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Intro: Hollywood plays a concrete role in shaping the community’s perception of our world. In some cases, this role is creating fiction stories of fantasy, terror, comedy and mystery, among others to stimulate the mind. In other – arguably more important – cases, its role is dictating true but controversial events to enlighten audiences of issues that might otherwise remain unknown. These stories spark conversations, encourage social change and should be praised for it. Below are summaries of socially impactful Hollywood films based on true events: Fruitvale StationSpotlightThe Big ShortBlack Hawk DownFruitvale Station—Director: Ryan CooglerProducer: Nina Yang Bongiovi, Forest WhitakerWriter: Ryan CooglerStarring: Michael B. JordanMelonie DiazKevin DurandChad Michael MurrayAhna O; ReillyOctavia SpencerRelease Date: January 19, 2013 (Sundance) | July 12, 2013 (United States)Production Company: Significant Productions A New Year, and a Last Day Alive‘Fruitvale Station’ Is Based on the Story of Oscar Grant IIIAuthor: A.O. ScottJuly11, 2013In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009, Oscar Grant III, unarmed and lying face down on a subway platform in Oakland, Calif., was shot in the back by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. The incident, captured on video by onlookers, incited protest, unrest and arguments similar to those that would swirl around the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida a few years later. The deaths of these and other African-American young men (Mr. Grant was 22) touch some of the rawest nerves in the body politic and raise thorny and apparently intractable?issues?of law and order, violence and race.Those matters are hardly absent from?“Fruitvale Station,”?Ryan Coogler’s powerful and sensitive debut feature, which imaginatively reconstructs the last 24 or so hours of Oscar Grant’s life, flashing back from a horrifying snippet of actual cellphone video of the hectic moments before the shooting. But?Mr. Coogler, a 27-year-old Bay Area native who went to film school at the University of Southern California, examines his subject with a steady, objective eye and tells his story in the key of wise heartbreak rather than blind rage. It is not that the movie is apolitical or disengaged from the painful, public implications of Mr. Grant’s fate. But everything it has to say about class, masculinity and the tricky relations among different kinds of people in a proudly diverse and liberal metropolis is embedded in details of character and place.As played by Michael B. Jordan (Vince Howard?to devotees of?“Friday Night Lights,”?though to fans of “The Wire,” he will always be Wallace), Oscar is a case study in confusion, unsure of where he’s going and a source of worry to those who love him. He dotes on his daughter, Tatiana, and seems sincere in his desire — if not entirely steady in his resolve — to stay with her mother, Sophina (Melonie Diaz). His own mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer), is still able to boss him around, and he spends a lot of the day shopping for her birthday party.There is a natural, easy sweetness to Oscar, but neither Mr. Coogler’s script nor Mr. Jordan’s performance sugarcoats his temperament. He is, for one thing, irresponsible and not always honest, unable to admit to Sophina or Wanda that he has been fired from his supermarket job for chronic lateness. Even after two stints in prison (one visited in the film’s only chronological digression), he is still selling drugs, and his vows to stop have the feel of New Year’s resolutions, inspiring more hope than confidence.A few moments lean a bit too hard on our dread-filled foreknowledge of Oscar’s tragic end. The lost dog he encounters at a gas station might as well have “Metaphor” stamped on its collar. But Mr. Coogler, with a ground-level, hand-held shooting style that sometimes evokes the spiritually alert naturalism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, has enough faith in his actors and in the intrinsic interest of the characters’ lives to keep overt sentimentality and messagemongering to a minimum. You get the sense that he might have made this movie even if the world had not handed him a terrible true story, and made any day in the life of Oscar Grant into a sad, touching and subtle film.And, in truth, Mr. Coogler has made that movie, even as he has also made one full of anger, grief and frustration. His main intention — and his great achievement, as well as Mr. Jordan’s — is to make Oscar a fully human presence, to pay him the respect of acknowledging his complexities and contradictions. The radicalism of “Fruitvale Station” lies precisely here, in its refusal to turn a man into a symbol. Nearly every black man, whether or not he is president, tends to be flattened out by popular culture and the psychopathology of everyday American life, rendered as an innocent victim, a noble warrior or a menace to society. There is a dehumanizing violence in this habit, a willed, toxic blindness that “Fruitvale Station” at once exposes and resists.The other characters, the social environment they navigate and the language they speak are treated with a similarly nuanced attention. Sophina and Wanda have their own burdens and distractions, and they deal with Oscar’s shortcomings as well as they can. The streets of Hayward, Oakland and San Francisco and the cars of the BART trains are places of happy chaos and spontaneous solidarity, but also contested spaces where violence often seems close at hand.Even as it