R.I.P. Robert Redford: The Sundance Kid Once Saved Cinema

Robert Redford, the iconic movie star, filmmaker and Sundance Institute founder, died yesterday at the age of 89.

As gigantic a movie star as Robert Redford was…and he was a monumental movie star, particularly in the 1970’s, the most important thing about him is what he did for, or to, the film industry with his creation of the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival – which he took over in the mid 1980’s.

It is impossible to imagine the depths to which filmmaking would have fallen if Redford had not built Sundance, the place where “independent” filmmakers could develop and then show their films.

Without Sundance, the renaissance of cinema in the 1990’s, which includes the emergence of such filmmaking luminaries as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, would never have occurred.

Did Sundance quickly go from being sanctified and deified to becoming corporatized and commodified? Yes, it did. And is it now little more than a movie business version of the red-light district in Amsterdam? Yes, it is. But that doesn’t diminish its original importance or the good it did for cinema back in the early days…and it is crucial that we do not forget that when remembering Robert Redford.

As for Redford the actor, he was an impossibly handsome leading man who was gifted with a tendency toward stillness (a skill few actors possess) and the ability to share the screen with other actors with a charming effortlessness.

Redford was a good movie star, good enough that he could unflinchingly share a screen with Paul Newman, one of the biggest movie stars of all-time, for two memorable movies – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting.

He was also a good and often underrated actor, who could comfortably share the screen with acting luminaries like Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.

Redford, with his all-American good looks and stoic demeanor, resembled an old school movie star from the studio system but who hit his heights during the glorious age of the New American Cinema in the free-wheeling 1970s.

Redford catapulted to enormous fame in 1969 when he starred with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – what some have called the perfect movie.

Butch and Sundance – with their snarky bromance, are essentially the template for every action comedy and Marvel movie of the last 50 years. You don’t get the Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and Marvel franchises without Butch and Sundance and their witty quips to one another under fire.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really is a remarkable movie in that it is pure movie star popcorn entertainment but its shot with a glorious aplomb by Conrad Hall – and directed with verve by George Roy Hill.

Redford and Newman’s chemistry is legendary, and while many have tried to replicate it – like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, none have succeeded. The problem with Clooney and Pitt trying to be Newman and Redford is that Pitt is not Redford - despite Hollywood’s determination to make it so, and Clooney sure as shit ain’t Newman, no matter how much Clooney tries to pretend otherwise.

Redford’s filmography is, not surprisingly considering the length of his career, a mixed bag.

His best/most popular films are most certainly Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men and The Natural.

I can say without hesitation that I unabashedly love all of those movies, and love him in all of those movies.

As previously stated, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is popcorn perfection. Three Days of the Condor is a truly spectacular film and a glorious piece of 70’s paranoid cinema that I adore. All the President’s Men is a movie with undeniable momentum to it that compulsively compels. And finally, The Natural is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the greatest baseball movie ever made and also a phenomenal American myth that Redford perfectly embodies.

As much as I love those Redford films, the Redford movies that I find most intriguing are Downhill Racer, Jeremiah Johnson and The Candidate. These three films, all from the 70’s, show Redford giving his most complex performances, and are all really fantastic films that are often-overlooked.

The final movie I’d recommend is the lone late-period Redford movie that I think works well. The film is 2013’s All Is Lost directed by J.C. Chandor, which is about a man lost at sea by himself. Redford barely speaks at all in this movie, and it was a ballsy performance for him to undertake. I loved the film but others hated it. I think it’s worth watching now as it will take on particular profundity in the wake of Redford’s death.

Another movie some have mentioned is 2018’s The Old Man & the Gun, directed by David Lowery. I thought this film was a misfire, but I could see how it could be nice to indulge in its nostalgia now that Redford has passed away.

As for Redford as a filmmaker, I never really thought very much of his directorial skills. Redford was undoubtedly interested in independence and freedom for other filmmakers but as a filmmaker himself he was extraordinarily restrictive in his artistry.

The films Redford directed, Ordinary People (for which he won a best Director Academy Award), The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, The Horse Whisperer, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Lions for Lambs, The Conspirator, and The Company You Keep, are all suffocatingly staid and cinematically conventional.

The lone Redford directed film that I would recommend is Quiz Show, and even that is a rather middlebrow piece of mainstream cinema that never quite rises to the heights you feel like it should.

