Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/08/2013 07:57 PM Report

Kathleen Bigelow was NOT somewhat robbed.

MR. PANETTA: I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that.

The first act of "Zero Dark Thirty" is 25 minutes of torture and this thing was first written as if we did NOT even get UBL.

Kathleen Bigelow coasted on crap. She should have spent 25 minutes explaining why the CIA lost a critical file for almost a decade instead of dehumanizing America and making a terrorist recruiting film.

We hear during the discussion: Unified narrative of torture (including water boarding on the guy who did not get water boarding) that lead from those sessions to the assassination. Thus claiming both the authority of fact and the license of film making. That the 25 minutes of the night raid is astounding film making. That “Kathleen Bigelow was somewhat robbed.” That the perspective of the Best Director Category: 371 members that nominate Best Director versus 15,000 members who do it in the Directors Guild.

NOPE! No Best Director nomination is spot on.

Great Job Academy!!!

TODD: Zero Dark Thirty. You-- you’ve-- we’ll-- we will show a little bit here. We’ve got James Gandolfini of course most of us just call him Tony Soprano playing you as CIA director. There you are out there. I won’t ask you to comment on the acting, but there’s been a serious debate about-- the movie seems to say-- seems to indicate that enhanced interrogation techniques or torture was used to get information to get bin Laden. Is that true?

MR. PANETTA: Well, you know, first of all, it’s a movie. Let’s first remember that.

TODD: Okay.

MR. PANETTA: I-- I lived the real story with the bin Laden operation.

TODD: Well, then tell us what-- what…

MR. PANETTA: And the real story is that in order to put the puzzle of intelligence together that led us to bin Laden, there was a lot of intelligence. There were a lot of pieces out there that were part of that puzzle. Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used. But the fact is, we-- we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that.

TODD: And you think you could have gotten it without any…

MR. PANETTA: I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50666148/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/february-leon-panetta-martin-demps ey-robert-gibbs-ralph-redd-ana-navarro-david-brooks/#.URWYH_LVqSo

8oclockman  01/20/2013 09:07 PM Report

Forgive me, but how can we take these critics seriously if they can't give note to Joaquin Phoenix's performance in The Master? Think about it, when have we ever seen any human being behaving in the way that he did? Who was not disturbed or even horrified during the first scene of that masterpiece?

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/15/2013 02:47 AM Report

"Your performance in the film is Daniel Day-Lewisian."

So he is his own adjective and we are told he will win Best Actor.

To think he turned down the part twice and subsequently may not have become an adjective.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/15/2013 02:38 AM Report

“As vital as film criticism is,” he noted gravely, “the business of film criticism is in serious trouble. Jobs are being eliminated, the columns are shrinking, and writers who have spent years and years building a readership and establishing their authority are getting downsized and pushed out of these jobs. So, on behalf of my group, I have to say, if you’re an editor-in-chief or a publisher within the sound of my voice and you don’t have a full-time film critic on your staff with benefits, then you’re failing your readership.”

Joshua Rothkopf

(Well it is not only films for adults.)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/14/2013 07:38 PM Report

Poor David, he has to write for "The New Yorker" when his talent would be best suited for AARP magazine.

Watch more documentaries, they are adult fare.

Here are the nominees: http://oscar.go.com/nominees

ko8ko  01/14/2013 06:37 PM Report

I take issue with the way in which David Derby's recent book was critiqued by the others. It was not the time or place for that.

REMant  01/14/2013 12:38 PM Report

I can't understand any of this. Lincoln and Zero Dark 30 are terrible. The actors, awful, their scripts, melodramatic, and most of what isn't these days has all the perspicuity and allure of Edson's "Wit," even the Cannes winner, whose choice should not be surprising at all. If Hollywood is any sign, this is a very sick society. So far from the latter being a case of unfeeling academics, this is the kind of thing that has largely infected our campuses, reflected as well in the modern detective genre set there, where misogynistic miscreants lurk in every shadow, but to be expected, I suppose, among ppl with so little experience in life. They are the cries of those unprepared for life as much as death.