unfolds with a terrible sense of inevitability, “Fruitvale Station” is rarely predictable. The climactic encounter with BART police officers erupts in a mood of vertiginous uncertainty, defusing facile or inflammatory judgments and bending the audience’s reflexive emotional horror and moral outrage toward a necessary and difficult ethical inquiry. How could this have happened? How did we — meaning any one of us who might see faces like our own depicted on that screen — allow it?The Big Short—Director: Adam McKayProducer: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Arnon Milchan, Brad PittScreenplay Writer: Charles Randolph, Adam McKayBased on: The Big Short by Michael LewisStarring: Christian BaleSteve CarellRyan GoslingBrad PittMelissa LeoHamish LinklaterJohn MagaroRafe Spall Jeremy StrongFinn WittrockMarisa TomeiRelease Date: November 12, 2015 (AFI Fest) | December 11, 2015 (United States)Production Company: Regency Enterprises, Plan B EntertainmentWhat ‘The Big Short’ Gets Right, and Wrong, About the Housing BubbleAuthor: Neil IrwinDecember 22, 2015“The Big Short,” the movie version of the Michael Lewis?book?about a bunch of misfits who foresaw the housing and mortgage bubble a decade ago and profited handsomely from its popping, is to be released widely Wednesday.It is the strongest film explanation of the global financial crisis.Spoiler alert: In the end, the global economy collapses.The movie does an impressive job of conveying arcane financial concepts that are very hard for a general audience to grasp. (Turns out, the best way to explain synthetic?collateralized debt obligations?involves a blackjack table and the singer?Selena Gomez.) But a different, perhaps unintentional, lesson of the movie stands out to me.“The Big Short” makes a big deal of its protagonists realizing that there was a giant housing bubble in the middle of the last decade at a time no one else could see it. But that’s not quite right. When no-money-down home loans were commonplace and home prices were soaring, there was widespread discussion of the possibility that the United States was experiencing a housing bubble.It was in August 2005 that the number of Google searches for that term hit its peak,?according to Google Trends, fully two years before the crisis began. That year alone, there were 1,628 articles in major world publications included in the Nexis database that used the term “housing bubble.”It’s true that plenty of those articles quoted economists and real estate industry representatives arguing there was no bubble and nothing to fear, but there are also clips discussing the possibility it could end with tears.“The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history,” The Economist said in a 2005?article. “Prepare for the economic pain when it pops.” The New York Times published an article in August of that year citing the economist Robert Shiller: “He is arguing that the housing craze is another bubble destined to end badly, just as every other real-estate boom on record has,” said the?article,?by some guy named David Leonhardt.So plenty of people were at least discussing the possibility of a dangerous bubble. But there’s a big difference between identifying at the macro level that something is going on, and understanding the financial plumbing that would allow a person to profit from that insight.“The Big Short,” the movie version of the Michael Lewis?book?about a bunch of misfits who foresaw the housing and mortgage bubble a decade ago and profited handsomely from its popping, is to be released widely Wednesday.It is the strongest film explanation of the global financial crisis.Spoiler alert: In the end, the global economy collapses.The movie does an impressive job of conveying arcane financial concepts that are very hard for a general audience to grasp. (Turns out, the best way to explain synthetic?collateralized debt obligations?involves a blackjack table and the singer?Selena Gomez.) But a different, perhaps unintentional, lesson of the movie stands out to me.“The Big Short” makes a big deal of its protagonists realizing that there was a giant housing bubble in the middle of the last decade at a time no one else could see it. But that’s not quite right. When no-money-down home loans were commonplace and home prices were soaring, there was widespread discussion of the possibility that the United States was experiencing a housing bubble.It was in August 2005 that the number of Google searches for that term hit its peak,?according to Google Trends, fully two years before the crisis began. That year alone, there were 1,628 articles in major world publications included in the Nexis database that used the term “housing bubble.”It’s true that plenty of those articles quoted economists and real estate industry representatives arguing there was no bubble and nothing to fear, but there are also clips discussing the possibility it could end with tears.“The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history,” The Economist said in a 2005?article. “Prepare for the economic pain when it pops.” The New York Times published an article in August of that year citing the economist Robert Shiller: “He is arguing that the housing craze is another bubble destined to end badly, just as every other real-estate boom on record has,” said the?article,?by some guy named David Leonhardt.So plenty of people were at least discussing the possibility of a dangerous bubble. But there’s a big difference between identifying at the macro level that something is going on, and understanding the financial plumbing that would allow a person to profit from that insight.Spotlight—Director: Tom McCarthyProducer: Blye Pagon Faust, Steve Golin, Nicole Rocklin, Michael SugarWriter: Tom McCarthy, Josh SingerStarring: Mark RuffaloMichael KeatonRachel McAdamsLive SchreiberJohn SlatteryStanley Tucci Release Date: September 3, 2015 (Venice) | November 6, 2015 (United States)Production Company: Anonymous Content, First Look Media, Participant Media, Rocklin/FaustReview: In ‘Spotlight,’ The Boston Globe Digs Up the Catholic Church’s DirtAuthor: A.O. ScottNovember 5, 2015“Spotlight” won the Oscar for best picture.?Read our complete coverage of the Academy Awards.