The Benghazi movie is bombing. Might have done better if they stuck with the working title: Hitlery's Fault
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) January 17, 2016
Michael Bay's "13 Hours" is punishingly paced, flimsily constructed, and tackily executed https://t.co/twyD5G4Wm0 pic.twitter.com/HS3btXo5Rw
— Flavorwire (@flavorwire) January 15, 2016
From that Flavorwire article:
… It’s sort of a perfect storm of moneymaking elements, a dramatization of an international incident that remains particularly interesting to the segment of the movie-going audience that’s made big hits out of war movies for the past three consecutive Januarys (American Sniper, Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty). But those films went “wide” in January after Oscar-qualifying runs the previous month; no one bothered to take that step for 13 Hours, which takes the complexities of those films and burns them off like fat in the Foreman grill of director Bay’s shiny flag-waving. (13 Hours is as clumsily imitative of those films as his Pearl Harbor was of Titanic, and about as dire a sit.)
…[L]et’s ignore the obvious red and blue elements, let’s bypass the obvious digs at Obama and Clinton and the like, let’s take Bay’s word that his film “doesn’t get political at all” and that he only aims to tell this story and honor these men. Even taken purely on those terms, it’s still garbage – punishingly paced, flimsily constructed, tackily executed with the subtlety and panache of a third-rate 1930s melodrama…
And all the sad pianos and teary-eyed reactions and scorched family portraits floating through the debris like the feather in Forrest Gump merely serve to underscore the fact that Bay took that moment, and he cheapened it into whiz-bang “Bayhem.” In the Wall Street Journal, Mark Geist, one of the men at the center of the story, says, “I told Michael, if you do anything that disrespects the four Americans that died, I will beat the shit out of you.” Well, the filmmaker’s got an ass-kicking coming. Because at the end of the day, he took these brave men, and he plugged them into a goddamn video game. Fuck Michael Bay, and fuck his bullshit movie.
The Washington Post‘s film critic, on “‘13 Hours,’ Benghazi and the slippery definition of ‘political’”:
In a juxtaposition so perverse that it could only have been dreamt up in Hollywood, the holiday designated to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. — America’s most prominent practitioner of nonviolence — has become the go-to weekend for war movies.
This year’s entry is “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” Michael Bay’s visceral tick-tock of how six CIA security contractors tried to defend a secret agency annex and a State Department compound during a violent standoff in Libya in 2012. Aggressive, chaotic, suffused with patriotic swagger and a mournful sense of loss, “13 Hours” clearly seeks to capture the box-office success of such forebears as “Lone Survivor” and “American Sniper.” Those similarly rousing accounts of real-life heroes earned $25 million and $107 million during the same period in 2013 and 2015, respectively, with “American Sniper,” about Iraq war sharpshooter Chris Kyle, ultimately raking in a breathtaking $350 million. (As of Sunday evening, “13 Hours” was poised to earn around $20 million for the holiday weekend.)…
Even with Iowa and New Hampshire looming, with Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz ending his recent debate performance by urging his constituents to see “13 Hours” the next day, with conservative media saturated with ads for the movie and with Republican super PACs America Rising and Future45 showing “13 Hours” in Georgetown on Friday night in a spirited attempt to make Benghazi “a thing,” in the words of journalist Mary Katharine Ham — Paramount has insisted that the film is “not political.” That’s a whopper, even for an industry that has so brilliantly perfected the art of relieving itself on consumers and telling them that it’s raining…
Michael Bay Opening Weekend Box Office
Transformers: $70m
Pearl Harbor: $59m
Bad Boys II: $46m
Armageddon: $36m
The Rock: $25m
13 Hrs: $16m
— Wyeth Ruthven (@wyethwire) January 19, 2016
Thanks, Obama!….
Corner Stone
That is one yooge phallic symbol crashing to earth right behind that guy who is screaming loudly that Hillary has killed him.
