Movie Nation

The end — when it comes — arrives by cell phone, a text message virus that crashes servers and tips our wired-in/dialed-up civilization into collapse. Anarchy begins, bikers and gun nuts and rogue National Guardsman run the show.
But if we’re lucky, with the sort of luck that only exists in the movies, we’ll have friends in Northern California — survivalists. Because when the grid goes down, it’s the folks already living off the grid who have the best chance at “riding out the apocalypse.”
“Goodbye World” is about a group of eight friends who hunker down when society’s simmering rage blows up. And since it’s a movie, they’re all really good looking friends, played by the likes of Kerry Bishe’, Adrian Grenier, Gaby Hoffman and Scott Mescudi.
And since it’s an indie film — a parable, if you will — everybody on that hilltop falls into a “type,” to make for better debates, better mixing and matching when old flames re-flicker and old grudges, ideologies and rivalries are revived.
Survivalists James (Grenier, of “Entourage”) and Lily (Kerry Bishe’, “Sex and the City”) dropped out years before, choosing to raise their little girl in a place with its own water, solar power, tillable land and hippie co-op minded neighbors.
Christian Libertarian Becky (Caroline Dhavernas) and Lily’s ex-web business partner Nick (Ben McKenzie) have just arrived in their Volvo SUV when the social breakdown happens.
Benji (Mark Webber) is a perpetual student radical, a “revolution is our moral obligation” lecturer who shows up with his latest coed conquest (Remy Nozik). Benji’s worst predictions are coming true.
And D.C. insider Laura (Gaby Hoffman of “Veronica Mars”) stumbles into old computer whiz/hacker pal Lev (Scott Mescudi) on her way to this sanctuary in the foothills of the High Sierras.
They drink, smoke a lot of dope and hot-tub together until the bickering starts, until old feelings bubble up and then the true limits of their Libertarian lifestyle are revealed. It’s all fine until others have a need for something only they have, and then men with guns and no moral compass show up.
As societal breakdown dramedies go, “Goodbye World” is pretty mild-mannered stuff. Mercifully zombie free, it throws a generation that has only been tested by a rough job market up against basic tenets of civilization — what they mean and what can happen when you apply idealism to people who don’t share those ideals.
It’s a glib script, with college reunion movie conventions — a “talent show” where they sing their favorite hip hop, a “What are you going to miss the most?” dinner conversation.
“I’m really going to miss NASA.”
“Starbucks.”
“History!”
Film buffs will see “Goodbye World” as a sort of “Trigger Effect” meets “Return of the Secaucus Seven” — growing up, learning to look at the world through more jaded adult eyes as the world ends.
It’s not a bad concept, even if it is a weary one, thanks to all the world is ending movies and TV shows that pepper the culture these days. But it’s a thin and utterly predictable movie, with just a few scenes that crackle, few memorable lines and not a lot of sparks — romantic or otherwise — set off by the young and attractive cast. Thus, “Goodbye World” should trek straight from theaters onto the SyFy channel long before The End comes.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, pot and alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Adrien Grenier, Gaby Hoffman, Ben McKenzie, Kerry Bishe, Scott Mescudi
Credits: Directed by Denis Hennelly, written by Denis Hennelly and Sarah Adina Smith . A Samuel Goldwyn release.
Running time: 1:41