Regardless of the merits or imperfections in Robert Redford’s acting and directing career, the truth is that anyone who enjoys movies, be they cinephiles or cineplex-goers, owe a huge debt of gratitude to Robert Redford. Without Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival and Institute, both the movie business and the art of cinema would be in much worse shape than they are today – and it;s important to remember that the Sundance Film Festival never happens if Robert Redford doesn’t become the Sundance Kid.

So, a big tip of the cowboy hat to the Sundance Kid on a job well done and a life well lived. Thanks for saving cinema…let’s hope that one day that it can rise from the ashes and once again be worthy of all you’ve done for it.

By the way…here is a 2013 article I wrote about Redford’s acting that you might find of interest.

Stillness: Lessons from Redford, DeNiro and Penn

©2025

She Said: A Review - Agenda is No Subsitute for Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This absolutely awful, dreadfully dull, banal bore of a film is a muddled misfire.

I missed seeing She Said, the story of how New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey exposed the Harvey Weinstein scandal, when it premiered in theatres this past November. I wasn’t the only one not to see it as the movie was a major flop, bringing in only $12 million on a $32 million budget.

But She Said, which is based on the book of the same name and stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, is now available to stream on Peacock and I just had the great displeasure of watching it.

This dreadfully dull movie is directed by a hapless Maria Schrader and written by an even more hapless Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and is a sort of procedural journalism drama minus the drama….and storytelling, and craftsmanship and skill.

She Said is what happens when a movie is all agenda and no drama or cinematic skill. It’s expected in this day and age that people – the “right-thinking people” anyway, will love this type of movie just because it exists and because it holds the correct cultural/political opinion.

Just so viewers know what the correct opinion is, the film gives them a totally ham-fisted scene early on where the two female reporters and their female editor go to a bar in the middle of the day to talk about the story they’re developing. At the bar a drunk thirty-something white frat bro tries to hit on them and Carey Mulligan’s Twohey defiantly stands up to him and shouts him down. You go girl!! The dude then stumbles away muttering about “frigid bitches”. Then Mulligan’s Twohey apologizes to the women she’s with, Kazan’s steely-eyed Kantor retorts, “don’t apologize.” So brave.

This scene is so bizarre, contrived and hackneyed it’s actually unintentionally hysterical. I mean, the scene opens with the waitress bringing over menus and placing them in front of the women and saying, “these are the menus!” That sort of clumsy, amateurish dialogue and blocking is omnipresent throughout She Said.

As for the drunk white thirty something frat bro, that day drinking, horny character is so obscenely absurd as to be ridiculous. But what makes that scene even more funny is that later in the film Twohey and Kantor strut down the street in New York in a long shot and they approach and then walk past two construction workers chatting next to a construction site. I fully expected a cat-calling scene and another Twohey “and then everyone clapped” superhero moment of standing up to predatory men, but then I noticed the construction workers weren’t white guys but minorities and I knew Twohey and Kantor were safe. And sure enough…they walk by unmolested! The lesson, as always, is that only white men are misogynists and sexual predators.

Critics of course are among that desperate-to-be-approved-of group who respond to this sort of vapid virtue signaling (because they do it so much themselves), and so they have written positively about the film because they know they’re supposed to. The paradigm in these situations becomes ‘if you dislike this movie then you love Harvey Weinstein!’, and critics on the whole are much too spineless to actually speak the truth about this movie and risk being seen as ‘bad people’.

She Said isn’t even really a movie, it’s a two-hour and ten-minute #MeToo virtue signal by the New York Times and the female filmmakers meant to extract money from ideologically enthralled fools in the audience and awards from similarly comported morons in Hollywood.

Journalism movies are no easy task. For every All the President’s Men and Spotlight, there’s something abysmal and trite like Spielberg’s The Post, but She Said makes The Post look like Citizen Kane.  

All of those journalism movies had the same obstacle to overcome as She Said, which is that audiences all know how it turns out in the end. We know The Washington Post nails Nixon Watergate, and that the Boston Globe publishes the sex abuse scandal articles, and in this case that The New York Times publishes and Weinstein gets busted.

But nothing is revealed in this movie that we didn’t already know about what the deplorable and disgusting rapist, brute and bully Weinstein was up to, and even the re-telling of known facts is so poorly pieced together as to be laughable. Hell, the biggest obstacle/villain in this movie is Ronan Farrow who might break the story before Twohey and Kantor. And the fact that Weinstein’s Israeli “security team” was out committing crimes and intimidating witnesses and journalists is something She Said refuses to ever admit or acknowledge, is a pretty damning decision in terms of credibility.