Luthe
What’s the Rotten Tomatoes score?
Gimlet
(repost) When will Michael Bay have the definitive documentary out on Hillary’s emails.
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton’s emails on her unsecured, homebrew server contained intelligence from the U.S. government’s most secretive and highly classified programs, according to an unclassified letter from a top inspector general to senior lawmakers.
Fox News exclusively obtained the unclassified letter, sent Jan. 14 from Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III. It laid out the findings of a recent comprehensive review by intelligence agencies that identified “several dozen” additional classified emails — including specific intelligence known as “special access programs” (SAP).
That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret,” the label previously given to two emails found on her server, and brings even more scrutiny to the presidential candidate’s handling of the government’s closely held secrets.
While the State Department and Clinton campaign have said the emails in questions were “retroactively classified” or “upgraded” – to justify the more than 1,300 classified emails on her server – those terms are meaningless under federal law.
Baud
@Gimlet: Why post an article from Fox News?
Mike J
Hey AL,was waiting for you to show up. Didja see Ursula K. Le Guin’s LttE about Vanilla Isis?
gf120581
I’m discouraged to see “The Rock” down that low on the list of Bay opening weekends, as that’s the one really good movie he’s directed (and one I give him zero credit for; that all goes to Connery, the rest of the cast, and apparently a un-credited rewrite from Tarantino).
Gimlet
@Baud:
Entertainment, just like the Benghazi post.
Baud
@gf120581: The Rock was awesome, but maybe it didn’t have a strong opening.
gf120581
As if Bay’s presence wasn’t enough, the fact that “13 Hours” got released in the January dumping season is a pretty good indication that the studio knew it was crap.
Roger Moore
@Luthe:
57% fresh, which is neither great nor terrible, and puts it well ahead of Ride Along 2, which comes in at 13% fresh.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I like that last bit. Not that they were classified at the time, just that the law doesn’t specifically recognize retroactive classification.
Somebody tell HRC not to use the phrase “controlling legal authority”
gf120581
@Baud: I think it had much better legs at the box office than other Bay flicks, again, because it’s actually a good flick. Maybe because it was before Bay become a box office Goliath (it was only his second film) and therefore wasn’t given free reign to indulge in his typical bad habits (camera shaking worse than an epileptic on a Folger’s rush, quick cuts that’s break your neck, insulting stereotypes, etc.).
Jeffro
OMG and OT but again, OMG, Palin is absolutely going nuts…if this doesn’t bring the Establishment together to knife Trump in his sleep I don’t know what will…
gf120581
@Jeffro: And her son got arrested for domestic assault. How is this family any different from the white trash idiots who get manhandled on every episode of Cops?
jl
I heard, or maybe read someplace (here at this miserable lefty blog), that Bay took the project so seriously that he left out his usual nekkid chix pix. And ‘uh-oh’ crossed my mind immediately. I have a hunch that is one of the problems.
jl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I saw a news story that gave examples. It is still all BS, IMHO. I hope it stays that way. I may be jaded and biased from my early career experiences when I did statistical work with classified data, though.
NotMax
Mirror image Transformers.
Less than meets the eye.
Mike J
@jl: I don’t think it was nudity he was famous for, but what I would call the
Alejandro Escovedo[1] shot.
[1] I love the sun when it silouhettes, I like her better when she walks away
Iowa Old Lady
@jl: Adam just explained what this might mean in the previous thread.
gf120581
@jl: He missed the change to have Megan Fox appear as a sexy secretary at the consulate who tries to distract the attacks with a dance number.
Of course, given how apparently fanciful this film is, Bay probably should have just had the Decepticons assault the compound. That’d bring in the kids.
Mnemosyne
I’m still pretty convinced that Bay did this to prove that he’s a better director than Kathryn Bigelow (who did “Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty”). Because, by all accounts, Bay is a sexist asshole like that.