“The city flourishes when its great institutions work together,” says the cardinal to the newspaper editor during a friendly chat in the rectory. The city in question is Boston. The cardinal is Bernard F. Law and the editor, newly arrived at The Boston Globe from The Miami Herald, is Martin Baron. He politely dissents from the cardinal’s vision of civic harmony, arguing that the paper should stand alone.Their conversation, which takes place early in “Spotlight,” sets up the film’s central conflict. Encouraged by Baron, a small group of reporters at The Globe will spend the next eight months (and the next two hours) digging into the role of the Boston archdiocese in covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. But the image of two prominent men talking quietly behind closed doors — Law is played with orotund charm by Len Cariou, Baron with sphinxlike self-containment by Liev Schreiber — haunts this somber, thrilling movie and crystallizes its major concern, which is the way power operates in the absence of accountability. When institutions convinced of their own greatness work together, what usually happens is that the truth is buried and the innocent suffer. Breaking that pattern of collaboration is not easy. Challenging deeply entrenched, widely respected authority can be very scary.Directed by Tom McCarthy from a script he wrote with Josh Singer and based closely on recent history, “Spotlight” is a gripping detective story and a superlative newsroom drama, a solid procedural that tries to confront evil without sensationalism. Taking its name from the investigative team that began pursuing the sex-abuse story in 2001, the film focuses on both the human particulars and the larger political contours of the scandal and its uncovering.We spend most of our time with the Spotlight staff. Their supervising editor, Walter Robinson (known as Robby and played by an extra-flinty Michael Keaton), has a classically blunt, skeptical newsman style, but he’s also part of Boston’s mostly Roman Catholic establishment. He rubs shoulders with an unctuous church P.R. guy (Paul Guilfoyle) and plays golf with a well-connected lawyer (Jamey Sheridan) who handled some of the archdiocese’s unsavory business. The reporters working for Robby — Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) — come from Catholic backgrounds, and have their own mixed feelings about what they’re doing.Mr. McCarthy, who played a rotten reporter on the last season of “The Wire,” views journalists primarily through the lens of their work. He follows Pfeiffer as she interviews survivors, Rezendes as he wrangles a zealous lawyer (Stanley Tucci) and Carroll as he digs into long-hidden records, including articles buried in the newspaper’s archives. Though the film, like the?Spotlight articles, avoids euphemism in discussing the facts of child rape, it also avoids exploitative flashbacks, balancing attention to individual cases with a sense of pervasive, invisible corruption. Baron urges the reporters to focus on the systemic dimensions of the story, and “Spotlight” does the same. As the number of victims and predators increases, and as it becomes clear that Law and others knew what was happening and protected the guilty, shock and indignation are replaced by a deeper sense of moral horror.The outcome of the story may be well known, but Mr. McCarthy and his superb cast generate plenty of suspense along the way, and the idiosyncratic humanity of the reporters keeps the audience engaged and aware of the stakes. During the climactic montage — the presses humming, the papers stacked and baled, the trucks rumbling out into the morning light — my heart swelled and my pulse quickened, and not only because I have printer’s ink running through my veins. Journalists on film are usually portrayed as idealists or cynics, crusaders or parasites. The reality is much grayer, and more than just about any other film I can think of, “Spotlight” gets it right.It captures the finer grain of newsroom life in the early years of this century almost perfectly, starting with a scene in which a retiring veteran is sent off with awkward speeches, forced laughter and dry cake. As the story unfolds, there are scenes of pale-skinned guys in pleated khakis and button-down oxfords gathering under fluorescent lights and ugly drop ceilings, spasms of frantic phone-calling and stretches of fidgety downtime. Not even the raffish presence of “Mad Men” bad-boy John Slattery can impart much glamour to these drab surroundings. Visually, the movie is about as compelling as a day-old coffee stain. As I said: almost perfect.The Globe itself (owned by The New York Times Company when the film takes place) is shown to be an imperfect institution. The people who work inside it are decidedly fallible — as prone to laziness, confusion and compromise as anyone else. Before 2001 — with some exceptions, notably in the work of the columnist Eileen McNamara (played here in a few cursory scenes