The Report
A Senate-based Three Days of the Condor released post-Snowden, in the Trump years. Delusional insanity, trust the process? The slimeballs hint at but never fucking say the name Gina Haspel!
The plot is simply depressing: Daniel Jones and a couple more people spent years locked in a basement reading 7 million pages of CIA internal reports on the post-9/11 torture program, produced a report with 7000 pages, of which 500 were “published” with massive redactions. That guy was shafted all the way, years of his life down the drain, but did not leak it to the press, so it was all for nothing, it’s like it never existed. Parts of it were exposed in separate investigations, but there was no official record anywhere.
Gina Haspel was nominated CIA director, where she remains to this day. One of the freaking psychologists admitted on the confirmation hearing the black site she headed was in Thailand even!
There are even more insane stories part of that report! Some cab driver is sold for a bounty, the spooks notice they have the wrong person a couple days later, but they still torture him for nearly two years. During that time, the guy he was supposed to be is captured, taken to the same prison, but talks and gets released two days later, and killed by a drone strike nearly 10 years later. To this days, that cab driver is still in Gitmo.
Doing an hagiography of Dianne Feinstein is bad enough, a senator that was there since the time of fucking Harvey Milk, told the Sunrise kids that she didn’t care about climate change since it would not affect her personally, and died in office an absolute senile husk. She calls Snowden a traitor directly, in the film!
The protagonist also watches a trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, oof.
The credits are kinda nuts too. The Senate committee is all thanked, from Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, to insane psychos like Susan Collins, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and motherfucking Marco fucking Rubio. The current Secretary of State, the Trumpist nutter! Wild, he has the authority to release the whole thing, but with Steve Bannon’s faction in disarray, I think he won’t, the neocons are winning.
They also thank James Risen in a plot about not saying the names of anyone, where the climax is an insider preparing to leak a report to the tame press (like the New York Times) about CIA misconduct, but at the eleventh hour, the guy decides not to, and trusts the process. Why talk with Risen then, to know what not to show on the film?
Annette Benning does an incredible job playing Dianne Feinstein. The senator is already half-dead here, but this is set almost 20 years ago! Adam Driver just has to look extremely angry all the time, piece of cake.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.