espionage

WIFE OF A SPY: espionage non-thriller

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Photo caption: Yû Aoi and Issey Takahashi in WIFE OF A SPY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

In the espionage non-thriller Wife of a Spy, the prosperous Yusaku (Issey Takahashi) runs a business in international commerce. That is increasingly uncomfortable in 1940 Japan, where the militaristic government is whipping up xenophobia and bullying those Japanese who interact with foreigners.

Yusaku is a smooth cosmopolitan who won’t be intimidated. He keeps on the road, even to dangerous hotspots like Manchuria. That’s not okay with his loving, apparently frivolous wife Santoko (Yû Aoi), who, frustrated by his absences, is getting increasingly suspicious about what he’s really up to.

She finally stumbles upon his secret – he and his nephew Fumio (Ryôta Bandô) are outraged by the war crimes of the military government and are engaged in a secret plot to undermine it. Santoko, who was been a mere adornment, becomes herself embroiled.

Regrettably, Wife of a Spy is more of a snoozer than a thriller. It just takes director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) too long to get through the first and second acts.

Worse, I found the sudden dramatic lurches in the performances by Yû Aoi and Ryôta Bandô very off-putting. I don’t think I missed something cultural because I’ve watched a lot of Japanese cinema, and haven’t seen anything like this before. It’s like the director of a high school play says, “Now throw yourself on the floor!” Yû Aoi is a popular and lauded actress who has five nominations and two wins in the Japanese equivalent of the Oscars. I’m blaming Kurosawa.

I’m also mostly alone in my opinion. Wife of a Spy enjoys a high score of 79 on Metacritic and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Wife of a Spy’s advocates may be seduced by the film’s undeniable beauty. The cinematography by Tatsunosuke Sasaki, production design by Norifumi Ataka and the costumes by Haruki Koketsu are exquisite.

Here’s a novel aspect to Wife of a Spy. The hero is a traitor to his nation. Yusaku loves Japan, hates the Japanese government, and believes Japan will be better off the sooner that Japan loses the war. So, he is trying to hasten the defeat of his own nation’s military, which is the definition of traitorous. I haven’t heard that this was hugely controversial in today’s Japan.

Wife of a Spy is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and KinoNow and is included on MHz.

THE GRAY MAN: an action movie highlight show

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Ryan Gosling in THE GRAY MAN. Courtesy of Netflix.

Ryan Gosling stars in the kickoff of a Netflix espionage thriller franchise, in The Gray Man. It’s a top rate action film directed by the Russo brothers, Anthony and Joe (Arrested Development, The Avengers and Captain America) .

Gosling plays a highly skilled covert operative with a back story thatreally doesn’t matter – just think of him as a renegade American James Bond.

There are six, count ’em, SIX, amazing action set pieces , at least as good as in any James Bond film. The effect is like watching an all-highlight show like ESPN’s Sportscenter, where every football clip is an amazing TD catch and every baseball clip is a walk-off home run. No need for much dialogue or character development in between, That’s okay – The Gray Man isn’t trying to be more than it is – glossy entertainment.

There’s a reason that Ryan Gosling is a Movie Star in the best sense of the phrase. He has a special charisma before the camera, and we are driven to watch him and to sympathize with him. Of course, he’s a remarkably versatile actor who can be heroic, stolid, sexy, dangerous, funny, lovelorn and even musical. Gosling has brought whatever was needed to excellent cinema like La La Land, Drive, The Ides of March, The Big Short, The Place Beyond the Pines and Crazy, Stupid Love, and even to crap like Gangster Squad, First Man and the execrable Only God Forgives. Gosling is a perfect choice to lead a franchise like The Gray Man, and his acting chops are not challenged here.

Netflix’s bankroll provides the Russos with an impressive cast. Chris Evans is a worthy villain to match up with Gosling, and Ana de Armas is a glamorous sidekick. The great Alfre Woodard, along with Billy Bob Thornton, show up in key roles. There’s a very brief flashback to a rotten father figure, close to a non-speaking part, and the Russos were able to utilize the always memorable Shea Whigham in this tiny part.