The limited release of Bigelow’s movie averaged $83K per screen on its opening weekend. Bay averaged $7K per screen (if you round up). Mikey’s big swinging dick is looking pretty puny there.
jl
@Iowa Old Lady: thanks. I will look.
lamh36
SNL should be on the phone right now with Tina Fey and Darrell Hammond (best Trump impersonation on SNL) cause that endorsement rally was gold…
Gravenstone
@Luthe: Currently 58%, although the audience score is 87%. Just goes to show it’s attracting the desired crowd. Unfortunately for Bay (and Republicans in general), that audience is much smaller than they believe.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@lamh36: when Hammond showed up in one of their debate skits a couple weeks back, he was so convincing standing perfectly still that for more than a second, I’d thought they’d brought the real thing back
Chris
“Doesn’t get political.” Ha! I heard that line about AmericanSniper, not falling for it again.
Ken
Well, at least it’s outperformed Atlas Shrugged. Total lifetime revenue, of all three movies, combined.
lamh36
Alright…time for #FindingYourRoots on PBS…Tonight: Maya Rudolph, Shonda Rhimes, and Keenan Ivory Wayans. This one looks good!
See ya on da flip side BJ
Patricia Kayden
So glad 13 Hours bombed. Serves Bay right for trying to make political hay out of a tragedy. I guess not enough Rightwingers went to the theaters to support this drivel. Oh well.
Patricia Kayden
@lamh36: Thanks. Just turned to watch it.
Ultraviolet Thunder
The Island didn’t make the list? That’s the only Michael Bay movie I’ve liked. They filmed parts of it in the old gorgeously decrepit train station in Detroit. I got to meet Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor when they came into Saks to buy cold weather clothes from me (it was November).
But it was a pretty good old fashioned type sci-fi flick, with Bay’s signature over the top ‘splosions here and there. Decent fun.
sigaba
@Chris: “Doesn’t get political” in this case just means “doesn’t mention Hillary,” since the extent of politics is who’s running for President. Everything else is common sense:
* The world is full of chaos and masses of Africanized Muslim thugs claw at every wall.
* Diplomats and politicians are nancy-boys who are either dangerously naive, incompetent or fatally arrogant.
* The only thing that stands between us and the Thugs are chiseled, hard American Christian men, who hail from Texas or the south, wear beards, and call themselves “operators” or “contractors” while spewing death from their M4s.
* Our political system does nothing but stab our Hard Men in the back.
Whatever you do, don’t try to suggest to someone who liked Lone Survivor, or American Sniper, or 13 Hours that any of these contentions are “political.” Only SJWs think any of this stuff “means anything.”
Adam L Silverman
@Gimlet: I repeat my response from the previous thread:
As someone who has clearance at all of those levels this really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Anything that is special access program (SAP) only, let alone sensitive compartmented information (SCI) or even just Top Secret (TS), is compartmented. In order for this to have originated on her server – as in from her – she would have had to recreate from memory whatever it is that she read and or heard while in the sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF). While that’s possible, I find that hard to believe. What would be more likely is that someone emailed her something that they had seen or heard. This would be called spillage and the receiver is not on the hook for any penalty, just the sender/originator. There is spillage all over the Internet. Technically no one with active clearances can read or access anything on Snowden because those news reports all contained spillage of classified information.
What I think is the most likely thing going on here is that she was sent things by people who thought it was unclassified. The reason for this is that classification, or steps up in classification, are not necessarily because a specific piece of information is classified, but rather because its combined with one or more other pieces of what would be on its own unclassified, but when combined are deemed to be either Secret (S), Top Secret (TS), Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), or Special Access Program (SAP).
And while it may be true that reclassification after the fact has no salience under Federal Law, it happens all the time. Stuff is periodically reviewed to determine if it can be partially or completely declassified. When this happens it is sometimes determined that it needs to actually, because of changes around the world, have its classification increased. In other cases something maybe ambiguously marked, hung on a server of higher classification than needs be, and then it technically defaults to that level of classification.