Truth in advertising? “Alien Abduction” is about just that.
And it’s as simple in concept as it is in title — a hand-held camera/found
footage bogeyman thriller in the “Blair Witch” mold.
A family of five heads to the mountain of North Carolina. There, they come to
discover what “The Brown Mountain Lights” are and what the critters using those
lights can do.
The autistic tweenage boy in the family, Riley (Riley Polanski) documents
their trip — from hikes and setting up tents, to getting lost on the roads,
pounded by crows that hurl themselves at their mini-van and then stumbling into
a remote highway tunnel filled with freshly-abandoned cars, trucks and a police
cruiser.
The doors are open, the emergency flasher lights still blinking.
“This doesn’t seem right,” is the obvious response.
“The people who own these cars HAVE to be somewhere!” is another.
Flickering images seen through the blinding light of “arrival” show us some
perfectly conventional “Signs” that we’re not dealing with bear attacks, here.
Before a day and night have passed, they will face horrific attacks and team
up with a no-nonsense, well-armed mountain man/redneck.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Sean (Jeff Bowser, who has great screen
presence) drawls. “It is what it is.”
It’s amazing the chills you can accomplish with just sound effects of
gurgling, growling beasties, and with high wattage lights. Hiding from those
lights in a cabin, a car or a barn, with beams searing through the cracks and
windows, is as creepy today as it was in “Close Encounters” back in Spielberg’s
childhood.

Director Matty Beckerman makes great use of his most expensive “abduction”
effect. But it, like the situation, the story and the style, is nothing we
haven’t seen before.

This is lowest common denominator horror with a space alien twist. The
opening shot, of something hurtling out of something in orbit, is a doozy. But
the performances are perfunctory and the scenario standard-issue even if the
execution of this no-budget thriller is top drawer.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violent, with profanity
Cast: Corey Eid, Katherine Sigismond, Jeff Bowser, Riley Polanski, Jillian
Clare

Credits: Directed by Matty Beckerman, written by Robert Alvin Lewis. An IFC
Midnight release.
Running time: 1:15

The superhuman efforts director Joe Johnston made to persuade Chris Evans to re-enlist in the comic book movie universe as “Captain America” pay more dividends in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
Evans, that perfect specimen of American manhood, really sells the earnestness, the dry wit, the sense of duty and righteousness of the icon of American values that he represents in this sequel, even if Johnston isn’t around to direct it.
And it’s great that “The Winter Soldier” is actually about something, a comic book spin on privacy and civil liberties issues straight out of today’s data mining headlines. It’s a freedom vs. fear movie, liberty vs. “order.”
There are clever ways the story folds back into the first “Captain America” film’s world, great effects and a retro-future tech that is fascinating.
But “The Winter Soldier” lacks that lump-in-the-throat heart that Evans, Johnston & Co. brought to the first “Captain America.” The co-directors of “You, Me and Dupree” serve up a pretty generic sequel, with inconsequential villains and predictable flourishes, an epic whose epic effects lack grandeur.
From its quasi-fascist logo and overly-imposing D.C. headquarters to the Stalinesque uniform that Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) sports, S.H.I.E.L.D. (“Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate” in the comics) is plainly a multi-national agency that’s reaching beyond its “fight evil, protect Earth” mandate. Robert Redford plays Alexander Pierce, the fellow who lords over the directors of this directorate of this ever burgeoning security empire.
Nick Fury barely has time to fret over the idea that “to build a really better world, sometimes that means you have to tear the old one down,” when he’s attacked. The Captain, Steve Rogers (Evans) and Black Widow, Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) set out to unravel this mystery, who the new menace is and what the enemy’s masked “Winter Soldier” super-warrior has in his bag of tricks.
The repartee is cute enough — “You want to say something snappy, NOW would be a good time.”
Johansson, who has no hint of a Russian accent this time (not a bad move, considering how Russians are regarded this spring), makes an apt, super-sexy sparring partner for the Captain. She’s constantly suggesting he get back on the dating scene — in between epic brawls with legions of foes. Not that the Captain doesn’t notice women — his nurse-neighbor, for instance (Emily VanCamp).
“I’m 99. I’m not DEAD.”
The fights are spectacular combinations of digitally-augmented stunt-work. The directors and screenwriters find all manner of new ways for the Captain’s shield to pay off, and Evans and Johansson make these shooting, strangling punch-outs cool.
Anthony Mackie shows up as a potential new sidekick, which only calls attention to the question, “Hey, where are Captain America’s OTHER Avenger pals in this hour of crisis?”
The best new effect is a holographic teleconference involving Redford (fairly bland in this part) and the other governing execs of S.H.I.E.L.D. Worst cameo is Garry Shandling, as a Senator who apparently has been seeing Kim Novak’s botox team.
And that message, that we’re more likely to give up our freedoms by consent than by force, is not a bad one to hammer home.
But “The Winter Soldier” has long, talky, dead stretches. It’s emotionally flat, a lot closer to Evans’ “Fantastic Four” films or the “Thor” sequel than it is to “Captain America: The First Avenger,” or “The Avengers.” It’s OK for April, in other words, but not up to the higher standards of a Marvel summer blockbuster.
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, gunplay and action throughout
Cast: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford, Cobie Smulders, Anthony Mackie
Credits: Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, scripted by Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus. A Marvel Studios/Disney release.
Running time: 2:16