by Maureen Keiller) — the paper overlooked both the extent of the criminality in the local church and the evidence that the hierarchy knew what was going on. The Spotlight reporters and editors are pursuing a big, potentially career-making scoop. At the same time, they are atoning for previous lapses and trying to overcome the bureaucratic inertia that is as integral to the functioning of a newspaper as the zealous pursuit of the truth. “What took you so long?” is a question they hear more than once.To use “Spotlight” as an occasion to wax nostalgic for the vanishing glory of print would be to miss the point. The movie celebrates a specific professional accomplishment and beautifully captures the professional ethos of journalism. It is also a defense of professionalism in a culture that increasingly holds it in contempt.Mr. McCarthy is a solid craftsman. The actors are disciplined and serious, forgoing the table-pounding and speechifying that might more readily win them prizes from their peers. Everything in this movie works, which is only fitting, since its vision of heroism involves showing up in the morning and — whether inspired by bosses or in spite of them — doing the job.Zero Dark Thirty—Director: Ridley ScottProducer: Jerry Bruckheimer, Radley ScottScreenplay Writer: Ken NolanBased on: Black Hawk Down by Mark BowdenStarring: Josh HartnettEwan McGregorTom SizemoreEric BanaWilliam FichtnerEwen BremnerSam ShepardRelease Date: December 28, 2001 (Limited) | January 18, 2002 (Worldwide)Production Company: Revolution Studios, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Scott Free ProductionsBy Any Means NecessaryJessica Chastain in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’Author: Manohla DargisDecember 17, 2012There is a crucial scene in?“Zero Dark Thirty”?—?Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliantly directed fictionalized account about the search for Osama bin Laden — in which three Central Intelligence Agency officers stop talking and look at a television. On the screen Barack Obama is speaking with a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” It’s Nov. 16, 2008. “I have said repeatedly,” Mr. Obama asserts, “that America doesn’t?torture.” The three look at the screen without a word, and then Ms. Bigelow cuts to a close-up of one, Maya (Jessica Chastain). The analyst’s face is a blank. This is, Mr. Obama continues, part of “an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”That vacant face partly explains, I suspect, why “Zero Dark Thirty” has stirred up so much?controversy?before hitting theaters. (It opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday and nationwide on Jan. 11.) Is she stunned by what she hears? Contemptuous? Relieved? Irritated? Indifferent? Maya’s face reveals nothing and offers as much explanation as her silence. How viewers interpret this look will depend on them because here and throughout this difficult, urgent movie Ms. Bigelow does not fill in the blanks for them. Given that the opening sequences show Maya helping carry out violent, cruel interrogations of detainees, I read her expression as that of an employee absorbing a new set of marching orders from her next boss — orders that drastically reverse her old ones.A seamless weave of truth and drama, “Zero Dark Thirty” tracks the long, twisted road to Bin Laden’s capture, beginning on Sept. 11 and ending a decade later at another conflagration, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. With a script by Mark Boal, who wrote?“The Hurt Locker,”?Ms. Bigelow’s last feature, this new movie is a cool, outwardly nonpartisan intelligence procedural — a detective story of sorts — in which a mass murderer is tracked down by people who spend a lot of time staring into computer screens and occasionally working in the field. It is also a wrenchingly sad, soul-shaking story about revenge and its moral costs, which makes it the most important American fiction movie about Sept. 11, a landmark that would be more impressive if there were more such films to choose from.The story hinges on Maya, a spiky loner with next to no back story, no friend or family, who’s more of an ambivalent protagonist than a traditional heroine. She is introduced in the first scene during the interrogation of a prisoner, Ammar (Reda Kateb), by another C.I.A. officer, Dan (Jason Clarke). Ammar, whom Mr. Boal has said is a composite, looks as if he has been beaten. “I own you,” Dan says, “you belong to me.” Dan leaves the room with someone wearing a ski mask; this turns out to be Maya, who pushes him to continue. He does. During this scene and a second questioning, Dan knocks Ammar down, subjects him to simulated drowning and forces him inside a horrifyingly small box. The violence is ugly, stark, almost businesslike and is largely presented without music cues or any obvious filmmaking commentary.The scarcity of fiction films about Sept. 11 only partly explains why this movie has provoked debate. Primarily, though, it is the representation of torture — and, more important, the assertion that such abuse produced information that led to Bin Laden — that has provoked outrage in some quarters. We are clearly hungry to work through this raw subject. The most difficult scenes occur early and set the grim mood and moral stakes. (Later there are other, briefer visions of detainees being treated harshly.) It is hard to imagine anyone watching them without feeling shaken or repulsed. Some of the worst is implied: You see a bruised face, not the punch that battered it. You see a man forced into a small box, rather than