The Fifth Estate and Rush (with some commentary on Escape Plan)

            Hard Drive, He Said (plus some info on our new

                                          “breakout” technologies)

         

                   Review by Ken Burke             The Fifth Estate

          

A fictionalized version of Julian Assange’s secret-document-posting website, WikiLeaks, leaving you to decide if he’s a channel of truth or a dangerous criminal.

                                                                            Rush

Another based-in-fact film, about the 1976 Grand Prix racing season’s competition between Niki Lauda and James Hunt with intense images of this dangerous sport.

[Take care, curious readers, for plot spoilers gallop rampantly throughout the Two Guys’ brilliantly insightful reviews.  This is how we write, so as to explore what must be said as art transcends commerce (although if anyone wants to pay us for doing this ...); therefore, be warned, beware, and read on when ready to be transported to—well, wherever we end up.

We also encourage you to check your tastes against ours with the summary of Two Guys reviews, which we update with each new posting.  But please be aware that the links we recommend in our reviews may have been removed or modified without our knowledge.  Other overall notations for this blog may be found at our Two Guys in the Dark homepage.  Now, onward to illumination; you may want to protect your eyes from the brilliance.]

This week’s main pairing takes us once again into the world of docudrama (as so many notable [not always for the right reasons] films have done already this year and last, including Captain Phillips [Paul Greengrass], Lee Daniels’ The Butler [Daniels], Fruitvale Station [Ryan Coogler], The Bling Ring [Sofia Coppola], 42 [Brian Helgeland], On the Road [Walter Salles], No [Pablo Larrain], Zero Dark Thirty [Kathryn Bigelow], The Impossible [Juan Antonio Bayona], Lincoln [Steven Spielberg], Hitchcock [Sacha Gervasi], The Sessions [Ben Lewin], and 2012’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Argo [Ben Affleck]*, along with upcoming 2013 films 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen), Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée), Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (Justin Chadwick)—and even though their history is highly fictionalized [to say the least] the historical contexts of 2012’s Les Misérables [Tom Hooper] and Django Unchained [Quentin Tarantino]** are also undeniable), with focused explorations on divulging incriminating state secrets in Bill Condon‘s The Fifth Estate and grueling depictions of the horrors lurking while racing at breakneck speeds around a Grand Prix track in Ron Howard’s Rush (if you’re intrigued by this “rush” of facts-inspired offerings you can read more about the topic in Tim Grey’s "Why Reality-Based Films are Flooding the Oscar Race" from the October 15, 2013 issue of Variety [Although you may need a subscription to this site to access the article.  I know I paid for one at some point but can’t remember if it’s still needed; also, the download may be a bit slow.]–however, as Grey points out, not all of the examples from this approach are automatic winners, as evidenced by the very poor showings this year of Jobs [Joshua Michael Stern] and Lovelace [Jeffrey Friedman, Rob Epstein], about the late computer genius who redefined an entire global industry and the late actress best known for the porno “classic” Deep Throat [Jerry Gerard (actually Gerard Damiano), 1972]—which you could say redefined its industry as well, though not in a good way for Lovelace [Linda Susan Boreman] who went on to detail her abuse in this emerging-from-the-underground-world as she became an anti-porn activist).  With The Fifth Estate I’ll have to admit up front that I’m out in the wilderness on this one (or else almost everyone else is), with the Rotten Tomatoes average at a mere 39%, Metacritic barely better at 49%.  Of course its real-life protagonist, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, doesn’t care for it at all either (see the second suggested video link far below), a point made in a meta-manner at the end of the film when the character of Assange (Benedict Cumberpatch) faces the camera and tells us directly that what we have on screen is based on 2 books (Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange and the World’s Most Dangerous Website by Daniel Domscheit-Berg [Assange’s close associate for most of our film’s narrative, played there by Daniel Brühl] and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding [both books from 2011]), which he dismisses as awful distortions, so we’re no closer than we were about 7 years ago—when this tell-all exposé site began making life uncomfortable for a number of corporate and political institutions—to really knowing the inside story of how Assange and company constructed their assault on “eyes-only” documents and how it fell apart internally between these former colleagues because their own story doesn’t come across as clearly as the many secrets that they have received from various sources and made disturbingly public.

