When Soldiers Of Fortune Held Forth In The Central American Night (And Were Well Paid)- Tom Cruise’s “American Made” (2017)-A Film Review

When Soldiers Of Fortune Held Forth In The Central American Night (And Were Well Paid)- Tom Cruise’s “American Made” (2017)-A Film Review

DVD Review

Bart Webber

American Made, starring Tom Cruise, 2017

If you are going to be a drug smuggler you had better be the best liar, con man, sell-out artist you can be otherwise you are going to wind up in some dirty, dusty back road someplace with a couple of slugs in your head and an unmarked grave in some stinking potter’s field far from home. This I know. All of this the lying, conning (including to close long-time friends), selling-out and falling down in some abandoned arroyo south of the border happened to my old time high school friend Peter Paul Markin (the real Markin not Allan Jackson who formerly headed the operations at this publication and took the Markin moniker as an on-line identity-and nobody complained). Yeah, Markin fell under the bus after making it through not unscathed in Vietnam and was never quite the same especially when that golden age hippie minute evaporated under the counter-offensive of the night-takers who have been running the show in this country ever since. But Markin was small time, was just trying to feed his serious cocaine habit at the end (a no-no if you are smuggling and tasting the product at the same time) when he made a fatal move to go “indy” down in Mexico and got nothing but two slugs in the head and a potter’s field grave for his efforts.    

Which brings us to this so-what based on fact true story about a serious upscale TWA commercial flight go by the book pilot Barry Seal with a taste for the wild side, for the dough side, who converts to drug smuggler extraordinaire in the film under review American Made.  

Of course. any time you have a story line involving the CIA, drug cartels, the DEA, Contras and who knows who else you should hold onto your wallet. This is not supposed, at least in the director’s eyes, to be a biopic since Tom Cruise as the lead character Barry Seal, the late Barry Seal and the real one were very much unlike and moreover the story-line holds together better if it is told as on screen. So take the plot for what it is worth but know that Barry had a taste for the wild side beyond the bags full of money he was making in his very useful skilled profession as an ace pilot.

You need a scorecard in any case to work through the cons, lies etc of this one. Barry an unhappy TWA pilot with a gaggle of kids and a good-looking wife meets up with the CIA who need some help with the troublesome growing insurgencies in Central and South America. Barry buys in if the price is right and the plane is fast. Then the CIA wants him to be the bag man for their guy in Panama. Which leads to the fatal collusion with the very interested drug cartels starting their big-time cocaine runs heading north. Naturally through all this Barry is living high off the hog and a charmed live. Until. Until things go awry as he expands his operations and is caught. Not good for a gringo with much information to offer to save his own skin. Vaya con dios Barry once the cartel sends its hit men north. See, high end or low like Markin when you play with that fire it is every person for him or herself. A nice swift moving action film which Mr. Cruise is well-known for with a shade bit more nuance in the role than the usual bang-bang operations he is cinematically involved in.

*Not Quite Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle- The Art Of Fine Cooking For The Servantless- “Julie and Julia”- A Film Review

Click on the title to link to a "The Sunday Boston Globe", December 13, 2009, review of writer/cook/apprentice butcher Julie Powell, author of the blog and book reviewed below.


Every once in a while there is something to review that I have watched, listened to or read that just does not fit the 'high' standards of this space. Something that is lacking in the way of lessons to be drawn for the pushing the class struggle forward. Or, put another way, this writer, on occasion has the need to stretch out and write something whimsical. Today commentary is one such example. So be it.

DVD Review

Julie and Julia, starring Meryl Streep, directed by Nora Ephron, 2009

I can boil water. My “soul mate” can boil water and, in addition, throw something into the pot. That, sadly, is the extent of our culinary acumen. That condition, nevertheless, does not preclude said “soul mate” from enthusiastically partaking in the recent mania for all things cookery. This last sentence is a round-about way of getting to the why of reviewing this recent film centered on a parallel presentation of the lives of a modern (maybe, post-modern, blog and all), alienated, middle class woman who gets caught up in a French cooking frenzy and the American post-World War II “queen” of that domain, the alienated, upper middle class woman, Julia Child.

Now it would be quite easy to sneer at the original premise of the plot- connecting the high-pitched old PBS icon Child with a "thoroughly modern Millie", Julie, in a fluffy, feel good piece of film about the travails of finding meaning in modern day life. Or to look askance at those old OSS (predecessor of the CIA) connections of old Julia and her husband, Paul. Or, more interestingly, the noblesse oblige premise of an intelligent woman with time on her hands behind her manic struggle to publish a book on fine French cooking for the average, servantless American housewife.

