether he has the authority. Then Addington immediately sits down next to Cheney and they chat quietly, and the film narration asks why Cheney is talking to his lawyer at this point in time. Then he tells an aide to answer a request from Congress, about whether they should evacuate, by telling them to stay put, directing the aide to claim there are no helicopters available. Rice watches as the South Tower is shown collapsing on TV (9:58). All of these moments did happen, but could not have happened in the same two-minute frame, so it's filmmaker's license. Then, with a close shot on Cheney from the side (Lynne whispering to him) a title reads: "The Unitary Executive" (1:22 in the film).

After some 9/11 carnage shots, we are on to an inner cabinet meeting late that night, so that's it for the 9/11 scenes. The "principals" deliver a compressed statement of positions known from things like Rumsfeld's released notes. For example, Clarke says al-Qaeda is responsible, for he has been "tracking them for years." But Rumsfeld answers that directly: "Iraq has all the good targets!" So this is not done as though it were a transcript but a caricature, as in a work of fiction (duh), albeit truthful about what claims were embodied by the two characters in real-life. Also, Rice asks Tenet, "what was the leader of al-Qaeda's name?" (!) Unless this is supposed to mean she was intentionally playing stupid as her alibi (which it's not), that is my most serious problem of detail in the whole depiction: again, it's trying to place her out of the loop, a kind of innocent bystander or witness to history, and a highly incompetent but well-meaning one. (She of the famous testimony about the Aug. 6th PDB titled, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike inside the U.S." Who spend a night that same month with Bush on a US aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean because of fears, according to a Time mag account, that Bin Ladin would hit the Genoa G8 summit with a remote-controlled exploding toy plane! This is when drones were still more in development.)

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Last edited by JackRiddler on Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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Re: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

Postby RocketMan » Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:29 am

Wow, that is some impressive micro level work Jack. :D Thank you for the effort.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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