In the cinema, nothing is more legendary than a movie that never got made. We’ll never know what Orson Welles’ “Don Quixote” or “Dead Calm” would have been. We’ll never see Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon.”

But these films, limited only by our imagination of how they might have turned out, become more mythic in the unmaking than they ever could have been with real-world budgets, real-life casting decisions and the other shortcomings that actually making a movie entail.

Alejandro Jodorowsky was a Chilean director from the golden age of avant garde cinema — the 1960s and early ’70s. His surreal, nightmarish visions “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain” practically invented “midnight movies” as a genre. Extreme, horrific, striking and drug-influenced (Jodorowsky liked his drugs, too), they have their amateurish touches, which one takes into account when seeing them through modern eyes.

And once upon a time, “Jodo” had his hands on one of the greatest science fiction novels of them all. “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a film about the film he never got to make.

It has Jodo, on camera, wild-eyed and in fractured English, telling the story of rounding up artists such as the French comic book illustrator Moebius, the Swiss sculptor and designer H.R. Giger, and others, a team of “spiritual warriors” he enlisted and dragged to France to conceive a transcendent film experience. It would a Messianic movie that would mimic the effects of LSD for the viewer, science fiction more in the vein of “2001” or “Solaris” than the film that followed it and set the tone for big screen sci-fi — “Star Wars.”

Jodo, who has aged into a Klaus Kinski look-alike, is a mesmerizing storyteller who embraces the “madness” that it takes to make his sort of art. Just hearing him tell this tale transports us to a time when directors were godlike artists who raised money based on their artistic visions and not on the box office potential.

Directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”) and Richard Stanley (the cult sci-fi classic “Hardware”) sit in awe of this huge book of storyboards and designs that Jodorowsky’s team concocted, a guide to the movie he was to make which he showed to every studio in Hollywood — only to have them, to a one, reject it.

Frank Pavich’s documentary starts giving us hints as to why that happened early on. Jodo meets with the King of Hollywood Effects of the ’70s, Douglas Trumbull (“2001,” “Silent Running”), and is put off by the man’s practical considerations, which Jodo takes as arrogant and technocratic.

Jodo lines up bands of the era — Pink Floyd, Magma — to do the music. He courts artist Salvador Dali to play the Emperor of the Galaxy and the artist proceeds to hijack the budget. Jodo lines up Dali’s “muse,” Amanda Lear, for a part. He wants Mick Jagger for this role and Orson Welles for that one.

Forget for a moment that he had David Carradine for the leading Duke Leto role. That’s legitimate enough. But Jodo cast his teenage son as lead character Paul Atreides, having him trained to “live” the part. For years. It was to be a movie built entirely on stunt-casting.

“When you make a picture,” Jodo laughs and shrugs, “you must NOT respect the novel.” He refers to what he’d planned for “Dune” as “raping, but with love” novelist Frank Herbert.

Not that anybody quoted here has so much as a discouraging word about Jodo’s ambition and plans for the project. As fascinating as his vision was, it’s hard to see this film-that-never-was as a tragedy.

