Category Archives: Wikileaks

Film Review | The Fifth Estate

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From left: Benedict Cumberbatch, Carice van Houten, Daniel Bruhl and Moritz Bleibtreu.

Teodor Reljic

Films based on true events are almost always crushingly dull. This is because shoe-horning a slice of history into a Hollywood blockbuster format means that the story loses all of its immediacy and variety to collapse into complete clich.

If you want to make a film about real-life events, a documentary will do just fine. A documentary may have its limitations and will not - by definition - feature top-billing superstar actors, but at least you'll be more or less free to tell the story without the trappings of tired and all-too-familiar plot devices that we've seen in a dozen other films before: be they entirely fictional or kind-of fictional.

Of course, every rule has its exception, and we've actually been privy to one quite recently. Martin Scorcese's The Wolf of Wall Street was a wild, rollicking ride - a satire that took no prisoners (unless you - rightly - consider its prisoners to be its unapologetically venal protagonists).

But there's the rub: making an artistic effort makes all the difference, not to mention the fact that Scorcese has experience, vision and confidence in spades. Plus, his source material - a memoir penned by his subject - already snugly fits his directorial MO.

No such luck with Wikileaks drama The Fifth Estate. Cobbled together from all-too-recent events detailing the history of the controversial whistle-blowing website run by Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), it knows it has very little to go on but plugs its gaps with clichs, not creative solutions.

Much like the far superior 2010 thriller The Social Network - in which director David Lynch spun the tale of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spurned ex-business partner Eduardo Saverin - The Fifth Estate attempts to hook its viewers by means of a similar 'frenemies' two-hander; the only difference being that instead of a revolutionary social media platform, here we're dealing with a far-more-literally revolutionary online space.

In this case, the put-upon sidekick is Daniel Berg (played by German actor Daniel Bruhl, last seen as F1 racer Niki Lauda in Rush). Just as The Social Network was based largely on the supposed injured party's (aka Saverin's) version of events, The Fifth Estate is partly sourced from Berg's own account of his time as founding partner of Wikileaks and Assange's right-hand-man. As such, the film was pre-emptively denounced as a hatchet job by Assange - currently in exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

But bias is the least of the film's concern. If anything, director Bill Condon (Kinsey) and screenwriter Josh Singer (TV's The West Wing) could have done with being a little less 'balanced' and a little more striking in their approach.

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Film Review | The Fifth Estate

Sam Worthington’s Gallipoli drama for the WikiLeaks era

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By Nick GalvinJan. 30, 2014, 3:25 p.m.

The Avatar star believes he has uncovered a fresh take on the Gallipoli story.

Actor Sam Worthington believes he has uncovered a fresh take on the Gallipoli story that is not "a re-telling of the last 20 minutes of Peter Weir's movie" and which will resonate with modern audiences in the era of WikiLeaks and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Worthington will produce and star in the mini-series Deadline Gallipoli for Foxtel, which tells the story of the journalists "embedded" with the troops on the ill-fated campaign and their fight to get the truth out about how badly the fighting was going.

"Me and my producing partner John Schwarz wanted to come up with an idea so that we could be part of this 100-year commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign," Worthington says. "But we didn't want it to be the old slouch hat, bully beef kind of story.

"The more we uncovered about these journalists, the more we realised we had an All the President's Men in a war zone kind of movie where these guys actually fought to get the news out because censorship was so strong back then.

"If you look at WikiLeaks and any kind of war zone where there is censorship, the story and the idea and the themes are still as relevant today as they were back n 1915."

Worthington, best known for his starring role in Avatar, will play Age journalist Phillip Schuler, who travelled with the first convoy to Turkey in 1915.

"The soldiers themselves would have kept fighting for as long as they were told to," Worthington says. "I can appreciate . . . that spirit. The thrilling part of the drama is the story of these four journalists fighting the upper echelons of the military to get the truth out and stop the carnage."

He was tight-lipped about who was in the frame for the roles of legendary Australian war correspondent Charles Bean and journalist Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert.

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Sam Worthington's Gallipoli drama for the WikiLeaks era

‘Bad Grandpa,’ ‘The Fifth Estate,’ ‘Cloudy’ sequel, ‘Rush’

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New DVDs

Theres one Oscar nominee in this weeks bunch, and its ... Bad Grandpa! Check it out, for makeup and hairstyling.

Star ratings are by Seattle Times movie reviewers, freelancers or wire services. For full reviews, search the movie title at seattletimes.com. Release dates are subject to change.

The Fifth Estate (R): A friendship turned sour is at the core of this ripped-from-the-headlines saga of WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website founded by Julian Assange. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Assange and Daniel Brhl as a network-security specialist he meets at a hackers conference.

Last Vegas (PG-13): A quartet of grade-school pals (Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline) reunite, 58 years later, in Sin City.

Bad Grandpa (R): The title character (Johnny Knoxville) and an 8-year-old (Jackson Nicoll) go off on a bad-grandparenting trek in this semi-scripted Jackass outing built around elaborately staged pranks played on the unsuspecting.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (PG): The animated sequel churns out a villain and Taco-diles, Shrimpanzees and Fla-mangoes. The voice cast includes Bill Hader, Will Forte, Anna Faris and James Caan.

Metallica Through the Never (R): Its part live concert of the heavy-metal kings and part fantasy, about a roadie sent out on a mysterious assignment.

Rush (R): Daniel Brhl and Chris Hemsworth rev up the high-octane action as Formula One race-car rivals Niki Lauda and James Hunt. Ron Howard directed.

TV on DVD

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‘Bad Grandpa,’ ‘The Fifth Estate,’ ‘Cloudy’ sequel, ‘Rush’