The supporting roles of Jessica Henwick (Nymeria Sand in Game of Thrones) and Tamil superstar Dhanush set them up for key roles in future chapters of the Gray Man franchise.

The Gray Man streams on Netflix.

NO TIME TO DIE: went to a James Bond movie and a romance broke out

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Léa Seydoux and Daniel Craig in NO TIME TO DIE. Photo credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM.

I went to a James Bond movie and a romance broke out. No Time to Die, a fitting farewell to Daniel Craig’s reign as James Bond, has all the action set pieces, fantastic gizmos and exotic locations that you would want in a Bond film; it all just comes down to his profound love for a woman.

Remember when the Bond formula was impossibly sexy woman beds James Bond and then tries to kill him; repeat. In No Time to Die, however, there are no disposable women.

Bond, retired from the British MI6, is living in domestic bliss in Southern Italy with his girlfriend Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) from the previous Bond movie, Spectre. Bond is also grieving for the redeemed double agent of past Bond films, Vesper Lynd (most recently played by Eva Green); on the suggestion of Madeleine, who is a psychiatrist, he visits Vesper’s grave – but an assassination attempt kicks off the action in No Time to Die.

Besides Madeleine and Vesper, Bond faces another woman, his own replacement in MI6’s new Agent 007 Lashana Lynch. 007 is talented and cocky, and Bond and 007 slide effortlessly into comradeship. Ana de Armas is very funny as the supposedly inexperienced agent Paloma in a set piece (in de Armas’ native Cuba) – lethal in a stunning Bond Girl dress.

Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas in NO TIME TO DIE. Photo credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM.

But No Time to Die revolves around Bond’s relationship with Madeleine. Madeleine’s father was also a hunter of super villains, and she has as many secrets as Bond. So, Madeleine’s reliability comes into question, and the oft-betrayed Bond certainly has justification for his trust issues. Bond once ruefully mutters, “No – I don’t know her at all.” Can Bond summon the trust that is requisite to love?

Don’t worry – the action set pieces are spectacular, particularly the once before the opening titles. That one features perhaps the most impressive deployment ever of the Bondmobile.

There’s also a super villain (Rami Malek) with a biological weapon of mass destruction. There’s a lot of blah blah about how this weapon works, and then more blah blah between the supervillain and Madeleine. And then Bond has a face-to-face with the previous supervillain, Blofeld (Cristolph Waltz) with more blah blah. I started to doze during this part of No Time to Die, but soon we were plunging back into another thrilling action.

Neither supervillain is as entertaining as the traitorous agent Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), an ever smiling bro boy so white bread that he is referred to as “Book of Mormon”.

Daniel Craig in NO TIME TO DIE. Photo credit: Nicola Dove © 2020 DANJAQ, LLC AND MGM.

IMO Sean Connery was essential to the Bond franchise by creating a studly character so arrogant yet sympathetic – the guy who men want to be and women want to be with. Movie James Bonds have come and gone; (Pierce Brosnan was good, I never saw the Timothy Dalton Bond movies, and my least favorite Bond was the brattily insouciant Roger Moore.) To me, Daniel Craig is every bit as good as Connery. Craig has the requisite physicality, confidence and sex appeal, while off-loading a Connery’s hint of brutishness and adding a sad tint of world-weariness.

The Bond franchise itself is remarkable. Mick LaSalle recently wrote:

…The key to its resiliency is that it has changed with the times, yet never so much that it fully lost contact with what initially made it popular. This amazing balancing act has played out for 59 long years. (To give you a sense of how long that is in movie time, 59 years before the first Bond movie, “Dr. No,” it was 1903.)

No Time to Die is ably directed by the Bay Area’s own Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Beasts of No Nation, True Detective). No Time to Die is epic and is the keystone to Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond.

THE COURIER: amateur among the spies

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Photo caption: Benedict Cumberbatch in THE COURIER. Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

The docudrama The Courier tells the true story of Greville Wynne, a British businessman who became entangled in espionage during the height of the Cold War. British and American intelligence were getting Kremlin secrets leaked by a high-ranking Soviet official. How to sneak the secrets out of the USSR? The whole point was to use an amateur because the KGB would be less suspicious, so the untrained salesman Greville Wynne was recruited. His experience was thrilling at first, and then searing.