When a couple of fanboy critics show up on camera to declaim the project’s wide influence on sci-fi that followed, they have a point. But they, like “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, oversell it and gild the lily. Yes, H.R. Giger got a taste for Hollywood and he and “Dune” designer Dan O’Bannon and artist Jean “Moebius” Girard teamed up on “Alien.” And many movies plainly have similarities to this planned film’s look, setting and design.

But you have to credit Herbert with the whole desertification of science fiction. He’s the one who raided Bedouin and other cultures for his story of a desert world where moisture is gold and the excrement of giant worms is “Melange,” the mind-altering “spice” that is the most valuable substance in the galaxy.

And claiming Jodo’s film would have had the cinema’s first use of “heads-up” graphic displays is simply wrong. American TV’s “The Six Million Dollar Man” beat him to it. Perhaps Jodo borrowed that idea from it.

“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is still a mesmerizing movie, a history lesson about the pre-blockbuster era in science fiction movies, even if it is a documentary that plays like a pitch for yet another adaptation of “Dune.” The tale that foiled David Lynch (he made a 1984 flop film of it) and tested TV’s SyFy Channel still sits in those production books, Jodo’s Great White Whale of a movie that never was.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violent and sexual images and drug references

Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky, H.R. Giger, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gary Kurtz, Michel Seydoux, Chris Foss

Credits: Directed by Frank Pavich. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:30

At 41, moviegoers think they know what they’re getting when they see Jude Law’s name in the opening credits. A tabloid darling, the “Aflie” of his generation, Law’s screen presence is summed up by British critic Brian Viner thusly.
“Best suited to pretty-boy roles,” he wrote of Law in The Daily Mail.
But putting on 30 pounds, a collection of tattoos and fearsome facial hair for “Dom Hemingway” “poleaxes” that image, Viner noted. Law “grabs his opportunity to fill the screen with a gloriously over-the-top character” John Millar raved in The Daily Mail. Reviews for “Dom Hemingway,” which has Law playing a comically loud, wild-eyed and violent ex-con who gets out of prison seeking repayment for the years he lost, have been mixed. But Dom is still an eye-opening detour for Law. We caught up with him in New York.
Q: What’s the appeal of playing someone this unfiltered?
Jude Law: “I like the idea of playing someone who has gone to seed. Life today is about trying to hide all your excesses — physical, emotional. He’s someone who wears them on his sleeve, on his face, and on his chest. The challenge is playing someone so offensive, yet also weirdly likable…’How’s that going to work?’ I wanted to play around with that equation, work that out, just for myself.”

Q: He’s so over-the-top, he must be putting on an act, right?
Law: “He’s held onto his rage. It’s how he’s survived… He’s an angry guy. So we watch him learn that he has to embrace other sides of life and move on — forgiving, and asking forgiveness.
“But he is an actor, yes. There’s an important scene where he talks about his childhood, in a reform school. A teacher cast him in a play and he was pretty good in it. That’s a hint that you get about his past. He’s playing this brutish part. Maybe if the dice had landed differently, he could have been an actor. He’s that kind of confident, larger than life person. He performs instead for anyone and everyone who will listen — with bluster, this violent bravado that he puts up as a front.”
Q: Most people don’t get to act out in the real world the way Dom does. Was living with him fun?
Law: “There’s a certain amount of RELEASE in playing a guy this loud, this impulsive and violent. I was always curious about what makes someone this way. That’s what I need to know to pull it off, to make him realistic and rounded, to me. People have to forgive him and like him, after all…There’s a vibrancy at his center that is exciting to channel. I got to unleash that every day, and that certainly had an effect on me. And Dom came with me, sadly. Every night…When you’re sporting a pair of mutton chops like that, it’s hard to take a character off every night.”
Q: You just played “Henry V” on the London stage. You have a Melissa McCarthy comedy coming up, and another Sherlock Holmes film (with Robert Downey Jr.). Might “Dom Hemingway” be a game-changer for you?
Law: “People are going to see me differently after this, I suppose. I’m always trying to keep myself guessing about the sorts of parts I can do, what works and what doesn’t work…There’s something to Dom that could make people think, ‘Yeah. He’s savable. And he’s not at all who we first think he is.’ I can identify with that. And that’s why it’s great that we make films about people like Dom. It’s why we should give people like Dom an hour and a half of our life to understand them. In a movie, you don’t have to confront him in public, which is even better, considering what he’s capable of.”

