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Posts Tagged ‘Zach Galifianakis’

Reality Winner double feature: WINNER (2024) and REALITY (2023)

Thursday, April 3rd, 2025

You know Reality Winner? The young translator who was working as an NSA contractor and got busted for leaking an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election? She got sick of hearing Glenn Greenwald in particular say it was a hoax when she had proof sitting right there, so she mailed it to The Intercept, who published unredacted scans of the documents, “accidentally” leading the feds to the exact printer they came out of. She pled guilty and was sentenced to 5 years and 3 months in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917, the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to the media.

I always thought it was an intriguing story because it seemed like such a foolish thing for somebody to do, but also sorta relatable, and of course you did a double take when you read her name. What was up with her? I got why they had to prosecute her, but it really seemed like she got a raw deal, even moreso in retrospect. The very guy who benefited from the Russian interference (and who ignored her pleas for clemency) later stole a literal truck load of secret documents, dumped them around his shit-ass country club like half-eaten pizzas in an ‘80s movie cop’s apartment, then committed numerous other serious crimes in the cover up of that crime. Winner served about four years, Trump was able to slow walk his with his own judge, have it dismissed and then fire the FBI agents assigned to (unsuccessfully) investigate him – this seems like an imbalance to me. They should at least fly Reality Winner to DC and give her one running kick to his nuts wearing a cement boot. Or she could outsource it to a Make a Wish Foundation kid if she chooses. I think something like that would be good for the country.

Anyway I was intrigued when I came across the 2024 movie WINNER on Hulu and realized it was a biopic of Reality Winner. (Tagline: “based on reality.”) The thumbnail looks more like a quirky indie comedy, and that’s kind of what it is. Instead of doing it as a big dramatic whistleblower thriller it’s Reality Winner (Emilia Jones, star of CODA) telling you the story like you’re a friend who gets her sense of humor. It has all kinds of drama and it got me emotional about family stuff but also it knows this is a colorful character and a wild story and it’s more effective to have fun with it than be self-important. (read the rest of this shit…)

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Friday, December 5th, 2014

tn_birdmanorBIRDMAN OR is an incredible movie on a technical and craft type level. It’s like a play, really. Mostly dialogue and centered around one building, but it’s also very cinematic because it’s photographed ROPE-style, as if the whole movie is one continuous shot. Of course it’s not, that’s all an illusion, and it’s not even supposed to mimic real time. Sometimes it will pull up to the sky and it will become day or night before it comes back down, or the events within the shot will make it clear that time has passed. One second they’re in a rehearsal for a play, the next there’s an entire audience there. Pretty tricky stuff pulled off with the genius of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, expanding on the long takes he did with Alfonso Cuaron in CHILDREN OF MEN and GRAVITY. The director/co-writer this time is their buddy Alejandro González Iñárritu (BABEL).

It’s the story of Hollywood actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton, JACKIE BROWN), who was a serious actor but became known mainly for playing a super hero in a trilogy of movies in the early ’90s. Now he’s trying to adapt a Raymond Carver story for the stage. He’s having all kinds of problems right before the first preview, while also dealing with emotional crises about his lagging fame, his perceived lack of respect as an artist, his failed marriage (Amy Ryan plays his ex-wife, still in his life), the crappy job he’s done as a father (Emma Stone plays his recovering junkie daughter/assistant, who is constantly annoyed with him and her job). So we, as the point of view of the camera, hover there and watch his rehearsals, his arguments, we fly through the labyrinthine back halls of the theater, into the dressing rooms, onto the scaffolding, onto the stage, outside into crowded Times Square. There is crying, fighting, fucking.

Meanwhile Riggan seems to be losing it, he occasionally hears the Beetlejuice-like voice of his movie character egging him on and finds that he can move objects with his mind and even fly. In fact we first meet him levitating in a yoga pose, but still managing to look pathetic in his slightly loose tighty whiteys and dingy theater-basement apartment that the narration tells us “smells like balls.”
(read the rest of this shit…)