Courtesy of Amazon Prime, I had the chance to watch two movies I missed during their original release, to wit:

The Post: aka Steven Spielberg does the Pentagon Papers as "The Education of Katherine Graham". It's a well-made movie (duh!) with an excellent cast both in major and minor roles, including Matthew Rhys, evoking missing-The-Americans-pangs in me, as Daniel Ellsberg in a near silent role but with his body language telling so much about what's going on within Ellsberg as he witnesses McNamara going from a private conversation in the plane about how the situation in Vietnam is going from bad to worse to the creepily cheerful optimism once he faces the press outside. I noticed the scriptwriters credited were a woman and a man, and they provided a good emotional arc for Meryl Streep going from endlessly condescended to society hostess to risking it all. Tom Hanks as Ben Bradley is yet another incarnation of the honest American persona (flamboyant news editor variation), though for all that Bradley's stomping around like he's in The Front Page, Hanks' best scene is a quiet, introspectively self critical one. Earlier, he's accused Kay Graham that she's letting her friendship wth McNamara influence her, and she's pointed to his friendship with the Kennedys and the fact he did pull his punches accordingly during the Kennedy administration, which he angrily refuted; now, in the follow up scene, he realises she was right, and that you can either be sincerely friends with a politician, or you can be a good reporter, but you can't possibly be both.

For all the obvious topical relevance of the "government versus press"/"whistleblowers: traitors or true patriots?" scenario - and Spielberg wisely goes less is more with Nixon, keeping him entirely to an angry, ranting voice we hear without seeing his face, we only see the White House - this film feels both eerily like a West Wing episode and deliberately old fashioned, and not just because Spielberg's camera positively drools over ye olde printing machines and their lettering. Also not because it's set in a past era. No, it's the part where everyone in the ensemble is basically idealistic and well intentioned. The opening sequence, introducing Daniel Ellsberg as a military observer getting motivated for his later wistle-blowing, is set in Vietnam, it's brief, it's effective, but it also reminded me how impossible a Vietnam movie from Steven Spielberg - who actually is of that very generation - would be, because it's so counter everything a Spielberg movie stands for. In that brief sequence, we see US soldiers getting shot in the jungle, and later much of the indignation of our heroes centres on the Pentagon Papers proving that various US administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, escalated the US presence in Vietnam without admitting they were doing it and despite early on realising this couldn't possibly end well kept continuing the war to avoid the humiliation of an US defeat. Of course, that's one aspect of the Vietnam war to get indignant about, but you know what's actually missing here? War crimes. Little girls burning in US napalm. (If Spielberg ever was assigned to do a film about the My Lai Massacre, he'd undoubtedly focus it on the lone G.I. testifying to the truth, not on either all the other G.I.s going along with it and being or the Vietnamese dying.)

In The Post, Ben Bradley might be frustrated that the New York Times always has the better scoops and the great reputation and be gleeful when he finally gets the chance to let the Washington Post participate in a major major story once the Time gets slammed with a government injunction, but since this isn't a Billy Wilder script and Ben Bradley is played by Tom Hanks, we don't doubt Bradley's primary motivation isn't beating the competition, it's getting the truth to the public which needs to know. The scene early on at a dinner in which Kay Graham leads the other women to the next room once the men (and only the men) start to discuss politics is devastatingly effective in demonstrating the sexism taking for granted by everyone (also how much Kay has internalized it and needs to overcome it to believe her take on the situation is just as valid), but none of the characters are malicious about said sexism; you just know that once they learn better, they will be better. Of course they won't cling to their privileges, not these basically likeable men.

Now, given the sheer current day awfulness on both sides of the Atlantic, I can't decide wehether I find escape in a Spielbergian world where people might be wavering but will of course to the right thing soothing or frustrating. I mean, I want to be inspired by hope. I do. It's just - let me put it this way. I hear this scriptwriting team was also responsible for the excellent Spotlight, aka the movie about the Boston Globe's investigation into the sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic Church. The Post ends with our heroes triumphing and a winking epilogue in which there's a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. But not to worry, audience, the Post is on the job and Truth Will Prevail. Spotlight ends with a devastating credits sequence listing sexual abuse scandals outside of the Boston area everywhere in the world. Going on, and on. I think I've made my point.