Adam L Silverman
@Iowa Old Lady: I just copied and pasted it here. I would add that in order for either Secretary Clinton to have originated an email of SAP material to someone else or for someone to have done it to her would have taken a lot of work. You would have had to print the thing off of the SAP workstation on a SAP printer. Then removed it from the SCIF without being caught. Then taken it to an unclassified scanner and scanned it in and then sent it to oneself or someone else as a pdf. Or after printing it out and removing it from the SCIF without being caught, then sitting at an unclassified work station and typing the thing directly into the email and sending it. That’s a lot of effort when you just could have emailed on the correct classification system or called on the SCIF phone or spoken about it in the SCIF.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: I just copied and pasted it here too.
Keith P
@Gimlet:
That’s the part I’m curious about. Wouldn’t ex post facto apply to retroactive classification?
Also, it really goes without saying that if this was Condi Rice running for president, Cheney would have just gone to State and blanket declassified everything on the server.
Citizen_X
I’m sorry, is that mortar round supposed to be twelve feet long or something? That picture doesn’t make any sense.
Chris
@sigaba:
Yoir point # 2 is why the Benghazi memes pissed me off so much from the start. These people HATE diplomats. This was the first and last time they’ll ever pretend to give a shit about them. If the ambassador’s death hadn’t been a convenient thing to pin on Obama, he’d still be a weak kneed liberal appeaser to them.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
So 13 Hours is in contention for being Bay’s second best movie. AND second worst, since everything else is in a tie for worst Michael Bay movie.
Chris
@sigaba:
And yeah, you’re quite right. To them, politics aren’t politics, they’re just common sense.
In fairness, that’s how I feel about most of my beliefs too, but I’m still self aware enough to realize that not everyone shares them, and that debating these things is the province of what we call politics.
Mnemosyne
@Ultraviolet Thunder:
Bay stole the plot from a low budget sci-fi movie called “Parts: The Clonus Horror.” They actually managed to sue and win. Why the filmmakers thought they could get away with outright stealing the plot of something that was featured on “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” I have no idea.
Chris
@gf120581:
Yeah, I too think The Rock holds up very well, even as I hate Michael Bay.
The theme of glorious soldiers betrayed by the backstabbing politicians was already there, but for sone reason it worked a lot better then.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne: I am such a bad film geek I had seen Parts, the Clonus Horror when it came out in theaters. I watched The Island with a lot of “Wait a minute…”
Adam L Silverman
@Keith P: Actually as the head of the State Department, the Secretary of State determines what State considers to be classified versus unclassified – within the rules set forth by Federal Law and the Administrations policies.
sigaba
@Chris: To be honest the “it’s common sense” people don’t bother me as much as the people that say “it’s just a movie.”
It’s like the GamerGate thing. If you point out that a movie has an agenda, it’s just not an overtly partisan one, people can get really irate, because you’re making them think about why the bad guy died, and not just enjoying it for the surface, visceral thrill. It “doesn’t have to mean anything.”
And this doesn’t even necessarily mean the filmmakers intend the agenda to be there– I don’t think Bay has seriously analyzed what exactly this stuff “means” politically or the sort of ideas his film might propagate, I think he just wanted to make movie that looked kickass, like ZD30 or, the ur-text, Black Hawk Down.
Truffaut once said that it was impossible to make an anti-war war film, because war is so kinetic and aesthetically compelling the movie always becomes a glorification. The politics of war movies are systemic, they have politics that are baked into the cake from the start.