Dom Hemingway doesn’t so much converse as rant — long, colorful, creative tirades that seem to run through the entire Cockney vocabulary he polished while in prison. He rants about the guy who married the wife who divorced him, about pubs that have gone “non-smoking” while he was “away,” about what life owes him, giving voice to “the revolutionary INSURGENTS inside my brain.”

And he doesn’t so much shout as bellow, starting with an “OY” as he turns red in the face, his eyes bugging out, his manner suggesting there’s no violence he won’t commit, on impulse, if you give him an excuse.

Jude Law revels in this, the requirements of the title role in “Dom Hemingway,” a violent British comedy about a brutish thief whose 12 years in prison have not mellowed him. It’s a “Sexy Beast” turn — ugly and loud and menacing. And funny. Because Dom’s rage rarely serves him well. He’s determined to beat up the mechanic who married his now-dead wife, to collect a payment from the crime boss who owes his freedom to Dom’s silence, and to reconnect with the daughter who never knew him — and in that order.

Good thing, too. Dom needs an eye-gouging, ear-biting beat-down to settle his nerves.

“I got ANGER issues.”

He needs a little break at the chateau of Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir of “A Better Life” and “The Heat”), where he’ll get his pay off. Of course, Dom is a British bull in the South of France china shop in these scenes.

And by the time all that’s sorted, maybe he’ll be calm enough to win back Evelyn (Emilia Clarke), the daughter who sings in a band, has taken up with a mellow Senegalese band mate and had Afro-English child.

Writer-director Richard Shepard did “”The Matador” and “The Hunting Party”, and he surrounds Law’s lunatic Dom with assorted underworld figures who have mellowed where Dom did not.

“You’re old,” Dom growls at his only friend (Richard E. Grant, also cast against type and quite funny). “I’m old SCHOOL.”

Dom’s unfiltered tirades are sure to get him killed. Or so you’d think. But there’s charm in the venom. Insulting Mr. Fontaine, whose real name is Anatoli, shouldn’t pay off. But the mob boss lets Dom’s “Anal-toli” cheap shots roll off his back.

Dom’s balancing act has a hint of desperation about it. And so does Law’s performance. Over 40 and in need of a re-invention, Law hurls himself at this guy as if his life depended on it. Dom could be describing them both in his narration.

“A man with no options suddenly has ALL the options in the world.”

“Dom Hemingway” has a few similarities to Guy Ritchie’s British mob movies — “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, for instance. Perhaps that’s the message Law is sending to the movie world with his turn in “Dom Hemingway.” His “Sherlock Holmes” director, and everybody else, should see there’s a lot more to him than the fussbudget Dr. Watson that he’s playing of late. He’s still got his dangerous side.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, some violence and drug use

Cast: Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, Demien Bichir, Emilia Clarke, Madalina Diana Ghenea

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Shepard. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:33

True cases of people suffering from multiple personality disorders are among the most harrowing encounters most of us could ever expect to face this side of the supernatural. The idea that a person is not just “acting” like wildly different people, but wholly inhabited by several distinct personae whom they believe themselves to be — utterly — is just chilling.

So it’s a shame that the movies have rendered such rarities humdrum and routine. But actors just love the idea of slinging several accents and wearing several guises during the course of a film. Halle Berry certainly did. That goes a long way in explaining “Frankie & Alice,” a long-shelved 2010 melodrama, “based on true events,” with six credited screenwriters (with two other writers credited for the story) and nothing new to add to the genre.

Frankie is a good-looking, streetwise stripper in 1970s Watts, Los Angeles. The veteran of the gilded cage/take-it-off club tells a newcomer that she just lets “the music take me, like I’m watching myself from the outside.” It’s how she copes.

