Movie: CitizenFour

Last night Laura Poitras was on The Daily Show talking about her new film about Edward Snowden, "CitizenFour." It looked like something I had to see.

It was good. I knew Laura Poitras was a filmmaker, and I knew Edward Snowden chose her because she was a fearless critic of government overreach, but I guess I never knew before that she filmed almost all of the first contacts with Snowden. These weren't re-creations by actors -- this was the real scene as it went down.

Having read the story from a couple different people already I was familiar with the facts, but actually seeing them play out in real time was revelatory.

Of course as things got crazy and Ed has to leave Hong Kong, and eventually got stranded in Moscow, she wasn't able to film every step. These parts of the story are told with title cards.

But wow, what a story.

I saw that Daily Show. I will watch CitizenFour the first chance I get. Looks fascinating (as does Rosewater).

apparently it won an Oscar Sunday night. It was good but not THAT good.

It doesn't have to be THAT good to win an Oscar. It just has to be (subjectively) better than the other entrants.

It's like you and your friend running from a bear. You don't have to be able to outrun the bear; you just have to outrun your friend.

After reading his book I decided to buy the DVD of Citizenfour.

Several Democratic candidates, as well as Hillary and Barack, have said that Ed should stand trial for what he did. The consensus opinion has not yet come around to my view, that he’s a whistleblower and a hero.

We’ll see if the 2020 election brings him up and/or home.

In the extras on the Blu-Ray disc of Citizenfour there are some deleted scenes, filmed in 2014 I think, where Snowden talks about what “the next president” will have to do now that the NSA spying is out in the open. There’s also a New York Times Timestalk public forum where Snowden talks about how the NSA pressured Obama to INCREASE Bush-era, 9/11-era surveillance rather than scale it back.

Fascinating predictions about where we are now, and why. I’m sure Trump’s election was not unrelated to the Bush/Obama government overreach.

And the Brazilian government is also overreaching, this time charging Glenn Greenwald for his series on corruption within the Brazilian government.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/glenn-greenwald-brazil-cybercrimes_n_5e2723f3c5b63211761a3c84