hear his screams inside it. In these early scenes there is also talk — threats and pleas.If Ms. Bigelow leaves some of this to your imagination, it is because, I assume, she knows that the viewers for a movie like this one have been following the news for the past decade. They have read the articles, books and legal arguments about the C.I.A.’s use of what was called “enhanced interrogation” and that others have condemned as torture. Trusting the audience in this fashion is gutsy and all too rare in a movie released by a major studio. But it is an article of faith in “Zero Dark Thirty” that viewers are capable of filling in the blanks, managing narrative complexity and confronting their complicity. This is unusual territory for American moviegoers habituated to an industry that preaches simplified morality even as it turns torture into entertainment.The scenes of Ammar in the C.I.A.’s medieval chamber of horrors are broken into two separate time frames and occur during the first 25 minutes. And while they take up 15 of the movie’s 156 minutes, they linger, casting a long, dreadful shadow over everything that comes after. The openings of movies are always significant (“Rosebud”), and the key to understanding this one is grasping what occurs during its introductory passages. The movie actually begins with a prelude: a brief stretch of black screen accompanied by a disturbing collage of voices from Sept. 11. The first of the two interrogations with Ammar follows immediately after, a juxtaposition that asserts a cause and effect relationship between the void of Sept. 11 voices and the lone man strung up in a cell.The abuse scenes are crucial to “Zero Dark Thirty” because they serve as a claim — one made cinematically rather than with speeches — that these interrogation methods are unreliable when it comes to producing actionable information. The second session ends with the screaming, babbling, weeping Ammar insisting that he doesn’t know about a coming attack as he is sealed in the box. The final moment is shot from his point of view, and what follows is a scene of a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. This juxtaposition of the abuse and the massacre suggests, in cinematic terms, that torture does not save lives. It is only later, when Dan and Maya lie to Ammar, sit across from him at a table, talk to him like a human being and give him food and a cigarette, that he offers them a potential lead.That valuable clue is a false name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (Tushaar Mehra). Called a “needle in a haystack” by one character, he becomes the lead that Maya chases over the next eight years and for much of the next hour or so of the movie. Along with her colleagues, including the equally tough Jessica (an excellent Jennifer Ehle), Maya unearths good and bad intelligence, stumbles into dead ends, unearths glimmers of hope. and endures, both at a distance and in close, frightening proximity, further terrorist attacks. She also interrogates suspects, sometimes violently (a man slaps a suspect at her command), until the political climate abruptly changes. “You don’t,” Dan cautions her, “want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.”The glibness of Dan’s comment is shocking, but one of the movie’s most radical, unpleasant themes — radical because it is so unpleasant, especially for an American fiction film — is that these are employees doing a job. In reality there were those who objected to the way that detainees were handled. But this isn’t a movie about those who protested. This is about those who did not protest, who went along and who — while searching for a needle in a haystack — interrogated detainees deemed “enemy combatants” in what the former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld?described?as “a war like none other our nation has faced.” The movie shows the dark side of that war. It shows the unspeakable and lets us decide if the death of Bin Laden was worth the price we paid.“The Obama administration has claimed that torture played no part in tracking down bin Laden,” Mark Bowden writes in his 2012 book “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden,” but “in the first two important steps down the trail, that claim crumbles.”In his 2012 book, “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad,” Peter L. Bergen asks, “Did coercive interrogations lead to Bin Laden?” Mr. Bergen reasons that “since we can’t run history backward, we will never know what conventional interrogation techniques alone might have elicited from” four important prisoners. However unprovable the effectiveness of these interrogations, they did take place. To omit them from “Zero Dark Thirty” would have been a reprehensible act of moral cowardice.There is much else to say about the movie, which ends with the harrowing siege of Bin Laden’s hideaway by the Navy SEALs (played by, among others, Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt), much of it shot to approximate the queasy, weirdly unreal green of night-vision goggles. Ms. Bigelow’s direction here is unexpectedly stunning, at once bold and intimate: she has a genius for infusing even large-scale action set pieces with the human element. One of the most significant images is of a pool of blood on a floor. It’s pitiful, really, and as the movie heads toward its emphatically nontriumphant finish, it is impossible not to realize with anguish that all that came before — the pain, the suffering and the compromised ideals — has led to?this. ................
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