Worst Mass Shooting In US History At Gay Nightclub in Orlando, Florida (50 Dead, 53 Injured)

The worst mass shooting in U.S. history occurred late Saturday night at an LGBT nightclub called Pulse in Orlando, Florida. Omar Mateen, 29, has been identified as the person armed with an AR-15 and a handgun who killed 50 people and wounded 53 others.

President Barack Obama delivered a live address to the nation on the tragedy:

This is an especially heartbreaking day for all our friends -- our fellow Americans -- who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live. The place where they were attacked is more than a nightclub -- it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.  So this is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American -- regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation -- is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country. And no act of hate or terror will ever change who we are or the values that make us Americans. Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.

A very sad day indeed!

FILM REVIEW: A Most Wanted Man

The other half and I wanted to see a movie last weekend and so we went to see A Most Wanted Man which is getting excellent reviews (90% rating on rotten tomatoes) and extra attention as one of the last films starring the late Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman.

A Most Wanted Man is an adaptation of a book by John le Carré, a spy thriller by the same guy who wrote the source material for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Also starring in A Most Wanted Man is Rachel McAdams (Midnight in Paris), Robin Wright (House of Cards) and Willem Dafoe (The Grand Budapest Hotel). This is not as distinguished a cast as the other le Carré adaptation, which had the likes of Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The later film has a similar "vibe" to the first, which I think is intentional, even if the directors are different. Both films are about the spy trade. While Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about the hunt for a deep cover double (or triple?) agent in British Intelligence in the 1970s A Most Wanted Man is set in Hamburg, post-9/11. A title card as the movie starts reminds the audience that this is the city in which Mohammed Atta planned the attacks of September 11, 2001. Then we see a gaunt white guy with a very long beard and a large backpack drag himself out of a manhole and approach a series of parked cars.

We next see Hoffman as Gunther Bachmann, apparently part of some kind of German domestic secret intelligence service trying to find the next Mohammed Atta. Bachmann looks like a man who is married to his work, overweight, smoking and drinking but clearly dedicated. It turns out the white guy we saw earlier  draws the attention of Hoffman's group because he is a known Russian-Chechen extremist whose name is Issa. Issa apparently is the son of an infamous Russian general named Karpov and he is in Germany trying to claim his inheritance, which is in a secret numbered account held in a bank run by Dafoe's character, Tommy Brue. McAdam plays a naive asylum attorney named Annabel who brokers the connection between Brue and Issa. Bachmann's team knows all this is happening because they immediately have Issa, Annabel and Tommy all under surveillance.

The regular German domestic security service (equivalent to our FBI) and "the Americans" in the form of a raven-haired Robin Wright show up at this point, very interested in trying to capture Issa and stop whatever he's planning, especially when Brue discovers that Issa's inheritance is in millions of Euro. That could buy a lot of bang.

The interesting thing about the movie is that it raises a lot of questions about terrorism, surveillance, interrogation, loyalty and bureaucracy. It's not clear who the film wants the audience to root for, since even a very good man has a little piece of him that might be very bad, as one terrorist hunter says to another, as they dangle an opportunity for one character to take an action that could most definitely be seen to be supporting the movement of money which could support terrorists. But it is the terrorist hunters who create the opportunity and present it to the attention of the "good guy." Hoffman and his team are very willing to allow circumstances to go further and further along so they can get a better view of the bigger picture, perhaps snare a bigger fish, even though they aren't even sure who (or even if) that bigger fish would be.

There's a lot of nuance in A Most Wanted Man, and that makes it thought-provoking and more than a little unsettling as well. 

Title: A Most Wanted Man.
Director: Anton Corbijn.
Running Time: 2 hours, 1 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language.
Release Date: July 25, 2014.
Viewing Date: July 27, 2014.

Writing: B+.
Acting: A-.
Visuals: B-.
Impact: B.

Overall Grade: B/B+ (3.16/4.0).

The Boston Bombers Were White. Any Questions?

As is the case whenever an event or incident which causes America to consider it's founding principles and self-identity, notions of race appear soon afterwards. Now that the pictures of Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev,  the perpetrators of the first completed terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, are ubiquitously distributed, one question being asked is: Are the Boston Bombers White?

Peter Beinart says the answer to this question is clearly yes in a thoughtful piece in The Daily Beast in which he discussed the historical shifting of racial categories in America, especially the conflation of racialization with religious affiliation.

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

[...]

Think about American history and you can understand why. For centuries, Americans were legally segregated by race. Thus, when newcomers from the Middle East came to our shores, Americans had to decide which side of the line they were on. And in the struggle to be classified as white, Middle Eastern Christians had an advantage: Jesus. In the 1915 case Dow v. United States, a Syrian Christian successfully argued that he was white because Jesus, the original Middle Eastern Christian, was too.

[...]