But the stage isn’t the only place she does that. All sorts of things can set Frankie (Berry) off. And when she goes, she becomes a drawling, hellfire and brimstone quoting Southern belle, railing about “idolatry” and “covetousness” and the coming “wrath of God.”

Which is a real buzz kill for her love life. That, and her tendency to turn violent and then black out.

One such episode puts her in the reluctant care of free-thinking Dr. Oswald (Stellan Skarsgard). He’s wondering if it’s her drug use.

“Frankie got rules,” Frankie says. “No Smack. No Blow. No Speed.”

And then the doctor meets the other woman in Frankie’s head.

“In mah experience, doctors are most always TIREsome bores,” “Alice” acidly drawls. “Or drunks. Which are you, Doctor Oswald?”

Alice tests at a lower IQ, writes with a different hand and feigns racist, Anti-Semitic leanings. The jazz-listening research scientist turned clinician is fascinated.

“Frankie & Alice” is a soapy period piece that hits all the usual mileposts in filmed versions of such stories. Frankie refuses to admit she has a problem, but we see flashbacks that hint at the “reasons” for the disorder and meet her protective mother (Phylicia Rashad) who knows more than she lets on.

Skarsgard plays Oswald with a sort of offhanded good humor, but the doctor is a stock “type.” And the Oscar-winning Berry treats this showcase for what it is — an acting exercise, and a fairly broad one. She can and has pulled off versions of these women she’s playing in other films. And the 32 year-old stripper in a strip-club opening has a hint of “See how well-preserved I am?”

Yes, she is. Of course, she filmed this vanity project almost five years ago, which tends to undercut it as a bid for more Oscar-worthy roles. That and her performance of this unoriginal script.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content, language and drug use

Cast: Halle Berry, Stellan Skarsgard, Phylicia Rashad

Credits: Directed by Geoffrey Sax, screenplay by Cheryl Edwards, Marko King, Mary King, Jonathan Watters, Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse. A Lionsgate release.

Running time:

A good per-screen average, decent reviews and a 3D release (in some theaters) helped Darren Aronosky’s “Noah” open at a surprisingly robust $44 million. Predictions were in the $30s.

“Divergent” held more audience than I could have guessed. Tween and teenage girls aren’t swayed by critics, and it only lost 50% of its opening weekend take. Over $26.

“Mr. Peabody” is closing in on $100 million.

“God Isn’t Dead” added hundreds of screens, but lost some steam per screen even as it made about as much this weekend as last.

“Cesar Chavez” didn’t have the benefit of decent reviews, overall (I liked it) and didn’t crack the top ten. It could manage mid-$30s, $40 even before all is counted up when it has finished its runs.

“Sabotage” is the weakest Arnold Schwarzenegger opening ever — just over $5 million. It’s a dog, his audience has aged out of movie-going. He’s done.

“Grand Budapest”: is shaping up as a decent sized hit, but it almost doubled its screens and only saw a 30% spike in box office. So it’s probably spent and will end up taking in, overall, something around $35.