In Spotlight, director Tom McCarthy, who isn’t exactly Orson Welles, uses some cinematic and dramatic flair when he crafts his story. For example, in one scene, three characters, two reporters and their editor, simply discuss the story they’re trying to crack, but they do it in a dimly lit basement library which smells because of a dead rat. The characters all comment on how dark and stinky it is and that is great sub-text because it informs both the scene and the overarching narrative of the movie. That scene construction is pretty simple, but nothing like that exists in She Said. Instead, She Said is a litany of women walking and talking on phones.

Another huge issue with the film is that it never clearly lays out the puzzle pieces the reporters must put together in order to “win” – which in this case means getting the story published, resulting in a terribly muddled and unsatisfying movie that have no pulse and no dynamism.

The cast of this film is a collection of very good actresses, but none of them do quality work in it.

I think very highly of Carey Mulligan, but her work as Meghan Twohey is embarrassing it’s so awful. Mulligan’s chesty American accent is tinny and her supposed profound girl power glares and glances laughable.

Zoe Kazan too is a terrific actress but she is as dead-eyed and dull in her role as Jodi Kantor as I’ve ever seen. At one point Kazan’s Kantor comes to life, which is when she bursts into tears when she learns a victim will go on the record against Weinstein. How professional!

Weinstein is not shown from the front in the film (although we hear his voice and see him from behind) because the filmmakers didn’t want to “center” him but preferred to “center” his victims, but the victims aren’t “centered” either. We learn next to nothing about anybody in this movie, and we certainly don’t care about anybody.

Actress Ashley Judd, one of Weinstein’s victims, plays herself in the movie and I understand why that happened, but that choice is undermined when other celebrities, like Gwyneth Paltrow, do not appear even though we hear their voices (I don’t know if it’s Gwyneth’s real voice or not).

The structure of the movie is nonsensical as well. We get flashbacks to a young Irish girl stumbling upon a movie set and later running down the street crying, and we get Meghan Twohey’s pregnancy and post-partum depression (spoiler alert - men are the cause of post-partum depression!!), before we ever get into the story, but none of this is cinematically coherent or narratively comprehensible.

Let me be as clear as I can about this…Harvey Weinstein and his ilk…like Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose and Les Moonves and all the rest of the predatory douchebags who have long populated Hollywood and every other industry, should get the Vlad the Impaler treatment and have their eyes plucked out by ravens as they bleed to death out of their assholes.

Let me also clearly state that She Said is an absolutely awful, dreadfully dull, banal bore of a film that is a total waste of not only two hours and ten-minutes but also of a fascinating and important story.

She Said should’ve done for the Weinstein scandal what All the President’s Men did for Watergate and Spotlight did for the Catholic Church sex scandal. But due to abysmally poor directing, writing and acting, the movie is a gigantic failure. I guess all I can say is better luck next time. Maybe if they ever make a Ronan Farrow biopic – now that’s a compelling story, they’ll get a writer and director who have half a clue. Maybe, just maybe, they won’t fuck that one up. Oh, who am I kidding…they’ll definitely fuck that one up too.

©2023

The Old Man and the Gun: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. No need to see this rather dull and insipid bit of psuedo-nostalgia in the theatre, but if you stumble across it on cable feel free to watch it if you want…it is entirely harmless and toothless…which is what is wrong with it in the first place.

The Old Man and the Gun, written and directed by David Lowery, is the ‘mostly’ true story of Forest Tucker, a career bank robber. The film stars Robert Redford as Forest, with supporting turns from Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover and Tom Waits.

I like David Lowery as a director, I don’t think he is Scorsese or Kubrick or Malick, but he is an interesting filmmaker. I found Lowery’s last venture, A Ghost Story, to be a really daring art house film which is one of the reasons why I was excited to see Lowery’s latest project The Old Man and the Gun. Even the graphics for the advertisements and trailer of the movie were intriguing to me, as they had the look and feel of a 1970’s Robert Redford movie, most of which were pretty darn good.

And so, I headed to the theatre hopeful that Lowery and Redford had recreated some of the movie star’s 1970’s magic in what could very well be his last film. Sadly, The Old Man and the Gun does not live up to its premise, its collection of talent or even its marketing.

The Old Man and the Gun is the flimsiest of nothing-burgers that is so devoid of substance and drama that it plays more like a 90 minute commercial for itself than an actual cinematic experience

The Old Man and the Gun is a shockingly dull and derivative affair, and it is a remarkably mainstream enterprise considering the director’s last picture bent space and time while starring a ghost with a sheet over his head and was highlighted by a women compulsively eating a whole pie in a single take.