           * Reviews in this blog respectively in the October 16, 2013; August 22, 2013; July 16, 2013; April 18, 2013; March 29, 2013; March 16, 2013; January 7, 2013; December 28, 2012; December 14, 2012; November 9, 2012; and October 19, 2012 postings.

** Reviews in this blog in the December 30, 2012 posting.

Given that I can’t know what really went on between Assange and Domscheit-Berg beyond their conflicting accounts, all I can do is judge this film on its merits as a compelling story with excellent acting and polished production values; on those counts it works very well for me, leaving me properly concerned about what goes on behind the scenes in the sociopolitical maneuverings that are responsible for the economic, policy, and military decisions made by the dominant countries of this troubled planet, especially when I keep hearing every day about additional intrusions into not only the private lives of American citizens by our own National Security Agency (as revealed by fellow informer and political refugee—or dangerous criminal, take your pick—Edward Snowden) but also into the private correspondence of a number of world leaders who are joining with segments of the U.S. populace to demand clear explanations about what’s going on behind the scenes of governments and why affairs (the diplomatic kind, not the sexual ones; we learn plenty about most of those) are conducted in the manner that they are (Yet, if the public statements of many of our elected officials about the reasoning for their actions regarding the recent federal govt. shutdown and the raising of the national debt limit are indications of what’s passing for reasoned discourse in those closed-door bargaining sessions, then maybe I’d be better off just not knowing how far down the river most of us are being sold in order to perpetuate the specific policies, policymakers, and support sources currently in place, no matter who's running the show in Washington).

One of the presentations of WikiLeaks in terms of intention and execution that probably does stand up under scrutiny is how few actual people were responsible for running the site and for making decisions on what was to be done with the constant flow of information that was coming in to Assange and his tiny band of rebels from a variety of anonymous global contributors (with the most famous now-exposed one of these whistleblowers being Chelsea [previously Bradley] Manning, regarding the huge trove of Afghanistan and Iraq war documents which are scheduled for release not just by WikiLeaks but also by the New York Times, the U.K. Guardian, and the German Der Spiegel when the film opens in a July 2010 scene).  The central quandary of the story is up for argument right from the beginning as there’s not only pressure within the traditional press community (the so-called “Fourth Estate,” which may not have always been accorded parallel status with the traditional “estates” of the Church, the Nobility, and the Public but has always been a part of human society and culture in the discovery and use of communication tools and technologies, as presented to us in a marvelous montage under the opening credits, showing the compressed evolution from the earliest image-making implements to contemporary electronic media) to match each other in getting this clandestine Manning information out into the light of day but also pressure to get assurances from Assange that the WikiLeaks version would also redact specific names from the hundreds of thousands of documents so as not to endanger the lives of various secret field agents and informers when all of that information is made public.  If you just want to save your time for the essence of The Fifth Estate’s prime dilemma until some future date on video, you could probably just watch these rapid opening minutes of the first scene, then skip ahead to the almost-end when Domscheit-Berg breaks from Assange on this very issue (he sides with the mainstream press on the redaction, Assange publishes the unabridged version thereby intensifying all the ensuring chaos, which results in his current diplomatic immunity within London’s Ecuadorian embassy [although the immediate reason for that, as we’re reminded in the closing credits, is due to a sexual assault charge regarding 2 Swedish women and Assange, but he insists their intercourse was consensual and that him leaving England at this point would just be part of a plot to extradite him to the U.S. for arrest and trial on espionage and sedition charges), then watch the final direct-to-the-audience statements from Assange as he challenges the very legitimacy of the manner in which his story is presented in this film while still encouraging all of us to challenge the power of the powerful in our various societies, using the sophisticated media tools now available to us in the process of locating, then sharing the type of information that we have a right to know about the decisions, illegal or fatal in many cases, that shape our collective lives despite uninformed, manipulated input from us at best or no input at all given the covert nature of the many actions being hidden from our knowledge.

