FILM REVIEW: GOOD KILL By: Faiz No comments

Major Tom Egan (Ethan Hawke) in Good Kill.

Assassins to ashes

By Ed Rampell

In 2013 this reporter interviewed CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin, author of Drone Warfare, Killing by Remote Control, who asserted: “There were between 46 and 52 drone strikes under the Bush administration. And now there are over 400 -- that’s not counting Afghanistan.

Now a feature film has been made with major Hollywood talents dramatizing the dubious Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program and the controversies surrounding it. New Zealand writer-director-producer Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is a hard hitting, thought provoking movie exposing and opposing drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen. Fresh from his Oscar-nominated role in Boyhood, Ethan Hawke portrays pilot Major Tom Egan, who, after repeat combat tours flying over the Iraq and Afghan theaters of conflict, is now stationed outside of Las Vegas, where he is deeply conflicted by his role in the UAV liquidation-by-remote-control project.

From the relative comfort of an air conditioned trailer in a military base at the Nevada desert the droners wreak Hellfire havoc on targets in deserts half a world away. The fetching if kvetching Zoe Kravitz (Mad Max: Fury Road, Insurgent, X Men: First Class), daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, plays fiery Vera Suarez, a Latina Air Force officer who has qualms after she joins the UAV team at the Nevada air base.

What Suarez bellyaches about are the moral implications (or lack of) of droning, which according to the movie (and Medea) is an imprecise method of murder which inevitably results in “collateral damage” -- including the deaths of unarmed civilians, among them, alas, children, women and the aged. According to the film, this killing of casualties, whose only crimes are being at the wrong places at the wrong times, is acceptable to the CIA. You know, that U.S. organization (your tax dollars at work, my Fellow Americans!) that LBJ called “Murder Incorporated” (hey, it takes one mass murderer to know another!), which has overthrown democratically-elected governments from Iran to Guatemala to Chile, etc., tortured more dissidents than the Spanish Inquisition, and so on.

Suarez denounces the CIA-directed droning of non-combatants, as U.S. "terrorism" and a "factory creating terrorists," because of the widespread anger and blowback these killings provoke and spread. During one testy trailer exchange with her commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood) Suarez cheekily asks: “Was that a war crime, Sir?” To which Johns replies: “Shut the fuck up, Suarez!”

His conscience troubled, Major Egan can no longer “keep compartmentalizing,” as Lt. Colonel Johns advises. He has a drinking problem and his marriage to Molly (January Jones) is, like his liquor, on the rocks. Like Jeremy Renner’s lead character in 2010’s Best Picture Oscar winner, The Hurt Locker (co-produced by Nicolas Chartier and Zev Forman, who also co-produced the far superior war film, Good Kill), Egan has difficulty making the transition from the combat zone to the home front, although he is still at war, “taking potshots” at people across the globe being surveilled by remotely piloted aircraft with their lethal payloads.

But unlike The Hurt Locker’s PTSD-ed, traumatized psychopath, Egan finds a path back to his sanity. It’s a similar route blazed by veterans such as the courageous Ron Kovic, whom Tom Cruise depicted in Oliver Stone’s 1989 anti-war classic, Born on the Fourth of July: Taking a stand against orders to shoot Hellfire missiles from a drone at civilians.

Meanwhile, the gung ho Specialist Zimmer (Jake Abel) is the troop’s trailer trash, who represents the jingoistic dregs of military madness. Zim derides Suarez as “Jane Fonda” and quips about putting “warheads on foreheads.”

Perhaps Zim is one of the “gamers” whom the Pentagon recruits for its UAV program, which appears to play out like a videogame (albeit one with extraordinarily high stakes involving life and death). The Las Vegas vibe and backdrop enhances the sense of the inherently risky nature of drone warfare. Good Kill’s aerial footage, apparently shot in Morocco, has the look and feel of a videogame as it simulates what the Nevada-based airmen-turned-chairmen see on their computer screens as these not-so-Big Brothers watch Afghans and Yemenis from seats in their air conned trailer. This cinematic technique has a Brechtian alienation feel, as it distances film viewers from the actions, and Good Kill’s combat isn’t as viscerally exciting as that depicted in more conventional, pro-war flicks, like American Sniper or John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima.

But that’s because Good Kill is an anti-war work of art that wants audiences to use logic and reason, not just emotion, when assessing the story onscreen.

 

FILM REVIEW: THE MAN NOBODY KNEW By: Faiz No comments

William Colby in The Man Nobody Knew.