I’ve worked on a bunch of war and action films – I worked on Zero Dark and Hurt Locker, and on Battle: Los Angeles and others. I’ve seen it happen over and over, stuff goes into the movie for all kinds of reasons, and all people get out of it in the audience is “KILL=GOOD”. But challenge the audience on that point, that maybe it’s more complicated than “KILL=GOOD,” and having to think about it drives most people to distraction…
Adam L Silverman
@sigaba: I think Truffaut should watch Dien Bien Phu based on Bernard Fall’s Death in a Small Place. While I’m not sure it was meant as an anti-war film, there is certainly nothing glorious about it as depicted in that movie.
sigaba
@Adam L Silverman: Unfortunately we lost him in the 90s, and all we have left is Godard’s navel-gazing escapades… Truffaut made that statement in 1973, when France was just coming down from Gaullism and all war movies were about the One Good War. The full quote goes
Truffaut on another occasion claimed he turned down doing a film on the Battle of Algiers (not the film, a later one) because he believed that it was impossible to portray a terrorist doing a terrorist act without ennobling the terrorist.
I don’t know this film, though there are some films I’ve seen that I think are anti-war, Gallipoli comes to mind. But if you were to rewrite Gallipoli to give it a happy ending, what’s the happy ending? Is it getting everyone the hell out of Turkey, or is it killing all the Turks in a glorious charge? What’s the normative scenario the film is deconstructing?
Adam L Silverman
@sigaba: There is no happy ending for any ANZAC Soldier at Gallipoli. As for Dien Bien Phu, it was not made until 1992 and I completely bungled Small’s book title. It is Hell in a Very Small Place.
The problem is that the movies Hollywood makes about war aren’t really war movies. They’re movies were war is either the setting or a character.
sigaba
@Adam L Silverman: Right but who’s the antagonists in Gallipoli? Is it the Turks or the British? It’s the latter, and by doing so they’ve sortof sidestepped the central premise of the War Film. An anti-war film has to say war is bad even when the enemy is clear and has it coming.
I also worked on Fury, you can’t argue with killing SS (the film goes to pains to show we’re fighting SS formations now and the regular Wehrmacht are useless). You don’t come out of that movie thinking war is fun, or exciting, or even that the people involved are heroic or noble. The other side of war movies is Fate and Duty, and the worse things get, the deeper the mud, the more innocent the victims, the more these virtues come to the fore and are celebrated. Even if our protagonists die in the dirt chocking on their own blood, pissing their pants and weeping, that doesn’t make it anti-war, that just makes it The Alamo, another American archetype rich with meaning, and one very relevant to 13 Hours I suspect.
The Republic, Blah Blah Blah...
@Adam L Silverman: So after reading your very detailed and factual explanation, I’m left w/ the conclusion that all the Republicans shrieking and babbling about Hillary’s server either a) have no idea what they’re talking about, or b) are deliberately lying thru their teeth…
Then, there’s always possibility c) that while they have no idea what they’re talking about, they’re telling any and all lies their fevered imaginations can gin up… no?
It’s seems not unlike all the crap we’ve been hearing about the Iranian deal… mushroom clouds over Tel Aviv… mushroom clouds over Bayonne… you name it…
NotMax
@sigaba
All Quiet on the Western Front and Grand Illusion both project a strong anti-war tone.
The Republic, Blah Blah Blah...
@NotMax: Johnny Got His Gun? MASH?
sigaba
@The Republic, Blah Blah Blah…: See like “Grande Illusion” and “MASH” are barely war movies, the war itself is immaterial to the plot. “MASH” could just as easily be a comedy version of Jack Webb’s “Emergency!” And you’d hardly have to change a line.
The Republic, Blah Blah Blah...
@sigaba: MASH not a war movie?
Really?
NotMax
@sigaba
Would disagree about Grand Illusion, as the effect of the extant war is intrinsic to the psyche of the characters. It’s a unique presence casting its particular shadow over the proceedings
@The Republic, Blah Blah Blah…
The movie M*A*S*H wouldn’t be on any list of anti-war films I might construct. As sigaba mentioned, it is a series of absurdities which happens to take place in wartime; the venue is eminently fungible. YMMV.
hellslittlestangel
The audience for this film stopped going to the movies 30 years ago because it’s nothing but sex and cursing any more.