On most days I would be more than happy to throw some barbs that way. But here is the “skinny”. This is just , in its own way, a funny look at a couple of slices of Americana. Beside that, who has time to be critical, in the above-mentioned ways, when you have to concentrate on watching Meryl Streep BE Julia Child. (Director Nora Ephron, apparently, just let Streep goes through her paces, thankfully). As always that actress turns in a sterling performance, no matter what the part. Moreover, if those are not good and sufficient reasons for taking a dive on this subject, please remember that “soul mate”, who loved this film. I do not want to have to revive, in our household, the old tradition of having someone else taste my food before I eat it.

Honor the Memory of Phillip Agee

Commentary

This political obituary of Phillip Agee is passed on from Workers Vanguard. It seems to hit the political high notes on the career of Agee for leftists just about right. One point- In the history of the international working class movement we have had comparatively few class traitors come into our ranks. Phillip Agee would probably not come under either Lenin's Bolshevik definition of what service to socialism entailed nor for that matter Julius Martov's looser Menshevik definition either in that famous fight in the Russian Social Democracy in 1903. But, hell what Agee did by naming names of CIA agents, our implacable arch-enemies, was surely an important contribution to the struggles of the international working class. Yes, Agee deserves the political tribute below.

Workers Vanguard No.907 February 1 2008

On January 7, Philip Agee died in a Havana hospital after surgical attempts failed to correct his perforated ulcers. Agee, who is perhaps unknown to many of our younger readers, was an ex-CIA agent who resigned from that agency in 1969. He spent the rest of his life meticulously documenting and exposing the spies, non-governmental agencies and State Department operatives that prosecuted U.S. imperialism's myriad efforts to subvert and overturn such foreign governments as displeased the U.S. imperialist rulers, especially in those countries (such as Chile in the early 1970s and Nicaragua in the 1980s) where the threat of revolutionary overturns was posed.

A onetime altar boy and the son of a prosperous Florida businessman, Agee was recruited to the CIA in 1957 after his graduation from Notre Dame, spending, his time in the agency in a variety of assignments in Latin America. He was posted to Mexico City in 1968, the year in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party regime of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz slaughtered hundreds of protesting students on the eve of the Olympics, an event that precipitated Agee's resignation in early 1969. Agee, perhaps whimsically, said he left the CIA because "I fell in love with a woman who thought Che Guevara was the most wonderful man in the world."

In 1975 Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary in which he named 250 agency officers, NGOs and foreign agents—an activity he continued in the pages of Covert Action Information Bulletin (later Covert Action Quarterly) that he helped initiate in 1978 (it ceased publication in 2005). Agee later described his motivation: "It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going in in Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador—they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the US government" (London Guardian, 10 January 2007).

His activities did not go unnoticed by his ex-employer. In 1982, Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was specifically aimed at Agee's actions. It criminalized outing covert agents—a non-crime from the standpoint of the proletariat that is, in fact, a service to humanity. After the debut of Covert Action Agee became a "man without a country," expelled from Britain in 1977 at the behest of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger by the obliging Labour Party government of James Callaghan. He was subsequently refused entry by France and the Netherlands. Agee did not obtain secure residency until he achieved a German pass-
port in 1990 after marrying Giselle Roberge, a German ballerina. Until his death, Agee sojourned between his home in Hamburg and an apartment in Havana.

The "death of communism" triumphalism in the aftermath of the 1991-92 capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state has transformed many onetime critics of American imperialism into its sniveling and lying sycophants who religiously retail the lie that the "socialist experiment" has failed. Not so Agee, who, until his death, remained a staunch defender of the Cuban Revolution and an opponent of U.S. efforts toward a counterrevolutionary overturn of the Castro regime. While not a few of the obituaries detailing Agee's death describe him as a "turncoat," "renegade" and "traitor," none call him a liar, nor do any attempt to refute his revelations.

A man of considerable intellect and principle, Philip Agee saw deeply into the heart of the monster he chose to oppose. Just two weeks after the September 11 attacks, he gave a talk in Stockholm describing Osama bin Laden as "a creature of the CIA" in its efforts to mobilize Islamic reactionaries in opposition to the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan. He went on to assert that the "war on terror" was of service to the U.S. imperialist rulers precisely because it is "an ongoing war, for which there will be no quick resolution" and "no great battles." He pointed out that it would be used to effect restraints on civil liberties and political dissent. In all this he was spot-on.

Agee was not an advocate of proletarian revolution. Although he described himself as a socialist, it seems clear that his contempt was directed rather specifically at the bloody predations of American imperialism. Nor did Agee perceive that the nationalist Castro-led bureaucracy that holds sway in Cuba itself endangers the Cuban deformed workers state, not least through its Stalinist dogma of "socialism in one country," which stands in opposition to the struggle for international socialist revolution, including in the U.S.

Philip Agee was an intransigent opponent of the would-be world-conquering, bloodsoaked American bourgeoisie and, indeed, a traitor to his class. For that we honor him. As Granma, the paper of the Cuban Communist Party, said upon his death, Agee was "a loyal friend of Cuba and fervent defender of the peoples' fight for a better world." His contributions to that end will be sorely missed. •