The Old Man and the Gun is, to put it as bluntly as I can, nothing more than an old person movie in every single way. Old people love seeing movies about old people…especially old people doing un-old people things like robbing banks (such as 1979’s Goin’ in Style or the 2017 remake) or being astronauts (Space Cowboys) or something equally moronic. Old people will love this movie because it is a lot like them in that it has no teeth and moves real slow. Old people will like this movie because it is little more than an hour and a half of watching Robert Redford be charming…oh and Sissy Spacek be charming too…and, like prunes and Matlock, old people like that sort of thing.

The most damning thing I can say about this film, or any film really, is that there is not a single real or genuine moment in this entire movie. Everything in this maddeningly unsatisfying film is manufactured horseshit that feels more at home in a Lifetime movie or on the Hallmark channel.

Robert Redford is an often under-appreciated actor, and it wasn’t just his 1970’s heyday that highlighted his talents, as his work in 2013’s All Is Lost was also a reminder of his stellar ability. But in The Old Man and the Gun, Redford looks and feels every bit his 82 years and has most definitely lost a step. Redford matches the listless pace of the film and coasts through the movie on “charm autopilot” from start to finish.

While Redford is most definitely charming, his Forest Tucker character is not even remotely a real human being, even though he is based on a real person. The film never sheds any light into the real Forest, preferring to skim the surface and play things for cutesy shits and giggles.

Redford and Lowery had a chance to really create something special with Forest Tucker, to dig into the character and unearth his soul, but instead they chose to take the safe and easy route and make a entirely forgettable film.

One of the foundational problems with the movie is that Lowery’s script, like his direction, is tepid and flaccid. There are numerous opportunities to explore deeply dramatic and relevant themes throughout the story, such as Casey Affleck’s character, Det. John Hunt, and his interracial marriage in early 1980’s Texas, or the darker side of a sweet-talker like Forest Tucker who makes his living committing armed robberies, but Lowery ignores these things and instead chooses to make a stultifying elderly romance.

None of the talent assembled for this movie is able to overcome the insipid script or their under-written characters, as Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek and Tom Waits all give rather rote and lethargic performances.

The Old Man and the Gun is a dead-eyed failure of a film because it is only about the Old Man and not his Gun or his relationship with his Gun, and on top of that the Old Man has no scars, no wounds and ultimately no soul. The film suffers terribly because of its decision to focus on the vapid, the vacuous and the shallow.

Towards the end of the film, Lowery gives us a montage of Forest Tucker and his history of breaking out of prison. It is the only remotely interesting thing in the entire movie and that is because that sequence is basically an homage to Robert Redford’s career and a tip of the cap to his monumental filmography.

If you really want to pay tribute to the great actor and movie star Robert Redford, go watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, The Natural or All Is Lost and stay aware from the insidiously vacant and nostalgically saccharine The Old Man and the Gun.

©2018

Spotlight : A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONATINS ZERO SPOILERS!!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****

MY RATING : SEE IT IN THE THEATRE!!

Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer, is the true story of a team of reporters from the Boston Globe's Spotlight team, who investigate and report on child sex abuse by Catholic priests in the Boston Diocese. The film stars Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci, John Slattery and Liev Schrieber.

Spotlight is one of the very best films of the year. It is a tense drama, exquisitely acted by a sterling cast, deftly directed and intricately edited. Spotlight is the type of film that seems like it could have been made during cinema's golden age in the 1970's. It feels like a distant cousin of that decades All the President's Men, another story of journalism and hard-driving reporters investigating a scandal deep at the heart of a thought to be untouchable power. Interestingly enough, in Spotlight, John Slattery plays Boston Globe journalist and editor Ben Bradlee Jr., the son of famed Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, one of the key players at the Post during their Watergate reporting, who was played by Jason Robards in All the President's Men.