Today, Americans still often link Islam and dark skin. What’s changed is which category we consider more dangerous. For much of American history, the problem with being Muslim was that you weren’t considered white. Since 9/11, by contrast, one of the problems with not being considered white is that you might be mistaken for Muslim.

[...]

You can also glimpse this conflation of religion and race in the demand, which surfaces after every terrorist attack, to single out Muslims for special scrutiny at airports and the like. Often, the politicians and pundits most eager to profile Muslims are the same folks who in the 1980s and 1990s defended the “racial profiling” of blacks. And listening to them, you sometimes get the sense that they think the process would work the same way: just look to see who the Muslims are.

You should really go read the entire piece yourself. The only part I would quibble with is that Beinart does not explicitly use language saying that race is a social construction, a figment of our society's imagination, although the notion of its fluidity is clear throughout his piece. Just saying so does not undermine the very real impact that race has on the lives of very real individuals, but acknowledging its fictional nature is important when discussing it.

What do you think?

MOVIE REVIEW: Olympus Has Fallen

Sometimes you just want to go have some mindless fun at the movies. A group of co-workers decided a couple hours before to go check out the latest "patriotic disaster porn" movie by Antoine Fuqua, the director of Training Day. Olympus Has Fallen has a pretty ridiculous premise, as expressed in the rottentomatoes.com blurb:

When the White House (Secret Service Code: "Olympus") is captured by a terrorist mastermind and the President is kidnapped, disgraced former Presidential guard Mike Banning finds himself trapped within the building. As our national security team scrambles to respond, they are forced to rely on Banning's inside knowledge to help retake the White House, save the President and avert an even bigger crisis.

However the film does have a stellar cast: Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett, Rick Yune and Oscar winners Morgan Freeman and Melissa Leo. Butler stars as the heroic ex-Secret Service Mike Banning who tries to save the President (Eckhart), his young son and the Secretary of Defense (Leo). Basset plays the female head of the Secret Service (truth mimicking fiction!) who inexplicably is deeply involved in the decisions in the situation room at the Pentagon when the Speaker of the House (played by Freeman) becomes the acting President.

The movie chock-ful of action, and is incredibly violent. There are many, many scenes of bullets entering human bodies as terrorists successfully execute a mission which enables them to completely over-run the White House and kidnap the President of the United States in a jaw-dropping 13 minutes. This is quite an impressive and disheartening sequence. While watching how the terrorists outgun and overrun the brave men and women defending the White House as an American one is horrified at the visions of the desecration of "the nation's house."

Olympus Has Fallen is just the first (but not the last!) of the "disaster porn" movies to depict a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. that results in imminent danger to the president and the destruction of numerous national landmarks like the White House. The producers of disaster porn are exploiting the audience's strong feelings towards national symbols to enhance the emotional resonance and entertainment impact of the film.

Regardless of the excessive violence and the relentless emotional manipulation the movie is still an entertaining experience and good mindless fun.

Title: Olympus Has Fallen.
Director: Antoine Fuqua.
Running Time: 1 hour, 59 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong language and violence throughout.
Release Date: March 22, 2013.
Viewing Date: March 26, 2013.

Writing: C+.
Acting: B.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: B.

Overall Grade: B (3.0/4.0).

FILM REVIEW: Zero Dark Thirty

This movie has been controversial ever since it was announced that the Oscar-winning creative team behind The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal was going to follow up their film that won the 2009 Best Picture Academy Award with a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

That movie is Zero Dark Thirty, and it has only become more controversial, not less, since it moved from being words on a page to images on the screen. The primary controversy (although there are many!) is based on the characterization of the film as  "journalistic" combined with the inclusion of scenes of torture during "enhanced" interrogations which occur during the hunt to find bin Laden's location.

To me, the question of whether the film is trying to say that information garnered from torture led to the capture of bin Laden is a Rohrshach test. Different people viewing the film come to different conclusions about that that aspect of the film. The filmmakers itself attempted to dispute the characterization of the film's message as pro-torture saying that they personally were against "inhumane treatment of any kind" but that torture was as aspect of the story that the film could not ignore.

It's the second question, of the film depicting itself as a sort of docu-drama or stylized portrayal of the actual incidents that occurred during the decade-long fight to find bin Laden that I think is even more problematic for Zero Dark Thirty. The film does things like put titles on the screen like "Black CIA Site" when it is depicting locations and as it goes on, it depicts some of the large successful terrorist attacks that have happened since 9-11 in other countries, with the specific dates on the screen (like the July 7, 2005 London bombings, for example). This is all intended to give the film a sense of verisimilitude, but in the end it is a movie, despite the creator's attempt to describe it as 'journalistic" (i.e. depicting the truth). We, the audience, do know (from other sources) that many of the events depicted in the film actually happened, but we do not know whether all the events in the film actually happened. Boal has written (and been nominated for) an  Original Screenplay, which means Zero Dark Thirty is a work of fiction. But the intense negative reaction to the movie from some quarters (including statements from the acting head of the CIA itself and the current Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee) seem to forget that fact.