Certainly we are given reason to want to trust Assange’s initial motives as he and Domscheit-Berg go after a crooked fat cat, Julius Baer, whose massive Swiss bank is involved in illegal Cayman Islands activities with his clients’ money until those nefarious schemes are revealed by WikiLeaks when we flash back to 2007 Berlin as our 2 comrades first forge their alliance, even though the German technology activist is shocked to find that his Australian counterpart is really a 1-man band who uses several fake email addresses to enhance the presence of the WikiLeaks operation.  With their limited resources (and main server hidden on a Spanish farm), they expose Baer’s improprieties, survive court challenges to shut down their operation, and continue to lift the cloak of secrecy from controversial, at times disgraceful, activities that are going unreported in the mainstream press (such as the deadly firing on unarmed journalists by American troops in Iraq or the crimes perpetrated by death squads in Kenya) either because of information control by various governmental agencies or possibly by clandestine pressure on such news organizations to stay quiet (although that’s just conspiracy speculation on my part, not something that was explored in The Fifth Estate, so that's one bit of paranoia that you don't have to blame on WikiLeaks).  Once the huge cache of war documents pilfered by Manning and published in the various sources becomes known, careers are destroyed (as illustrated by what I assume is a fictional composite character, State-Dept.-Libya-expert Sarah Shaw [Laura Linney, in desperate conversation in this photo above with colleague James Boswell (Stanley Tucci)], as some scandalous cables of hers are released—one of which she admits was so “hot” that she signed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s name to it—whose supposedly private statements prove to be so damaging that she’s let go, even as her bosses are still scrambling to smooth over the damage presented in these thousands of revealed documents; as Shaw and Boswell note before all hell breaks loose for them, “Those computer geeks are starting to become a real nuisance”), although it’s not that clear (to me; please offer corrections if I’m in error) that any lives were lost because of the full versions of the war-related cables sent out by Assange, although the ongoing concern that such tragedies were imminent is what led the accomplice newspapers to take redaction action (notably, The Fifth Estate does show that hackers who sent some of the information about corruption in Kenya were identified and assassinated).  So, all of this leads us back to the initial question:  Is Julian Assange (along with Manning and all of the other “leakers”) to be hailed as a hero for forcing our vast international military-industrial-political complex to own up to its shady backroom dealings that so frequently enhance the profits of the already-wealthy-and-powerful, or are his actions nobly-conceived-at-best-but-horribly-misguided-in-practice, endangering the lives of those in the true line of fire while their superiors may face embarrassment but rarely lose anything of permanent value, including their lofty positions in government or commerce?

(Sorry about the tiny identification caption under this photo;
I can't remove it or make it larger.  I can't fix the spacing of 
this paragraph either or some other places in the review.  
You win, Blogspot.)

