BEFORE: After last night's disastrous house call from a cable company technician, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll need to get up early on Monday morning, disconnect my 14-year-old DVR from life support, and carry it in to the Manhattan service center with as much dignity as possible. Either that or take it out to the backyard, shoot it and bury it - but that might be hard to explain when the cable company starts asking questions. No, better to deal with this head on, I've had ample time to prepare myself for the inevitable push toward streaming-only, with no more permanent copies being added to the collection on disc, unless I love a movie so much that I'm willing to shell out for the professional, mass-produced version. That's what's wrong with the world today, nobody appreciates hand-crafted DVDs any more. You hipsters with your artichoke toast and your artisanal cheeses, what's so wrong with hand-crafted physical media? I want to keep making artisanal DVDs, is that not politically correct any more? Look, the discs aren't going to end up in a landfill until after I die, and even then, maybe my movie collection will be the last of its kind, and end up in the Smithsonian or something, you never know. People will flock to the exhibit to see the last VHS tapes in circulation, after parents explain to their kids what VHS tapes are, that is.
There's a slight hope, the cable tech on the phone who rebooted my DVR several times remotely, in a last-ditch effort to get the movie channels to come back, told me that if I swap out my DVR and ask for an older model, MAYBE I can still get one that will allow me to dub to DVD without blocking that signal. Hey, it doesn't hurt to ask. I'm willing to give up a little storage space on the hard drive if it means I can keep clearing the contents every week and storing everything on DVD. It's a lot of work being me, but I'm not really happy unless tasks are very difficult and frustrating, so it kind of all works out. Then I'm satisfied. Frustrat-isfied?
Anyway, Jeremy Renner carries over from his cameo role in "The House" for a lead role in today's film.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Post" (Movie #2,937)
THE PLOT: Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb, who uncovered the CIA's past role in importing huge amounts of cocaine into the U.S. that was aggressively sold in ghettos across the country to raise money for the Nicaraguan Contras' rebel army.
AFTER: This film is part of that trend of "newspaper people breaking stories" - we had "Spotlight" with the Boston Globe and the Catholic priest scandals, and more recently "The Post" with the Washington Post exposing the Pentagon Papers. But this one came before those other two films, it was released in 2014 and I don't think it got much attention. It's set in the mid-1990's, but the scandal involved goes all the way back to the mid-1980's, which much of today's audience is too young to remember, assuming they were even alive.
If you're old enough to remember President Reagan, and a man named Oliver North, who was an ex-Marine and member of the U.S. National Security Council who was involved in something called the Iran-Contra scandal. It was much like the scandals we're enjoying (?) today, with all kinds of shady deals going on with other countries, except the press didn't find out about them until after the fact, and the President didn't go on Twitter bragging about how he could make the best trade deals, and the failing New York Times didn't know what they were talking about. This was mostly because Twitter didn't exist yet, and Reagan was probably too old to read the newspaper any more, but maybe somebody read it to him in the morning while he was eating his oatmeal. Also there weren't as many porn stars involved, except there was one secretary who stole documents by putting them in her undies, and I think she later posed for men's magazines. But that's a different story.
In the first Iran-Contra scandal, the U.S. sold weapons to Iran (they were our allies back then, go figure) that they weren't supposed to have, and in exchange some U.S. hostages in Lebanon got released. It was one of those "the ends justify the means" things, I guess. And in the sequel, the CIA took that money from the Iran deal and supported the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, because Congress wouldn't support a war there, and in fact made it illegal for us to fund a war there, so guess what, it happened anyway. Again, the ends justified the means - one imagines this sort of thing goes on all the time, and it's only those rare cases where some nosy reporter exposes the whole thing and people get a glimpse of how the sausage is made, and it's not very appealing. Part of the reason our government seems to be doing so poorly right now is that reporting has gotten easier (and one hopes, better) due to the interwebs, so more regular scandals are being discovered every day, and they're getting out to the public more quickly so we can all pretend to be outraged at a faster pace.
There was another twist to the Iran-Contra scandal, this reporter from a small-market paper in San Jose scooped the big papers by stumbling on evidence that the CIA had also decided to raise money by taking whatever Nicaragua had a lot of, which just happened to be cocaine, and getting it to America. Really, this is just simple economics, supply and demand - take something that you've got a lot of, price it to sell, and get it to where people want it the most. And where are there a LOT of people? In big cities, of course. It would make no sense to bring kilos of drugs out to Montana or Wyoming or some place where there are no people, and therefore no market.
