BEFORE: All my traveling is finally catching up with me, I fell asleep in my recliner this morning, which for some reason gives me more vivid dreams, and I had a stress dream about being in a virtual reality scenario with my wife, which also had elements of being in a casino-like environment. The dream was sort of set in the future, where VR was now a thing, and the way the game would entice you to play was that characters from the game would appear in your living room and urge you to play, so I kind of found out that way that she was playing in the VR world without me, much like she sometimes plays video games in the afternoon before I come home from work. So I was thinking, "Who are these CGI people in the living room?" but this prompted her to show me how the whole process worked. We went out the door and down to the street corner, into a manhole cover, and somehow this was how you enter the VR world and start playing the games. They had versions of Pac-Man and other arcade games, and everything cost 2 credits to play (nothing cost 1 credit) but if you played well, you could win more than 2 credits from one game. Then we were in this sort of shopping environment, and there was a virtual a capella group walking around (probably selling their new album) and we were looking for some VR trivia games so I could start winning big. She found one and started to buy it with her credits, but I protested and said I didn't want her buying me this game until I could try it first to make sure I liked it. The store manager showed me how I could go into the back room and test out the game, but I think I got distracted by other things and never really got there.
There are elements in there of our New Jersey trip, like slot machines and the a capella group (we saw a Pentatonix concert at the Hard Rock), plus my wife was playing video games while I was in Massachusetts, and I guess I got a little envious. It's weird how you can sometimes see where every element in a dream came from, but your brain would never put those things together that way during the day, it's only when your brain does the mash-up at night that things can get creatively crazy. Given the movies that I've watched in the past week, I'm thankful that there weren't any Nazis, rats or crashing rockets in my dream.
Brian D'Arcy James carries over again from "First Man", and so does a very well-respected newsman who covered both the moon landing and Watergate. That's going to come in handy tomorrow when I finally start my 2019 documentary chain...
THE PLOT: The story of Mark Felt, who, under the code name "Deep Throat", helped journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in 1972.
AFTER: I don't know when they started production on this film, but it was released in 2017 and I think it could not possibly have been more relevant with its timing. In many ways the 2016 election reflects some elements of the Watergate scandal, where you had a Republican candidate (or his representatives) trying to dig up dirt on the Democratic party, and not caring much about how that was done, or whether the method was entirely legal. In 2016, that meant Benghazi or missing e-mails or "lock her up", anything that would give Trump the advantage and help him close the polls. Essentially, Nixon's crew was looking for the same thing - any advantage that was out there, and that meant spying on the Democratic committee offices at the Watergate Hotel.
John Oliver also calls the Trump election collusion and obstruction charges "Stupid Watergate". Like, didn't anyone learn from the past that this is something you should NOT do? But when you're behind in the polls, I guess you'll grab at anything that might give you an edge, even the illegal stuff - taking a meeting with Russian oligarchs or requesting out loud that Russian hackers find the missing 30,000 e-mails. That's not to say that other factors weren't at work, of course they were - Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein might have drawn a lot of votes away from Hillary, plus there are her own stupid statements like "Pokemon Go-to the polls" and the "Basket of Deplorables". And then you've got James Comey re-opening his probe of Clinton just two weeks before the election. Why? Because he didn't want to interfere with the election process. No, of course not, how could re-opening a closed case two weeks before the voting started have any effect on the election that was just days away?
And then, after the election, history started getting re-written because the new President gets to appoint a new Attorney General, and that can easily turn into a quid pro quo situation - "I'll give you the job, if you promise not to investigate me or the election process..." and that sound you hear in the background is democracy dying. How can someone in the Justice Department act impartially toward the man who hired him? If anything, the Trump administration has pointed out about a hundred potential conflicts of interest, which we're going to need to start making impossible in the future. From James Comey to Jeff Sessions to William Barr, everyone seemed to have a vested interest in the outcome of the Mueller Report, and nobody investigating Trump seemed to want to take that next step and say that he was responsible for anything. Or if he was, that wasn't a crime. Or if it was a crime, it doesn't matter, because the President has immunity. And that's the way it's been for the past two or three years, where there's so much debate over what happened and whether it constitutes criminal behavior that nobody gets around to doing much prosecuting.