As presented in the film, Assange is not easy to work with         (I doubt that the real guy is objecting to this presentation of himself but is more concerned with the depiction of Wikileaks, which functions almost like a religion for his purposes), possibly because of inherent personality traits, possibly because of childhood molding of his reaction to the world after his mother took up with a strange-cult guy whose group was very abusive of the children including requiring them to dye their hair white, a practice that Assange oddly continues even into his adulthood.  He states that he wants to be a moral crusader but one who allows others to disclose without fear of being disclosed (largely accomplished by the WikiLeaks practice of unleashing a glut of false information so that it becomes virtually impossible to pinpoint where the truthful releases have originated), yet he seems resigned to the reality that innocent civilians and quasi-innocent-mid-level-diplomats will be burned by his actions because he refuses to compromise the “purity” of his process through any adjustments to the original documents (The Fifth Estate is deadly serious from start to finish—except for a brief nightclub scene of Assange “dancing”—although I can’t help but think, when I hear Assange say “WikiLeaks doesn’t edit!,” of the protagonist in Machete Kills [Robert Rodriguez] being just as fundamentalist when he says “Machete don’t text!”), although the film does give a clear impression that Assange and company make reasonable attempts to verify the accuracy of their purloined properly before going public with it.  We get flashbacks of his traumatic upbringing that explain somewhat his social ineptitude (so that Domscheit-Berg becomes a much more effective public spokesman for their intentions and actions), but we see at heart that this is a deeply-troubled, increasingly-agitated man who easily becomes monomaniacal in his own right, raising questions of conscience about how much any one individual “prophet” can be trusted to always lead his followers to the correct sacred mountain in their quest for salvation.  Some have complained about the amount of event detail packed into this film (supported by a wealth of documentary news footage to illustrate the references), as if it might better be called Rush than Howard’s racecar opus because we get rushed through so many situations with graphic locations and information whirling past us on screen; for me, that worked well to indicate the huge task ahead of this small band of dedicated anti-hegemonic “taggers,” leaving evidence of their work for all to see but protecting themselves from their well-funded enemies by always being actively aware of their surroundings and who the likely spies are, awaiting a chance to drag them off.  Condon structures this tension appropriately, leaving us intentionally unresolved but disturbed, the exact attitude that Assange hoped to convey in his attempt to encourage other hackers and leakers, forcing secret operations and decisions into more open scrutiny.  As much as I admire the desire, though, I have to admit that as a former member of a good number of academic and organizational executive committees it’s a tough ideal to inhabit, being completely honest and transparent with those in your inner circle and those you represent because if only 1 or a few of you are being forthright you set yourself up for exactly the kind of comedown suffered by staffer Shaw as she takes the fall while others around her just look the other way as if they’d never be involved in such unsupportable actions (when the truth is, they just keep their secrets better hidden so they never have to explain them).  

If operations such as WikiLeaks could somehow force all of us, from small-group-interactions all the way up to the highest levels of government, to be more direct in what we act upon and more responsible for what results from our actions, I’d consider Assange to be more of a hero than The Fifth Estate (referring to the non-corporate journalists and disseminators who simply command the technology available to them rather than participate in the social systems that they wish to undermine, thereby making themselves gallant warriors to those who support them but destructive criminals to those who reject their tactics) presents him to be (purposely, as the real guy keeps reminding us from his exiled-in-embassy-limbo).  Until then, I’ll just keep walking the line of ambiguity between being glad that we’re increasingly in an environment where deadly secrets are harder to keep and concerned that with investigative journalism intentions being mixed with social media practices it’s becoming difficult for anyone to have any semblance of a personal life, no matter how much we need such a reprise from constantly being “on stage.”  As I walk that narrow line I’ll try to keep my nerves calm by humming The Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” (from their 1963 debut British album, Please Please Me), available for you to sing along with at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHhRC7K0RHA (accompanied by pictures of just John—who seemingly wrote most of it [although Paul presents a different story]—and George—who took the lead vocals [although I never realized that until now; I thought it was John singing lead]).

Moving speedily along to Rush we have the parallel situation already noted of a film based in reality—this time the fierce Formula 1 racing competition between Brit James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian Niki Lauda—but with the further connection of Lauda being played by The Fifth Estate’s Daniel Brühl, a German.  (We’ll get a final twist on the related countries/cultures of Germany and Austria when I make a few closing comments on Escape Plan [Mikael Håfström] where Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a German convict—and, if you’re just looking for random connections between the 2 main films this week, I guess I could also note the Australian character of Julian Assange in the previous film and Australian actor Hemsworth in this one, but my “brilliant” observational connections have probably worn thin enough by now—unless you’d like for me to somehow relate any of them to one of Hemsworth’s Asgardian relatives when he soon returns to his most famous role in Thor: The Dark World [Alan Taylor].)  It was a dark world back in 1976 too when F1 World Champion Lauda faced a stiff challenge from Hunt, whose freewheeling manner on and off the track must have felt like a personal insult to constantly-focused-and-“driven” Lauda, although both shared the “black-sheep-of-family” distinction prior to their racing triumphs as neither was groomed for nor expected to build a career in such a dangerous-as-well-as-proletarian sport.  In a nutshell, that’s all there is to the plot of this film—tightly-wound-but-successful-Teutonic-odds-calculator competes fiercely with ego-consumed-sensual-excess-playboy for superiority on the world’s most-prestigious-yet-dangerous raceways—especially if you’re already aware of this rivalry from over 3 decades ago or quickly Google (How’s that for subtle brown-nosing in hopes that it might improve my usual posting headaches this week? [After-post note: It didn't work; still took me hours to endure the horror that is posting on Google Blogspot, including some new wrinkles this time—but that's OK, I don't mind ... it's all for your precious benefit.]) the 1976 end-of-season-points-winner, but, as with any successful ripped-from-the-headlines movie, what must work for the audience is a narrative plan that pulls us into the flow of the story, keeping us riveted to the progression of events, even if we do already know the outcome.

