I was multi-tasking today, dividing my attention between the live broadcast of Super Bowl 43 (Pittsburgh 26, Phoenix 23) and this movie, titled as THE GALINDEZ FILE on my DVD box. While the football game was more exciting than most, this flick made it look like a "yawner." Though both were real life attractions, the ball players were risking bruises while the characters in the movie--a true life story (see one of my sources in my comment summary)--were facing the much greater stakes braved by any politically active U.S. citizen: death by torture in a foreign country at the capricious whims of innumerable Cheney- and Rumsfeld-like thugs and their countless mercenary henchmen. Does this mean every American do-gooder will be tortured to death in the full bloom of youth? No. Is it inevitable that your neighborhood organizer will be rubbed out this way? No. (He might even become president.) But no matter who is president, the thousands of evil-doers who make up the "shadow government" (call them black ops, loose cannons, blackwater, off-the-reservation, CIA, FBI, ATF, NSA, homeland security, what have you) "disappear" enough of the innocents they disagree with every year that 90% of the would-be Christians are turned into the "lukewarm" sort the Bible says will burn in hell. These individual stories happening during the Bush years all have been dismissed as "liberal" propaganda by the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Becks, and Savages of the world. But this sort of thing has been happening for 150 years, with the minions of money ("the love of money is the root of all evil") on one side, and the usually poor (often Christian, Southern, and/or conservative) patriots fighting for truth on the other.
This GF movie is a case in point. The composite instrument of the U.S. money men's shadow government--Edward Robards (a well-cast Harvey Keitel) is a game player (specifically, chess). He has absolutely no more feeling for the bystanders brushing too close to his dirty work--past and present--than he does for the wooden pawns in his chess set. After engineering the rendition of a Ghandi-like spiritual cousin of Che Guevarra (Jesus Galindez) from his Columbia University classroom in New York City to his death-by-torture cell in the Dominican Republic, at least four people--including three Americans--had their life snuffed out with the U.S. tax dollars of the day so these "intelligence" people did not have to worry that their dastardly deeds would catch up to them, disrupting their life of exotic resorts, booze, and "professional women" (your tax dollars at work). The main difference between an actual documentary without compelling actors and this fictionalization is that a couple of the Galindez assassination "cover-up" assassinations are moved forward from the late 1950s to 1988, so that the woman victim--history grad student Muriel Colber (Saffron Burrows)--does not seem so remote from the 21st Century. Also, poetic license is taken to make her fate perfectly parallel to her research subject's, with almost as deft and chilling a result as that achieved by the incomparable French director George Sluizer in 1988's SPOORLOOS (aka, The Vanishing).
This GF movie is a case in point. The composite instrument of the U.S. money men's shadow government--Edward Robards (a well-cast Harvey Keitel) is a game player (specifically, chess). He has absolutely no more feeling for the bystanders brushing too close to his dirty work--past and present--than he does for the wooden pawns in his chess set. After engineering the rendition of a Ghandi-like spiritual cousin of Che Guevarra (Jesus Galindez) from his Columbia University classroom in New York City to his death-by-torture cell in the Dominican Republic, at least four people--including three Americans--had their life snuffed out with the U.S. tax dollars of the day so these "intelligence" people did not have to worry that their dastardly deeds would catch up to them, disrupting their life of exotic resorts, booze, and "professional women" (your tax dollars at work). The main difference between an actual documentary without compelling actors and this fictionalization is that a couple of the Galindez assassination "cover-up" assassinations are moved forward from the late 1950s to 1988, so that the woman victim--history grad student Muriel Colber (Saffron Burrows)--does not seem so remote from the 21st Century. Also, poetic license is taken to make her fate perfectly parallel to her research subject's, with almost as deft and chilling a result as that achieved by the incomparable French director George Sluizer in 1988's SPOORLOOS (aka, The Vanishing).