The ordinary, avuncular Wynne is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, without his usual creepy sharpness. Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, House of Cards, Louder Than Bombs) plays a CIA officer. Georgian actor Merab Ninidze is solid as the Russian source. Jessie Buckley plays Wynne’s wife, and it’s good to see her cast in a mainstream movie after she was such a force of nature in indies Beast and Wild Rose

Cumberbatch, who is not a fleshy man, underwent a 21-pound weight loss to make Wynne frighteningly gaunt. To me, the risk to his health was just not worth it; The Courier is not close to a masterpiece like Raging Bull or The Pianist, and I would rather that Cumberbatch had played the part as his normally slender self.

The Courier does depict real events, but it grossly over-inflates the impact of this episode on the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the general arc of the story is historically accurate.

Keep watching the end credits to glimpse the real Greville Wynne.

The Courier is streaming from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and redbox. It’s watchable, but not a Must See.

COUP 53: uncovering what we suspected

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COUP 53. Courtesy of Coup 53.

The Cold War espionage documentary Coup 53 brings astounding new source material to the history of the 1953 coup which replaced the democratically elected Premier of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, with the Shah.

The key to the success of Coup 53 is that filmmaker Taghi Amirani uncovered troves of never-before seen source material. Amirani brings us oral histories of Iranian witnesses to the coup, including a play-by-play from Mosaddegh’s head of security. He adds a video interview with the last surviving Iranian coup plotter, an especially cadaverous and repugnant individual. There are also boxes of more recently-declassified CIA documents.

COUP 53. Courtesy of Coup 53

But, most essential are the tapes and transcripts of interviews for a 1970s BBC documentary. The testimony of Norman Darbyshire, the British spy who masterminded the coup, was cut from the BBC doc, but Amirani found an uncensored transcript. Ingeniously, Coup 53 reconstructs Darbyshire’s interview in the same room in London’s Savoy Hotel, with the same camera operator present (!) and actor Ralph Fiennes reciting Darbyshire’s actual words.

Why did Darbyshire spill the beans? He may have resented that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt (TR’s grandson) exaggerated his role as a last minute bag man, when Darbyshire had laid the groundwork for years and was the real instigator.

Although the UK’s involvement has never been officially acknowledged by the UK government, everyone has known about it for decades. There’s even a clip in Coup 53 of Richard Nixon explaining it on TV in the 1970s or 1980s. But this is very personal to Taghi Amirani, and he puts great import on the smoking gun – an interview with the British spy who designed and directed the coup.

Although I think that Amirani oversells the proof of British involvement, there is is lot of exciting new stuff for the moderately informed rest of us. For example, we get a deeper-than-usual dive into Mohammad Mosaddegh himself, a man many of us have only seen as a victim of Western over-reaction to communism. We also learn that:

  • Harry Truman opposed the regime change, but newbie President Ike was persuaded by Wall Street’s Dulles brothers to green light the coup.
  • The CIA was walking away after an initial coup failure.
  • After the UK did the dirty work, the US got the most influence with the Shah, and, with Israel’s help, set up the Shah’s brutal and hated secret police, the Savak.

From Mosaddegh’s nephew, we learn about Mosaddegh’s final years under house arrest, his last secret joyride through Tehran and his unusual dining room burial.

There’s one stunning What If moment – revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr explains that after the first coup attempt failed, Mosaddegh had the list of all the coup plotters. Had he executed them all immediately, there would have been no coup in 1953, no revolution and Hostage Crisis in 1978 and today Iran would be a stable, 70-year-old Muslim democracy in the Middle East.

Coup 53 is directed by Taghi Amirani and its editor, Walter Murch. The Iran-born and UK-educated Amirani is the researcher and on-camera interviewer. Murch is probably our greatest living film editor and the person who invented the entire field of movie sound design in the 1970s.

Coup 53 is available to stream on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Roxie.

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR: Skarsgård steals this robust thriller

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Naomie Harris and Ewan McGregor in OUR KIND OF TRAITOR. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.