Howard is highly effective at accomplishing this with Rush, as he uses a structure very similar to the one employed in The Fifth Estate: begin with a defining event in the overall plot, backtrack to show us how this critical situation came to be, then take us into the aftermath after having invested us in over half of the running time of the film so that we can appreciate both the original key event and what occurs with the main characters as a result of it.  In the case of Rush, the crucial conflict is the 1976 Grand Prix competition in Germany, a race that should never have occurred because of the dangerous track conditions from prior rain but which did go forward against Lauda’s arguments due to Hunt’s boastful goading, as well as his need to finish in good form to keep accumulating the needed points to catch up with Lauda for that year’s championship given his poor start due to inadequate engineering in his McLaren racecar (previously he’d never wanted a sponsor, but after the 1975 season he was in danger of not having enough financial backing to even continue so he ditched his loner attitude and covered himself up with corporate logos like everyone else in those “coffins on wheels,” as he put it).  The show went on, but Lauda almost didn’t because of a spinout that resulted in a collision followed by fire that severely injured him.  Yet, 6 weeks later after almost-superhuman determination and recuperation therapy he was back on the track, scarred for life but determined to stay put in the race to the top, given that Hunt had been accumulating needed points during Lauda’s enforced absence; Lauda came in 4^th but still got a huge response from the crowd, especially because in 1976 he was racing for Ferrari and his return match was in Italy (although his quest for a repeat championship didn’t pay off in 1976—sorry if I haven’t sounded the extra-special Spoiler Alert foghorn this week beyond the standard boilerplate warning at the beginning of my every review, but it’s just too easy for you to look up the results of that F1 year for me to be too worried about ruining your day—if you really want that, invite me over to do an a cappella medley of my favorite Roy Orbison songs—but he would bounce back in 1977, then later in 1984).  So, with the Spoiler Barn Door already wide open, I’ll just cut to the chase (so to speak) and note that it all came down to the last Grand Prix race of 1976, in Japan near Mt. Fuji, this time with even worse rain conditions than in Germany because torrents were still falling, as Hunt was only 3 points behind so that a 3^rd place finish would push him over the top.  Lauda made that considerably easier for him by deciding to drop out shortly into the race, determined not to injure himself again (as shown in his mind’s eye with images of his wife, Marlene [Alexandra Maria Lara], whom he’s determined to not put through another session in hell if he pushes his body into another death-defying circumstance), but Hunt still had to accomplish his own victory, not helped at all by his needed pit stop toward the end to replace some very-worn-out tires.  Still, he gets enough track covered by the end of the flag-waving to take the title, but that would be his only one (at age 29), then he’d retire 3 years later, followed by death from heart attack at in 1993 (at age 45, a sobering thought for me, given that we were born in the same year—him in August, me in December—and I’ve got a congenital heart valve problem, but I’m still here while he rests in peace; I can only hope that my lucky streak continues far beyond his, as in 1993 I was granted tenure at Mills College, allowing me a secure life in academia, then into film-reviewing retirement while Hunt's “candle burned out long before [his] legend ever did” [with that lead-in I don’t see how I can resist this “Candle in the Wind” (from the 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album) tribute to Marilyn Monroe by Elton John at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5CZBNwMy578; sorry if this is a distraction from Rush, but I could listen to this song all day, any day, even without the accompanying images of Marilyn you'll find at this link]).