It all tracks, except for the part where cocaine happened to be illegal and we had Nancy Reagan appearing on TV at the same time to tell kids to just "say NO to drugs", as if it's that easy, while her husband's government was also flooding the streets of the bigger U.S. cities with this new thing called "crack". Wait a minute, was Nancy Reagan using reverse psychology, telling people to not do drugs so that they WOULD do drugs, and therefore fund the Contras? God, it's a dastardly plan. The minute you tell teens to not do something, they'll want to run right out and do it. So the First Lady was IN ON IT! A-HA!
In New York City, we heard the circulating rumors for years about how the CIA invented crack to keep minorities from getting ahead and, also created AIDS to control that population, and was also putting some kind of sterilization chemicals in grape soda and red Kool-Aid. OK, so the rumor mill was 1 for 3 - who knew that even part of all that would turn out to be proven right? But it's unfortunate that the guy who reported all this never got any confirmation from the CIA, so his paper was forced to backtrack on the story, and eventually let him go. He was receiving a "Man of the Year" award one minute for breaking the news, then blackballed soon after for not being able to prove it.
And whatever happened to Oliver North? After revising his testimony to admit that he lied to Congress in the first round of the Iran-Contra investigation, he was convicted on three felony counts (out of a possible 16) and served probation and community service. He ran for office unsuccessfully in Virginia, then wrote a few books and I think had a radio show. Great news, this month it was announced he's going to be the next President of the NRA! I can't wait for him to screw that up somehow, given his track record this seems to be a fair bet.
Now, as to what we can LEARN from this story, that's a bit trickier. Now, of course, we know just how dirty the Reagan Administration was, and both dynastic Bush administrations that followed it were just as bad. (Bush Sr. used to be the head of the CIA, by the way. What did we expect?) Democrats don't come off any better, because how many scandals were there during the Clinton years? A different kind of scandal, perhaps, but I have to concede mistakes were obviously made, and as charming as Bill Clinton was, he always had that used-car salesman sort of niceness about it, like he's secretly screwing you, but at least manages to smile during the process. I can't really point to any outright scandals during the Obama years, other than the "birther" one, and other ones that seem conveniently manufactured by the alt-right.
Now with Trump, the pendulum has just swung back the other way, like we all know he's been dirty since day one, heck, since well before that, and now begins the difficult task of proving it. If we've learned one thing since the 80's, it's this: the process is going to take a while. Don't be surprised if the 6th or 7th congressional inquiry finally comes to some kind of conclusion on collusion, only by the time they do, Trump's 2nd term will be nearly over and half the defendants will be dead due to mysterious circumstances. I'd love to be proven wrong here, but I think this is the safe bet. If you're a reporter, just think of this time as your "salad days" and write your articles like there's no tomorrow, and make a name for yourself while you can, until the CIA comes for your family. And if you're a voter, go ahead and Rock the Midterms if you think it will make one damn bit of difference - good luck with that.
No matter how hard a movie tries, making the act of a writer writing look interesting on screen is an uphill battle, a near impossible challenge. You can play cool music, you can show the guy sharpening pencils or changing his typewriter ribbon, but at the end of the day, it's still a man either staring at a page or typing furiously, and it's just not very cinematic. This film tried harder than most, by intercutting scenes of Webb tacking up photos on his board and tying that little piece of string between two thumbtacks placed on a map, representing Mexico City and L.A. How else would we ever understand that a plane could fly between those two places? And thank God he had a photo of a crack baby in an incubator handy that he could post on that bulletin board, or else we'd never understand that concept. Are you kidding me?
Also starring Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "La La Land"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Bobby"), Oliver Platt (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Wonderland"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Paz Vega (last seen in "Spanglish"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Man of Steel"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Passengers"), Michael K. Williams (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Jena Sims, Joshua Close, Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Robert Pralgo, Lucas Hedges (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Michael Rose, Matthew Lintz, Michael H. Cole, David Lee Garver, Andrew Masset, Dan Futterman, Susan Walters, Steve Coulter, with cameos from Robert Patrick (last seen in "Lovelace"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Gil Bellows (last seen in "Miami Rhapsody") and archive footage of Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Nancy Reagan, John Kerry and the real Gary Webb.
RATING: 5 out of 10 DEA agents
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