It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?). But you invite that when your movie screams “THIS IS TRUE” at the beginning, like Zero Dark Thirty does in its opening “real events” title card. You can’t just forgive everything in the guise of “but it’s a movie!” when the movie is so clearly telling you that it’s fact. Thus, whether Zero Dark Thirty correctly depicts torture isn’t nitpicking, it’s relevant. So is it “pro-torture,” as John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and others have alleged? Mark Bowden, who wrote a book about the search for Bin Laden, says it’s not. Alex Gibney, who directed a movie about torture, doesn’t quite say Zero Dark Thirty is pro torture, but says it’s irresponsible.

To make a long story short and an answer predictable, they’re both right. Zero Dark Thirty is not immoral because it depicts torture as it was (something that happened, a context, a small part of the story but not a major player) without taking a particular stance. But it is a little amoral that it doesn’t seem to take any stance. It even omits key events to keep from having to. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with humans. It feels like an attempt to create suspense with no soul. Bowden’s rule of thumb for dramatizing a true story responsibly is that you can invent, but you have to “color inside the lines” of the truth. That is, you create fictions within the unknowns without altering the shape of the facts. Zero Dark Thirty mostly does that, but it also omits big chunks of them (we’ll get to that). Artistically, another problem is, who is Jessica Chastain’s character? I watched the whole movie and I still know nothing about her. Zero Dark Thirty invents a character with no apparent personality to tell a story the broad strokes of which we already know. How does that help? It even makes the movie dull at times, like a dry and talky procedural. The lady next to me was snoring loudly.

The Hurt Locker, for all the massive liberties it takes with actual military tactics, had a compelling protagonist and a clear perspective. “War is a drug.” What’s Zero Dark Thirty‘s perspective? Redheads are smart? Incorrectly or not, people jumped to “torture is good” because there’s a vacuum of anything else.

Gibney says ZDT is wrong because it doesn’t use its opportunity to argue against torture:

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One of the new movies lost in the bigger-hyped major releases like Let Me In and the Social Network this weekend is Freakonomics, the documentary adaptation of the wildly popular (wild, I say!) book of the same name, opening in 16 cities and already available for rent on iTunes.  Usually when a non-fiction best seller gets popular enough that someone tries to make a movie out of it, they turn the author’s research and unique storytelling into a generic Hollywood movie that just happens to be kinda sorta true like The Blind Side, or Fast Food Nation.  And who remembers Fast Food Nation?  Not even Wilmer Valderrama’s parents.

Freakonomics takes the novel approach of turning the book into a pretty straightforward documentary, with vignettes directed by Morgan Spurlock (Fast Food Nation), Alex Gibney (Gonzo, Enron), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp), and Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), all held together by introductions from the authors directed by Seth Gordon (King of Kong).  It’s sort of a documentary filmmaker supergroup, like Damn Yankees, but with less loincloths (depending on how Spurlock feels that day).  Each section promises to use an incentive-based way of thinking pioneered by “rogue economist” Steven Levitt (he’s been known to spit a bilious mixture of partially digested food when agitated and once gored a colleague with a calculator) to explain phenomena of the natural world.  Spurlock’s segment explores the effect of baby names on the child’s life, Gibney looks at corruption in the world of sumo wrestling, Eugene Jarecki’s portion deals with the link between legalized abortion and a drop in the crime rate, and Grady and Ewing try to find out whether ninth graders can be bribed into not acting like idiotic ninth graders.

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If you don’t enjoy documentaries, you’re probably dumb. Opening this October (though available through OnDemand in September), Freakonomics teams up pretty much all your favorite documentary filmmakers for a non-fiction film adaptation of the best-selling, non-fiction book.  This adaptation is a lot better than their original idea, which was to have Sandra Bullock teach a black kid economics. (“He can’t read, but I found something surprising: he scored in the 98th percentile in cost-analysis instincts.”)

“A Roshanda By Any Other Name” by Morgan Spurlock [Super Size Me] will look into the effects a name has on a child, particularly as it pertains to difference in names associated with black and white children. “Pure Corruption” by Alex Gibney [Gonzo, Taxi to the Dark Side] will use the world of sumo wrestlers to explore the incentive to cheat. “It’s Not Always A Wonderful Life” by Eugene Jarecki [Trials of Henry Kissinger] will investigate the link between abortion and dropping crime rates while “Can A Ninth Grader Be Bribed To Succeed” by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady [Jesus Camp] is pretty self explanatory. Seth Gordon [King of Kong] directed the introduction and transitional scenes. [ThePlaylist]

The trailer sort of explains the premise of the book and of a few of the segments, but doesn’t give too much of it away.  My biggest disappointment was that the Freakonomics authors look so normal.  I was hoping at least one dude would walk in with a huge mohawk and a sleeveless leather jacket with a bunch of piercings and a pentagram tattooed on his forehead, and people would start whispering, “Whoa, who’s that guy?”  And their friends would be all like, “Him?  He’s a freakonomicist.”

Rogue Economists have also been known to trample their keepers and gore pen mates

One of the great tragedies of the American political system is that we don’t give our politicians more leeway to bang whores.  Before you dismiss this as a joke, realize that Eliot Spitzer was one of the few people trying to reform Wall Street before the financial crisis, and then we found out he was visiting prostitutes* and he had to resign and let some blind assh*le no one likes take his place.  Anyway, acclaimed documentarian Alex Gibney has a documentary about Spitzer premiering at Tribeca in a few weeks, and Fortune/CNN (via Cinematical) just released this first clip.

In it, some chick with an obnoxious voice sets up the “vice vs. virtue” theme before Spitzer jumps in to answer some questions himself.  In yet another cheesy metaphor I could do without, he compares his meteoric rise before his eventual fall to that of Icarus.  Uh huh, sure, buddy.  More like DICKarus, amirite?  (Amateur mistake lobbing that softball up there like that, dude, seriously).

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If you were watching the news a few years ago, you might remember disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff showing up to his sentencing hearing in a black trenchcoat and fedora looking like Frank Miller‘s fat brother.  Well Alex Gibney (Gonzo, Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room) has made a documentary, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which promises to tell us the story behind the pear-shaped douchewipe in a hat.  The movie looks good and I’ll almost certainly see it (opens May 7th), but I don’t know. This kind of thing keeps happening.  Am I the only one annoyed with us always painting these guys as “geniuses?”  Just because they were the first ones to try some scam, does that mean they were the first ones smart enough to think of it?  Or does it mean they were just the first miserable f*cks unscrupulous enough to try?  And am I the only one who constantly misreads his name as “Jack Mehoffer”?

Tell me you don’t want to kick this asshole right in his tubby little stomach.

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