OK, back to the review, which is already in progress.  This photo illustrates what mainly makes Rush work as well as it does:  it’s all about the constantly-dangerous situations that these F1 drivers expose themselves to and how we are constructed to care about their fates, even if we know virtually nothing about their pedal-to-the-metal-sport (I acknowledge that I’ve had little interest in my life at watching people speed around in circles—or on more complex tracks—even as the constant back-and-forth of hockey, tennis, basketball, and [Dare I say it within the borders of any country below the Arctic Circle?] any nation’s definition of football wears me out in its repetition compared to the constantly-focused-but-sporadic-action-strategy of baseball).  Rush pulls us in effectively because there are so many unaccounted-for-variables as these madmen push their overheated machines through countless repetitions of the track, with serious injury or death awaiting at every turn.  Hunt attempts to defy death in another manner by trying to clean up his live-for-the-day-attitude, first by marrying supermodel Suzy Miller (Olivia Wilde)—which soon thereafter flops because it turns out there’s nothing in his wild world that he’s willing to replace with her so she replaces him instead by running off with actor Richard Burton (it’s not clarified in this film, but she also marries Burton, after his second divorce from Elizabeth Taylor, but their marriage was gone as well by 1982)—then by trying to tone himself down in support of his new McLaren sponsors, but when you’re born to run as he is there’s apparently nothing much you can do to rein in the quest for the checkered flag, so by the time he’s finally in the ultimate winner’s circle he’s dragging 3 buxom young ladies with him, apparently no more individually precious to his future (or maybe even his next week) than the nurse and the airline stewardess that we’ve seen him casually conquer earlier (in the latter case, followed by a clever cut to pistons pounding in an auto engine, with the simile easy to interpret but fun to see nevertheless).  Meanwhile, Lauda continues to use his disgust for such hedonism as an incentive to push himself back into the fray, from a different sense of ego, that of feeling naturally superior but needing to prove it because he lacks the charisma that drives Hunt on toward the finish line, no matter how irrational his tactics may be.  At various times throughout this film we get leading narration from each of these speedster experts, but the end commentary belongs to Niki as we get some actual footage of both men along with an acknowledgement from Lauda of his respect for Hunt as a competitor, if not as a trusted colleague.  Lauda shows his own unstable qualities, though, by telling his new wife that happiness is his enemy because it brings fear of losing what he now treasures beyond the racetrack.  That nagging concern may well be what both pushes him to near-death and encourages him to respect such limitations, showing him to be battling his own demons, giving him a bond with Hunt, about which we can only infer an understanding of the complexity that such a relationship represents.  In a similar manner, most of us can only imply to ourselves what it must be like to risk all in such a disaster-is-always-waiting-environment, no matter whether your position is informed by cautious consideration or wild abandon (Lauda has more of an engineer’s precise evaluation of track conditions before each race; Hunt throws up, then swigs some champagne, takes a toke, and smooches one of his off-track beauties as he lets it fly). Howard does a fine job of inserting us into the flow of this somewhat-long-ago-battle of indestructible wills (although their accompanying bodies are physically-limited enough), allowing us to see the high and low points of each unyielding driver, forcing us to rush along with them in POV shots of the various racetracks as these potential-death-machines hurtle us along in hope-to-come-back-alive-fashion, putting us onto the track alongside the speeding combatants.  

   Rush isn’t likely to garner much in year-end awards, but it certainly intrigued a non-racing fan such as myself and would likely be a worthwhile high-adrenalin day at the movies for anyone (I again thank long-time contributor Richard Parker from San Antonio, TX for encouraging me to see this, along with my race-car-loving-wife, Nina [just kidding; she was anxious to see the movie (because as Al Pacino and Antonio Banderas get older she’s finding new attractions toward dudes like Hemsworth), but after a near-fatal car wreck many years ago Nina would just as soon that all cars moved at the speed of turtles (not that she cares much for these creatures either, but at least she can outrun them)]), with its highly-effective combination of close-ups, quick edits, and subjective imagery that puts us in the drivers’ seats, along with a much quieter sense of closure as Hunt and Lauda meet up after the film’s final Grand Prix, with the former ready to take time off to indulge himself while the latter is still pushing off-season discipline and preparation, a clash of differently-oriented personas that likely need each other to provide an external balance that their internal makeup cannot even fathom.  To finish off these comments on Rush, then, I’ll just steal the use of David Bowie’s “Fame” (from the 1975 Young Americans album, with inspiration and musical backing from John Lennon, to once again connect up with the previous review’s Beatle comments) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvXrbKoGQOY which is used in Rush to underscore the media barrage that Hunt enjoyed during his “victory-lap-season” after the races were over in 1976.  Both of these push-to-the-limit-racers had their own sense of what “fame” offered them, which Ron Howard conveys effectively for those of us who’d previously never heard of these guys nor spent hours watching cars zoom along at close to 200 mph for no other reason than to see who could keep from leaving the venue in a real coffin when the day was done.