There's no question that these controversies had an impact on the reception for the film at the Oscars (but, tellingly, not the box-office). Zero Dark Thirty received only 5 Oscar nominations, with a clear rebuke to Bigelow by not including her on the list of Best Directors (even though she is one of the very few women to ever have been nominated and the only woman to have ever won) although the Academy still recognized the searing performance by Jessica Chastain at the heart of the film with a Best Actress nomination. The Hurt Locker was the lowest-grossing film ever to win Best Picture; Zero Dark Thirty has already grossed 4 times that amount and the Oscar ceremony hasn't even happened yet.

Chastain is a revelation in Zero Dark Thirty. She had previously received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in The Help as a helpless Southern Belle and also was noticeable in Tree of Life as the troubled wife and mother. However, in Zero Dark Thirty Chastain plays Maya, a CIA operative who was recruited into The Company out of high school(!) and has had one single job for her entire career: hunt down bin Laden. Chastain plays Maya as a very driven, forceful and somewhat obsessive person who is willing to do whatever it takes to sift through the vast haystacks of intelligence the CIA has on various terrorists in order to find the few golden nuggets of truth which can indicate where bin Laden is hiding.

We (the audience) see this from the very first scene in the movie where we see Chastain appear in a very business-like women's suit to attend an interrogation being conducted by her superior played by Jason Clarke. The interview quickly turns into a torture session as the bedraggled, visibly wounded prisoner is stripped naked, waterboarded and assaulted (verbally, physically and emotionally). The fact that Chastain does not blanch or complain or protest and even participates in a small way (i.e. by bringing the water bucket they use to pour over the prisoner's face to make him think he's drowning) immediately tells us: "This girl is a bad-ass!"

Bigelow must have been amazed to discover (just as we the audience is) that the key person at the center of the "the Greatest Manhunt in History" was a strong-willed woman. It makes for a great story as we watch Maya battle in a male-dominated environment to keep the focus on bin Laden when her superiors want to assign her to other activities when politics and priorities at the agency change. Interestingly, despite spending most of the time in various Muslim countries like Pakistan the film shows that Maya has several other female colleagues on staff, but that it's really her personality and disposition which make her a lone wolf and singularly focussed on the hunt for bin Laden.

Overall, the film is very well-directed and confidently constructed. Despite telling a story that the every audience member knows the ending to it is very compelling and suspenseful and never waivers in its grip on the viewer. The depictions of torture are very difficult to watch (as they should be) and your reaction to that may overwhelm you overall evaluation of the film. It also contains one of the best performances (in one of the best roles) by a woman on film in 2012. My personal reaction to the film is that I was not as emotionally invested or impacted by it as I expected to be. Every American was (and is) impacted by the death of Osama bin Laden, of course, so one would think that a film depicting the successful hunt to find and kill him would be cathartic However, just like Maya, by the end of the film I did not feel bliss or relief at (re)living the experience but somewhat drained and tired. That may have been Bigelow's intent, and if so, she succeeded masterfully. But the exhaustion I felt at the end of the movie was not one that I relate to having expended energy in the pursuit of some useful goal or pleasurable activity but more like the conclusion of a weighty task. Is that really how one wants to feel after watching a movie?

Title: Zero Dark Thirty.
Director: Kathryn Bigelow.
Running Time: 2 hours, 37 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong violence including brutal disturbing images, and for language.
Release Date: December 19, 2012.
Viewing Date: January 5, 2013.

Writing: A-.
Acting: A+.
Visuals: A.
Impact: A-.

Overall Grade: A/A- (3.917/4.0).

Osama Bin Laden is Dead!

Way more info at ABC on the death of Osama bin Laden, the world's most famous terrorist.

WATCH: Obama Tells The World 'Osama Is Dead'

Are There One Million Terrorists in America?

The blogosphere is buzzing about the fact the Federal Government's terrorist watch list has reached 1,000,000 names. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a website where people on the list can register their complaints and recount their experiences: http://www.aclu.org/watchlist.

From the press release:

"America's new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what's wrong with this administration's approach to security: it's unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. "It must be fixed without delay."

"Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning," said Steinhardt. "I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist."

Controls on the watch lists called for by the ACLU included:

• due process
• a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based
  tight
  criteria for adding names to the lists
• rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.

The ACLU also called for the president - if not this one then the next - to issue an executive order requiring the lists to be reviewed and limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months.

In February, the ACLU unveiled an online "watch list counter," which has tracked the size of the watch list based on a September 2007 report by the inspector general of the Justice Department, which reported that it was growing by 20,000 names per month.

Don't you feel safer knowing that the Justice Department is adding twenty thousand names per month to the terrorist watch list?