BUT IT'S POSSIBLE - Nixon got impeached for less. Nixon resigned for less. Nixon resigned because he "loved America" and didn't want to put the country through any more hassle. So, I guess Trump doesn't love the USA as much as Nixon did, that's a fair conclusion. But I'll get back to Trump later, let's go back through the mists of time and replace "Trump" with Nixon, so that means replacing Robert Mueller with Mark Felt, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani with John Dean and John Erlichman, and so on. (Most of what I know about Watergate actually came from reading MAD Magazine at the time, so please bear with me...)
Mark Felt was a top FBI agent at the time of the Watergate break-in, and right away it seemed suspicious to him that the burglars all had worked for the government, many with jobs at the White House, and that's where the trail of evidence seemed to be leading. But the sudden death of J. Edgar Hoover, who'd been in charge of the FBI for over 50 years, meant that the President could appoint a new director, one who'd be so happy to have the position that he'd be willing to put a stop to the Watergate investigation, which of course would benefit Nixon. (Sound familiar?) Felt wasn't considered for the job, apparently because he wanted to continue with the investigation - but when a time limit of 48 hours was imposed, that's when Felt went to the press, to Time magazine at first, to try to draw out some more information, and also get public support to help keep the investigation alive.
At the same time, Felt was leading the FBI's investigation into domestic terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, which had planted bombs at the Capitol building and the Pentagon. In addition, later on it was learned that illegal tactics were used to investigate the Black Panthers and various civil rights and anti-war groups - searches were conducted without warrants, wiretapping of ordinary citizens, all done in the name of national security. (Hmm, this also sounds a bit familiar, like a precursor to the Patriot Act...) Felt, Patrick Grey and Edward Miller of the FBI were all arraigned and charged with conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. But this was later on, in 1978, and Nixon famously appeared at the trial as a witness, and also contributed to Felt's defense fund.
And at the same time as all that, Felt was also systematically searching for his daughter, who was living as a hippie in some commune somewhere, only he didn't know where. The film shows him sending copies of the same letter to her to every known commune in the country, hoping that one of those many letters would reach her. The film doesn't mention that while attending Stanford, she went to Chile to study on a Fulbright scholarship, and fell in with Marxist revolutionaries there. When she came back, her radical political views put her at odds with her father, and after graduation, lived with other hippies in the Santa Cruz mountains. That had to be awkward for Felt, to be investigating radical militant protest groups at work while trying to find his radical militant daughter at home.
This film was very informative, but I'd be lying if I said it was also very exciting. I fell asleep several times during the last half hour, so I think it took me twice as long to watch that last half hour as it should have. Admittedly, I ran out of Diet Mountain Dew so I had to drink some grape soda instead with my movie, but it was the kind with real cane sugar, so I thought that might keep me awake, and it didn't. Once the sugar wore off I ended up crashing hard, and I think that also fueled my VR stress dream that came about later in the morning.
UPDATE: I didn't even check the calendar on this one, but it turns out that the Watergate break-in took place in June - June 17, 1972. That's 47 years ago as of YESTERDAY. Damn, my viewing was off by just ONE DAY. (If I hadn't added "Billy Elliot" to my chain, I could have hit it spot on...) Well, let's just say that the story broke in the papers the next day, so really I'm celebrating the anniversary of people finding out about Watergate for the first time. I need to start paying more attention to those "This Day in History" posts...
Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Diane Lane (last seen in "Tully"), Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "Bounce"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Game Night"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "Loving"), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Kate Walsh (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Maika Monroe (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Julian Morris, Wayne Pere (last seen in "Venom"), Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Ike Barinholtz (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Noah Wyle (last seen in "W."), Eddie Marsan (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Stephen Michael Ayers, Darryl Cox, Ricky Wayne, Richard Molina, with archive footage of Dick Cavett (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Walter Cronkite (also carrying over from "First Man"), John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, Richard Nixon (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Pat Nixon (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Spiro Agnew.
RATING: 4 out of 10 calls from the phone booth outside the laundromat
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