  So, I’ve already established the flimsy German-Austrian (not Australian; the last time I was in Austria the most common tourist item I saw—after big beer steins, cuckoo clocks, and Mozart chocolates—was a T-shirt that reminded everyone that there are no kangaroos in Austria—and I do hope that everyone at Jason King’s Salty Popcorn site Down Under is aware that distinction [now I’ll find out if any of them actually read my reviews like they say they do) connection between Rush and Escape Plan so let’s see what else I can say about it.  As is my practice sometimes I won’t offer an official review of Escape Plan because I’ve already rambled on enough this week, but I’ll admit that I was just too intrigued by a movie that paired Sylvester Stallone (master jailbreak artist Ray Brisling) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Emil Rottmayer, accomplice of mastermind-cybercurrency-disruptor Victor Mannheim) in something less overbearing than the Expendables movies where every action hero of the last 30 years (except Vin Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) has been propped up in front of the camera for old times’ sake (Stallone directed the first one in 2010, followed by Simon West in 2012—when Arnold was included—with a third installment intended for 2014 directed by Patrick Hughes, with both of our famous muscle boys back again along with other aging hunks Antonio Banderas [Nina says "Adiós"], Wesley Snipes, Mel Gibson, and Harrison Ford scheduled to join in—and then there’s Kelsey Grammer, but given that I doubt I’ll see this one so as to keep my Expendables non-attendance-record intact I’ll just have to speculate what the heck he’s doing joining in with all the star-power beefcakes).  If I were giving Escape Plan a regular evaluation I’d offer about 3 stars because the 2 1970s-‘90s star retreads (I can imagine that Arnold might need alimony money after that love-child-with-the-maid-scandal put his marriage on the rocks, but I guess that Sly just won’t quit until someone works out a career-ending CGI match between Rocky and Mohammed Ali [although, and I kid you not, there apparently is a plan in motion to have Rocky Balboa back again in a year or so in a story focused on Apollo Creed’s grandson, to be played by Fruitvale Station’s Michael B. Jordan, directed by the same film’s helmsman, Ryan Coogler; I’ll just let that rest until there’s a reason to say more about it]) still have some respectable screen presence and work well against each other in an interesting tale about how our CIA is infiltrated by a secret operative, Jessica Miller (Caitriona Balfe)—although we don’t learn that until the end of the movie, but thank me now for saving you from parting with your hard-earned cash unless you’re like me and just have to see what these aging icons might still have to offer to a tension-filled action film—daughter of Rottmayer (who’s actually Mannheim, so we fully understand by the end of this exercise in pension-relief why the big lug could never be broken to divulge the whereabouts of his “boss”), who sets up the scam to have breakout artist Brisling (a former attorney whose wife and son where killed by an escaped con, so Brisling has dedicated his life to making prisons ultra-secure) locked up in a secretly-located, maximum-security private prison with the intended intention of finding flaws in the design but is actually there, unbeknownst to Brisling, to help Rottmayer bust out of the place (if the CIA could arrange to have him shipped off to this seemingly-escape-proof-tomb it’s now not clear to me why they have no idea that it’s on a large tanker at sea—where’s Captain Phillips when you need him?—but let’s not let rationality intrude on our airtight plot now, shall we?)