The sins of my father

By Ed Rampell

The Man Nobody Knew is a conventionally made, 104 minute-long documentary about former Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby. There is the usual use of archival footage, plus a collection of talking heads, which includes a who’s who of the usual scumbags from government, military and top secret circles. However, while its technique is straightforward, what makes this doc -- subtitled In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby -- different is the fact that it’s directed by the subject’s son, Carl Colby. In this sense, The Man Nobody Knew is like Tell Them Who You Are, Mark Wexler’s 2004 documentary exploration of his dad, cinematographer Haskell Wexler – albeit from the opposite side of the political aisle.

History buffs and espionage aficionados will probably be interested in much of the terrain The Man Nobody Knew covers, starting with Colby’s derring-do in the fabled OSS, the World War II precursor of the CIA. Following WWII Colby was recruited by the Agency, and he was posted at Rome along with his family, under the cover of being a U.S. embassy staffer. There, his wife and children enjoyed a privileged existence as Colby helped orchestrate an unofficial version of the Marshall Plan, subverting Italian democracy with massive infusions of dollars to corrupt voting to ensure that the popular Communist Party didn’t win elections and join a coalition government. (Here the doc treads on similar ground as the 2006 feature, Fade to Black, with Danny Huston playing a beleaguered Orson Welles acting in a costume pic in Huston’s birthplace, postwar Rome, and it’s intriguing to see a nonfiction treatment of the same subject matter.)

After sabotaging Italy’s elections, in the late 1950s this not so quiet American was reassigned to wreak similar havoc in Vietnam, where -- as in Italy – the U.S. made sure the masses could not elect the very popular Ho Chi Minh president. In Saigon Colby and his well-heeled kin hobnobbed with South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Din Diem and other U.S. puppets, such as his despicable sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, who is seen in a news clip haughtily dismissing a Buddhist Monk’s self immolation as “barbecuing.” After Colby left Indochina to become the CIA’s Chief of its Far East Division, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were liquidated in a U.S.-backed coup – just a few weeks before Pres. Kennedy himself succumbed to the Cold War era violence that would also claim his brother Bobby five years later.

When America was waist deep in the big muddy and the big fool said to push on, Colby was re-posted to Vietnam, where he ran a pacification program, including the extremely controversial Phoenix Program, which resulted in the killing of up to 40,994 Viet Cong -- according to the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John Marks. 

(It’s interesting to revisit this counterinsurgency strategy as President Obama once again deploys targeted assassination as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. In any case, the extreme prejudice of Colby’s desperate measures were all for naught as Vietnam was liberated from scourges like Colby in 1975.)

Meanwhile, the sleazeball-in-chief – uh, I mean Richard Milhous Nixon – appointed Colby Director of Central Intelligence in 1973. But like King Rat Nixon himself, as DCI Colby became embroiled in scandals that made the Watergate break-in look like a frat house prank in comparison, the Catholic Colby’s sins and covert actions, and those of his Agency, caught up to him by 1974, as the Church Committee launched a nine month-long investigation of dirty tricks, dirtier tricks and dirtiest tricks (can you say “Allende”?) by the CIA, which LBJ had pithily summed up as “Murder, Inc.” Colby dutifully appeared before Congress 32 times in one year, and the doc features choice footage of Congressmembers Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug grilling the spymaster on the hot seat, as the people’s elected Representatives confronted America’s shadowy secret government.

Suspected mass murderer William Colby got his comeuppance when Pres. Gerald Ford rewarded him for his decades of loyal service by summarily firing him in October 1975. Twenty-one years later, Colby rather appropriately died as he had lived: Mysteriously. His filmmaker/ son suspects his dad’s death was somehow self-inflicted. Who knows?

Throughout the rest of the doc director Carl Colby tries to fathom his enigmatic father and come to terms with the parent who led a cloak and dagger life that inextricably cut him off from his own family. Along the way, his rogues’ gallery of interviewees include Zbigniew Brezinski (the foreign policy whiz who helped give us Osama and Al Qaeda), ex-CIA Director James Schlesinger, Iran-Contra co-conspirator Lt. Col. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, former Ford NSA adviser and Bush toady Brent Scowcroft, and Donald Rumsfeld, who had been Ford’s chief of staff (infections).

Also interviewed are investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward, and the helmer’s mother, Barbara Colby, a faithful wife whom William dumped after 38 years of marriage. She, like Carl, try to make sense of it all; who really was this bowtied 007? The doc appears to make an attempt to exculpate and justify Colby’s decades of wreaking mayhem around the globe, as nonfiction threatens to turn into fiction. But it’s more delusional than those humans unwittingly subjected to psychotropic drugs by the CIA were to fantasize that Colby, the grand subverter of democracy from Europe to Asia, was an honorable man simply serving his country. It’s no secret that this most private of public servants was, in reality, an agent of imperialism whose claws were as blood drenched as his masters’.