All Is True: aka Kenneth Branagh Does Shakespeare's Retirement, directing and starring as Will, with Judi Dench as Anne, Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton and Ben Elton writing the script. The one part which made me sceptical about this in advance was McKellen, much as I love him, playing Henry Wriothesley, who wasn't just younger than Shakespeare but half a century younger than Sir Ian at this point, but I'm happy to say 'twas all worth it. More on this in a moment. Anyway, Branagh's movies can be somewhat over the top, and the longer trailer was somewhat misleading in that it put the emphasis on comedy. Which this film decidedly is not. (The trailer nearly used up all the funny bits.) What it is: a quiet chamber play that doesn't try to be Shakespearean. Which is a plus. (Making movies about writers that have the writers and their lives resemble their best known characters and plots is what puts me off most fictional takes on Jane Austen, for example.) Ben Elton seems to agree with me - and Neil Gaiman, who in his take on Shakespeare at the very end of Sandman includes a scene between a retired Will and Ben Jonson that makes the same point All Is True makes in two scenes, one between Shakespeare and a visiting Jonson as well. No, if you're a writer, you don't need to have lived through all you're writing about. This is not how writing works.

This being said, of course a movie needs a plot. This one is far more Arthur Miller than Shakespeare, if we're making a dramatist comparison, as returning-to-Stratford Will is confronted by the fact he doesn't really know his estranged family any more, he hasn't really dealt with the loss of his son, and that the way he hasn't dealt with it also means he's been unwilling to see the surviving twin, Judith, for who she really is. Elton's script does a great job of using the few facts we have about Shakespeare's family - Susannah the oldest daughter able married to the Puritan-leaning Dr. John Hall and at one point embroiled in a law suit when a Stratford loudmouth tried to slutshame her, Judtih married rather late (as was her mother) - and coming up with distinct personalities for both sisters, their mother and their husbands. (Though if anyone other than Will emerges as the central focus eventually, it's Judith, in a way that would have pleased Virginia Woolf.) The picture he draws of Stratford as a community also is plausible - Will can't just skip Sunday mass, he'd get fined as was his father, the late John Shakespeare, whose fall from grace from alderman to indebted drunkard remains unforgotten, the Puritans are gaining influence, but aren't just painted as caricatures (Dr. Hall isn't very likeable, but gets a devastating scene showing his sincere commitment to his patients), and the local self important MP is none other than Sir Thomas Lucy of apocrphycal "Will once shot his deer" tale (who delights in snubbing Will and gets himself gloriously snubbed by the visiting Southhampton).

Which brings me to good old Mr. W.H.; btw, the movie does let Will point out to Anne that the sonnets were printed without his consent. McKellen might be many a decade older than Southhampton was at that point, and I'm not fond of Henry Wriothesley to begin with and tend to favour fictional Shakespeare tales where someone else was the Fair Youth, but like I said: all worth it, because the scene between Southhampton and Shakespeare is incredible (with the earlier "Southhampton disses Lucy" just McKellen and the audience having fun), both Branagh and MKelllen on top of their game. It's also the scene that by itself justifies this being a movie about William Shakespeare as opposed to, say, anonymous Elizabethan/Jacobean Dad X coming home to estranged family. It's about aging and love and longing and class and intimacy of various types. In this version, Southhampton is aware of Shakespeare's genius and, no longer young himself, now does look at those sonnets as his immortality - but he's also an aristocrat to the core who when Will finally says he'd hoped his feelings were in some way reciprocated goes "nope, you're a glovemaker's son, I'm an Earl, get real". And yet the scene doesn't end on a rejecting note. Earlier, in what only afterwards strikes you as the acting showcase it was because it's played so lowkey yet intense, Will goes from casual conversation into reciting one of the actual sonnets (and no, not bloody "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", thank you, Ben Elton, for recalling there are a lot of others to choose from) and it becomes a naked love declaration. And at the end of the scene, when he's already half out of the door, Southhampton turns back and recites that same sonnet back at Will, word for word, with since the poem's "I" now is the other party takes on a new meaning. And yes, it's an acting showcase as well, but one that feels entirely natural for how the scene has involved and who these two characters in this version are.

Lastly: a very human Shakespeare, this one, neither the jerk of some depictions (looking at you, Rupert Graves) nor the romantic hero of others (step forward, Joseph Fiennes). I remain moved and impressed by this film.

Not so coincidentally, I just finished reading, for the first time though of course I'd watched the movie by Alan Pakula a dozen times, All the President's Men, the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate case and their reporting of it. It still holds up incredibly well. Despite knowing a lot about the Watergate affair in advance, and the awareness Bob Woodward will end up as the prototype of the embedded reporter in love with power a few years down the line, the narrative is gripping, suspenseful, and despite featuring a huge cast (even huger than the movie, which prudently jettisoned a few players as movies must to get it down to a two hour tale), you never lose sight of all the interconnections or the developments. The various politicians, hangers-on, Washington Post staff people are given pen portraits, and what surprised me was that Bernstein apparantly was willing to either write himself or have included - all is written in third person, so you can't tell who wrote what - scenes which poke fun at him (Woodward not so much), like this one about a conference with the recently deceased Ben Bradlee ending:

Bernstein was dissappointed to see the meeting end. The editor had pushed his left sleeve up, and Bernstein had seen a tattoo of a rooster. Bernstein momentarily forgot about Watergate. Bradlee, whom he regarded with an unhealthy imbalance of respect, fear, anger and self pity (Bradlee didn't understand him, he had decided long before) was always amazing him. He wished he'd gotten a better look at the tattoo.