Donald Rumsfeld smiles, spins and passes the buck as he spars with Oscar winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in “The Unknown Known.” Rumsfeld has the certitude of a man — so dismissive of any questioning of his thinking and decision making in scores of press conferences over the decades — who figures this film guy won’t lay a glove on him. Rumsfeld will make his arguments about the hindsight of history, make a Reagan-esque suggestion that “mistakes were made,” admit to none of his own, and that will be that.
But Morris, who so memorably dissected an earlier defense secretary (Robert McNamara) in “The Fog of War,” is a persistent interviewer and a smart cookie in his own right. He may not score a knock-out “gotcha” here, as he engages in a battle of wits, wills and semantics with “Rummy.” His film still exposes the omnipotent architect of the Iraq War, the War on Terror and its subsequent fallout as, if not chastened, at least needy — the man who needs this chance to salvage his rep more than Morris needs yet another history lesson of a campaign that failed.
In the Morris style, the movie is in Rumsfeld’s own words, spoken straight at the camera. Occasionally, Morris, off-camera, will persist in a line of questioning in the way no TV anchor ever would.
“Why the obsession with Iraq and Saddam?”
Mostly, though, this is Rumseld, answering or evading questions and reading from his “blizzard” of memos from his years of public service.
As with McNamara, Morris expounds on Rumsfeld’s entire life, picking up the ambitious Congressman who played all the angles in the short-lived Gerald Ford Administration, shafted George Herbert Walker Bush in ways the elder Bush never forgot (Rumsfeld chuckles over this) and, with his former subordinate and lifelong pal Dick Cheney, wound up running the country’s foreign policy for the better part of a decade.
“I’m cool and measured,” Rumsfeld says, brushing off the Morris suggestion that Iraq was a Bush Administration “obsession.” He articulates “The Rumsfeld Doctrine,” installing “new regimes in states that sponsor terrorism.”
He denies that he and his Bush II colleagues set out to “confuse” the American people, post-9/11, into thinking Saddam Hussein had a hand in the attacks of 9-11-2001. Then Morris shows a damning press conference where Rumseld does his best to perpetuate that confusion.
His famous bluntness and glib sarcasm are softened, his memories of the Ford Era abandonment of Vietnam fuzzy and the accusations of his “Machiavellian” White House back-stabbing roll off his back. He sleeps at night.
“What are you going to worry about? You have to pick and choose.”
It’s the memos, revealing both his style of management (bullying) and his way of thinking that are most revealing, which is why Morris gets him to read them, most famously the “Uknown Knowns” one. Rumsfeld aptly compares 9/11 to Pearl Harbor as similar “failures of imagination.” It’s not just the intelligence you have in hand, it’s the intelligence that you don’t that creates such fiascoes.
And there are “things you think you know that it turns out you did not.” Thus, Bush II’s “obsession” with Saddam when Al-Qaeda was the real threat. Thus, Rumsfeld’s finger-pointing at George Tenet of the CIA, his arrogant power grab from Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (in memo form), his puerile wordplay to justify blunders.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
Morris, politely confrontational when his voice crops up, undercuts the tension of the interviews by jump-cutting Rumsfeld’s answers, not waiting, hoping he’ll hang himself. He uses the advantages of a film editor to insert TV news footage to make counter arguments to Rumsfeld’s version of himself and the events he took part in rather than throwing those in Rumsfeld’s face.
So while it’s a valuable document, a long-form interview with an important figure of ’70s, 80s, and 2000s American foreign and defense policy, “The Uknown Known” never rises to “Frost/Nixon” or even “The Fog of War.” We get a taste of the man behind the bluff and bluster and remember to be wary of those so sure of themselves that they refuse to brook any hint of second-guessing. And we realize that the cryptic, calculating Donald Rumsfeld himself may be the ultimate “unknown known.”
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing images and brief nudity
Cast: Donald Rumsfeld
Credits: Directed by Errol Morris. A TWC Radius release.
Running time: 1:43

Paramount’s Darren Aronofsky/Russell Crowe gamble is paying off, hitting $45 million or so by Sunday night, a box office take well above expectations — which were in the mid-30s. That’s based on a big Friday, but we’ll see how Sat. goes.

Decent reviews propped this one up, the director’s edgy track record helped but you have to figure Crowe, religious audience and big apocalyptic epic crowd showed up. Somebody turned this into a hit.

“Divergent” held more than 45% of its opening weekend take, doing $25 or so.

“Sabotage” is bombing — $5 million? Arnie’s over. Done. Stop giving him vehicles.

“Cesar Chavez” did OK on a limited number of screens, under $3 overall, though.

“God’s Not Dead” is doing a steady $8 million a weekend, not losing any audience. That’s a hit.

But “Grand Budapest Hotel” got a big bounce this weekend and is well up the top ten, justifying its platform release strategy. Go see it!