Our Kind of Traitor is a robust globe-trotting thriller, enlivened by a lusty Stellan Skarsgård and played out in a series of stunning set pieces.  A meek Everyman (Ewan McGregor) is a tag-along on his high-powered wife’s trip to Cairo.   Nursing a drink after a tiff with said wife (the sleek Naomie Harris from 28 Days Later… and a couple of Bond films), he is inveigled into joining a crew of partying Russians and becomes entangled in an intrigue that puts entire families at stake – including his own.

It turns out that our protagonist has been randomly plucked from the humdrum by Dima (Skarsgård), the top money launderer for the Russian Mafia, who is trying to get British intelligence to help his family escape from his murderous colleagues.  The story having been adapted from a John le Carré novel, the dour British spy (Damian Lewis from Homeland) on the case is being hindered at every turn by a thoroughly corrupt British law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracy, with the rot reaching up to Cabinet level.

Ewen McGregor and Stellan Skarsgaard in OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

The very best thing about Our Kind of Traitor is Stellan Skarsgård’s performance.   Dima is loud, flamboyant and profoundly course. Skarsgård has filled his career with brooding roles, but here he gets to play the life of the party, and he is hilarious – and steals the movie.

Our Kind of Traitor also looks great as it takes us from Russia (shot in Finland) to Cairo (Morocco) to Switzerland to London to Paris.  Director Susanna White is a veteran (21 directing credits on IMDb), but Our Kind of Traitor is her first big budget action movie.    The success of the film revolves around a series of spectacular set pieces, and White pulls it off masterfully.

Our Kind of Traitor isn’t as good as the best of le Carré’s work (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for instance), but it’s damn entertaining.  I saw the final four plot twists coming, but by then I was hooked, so I still enjoyed the film.  And, adapting to the post-Cold War world, le Carré may have become even more cynical. 

I saw Our Kind of Traitor (with The Wife) at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) at a screening with director Susanna White.  If you’re looking for an intelligent summer thriller for adults, this is your movie. You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Redbox.

THE CATCHER WAS A SPY: why couldn’t this have been a good movie?

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Paul Rudd in THE CATCHER WAS A SPY

The fact that Moe Berg’s is the only baseball card displayed at CIA headquarters tells us that he was a candidate for The Most Interesting Man in the World. Berg was a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law who played 15 years in the Major Leagues, one of the few Jews in pre-war baseball.  While a pro player in the early 1930s, he visited Japan twice, learned Japanese and surreptitiously photographed Tokyo for US intelligence. During World War II, he performed secret missions in Europe for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

That’s quite a life. Unfortunately, The Catcher Was a Spy drains the interest out of it by trying to portray that most cerebral of real-life characters, Moe Berg, in kind of an actiony movie. The climax is a will-he-or-won’t-he decision that Berg has to make on a secret mission. If you are still awake by then…

Most of The Catcher Was a Spy is Paul Rudd as Moe Berg being watchful. Berg was an enigma and notoriously closed-mouthed – so we see him being enigmatic and silent. Not very cinematic.

The cast is remarkably talented: Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels, Tom Wilkinson, Guy Pearce and Paul Giamatti, Connie Nielson, and Shea Whigham. Strong has a pivotal role, but we only glimpse the others, and I still can’t place who Connie Nielsen played; it must have been that other female character…

If you’re a history geek like me, you might stream this. But don’t expect an espionage thriller.

THE MOSSAD: epic cloak and dagger

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Subject Peter Malkin in a still from THE MOSSAD. Photo courtesy JFI

Anyone with an interest in historical cloak-and-dagger will appreciate the documentary The Mossad, about Israel’s legendary foreign intelligence service. We meet some current and recent Mossad officers, who are extremely tight-lipped.  But decades of intervening history have freed their older colleagues to spin first-hand tales of the Mossad’s most legendary operations:

