Tag Archives: Edward Snowden

Baby’s Got Hack

Snowden
Villians, Heroes, Ones & Zeroes
Official Site | Trailer & Mo
R | 134 min

snowden

Edward Snowden and his story must be told, as many times as possible.  It has been told thru the news, endlessly, and then again, personally, in the vital doc Citizenfour, and now Oliver Stone takes his crack, and you’d think it would be all kinds of crackpot-ted, but it’s actually crackerjack!

In fact – Stone’s Snowden is his best film since 1995’s Nixon!  Woah, that’s a long-ass time ago, and yeah, he’s kinda made nuttin but crap since then (although I thighly recommend his TV show ‘The Untold History of the United States‘), but maybe Ollie needed to circle the wagons before he could find himself again – railing against the system, while telling a good story

When watching Stone’s post Nixon output, I kept saying to myself – these don’t feel or look like Oliver Stone films.  They look like sh!t and they feel like a$$.  Maybe Ollie’s done with the 60s and 70s, but we weren’t done with Ollie’s 60s and 70s, but Snowden shows that in the 10s, and with the 1s and 0s, he can make a modern Oliver Stone movie that works, and one that we can be at peace with… while it’s at war, with the world!

As for the movie? Joseph Gordon-Levitt IS Snowden.  If you’ve seen Citizenfour (and you should), you’ll think that G-Levitt nailed it as Snowden.  And Shailene Woodley as his love interest?  She makes things lovely, and interesting, adding well needed humanizing to Snowden’s story, which I didn’t really expect from Stone, or from a spy story that mainly involves keyboards and monitors!

And the rest of the cast?  Outside of Nicolas Cage‘s oddly restrained role as a burned out g-man, Melissa Leo (nice and quiet), Zachary Quinto (forever intense with those eyebrows), Tom Wilkinson (nice Scottish accent!), Scott Eastwood (so glad we’ll have someone that looks like Clint for decades to come), Timothy Olyphant (always a jerk), Ben Schnetzer (keep an eye on this guy), Keith Stanfield (another one to watch), and Rhys Ifans (always a prick, always amazing) all help to shine a much needed light on the darkness that lies behind keeping our enemies at bay

Plus, most people aint gonna see a documentary, so it’s important that thee fictionalized movie gets it right, cause more people will see it, and this movie gets it right, and more people need to see it!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Snowden snowDOES it right, currently at a theater near jews

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

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He The People

Citizenfour
The Patriot Act
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
R | 114 min

You know that one photo of Edward Snowden, right?

ed snowden

It wasn’t taken at a Sears portrait studio. It came from an interview he gave abroad, right as he was about to drop a bombshell of information on an unsuspecting world, implicating the US government of spying on its citizens at home, and zillions others across the globe

Well, if you ever wanted a behind the scenes tour of that photo, then Citizenfour is the doc for you. And why wouldn’t you want to know what’s going on in the background? The info he leaked is only half of the story. Why he leaked the info is 1/4 of the rest of the story, and how he went about going public is the other 1/4 – and it’s 100% captivating!

Snowden knew what he was doing, and what the fallout from it would be. He stealthily got in touch with two rabble-rousers who could assist in his cause – filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald. He got them both to meet him at a hotel in Hong Kong, where they set up shop and laid out the plans to spring his leak. He didn’t want the story to be about him, but about the bad that the US gov’mint was doing, and he knew that once the info got out there, that they’d try to turn the narrative into nuttin but Snowden

citizenfour

So the three leak the leaks, and watch the plumbers come streaming in. At first, Snowden held his identify back, but before he could be outed, he outed himself, with the help of Poitras and Greenwald, and naturally, he became the story. What starts as soft jitters in a quiet hotel room quickly escalates into full-scale paranoia, both for the players onscreen, and for us. It is truly a privilege to be able to sit and watch the events unfold, for something so mammoth, and historic. Could you imagine if footage existed of Deep Throat meeting Woodward and Bernstein in a garage??? It’s juss plain crazy that we get to see Snowden try to remain calm, while his name and face are splashed all over the TV’s news broadcasts, and knowing that he’d never be able to go home again

The info Snowden divulged is the story, but who Snowden is, why he did what he did, and what he had to do next is juss as important as the info itself. I mean, why not tell a story from all sides? If only the US government believed in such transparency

Verdictgo: Jeepers Mos Def Worth A Peepers

get on all Fours, in limited release today

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

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