Even though Spotlight is set in the late 1990's and early 2000's, it is really an insightful period piece about the last days of the relevancy of newspapers, and of the dying craft of investigative journalism. The film pays homage to the last generation of journalists who will have had the opportunity to work full-time doing investigative reporting for a newspaper. Corporatism and the internet have devastated the newspaper industry, and Spotlight shows us that industry's last gasp, and what we are missing now that it is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Spotlight is also about the scourge of institutional blindness and the insidiousness of silence in the face of that blindness. The willful institutional blindness of the church, the press, the courts and law enforcement, and of the people of the city of Boston is on full display in the film. At its heart, Spotlight is really an indictment of the city and the people of Boston. Boston is one of the most parochial places you could ever imagine. For a place filled with legendary institutions of higher learning, it is remarkably narrow-minded and short-sighted. As the film shows us, the suffocating claustrophobia, knee-jerk myopia and the vicious parochialism of Boston created a toxic brew of dysfunction, arrogance and deference in which predatory priests and the Church hierarchy thrived. Only an outsider could break the spell of Boston's willful blindness, and in Spotlight that role is played by Liev Schreiber as Marty Baron, a Jewish editor from Miami who is new to the city and the Globe, and not beholden to the Church. Baron is the one who instigates the Spotlight team into investigating the church and pushes them to dig deeper and reach higher up the hierarchy in their work.

When the story of Spotlight ends, and the indictment of Boston is complete, a very long list of other cities and town scrolls across the screen. These cities and towns are places where other Catholic sex abuse scandals have been uncovered, and the viewer gets the dawning realization that Spotlight isn't an indictment against the city and people of Boston, it is an indictment against all of us, no matter where we live. We are all guilty of the same blindness and cowardice, to one degree or another, on display in Spotlight.

Director Tom McCarthy and his editors do a spectacular job deftly maneuvering the viewer through the morass of the allegations and the cover up at the heart of the film. He keeps a solid and steady dramatic pace, never letting the story lose steam or the viewer lose interest. McCarthy shows a great skill in pacing and tempo throughout the film. Spotlight is littered with detailed little gems which frame and shape each scene and propel the story through the entirety of the film. McCarthy is an actor himself, and his understanding of acting is on full display in Spotlight. He keeps the scenes tight and the actors loose. McCarthy directs the drama to be  vibrant, but never pushes the pace too hard that we lose the subtlety, specificity and humanity at the heart of each of the performances.

The acting on display in the film is exquisite across the board. Even the small, local hires, playing abuse victims and local residents, hit it out of the park. This is a top-notch, professionally acted film from top to bottom. Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian D'arcy James play the Spotlight reporters perfectly. They bring a tangible sense of purpose and vivd detail to their work that drives each scene and ultimately the narrative of the entire film.

It is great to see Michael Keaton follow up his great artistic success in last years Birdman, with his solid work in Spotlight. Keaton is pitch-perfect as Walter "Robby" Robertson, a native son of Boston and well-respected journalist. I hope Keaton continues to make these kinds of choices in the projects that he chooses as he is such an asset to any film where he can bring his skill and experience to bear.

McAdams does the best work of her career as reporter Sacha Pfieffer.  McAdams is as grounded and genuine as she has ever been on screen. She displays a humanity and a compelling internal life that is both steady and captivating.

Mark Ruffalo follows up his terrific work in last years otherwise disappointing Foxcatcher, with a dynamic performance as reporter Michael Rezendes. Ruffalo brings a magnetic power and a tangible wound to the role that is mesmerizing. Ruffalo has been on a roll lately with great work and Spotlight is some of his best.

Both Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci have smaller roles but they do spectacular work. Both men are actors of extraordinary craft and talent, and they both bring all of their skills to bear in Spotlight. Without Schrieber and Tucci's multi-dimensional portrayals, the film would have suffered greatly.

Spotlight is the type of superbly crafted film of which I wish Hollywood would make more. Spotlight, The Big Short, which is another great film from this year, and 12 Years a Slave from 2013, all had minuscule budgets around $20 million and all of them at least more than doubled their budgets in profits. Instead of spending $100 or $200 million to make a monstrosity like The Avengers or some action piece of crap, why not take that money and make five or ten Spotlights, or The BIg Shorts or 12 Years a Slave? Those three films combined cost $60 million to make and have grossed $363 million. With moderate budgets like that, there is less risk and higher reward, as opposed to a $200 million film, which will nearly double its budget on marketing and then need to make a billion dollars just to be considered a success. Spotlight shows that good and great films can be made relatively inexpensively using just the skill, craft and talent of the people involved. I wish for all of our sakes that Hollywood would learn that lesson, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they won't. Regardless of the state of the film industry, Spotlight is proof that there are still artists out there capable of making high quality, smart films. 