Because Woodward and Bernstein for a while ended up is the iconic reporters, it's easy to overlook how young they were when this all went down, and stuff like this humanizes them. (Another Bernstein-making-fun-of-himself scene is when his bike got stolen and he reflects how typical this is: when Woodward goes into a garage, it's to meet Deep Throat, when he goes, it's to find the remains of a lock and a stolen bike.)

Such neat touches aside: what makes the book is of course the story it tells, and the relentless way it traces and uncovers the corruption of the political process all the way back to the White House. (And Woodward & Bernstein, unlike today's readers, weren't even familiar with the paranoid Nixon rants immortalized on tape when writing this, as the book ends before Nixon leaves office.) Though it's not a little depressing that a lot of the campaign tactics they uncover today are taken for granted. To use a list from mid book: bugging, following people, false press leaks, fake letters, cancelling campaign rallies, investigating campaign workers private lives, planting spies, stealing documents, planting provocateurs in political demonstrations.

Planting spies and bugging, we were told by White House officials (and a lot of other people of all parties and persuasions) more recently, is absolutely okay because everyone does it. It's not something even Richard Nixon came up with as an excuse. (His most famous quote in the Frost interview being "if the President does it, it's not illegal", which is a similar idea, more personalized.) Which brings me to, you guessed it, Laura Poitras' movie Citizenfour about Edward Snowden and surrounding circumstances. But before I talk about the movie itself, some thoughts which have been plagueing me for a while. It is this: why didn't become Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras the new Woodward and Bernstein in the eyes of the American public? Especially the not conservative part of it? They certainly did in my part of the world (Germany), but within the States, at least compared to over here, the reactions were pretty much blasé. The right wing attacks on Obama focus on other stuff, and the democratic/progressive criticism of Obama and his government that I've seen mostly seems to be divided between a) "Why can't you be more like... *insert past democratic president of choice with ability to schmooze and intimidate other politicians on a nose-to-nose level*", b) "Why so sloppiliy organized?" , and c) "Where's the promised change, this "the Republicans are blocking everything" excuse isn't doing it for me anymore". Whereas voices like Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg's are rare, who firmly rejected John Kerry (and Obama) saying Snowden should have done as Ellsberg did and faced a trial in the US by stating he wouldn't do that in the current day US, either (and good lord, when you're told your government is less trustworthy in terms of human rights abuse than Richard Nixon's...), and witheringly added: (Snowden) would have no chance whatsoever to come home and make his case – in public or in court. Snowden would come back home to a jail cell – and not just an ordinary cell-block but isolation in solitary confinement, not just for months like Chelsea Manning but for the rest of his sentence, and probably the rest of his life. His legal adviser, Ben Wizner, told me that he estimates Snowden's chance of being allowed out on bail as zero. (I was out on bond, speaking against the Vietnam war, the whole 23 months I was under indictment). More importantly, the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing. (...) Without reform to the Espionage Act that lets a court hear a public interest defense – or a challenge to the appropriateness of government secrecy in each particular case – Snowden and future Snowdens can and will only be able to "make their case" from outside the United States. (...) John Kerry's challenge to Snowden to return and face trial is either disingenuous or simply ignorant that current prosecutions under the Espionage Act allow no distinction whatever between a patriotic whistleblower and a spy. Either way, nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterizations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Ouch. But like I said, Mr. Ellsberg as far as American voices are concerned seems to be in a distinct minority. And I don't think the reason is just the public as a whole having become fare more jaded. Becaube, Democrats, Liberals and Progressives on my list, ask yourself, and I'm truly curious: if Snowden had blown the whistle under a Republican president - doesn't matter who, McCain or Romney if they had won their respective elections, or Bush back when - would your reaction have been different? (And it could have easily happened. I don't think any Republican - or any alternate Democrat President, for that matter, i.e. Hillary Clinton if she'd won against Obama in the primaries - would have given the NSA & Co. less leaveway to spy on everyone than the Obama administration did.) Would you have been not only more outraged, but also seen the sheer extent of the licence to spy as something that does reflect the President's personal responsibility the way Watergate did reflect Nixon's? Because I really think the reason why Obama gets more leaveway here than any Republican President would have gotten is because Obama-as-bad-guy really, really, really doesn't fit into the narrative moderate-to-progressive Americans want to hear. Partly because it automatically associates right wing nutters (though these attack him for other reasons) and the sense of not wanting to give them more ammunition, I suppose. But partly because they seem so far apart: Tricky Dicky, Nixon paranoidly taping himself ranting about the Jews/Gays/Press/, and the first black President. He's supposed to be, at worst, the hero who couldn't due to the mess his predecessor left and the Republicans blocking his every move, not the licenser of tactics which any of the titular President's Men from Nixon's time would have wept for joy to be able to use legally.

