BEFORE: I had a couple of choices coming out of the last Sherlock Holmes film - but I missed that the actor who played the young boy, Milo Parker, is also in that movie "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children". I could have gone that way, but instead I'm going on the Laura Linney track, because it gets me to my Easter film on time. But the good news about having worked out a schedule that gets me to Father's Day is that I can confirm that I will get to the "Miss Peregrine" film in May, so it's OK to miss that connection now. Come to think of it, I probably miss hundreds of connections just by making my chosen linking path, so I shouldn't fret about any one of them. I'll get to everything on the list, it's just a question of when, and in what order.
Speaking of which, I was going to follow "Mr. Holmes" with "The Squid and the Whale", and then follow that with "Breach", which would then force me to watch "October Boys" with Chris Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal on iTunes for $2.99, in order to connect with another spy film, "Rendition", and that was going to get me where I need to be later this week. But then premium cable ran another Laura Linney film, and a quick check of the cast list revealed a link to "Music of the Heart", which gets me to "Rendition" in an extra step - but by just flipping two Meryl Streep films, and also flipping two Laura Linney films, I get from "Mr. Holmes" to Easter in the same amount of steps, plus I save three bucks. That's why any schedule I make has to stay a little bit fluid, and I need to search all my connections a few days in advance to make sure I don't miss anything that could be added at the 11th hour.
So Laura Linney carries over from "Mr. Holmes", and now it's a four-film set. I'll discuss April's line-up more when I get there. "October Boys" is off the list for now, but I've got more Gyllenhaal on the April schedule, so it can always be added later.
THE PLOT: FBI upstart Eric O'Neill enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen, an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.
AFTER: Getting back to movies on any and all subjects (just about) means that spy films are going to start popping up again - I'm always good for 7 or 8 of these in any given year, so far in 2018 they've been mostly ridiculous and fantastical, like "Assassin's Creed" and "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", but now it's time to get real. This one's based on a true story, and so is "Kill the Messenger", which is on the schedule, and "Fair Game", which at the moment is not. I've also got "Rendition" coming up this week, "Allied", "XXX: The Return of Xander Cage", "The Take", "13 Hours", "Seal Team Six", "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" and "John Wick: Chapter 2" that I'll have to find spaces for.
But let's stick with Robert Hanssen for now, he was a real FBI agent until 2001, and someone at the FBI finally realized that he had compromised the identities of at least 50 U.S. agents during his service, and three of those were killed by Russian agents. So the FBI built a case against him by creating a new phony division for him to lead, the Information Assurance Division, in order to lead him away from his position as liaison to the State Department. This put him back at FBI headquarters in a new office built just for him, with tons of lovely little surveillance devices. Then they assigned a young FBI employee as his clerk/assistant, who was told to keep ample notes on everything he observed, and he was only told at first that Hanssen was a sexual deviant who had posted some dirty stuff online. And he was just days away from retirement when he was busted. Gee, that sounds a lot like something that happened in the news last week, with Andrew McCabe.
(Which got grossly mis-reported, by the way. I think a lot of news organizations leapt on the story before they looked, and didn't realize there's a difference between "not getting his FULL pension" and "not getting any pension at all". McCabe was fired, sure, and if someone is fired "for cause" they don't get to be eligible for special early retirement (at age 50) which is what McCabe was close to doing. But that doesn't mean his whole pension goes bye-bye, he paid into that fund and he'd have to be found super-guilty of high treason to not be able to collect anything from that fund. McCabe can file a lawsuit, too, which would argue that he was fired on a whim by the President, and that that's HIS money in the pension fund, which he still worked many years to contribute to. The truth is that the guy's probably going to get another job, government or not, and he can still collect pension benefits, but only after he's 57 or 62 years old.)
But McCabe is not Robert Hanssen, who was definitely up to no good, despite being a devout Catholic. There's an implication here that Hanssen might have started out down a treasonous path by testing the system, perhaps trying to prove to his superiors that there were flaws in the system, if he could get away with sending information to America's enemies. But I'm thinking there were better ways to find the system's flaws than by actually giving out covert information and compromising the lives of agents. But hey, I'm not an expert.
Also starring Chris Cooper (last seen in "Live By Night"), Ryan Philippe (last seen in "Crimson Tide"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Far from Heaven"), Caroline Dhavernas (last seen in "Hollywoodland"), Gary Cole (last heard in "Batman: Under the Red Hood"), Kathleen Quinlan (last seen in "Sunset"), Bruce Davison (last seen in Apt Pupil"), Tom Barnett, Jonathan Watton (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Jonathan Potts, David Huband, Catherine Burdon, Scott Gibson, Jonathan Whittaker, Mary Jo Deschanel.
RATING: 6 out of 10 Catherine Zeta-Jones DVDs
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