Adam L Silverman
@sigaba: I don’t disagree with any of what you’ve written. I also don’t have any real answers for the questions you’ve posed. I think some of this is societally bound – history and how its presented, even popular history as portrayed in historic novels and films and TV, are still bounded by the societal, social, religious, political, cultural, and economic traits of the societies that make them. I remember seeing a very interesting documentary when I lived in Scotland. It was on the BBC (of course) and it focused on the Nuremberg Trials as we were approaching the 50th anniversary of the end of WW II. They had a panel discussion with it including historians of WW II – definitely not something you’d see on broadcast TV here, maybe not even PBS. Anyhow one made the very important point that it was the US that kept pushing for the war crimes trials among the Allies. And the reason for this is that the Americans at the time needed the trials, not so much to bring the NAZIs to justice as a matter of justice, but because America’s understanding of itself, the world, and how it related to the global system couldn’t survive if there were NAZIs and they weren’t held accountable. I think there is something very, very telling in that analysis that speaks to the points you are making.
Adam L Silverman
@The Republic, Blah Blah Blah…: I think there’s a couple of different things here. The first is that this server set up with the private emails had been the preferred way of doing business for Secretary Clinton’s two predecessors: Secretary Rice and Secretary Powell. Now I have no idea who hosted the latter two’s email addresses, but they did not use the Department of State unclassified system for their regular work related correspondence. In fact it wasn’t until President Obama’s second term that the new rules making this unacceptable and I would presume illegal from being done any more. So at one level there is just basic hypocrisy here. Especially when coupled with the fact that most of the White House senior staff under the Bush 43 Administration were using not the White House official email for work emails, but a RNC established server and email system. This allowed them to control what was covered under the National Security Archiving rules.
The second thing going on in the people making this accusations – either the politicians or the folks in the media whether reporters or commentators – is that they clearly don’t understand how classification works, or if they do they don’t care about accurately reporting the information.
I think the third thing, especially given Secretary Clinton’s presumed front runner status for the Democratic nomination and the possibility that she could become the 45th President, is that the infighting between the Intel Community (IC) and State over this, with DOJ caught in the middle, is a shot across her bow. Its the IC letting her and her people know well ahead of the game who has the juice in the Interagency.
All of this contributes to the mess we have. Remember the Benghazi outrage started over Ambassador Rice’s IC, specifically CIA, approved talking points on a Sunday news roundtable show. Once the Agency, via then Director Petraeus and others, confirmed that they’d approved the remarks that was jettisoned to someone issued a stand down order and forced our noble, heroic troops to not go in and save Ambassador Stevens and the others at the consulate. When that fell apart because the uniformed leadership confirmed no such order was given and it was explained that even the closest SeAL team would never have made it in time from Rota even if they’d been geared up and on a bird on the tarmac when the ball dropped in Benghazi, that was jettisoned. And that’s when this became about Secretary Clinton’s email because clearly if she had nothing to hide, if the smoking gun for the talking points or the stand down order could be found anywhere, it would be in this non governmental server containing her work emails.
And now I have a headache…
sigaba
@Adam L Silverman: Hmm, I dunno how to take that. At the end of World War I Pershing famously wanted to keep marching to Berlin, but the story goes, the French and British, exhausted with war, called an end to the rout, and spared millions of German lives. American historiography says that this helped precipitate World War II, because the debellation allowed the German army to claim that it was “undefeated on the field” and its loss had been caused by backstabbers in the government.
The Nuremberg-as-Pax-Americana’s-Coming-Out narrative is definitely intersting.
(I’m now Rusty Nail, Old Fashioned and Kentucky Mule, so this may be the last post of the night.)
@hellslittlestangel: That’s not true. We also have transforming robots.
AND FOR THE RECORD, there was a lot more swearing and sex in the 70s. Now it’s all deniable innuendo, which is far more corrupting, IMHO.