  • The kidnapping of Nazi death camp czar Adolph Eichmann (and we hear from the guy who physically grabbed Eichmann in Buenos Aires).
  • The cultivation of a longtime mole at the highest level of the Egyptian government.  The mole is identified.  We hear how the Israeli military reacted to the advance warning of Egypt’s 1973 invasion – you may be surprised.
  • The methodical hunting down of the Palestinian terrorists who kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The Mossad is a natural bookend to the The Gatekeepers, about another Israeli intelligence agency.  The Gatekeepers is centered around interviews with all six surviving former chiefs of Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret internal security force. We get their inside take on the past thirty years of Israeli-Palestinian history. What is revelatory, however, is their assessment of Israel’s war on terror. These are hard ass guys who went to the office every morning to kill terrorists. But upon reflection, they conclude that winning tactics make for a losing strategy.
The Gatekeepers is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and for streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

You can find how to watch The Mossad along with the entire SFJFF program at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

ATOMIC BLONDE: kicks ass, looks great doing it

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Charlize Theron and James McAvoy in ATOMIC BLONDE

Charlize Theron kicks ass and looks great doing it in the most entertaining espionage action thriller Atomic Blonde.  Theron plays a British secret agent on a mission behind the Iron Curtain just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  The MacGuffins that she must recover are a list of clandestine operatives and the double agent who has memorized the list.  She runs into more shady characters than in The Third Man’s Vienna, chief amongst them a debauched British agent gone rogue (James McAvoy).

There is intrigue and backstabbing, double-crossing and  at least one major plot twist.  The brutal action is exquisitely filmed and edited, and the Atomic Blonde qualifies as a full-fledged martial arts movie.  Theron’s character is so Stoli-fuelled, that Stolichnaya Vodka must have paid a fortune for product placement.

Atomic Blonde makes excellent use of a more somber version of 99 luftballons (a 1983 hit by the German group Nena).  There’s a Bond-like opening song, too.

Theron is a superb actress with wide-ranging skills (Monster, The Italian Job, In the Valley of Elah).  And, as we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road, she can credibly carry an action movie.  The rest of the cast is also very good:  McAvoy, Toby Jones, John Goodman, Eddie Marsan and a bunch of scary-looking guys who play commie thugs.

Atomic Blonde is the first feature directing credit for David Leitch, a guy with a long resume as a stunt man as and a stunt coordinator  Leitch sure knows how to film fights and chases, and Atomic Blonde is really a top-notch action film.

Stream of the Week: ZERO DAYS – cyberwar triumph? maybe not

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ZERO DAYS
ZERO DAYS

My Stream of the Week is a movie that has actually become MORE topical since its release last year.  The important and absorbing documentary Zero Days traces the story of an incredibly successful cyber attack by two nation states upon another – and its implications. In Iran’s nuclear weapons development program, the centrifuges used to enrich uranium began destroying themselves in 2010. It turned out that these machines were instructed to self-destruct by a computer worm devised by American and Israeli intelligence.

No doubt – this was an amazing technological triumph. Zero Days takes us through a whodunit that is thrilling even for a non-geek audience. We learn how a network that is completely disconnected from the Internet can still be infected. And how cybersecurity experts track down viruses. It’s all accessible and fascinating.

But, strategically, was this really a cyberwarfare victory? We learn just what parts of our lives can be attacked and frozen by computer attacks (Spoiler: pretty much everything). And we learn that this attack has greenlighted cyberwarfare by other nations – including hostile and potentially hostile ones. Zero Days makes a persuasive case that we need to have a public debate – as we have had on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons – on the use of this new kind of weaponry.

And here’s why it is more topical today.  Since Zero Days’ release last year, we have endured the successful Russian cyberattack on the US election process.  And we face an unpredictable foe in North Korea, and our only practical protection against North Korea’s nuclear threat may be our own preemptive cyberattacks.

Director Alex Gibney is one our very, very best documentarians. He won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and he made the superb Casino Jack: The United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Going Clear: The Prison of Belief and Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine.

Gibney’s specialty is getting sources on-camera that have the most intimate knowledge of his topic. In Zero Days, he pulls out a crew of cybersecurity experts, the top journalist covering cyberwarfare, leaders of both Israeli and American intelligence and even someone who can explain the Iranian perspective. Most impressively, Gibney has found insiders from the NSA who actually worked on this cyber attack (and prepared others).

Zero Days is available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.