  Ray soon finds that nothing is as planned, given that his implanted location finder has been ripped out of his shoulder, this prison of glass-walled cells and guards hidden behind masks is designed with insights from his state-of-the-art book, and his untrustworthy partner, Lester Clark (Vincent D’Onofrio), has conspired with Warden Hobbs (Jim Caviezel) of this for-profit prison (which does hold many a vicious victim, but they’re there to keep them out of circulation, with hefty fees paid to insure no parole from enemies of the captives—which was Rottmayer/Mannheim’s case, as it is now Breslin’s).  Fortunately, Breslin’s still savvy enough to figure out a reasonable breakout plan—until he finds that the escape hatch leads to the deck of a tanker rather than dry land—and Rottmayer/Manheim has contacts that can be reached when they finally realize they’re close to the coast of Morocco, so when all of the stars finally align (so to speak) our pumped-up protagonists escape their confinement (taking out evil warden Hobbes and many of his goons, especially the vicious Drake [Vinnie Jones], in the process), all is revealed at the end, and our 2 musclemen each go their separate way (with a cutaway to tell us that Ray’s associates, Hush [Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson] and Abigail Ross [Amy Ryan] have figured out the devious intentions of Clark so he’s now locked in a container headed for who-knows-where, if there’s enough oxygen inside that big metal box to support him until he gets there [implication is: don’t count on it]), back to their previous lives.  The “what” and “why” aspects aren’t that critical here, although the “how” of Brisling figuring out various escape plans and the initially-unclear-situations of who’s double-timing whom make for an enjoyable-enough-escapist adventure, although one that resolves itself in standard good-guys-can-shoot-rings-around-bad-guys-when-the-situation-has-to-be-resolved-fashion, just as we’re left with the quandary that a guy with the wherewithal to destabilize worldwide financial markets is just let loose, along with his daughter embedded in the CIA, so that if he decides to wreck havoc there’s probably no stopping him except for his fondness for smart capitalist/secure-prison-guru Ray Brisling—but, then, we’re not really supposed to be thinking about such dismal scenarios after 2 of our movie stars have escaped a dreadful end, are we?  IF you can keep it to that level of thinking, you’ll probably enjoy the well-crafted diversion of Escape Plan (to start you on a search for more info here’s an opening link at the official website) for its unobtrusive 116 min. running time; however, if you’re after anything much more than that, I’d recommend you to either of the more substantial films above, even if you care nothing for politics nor racecars.  Or, if you just need to escape completely before we convene again next week, I’ll keep the previous Beatle-ish flow going with McCartney’s “Band on the Run” (at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3wA4ZxGd3U [from the 1973 album of the same name, here as a performance by Wings from Seattle in 1976), simply because it seemingly references an ambiguous prison break, so I hope you’re havin’ fun until we meet again.

If you’d like to know more about The Fifth Estate here are some suggested links:

http://www.dreamworksstudios.com/films/the-fifth-estate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT1wb8_tcYU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy7Po2CQ6Zg (10:27 ABC news story about the actual Julian Assange who is opposed to the film and encouraged actor Benedict Cumberbatch not to take the role; most of this clip is an interview with Assange, including some commentary on WikiLeaks-allied whistleblower Edward Snowden and how Assange feels that those who oppose current governmental policies in the West are increasingly being forced into exile)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_fifth_estate/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-fifth-estate

If you’d like to know more about Rush here are some suggested links:

http://www.rushmovie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHCXKJyzD8Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0O7viDuNZ4 (5:34 min. 2013 interview with the actual Niki Lauda, who says that what’s depicted in this film is accurate to the real events) and http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HwDj-9-BVBM (5:42 min. interview with James Hunt from 1979 just prior to the ’79 Grand Prix season, with commentary on his non-championship seasons in 1977 and ’78 after his ’76 win and his prediction that he’ll retire after the ’79 season—which he did)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rush_2013/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/rush

As noted above, we encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, including our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control, as well as difficulties we’ve encountered with the Google RSS Feed Alert when used in conjunction with iGoogle and Google Reader.

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If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com.  Thanks.

By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile.    Ken

P.S.  Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.