Less philosophically, Spielberg should have hired a voice coach, and the script writer taken a course in 19th c declamation, a script, incidentally, which feels it has to tutor us in every line, when it isn't cussing. It's just plain bad writing. There is no way either to communicate the horrific toll of the Civil War and it certainly can't be done by the predictable opening scene of hand-to-hand combat, or a trip to a surgical hospital. At the same time, as with all wars, there was a great deal of time off. Holmes' went home to Boston several times in the course of it, and the Lincoln's to the opera, if not one quite so big.

And I think "Lincoln" lacks a great deal in the area of decorum and deportment as well, the director seeming to have mistaken it for David Copperfield or Huckleberry Finn. The set decoration, altho taking a stab at accuracy, is as overdone as the script, that is, when you can see it, (or make out the latter), small compensation for what seems to have been a not overly generous budget. The music, seemingly intended to underscore this as a turning point in the life of humanity, is just annoying.

A better production would have focused on the House, not the president, and the latter half of the film - buffoons notwithstanding - was much the better part. But, of course, this was not the focus of Goodwin's book, and it seems the producers could not make up their minds what they wanted the film to be about. Besides, Goodwin's thesis is misleading. Fine words or no, Washington's cabinet was as partisan as any. And, not only were posts still filled by a process of seniority and career development, but also, the ideal of crown-in-parliament lingered. Plus it was to be long time before the government in Washington took over management of the country. Nevertheless, I wonder where they got the idea that Congress resembled the Knesset.

The film's great flaw is that for those who had "freed the slaves" there could be no going back, and if peace were made without this condition, the amendment in a reconstituted union would not pass, and their proclamation viewed as so much window dressing, and the lives lost in vain. Altho a great effort seems to have been made to have the actors look their parts, I doubt Stevens was in any manner as likable as Jones' portrayal, nor any of the priggish reformers, much as their present day successors. There was nothing rational about Horace Mann. The righteousness of their case is assumed and the opposition given little better airing than it is today. This conflict is supposed to take place in the president, but it is highly unlikely Lincoln ever thought this nation a democracy. He had a lot in common with FDR, yet nothing evincing canonization.

Aside from perpetuating the myth of great men in history, the message of this film seems to be that great measures, such as Obamacare, justify whatever their means, indeed, require them. Beyond this the question of racial equality and the equality of persons before the law is a distinction without a difference. It only shows the absurdity of the radical position, as, in fact, it does today, and as it did in 17th c England. Belief cannot be legislated. Too, Washington, when the war began, held slave auctions, while at the same time there were many free Negroes, if always in constant danger of becoming not so. Neither, in any case, were unknown. Emancipation was not the Second Coming. In the end the war changed nothing, except perhaps to give additional momentum to the improvement of artillery and machine guns.

Tho I disliked Ken Burns' use of the war to hawk pacifism, as well, I would rather see pictures and read text of the time, than to have history worked over in this way, particularly when it resembles a comic book.

And, I'm sorry, Jessica Chastain always looks and sounds like Jessica Chastain, just as Meryl Streep always looks and sounds like Meryl Streep. Unless actors or actresses are playing a character that seems somewhat in their character, it's ridiculous. No one expects Whoopi Goldberg to play an Eleanor Roosevelt or Mata Hari, nor Katherine Hepburn to have done, and she certainly tried. The Philadelphia Story, however, was made for her (and she knew it, buying the script). Plus you can expect both actor and character to be liked based on personal taste, not acting ability, even in Sarah Bernhardt's day. No wonder a lot of us would rather view Crissy Moran's behind, or the gender equivalent thereof.

While the Academy, of course, likes to fawn over ppl, thinking in typical liberal fashion that it is doing them a huge favor, it also politically correctly spreads it around, so it's also not surprising Bigelow and Hooper were passed over. But maybe they should take their cue from Cooperstown.