{"id":8946,"date":"2019-10-14T15:10:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T14:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=8946"},"modified":"2019-10-14T15:10:15","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T14:10:15","slug":"lff-the-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/lff-the-report\/","title":{"rendered":"LFF: The Report"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>The Report&nbsp;<\/em>is a film that tells the story of how Daniel J Jones and the US Senate Intelligence Committee examined the CIA\u2019s programme of torture \u2013 or \u201cEnhanced Interrogation Techniques\u201d as they came to be known.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Adam Driver plays Jones, and we get to see his early life in DC as he works his way up until he\u2019s brought on by Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) to collate a report into what the CIA have been doing. He will spend five years, largely based in a windowless office deep within a CIA building, working with a few colleagues as they try to explore the 6.3m pages of documents they have on a computer server.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beyond that, they are not getting any other help from the CIA, and indeed there is general resistance to any of the details coming out.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We get sequences in flashback that fill in parts of the story for us, notably featuring Dr James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge \u2013 also appearing as Alfred in&nbsp;<em>Joker<\/em>) and Bruce Jessen (T Ryder Smith) two former military psychologists who claim to have invented these \u201cinterrogation\u201d techniques to get the truth out of captured prisoners.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The film explores the&nbsp;weasily&nbsp;words and legalistic arguments used to avoid falling under the definition of torture, and at the same time shows explicitly that these techniques simply don\u2019t work and that there\u2019s no proof that they\u2019ve ever worked. Mitchell and Jessen made millions nevertheless.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This tells an important story, and makes accessible a&nbsp;sometimes dense&nbsp;narrative. Director Scott Z Berg admitted to watching a lot of conspiracy films from the seventies from directors like Alan J&nbsp;Pakula. And we cropped frames of nameless grey office blocks, with much of the action taking place in a stark concrete echoey building.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are good supporting roles from a top-notch supporting cast that includes Michael C Hall, Jon Hamm and Tim Blake Nelson amongst others.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the LFF screening, as well as the director and producer, we got an appearance from Jones himself, who got a standing ovation.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think the film is getting a UK release, but it\u2019ll also end up on Amazon Prime in due course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Report&nbsp;is a film that tells the story of how Daniel J Jones and the US Senate Intelligence Committee examined the CIA\u2019s programme of torture \u2013 or \u201cEnhanced Interrogation Techniques\u201d as they came to be known.&nbsp;&nbsp; Adam Driver plays Jones, and we get to see his early life in DC as he works his way [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8930,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[49,43],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8947,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8946\/revisions\/8947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}