In conclusion, Spotlight is one of my favorite films of the year. It teaches us hard lessons about our own cultural blindness and the price that the most vulnerable among us pay for it. It also shows us a time not long ago, when the press could, on its better days, hold those in power accountable. Those days are long gone, and Spotlight reveals to us that our culture is lesser for the loss of true investigative journalism. Spotlight is well worth your time, money and effort to go see it in the theaters. I strongly encourage you to do so. 

©2016

****WARNING, THIS FOLLOWING SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT****

FROM THE KONSPIRACY KORNER!!

(This section is written by my lifelong friend and our resident conspiracist, Prof. Rev. Dr. Steve Keithans a.k.a The Mayor of Westfield. The good Professor Reverend Doctor Keithans views may or may not be the same as my own, but regardless, I am happy to share them here with you now.)

The strangest thing…when speaking with my good brother Michael McCaffrey about the film Spotlight, one of the great elements that we both noticed about the film was how fantastically well paced it is. But to my eyes there was one small hiccup which stuck out to me like a sore thumb. Films have a visual style, rhythm and pace to them. Shots are consistently framed and lit in a certain style and held for a certain length creating an unconscious rhythm for the viewer of a film. Each shot informs the shot that follows it and is informed by the one that preceded it. Spotlight quickly establishes its visual rhythm and sticks with it through the entire film…except for one…single...shot.

The shot in question takes place at exactly 1 hour 23 minutes and 22 seconds of the film. The shot is of the Boston Globe parking lot as editor Mark Baron (Liev Schreiber) arrives to the office. It is a wide shot, one which we have not seen yet, nor will we see it again. We have seen this same parking lot before but only in close ups and two shots of the actors in their cars. In this shot, from a high angle wide shot, we see Baron pull his car in to the parking lot. Looming over the parking lot, and dominating the shot, is a big "AOL Anywhere" billboard and the background is the skyline of Boston. Here is a screen capture of the shot.

It is an odd shot in the context of the visual style and rhythm of the film and it is jarring to the unconscious of the viewer because it breaks that rhythm. It is pretty striking that the one shot that is out of rhythm with the entire film is that of an AOL Anywhere billboard which happens to have a giant pyramid with an all seeing eye in it. What makes the shot all the more jarring is the context of where it shows up in the film. The scene directly following this shot shows Mark Baron entering the Boston Globe office, in the foreground a group of people are gathered around a television watching breaking news. The breaking news is the 9-11 attack. Baron stops in front of the television long enough to see a jumbo jet crash into the World Trade Center. 

When I first saw the film I felt uneasy with the parking lot shot, but didn't really give it much thought. The sensation was one of slight discomfort, something just seemed off, nothing more. It was more subconscious than anything and it barely registered in my conscious mind except to say…"hmmm…that feels…off".

Upon my second viewing of the film, I was more consciously jarred by the visual anomaly, and I wondered if this was just a very unsubtle case of AOL product placement.  

Then I thought, well, maybe the director is trying to symbolically say that newspapers in general, and the Boston Globe in particular, don't know what is coming at them, the black swan theory if you will…that they are blind to their own on-coming demise in the form of AOL (the internet), much like the U.S. was blind to the 9-11 attacks. 

Then I wondered if maybe this shot has a deeper meaning that the director was not even conscious of, or maybe he was…who knows, right? Maybe the all seeing eye highlighted in that shot is symbolic of one of the shadowy "secret societies" that are known to use child sex abuse rituals when they practice their dark art. Or maybe it is symbolic of the all seeing eye of "the powers that be" in the military-intelligence-surveillance industrial complex who were either complicit or entirely behind the 9-11 attacks in order to increase their power and control by creating a "new Pearl Harbor". Or maybe those two groups, the child sex abuse ritual people, and the military-intelligence-surveillience industrial complex people are cross pollinated and are actually one in the same and this shot shows us a brief glimpse of their vast power and control…the billboard does say "AOL Everywhere" after all.

Then I wondered if maybe this shot was a secret warning from an insider of one of these groups, alerting anyone with the eyes to see that this nefarious, shadowy group was behind both the sex abuse in the Catholic church, and 9-11 and most everything we see in the media (once again…"Everywhere"). And then I wondered if this shot was indicating that another 9-11 was coming, this time aimed at Boston.

And then I wondered why my head hurt so much, and then I realized that my tinfoil hat was on way too tight. Sadly, after I removed the tinfoil hat from my head, the aching still remained…and even more unsettlingly, so did the anomaly of that shot and the all seeing eye in the pyramid looming over the city of Boston, and glaring right at me…and seeing right through me…knowing and controlling…"EVERYTHING".

©2016