Now, on to Poitras' movie. Which definitely treats Obama as one of its villains. He's not the prime target, which is the post 9/11 mass surveillance and the total lack of any checks on it in general, and it's made clear early on by veteran whistleblower William Binney, who quit the NSA in 2001, that the Bush administration started this, but among other things, Citizenfour is an indictement of Barack Obama. Glenn Greenwald early on in the film quotes from Obama's campaign speeches (for his first run), all quotes condemming what he now practices. Then Edward Snowden in his first physical meeting with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald names as one of his key motivations the fact that the Obama administration contrary to its promises didn't reduce or curtail the surveillance but escalated it. And while Poitras throughout the film uses clips of various government officials (Keith Alexander, former NSA head, and various guys from the justice department) denying with bland smugness what the film then shows going on, the climax this builds up is a cut from the Guardian staff being forced to destroy hardware to Glenn Greenwald's partner David being held back at Heathrow after a meeting with her in Berlin to a newsclip of Obama (even smugger than the previous officials) saying Snowden was no patriot and should return to the US where lawful trial would happen. (At this point there was scornful laughter in the cinema.) And the very end of the movie, when Greenwald tells Snowden about a new source and its revelations, he draws the chain of responsibility on paper culminating in the letters POTUS, where camera lingers as a next to last final image.

Poitras' biggest problem as film maker must have been that this documentary by necessity takes place largely in hotel rooms where two or three people talk (or type), which potentially could have come across very static and boring. But she managed to avoid this trap, not least because Snowden and Greenwald (who do much of the talking, with fellow Guardian journalist Ewen MacArgill occasionally there as well) both come across as articulate and compelling. And as with All the President's Men, even though you know the rough outline of how this goes in advance - Snowden makes contact, eventually they meet in that Hongkong hotel room, data is transferred, explanation are given, Geenwald starts to release the stories, on the fourth day Snowden's identity is released as well, etc. - the way it plays out on screen remains captivating. Also like All the President's Men, the book, there's unexpected humor: when Poitras tells Snowden (via written communication online, since he's in Russia at that point) that the Merkel story is a go, but the German government hasn't publically reacted yet, Snowden types back whether she has tried to call Angela M. directly since she now has the number. :) There's even a mini subplot, as you'd say if this were a fictional story, about Snowden's girlfriend whom he worries about in Hongkong and whom we in the last five minutes of the film see has joined him in Russia in July this year.

It's, of course, an unabashedly partisan documentary, cum ira et studio, and never pretends to be anything else: the opening credits establish Poitras has been under surveillance since her first post 9/11 movie on the Iraq War, and while you get to know Snowden and Greenwald in the intimacy and extensive length of those hotel room conversations, administration members are only shown in (smug) newsclips. But the main argument, which Poitras lets Binney, Greenwald and Snowden make repeatedly, and also Joseph Applebaum, that surveillance is control, there are no restraints and no watchers on these watchmen anymore, that only a tiny part of the collected material actually can in any way be connected to counterterrorism and the rest is about competition between firms, industrial espionage and utter disregard of any privacy whatsover, and that the self censorship of people is already an every day fact because of this - all this can hardly be told dispassionatedly. Ditto for the point Snowden's pro bono lawyers later make about the Espionage act, which dates from WWI and doesn't differentiate between a whistleblower and a spy (Ellsberg has quite a lot to say about it in his article as welll) and gives the person indicted by it no chance of defense.

Stylistically noteworthy: as opposed to Michael Moore, who made his persona a part of all his films, Poitras remains invisible, though her voice is present throughout the film. And the clips she uses to establish the various locations (Hongkong, Berlin, Rio de Janairo) never show the obvious tourist sights; the most striking images not involving a person aren't of the cities, though, but of the NSA complexes being built in the US and the ones already existing in Britain and Germany, those ominous white balloons in front of landscapes.

Is the end result then a great movie? I don't know. But it's an important one, I think. And I hope it will be watched by as many people as possible.