Movie Review—The Infiltrator

he Infiltrator

by Peter J. O'Connell

The Infiltrator. Released: July 2016. Runtime: 127 mins. MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language throughout, some sexual content and drug material.

Bryan Cranston garnered attention and awards for five seasons on the cable TV series Breaking Bad, where he played a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who becomes a fearsome drug lord. Now in The Infiltrator Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a Customs agent who goes undercover to break up the money-laundering activities of the Medellin drug cartel, headed by the fearsome Pablo Escobar. The film, directed by Brad Furman, is based on fact.

Mazur's perilous assignment takes place in the wild-and-wooly Florida of the 1980s. The Customs Service's operation involving Mazur is focused, not on drug interdiction, but on tracing the drug traffickers' money in its labyrinthine passage through corrupt businesses and financial institutions, such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the world's seventh largest financial institution at the time.

For his role as a Mafioso connecting Escobar and BCCI, Mazur takes the name “Robert Musella” off a tombstone. His bling, cars, mansion, etc., are provided by forfeitures from other anti-drug operations. Mazur is aided by a streetwise agent, Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo), and assorted cons, ex-cons and confidential informants of questionable reliability. He also is provided with Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), a young Customs agent who poses as his fiancee, so Mazur as Musella can avoid certain “entanglements” by claiming devotion to her. Mazur is actually a loving family man whose wife, Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey), is worried sick while he is undercover.

Mazur/Musella gradually gains the trust of the traffickers—and bankers—after some harrowing “initiations,” including one involving a voodoo-type cult. M/M is able to maintain his cool through these tense situations but also can turn on the hot rage when necessary, as in a scene in a restaurant reminiscent of Joe Pesci's famous “Do you think I'm funny?” scene in Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). There is also a slight touch of regard on the part of M/M for one of the traffickers in particular, Roberto Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt). And Mazur begins to feel (non-romantic) affection for his partner, Kathy.

At times The Infiltrator approaches the crime epic stature of Scorsese's work or Michael Mann's Heat (1995) or Brian DePalma's Scarface (1983). Cranston's solid skills are in admirable evidence throughout, and the supporting cast is terrific. Diane Kruger, for example, a German actress pushing 40, effortlessly and convincingly plays an American woman in her mid-20s.

The Infiltrator evokes admiration for such lawmen and law women as Mazur and Ertz in the dangerous work that they do in defense of, really, civilization. The movie is admirable for evoking that admiration. 

Why You Should Try to Tape Conversations With Social Security

By Laurence J. Kotlikof

’ll get to this column’s topic — the importance of taping your conversations with Social Security, if you can — momentarily, but first I want to tell you a little about my expertise, so you know why reading Ask Larry will be worth your while.

I’ve been writing about Social Security for years. My columns have appeared on PBS NewsHour, Forbes and The Huffington Post. Paul Solman, of PBS NewsHour, suggested we write a book about claiming Social Security benefits and we did, after teaming up with Phil Moeller, a personal finance columnist with Money: Get What’s Yours came out last year and became a New York Times bestseller.

I became a student of Social Security out of necessity. I needed to help my company’s engineers program our Maximize My Social Security software. I had done lots of research on Social Security’s economic impacts on saving and retirement; that required 30,000-feet knowledge. Still, I thought there was little I didn’t know about the system’s details. Boy was I surprised when I got down to earth.

3 Dark Secrets About Social Security

Over the years. I’ve learned three very dark secrets about Social Security.

First, Social Security may be the most complex government policy yet designed by man. It has 12 different benefits, but is chock full of hidden secrets and gotchas that make collecting what you’re owed a user’s nightmare. Second, most people don’t do their homework before approaching Social Security’s 40,000 poorly trained and totally overwhelmed staff, over the phone or in the local office. Third, in my opinion, Social Security staff bats only 50 percent. Half of their answers are misleading, incomplete or dead wrong.

Which brings me to today’s topic: How to keep Social Security from ripping you off.

Social Security’s mistakes can be enormous and you can be held accountable for them.

Social Security Letter: You Owe $309,000

I recently wrote a column entitled 3 True Social Security Horror Stories. The first was about a lady who became disabled and started receiving Social Security disability benefits. She then took up writing to occupy her time. To her great surprise, she wrote a best selling children’s book in 1996 and started receiving royalty checks. As the checks came in ever six months, she’d contact Social Security in person or over the phone and each time she was told: royalty checks are earned income, so you can keep your monthly disability benefit. Click here to continue reading.

Movie Review—The Innocents

by Peter J. O'Connell

The Innocents. Released (USA): July 2016. Runtime: 115 mins. MPAA rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic material, including sexual assault, and for some bloody images and brief suggestive content. Dialogue in French, Polish and Russian; subtitled in English. 

Poland, late 1945. In the wintry land, ravaged first by German conquest and then by Soviet domination, a French medical team is winding up its stay treating injured French prisoners of war. A homeless orphan persuades Mathilde, a young French doctor, to meet with a nun. The nun implores Mathilde to come to her convent secretly to treat one of the sisters. Mathilde is reluctant because she is supposed to treat only the French military, but she yields to the nun's pleas. 

When Mathilde arrives at the convent, she is shocked to find that she is expected to deliver a baby from a nun who was raped when the Red Army swept through Poland earlier in the year. And that nun is not the only one of the sisters who was raped—and not the only one who is pregnant.

So begins The Innocents, directed by Anne Fontaine, a moving parable of the interaction of faith, fate-- and forms of feminism. Mathilde, sensitively played by the lovely Lou de Laage, is from a family of French communists. She is not one herself and is opposed to the brutality of the Soviet and Polish communists, but she is a rationalist and finds the traditionalist attitudes of most of the nuns difficult to understand. 

The sisters worry that they have broken their vows of chastity, even though they were the victims of sexual assault. They are troubled by the fate thrust upon them but manage to achieve a sense of transcendence, especially when they engage in their beautiful chanting and singing. As more births occur, Mathilde is called on again and again and finds herself developing affection and respect for the nuns—her “sisters”--because of the solidarity that the members of the convent show for each other. 

Mathilde's relationship with Mother Abbess (Agata Kulesza), the head of the convent, is more problematic. Mother Abbess is very stern. She takes away the babies as soon as they are born but says that she has found good homes for them. Mother Abbess' assistant (Agata Buzek) is more flexible.

Things also are problematic at the French medical station. Samuel (Vincent Macaigne), a doctor there, is very taken with Mathilde, but his approach to her is a mix of forwardness and hesitation. Mathilde likes Samuel but also longs for an independent way of life. Neither Mathilde, because of her communist family background, nor Samuel, who is Jewish, are looked on with favor by the French commander (Pascal Elso), who is a right-winger.

Anne Fontaine's skillful direction keeps the film's various plot lines moving in credible and complementary ways. The French members of her cast are nuanced in their performances, and the Polish actresses are marvels of controlled intensity. The film's cinematography of rural Poland in winter mixes the colors of black, white and gray together marvelously—whether focusing on nature, building interiors or the nuns' garb—just as the film's thematic development mixes moral blacks, whites and grays together as the work moves toward its stunning denouement. 

The Innocents is one of the finest films that that you could hope to see in this, or any, year.     

Great Myths of Aging

When it comes to what old people are like, everyone has an opinion, especially younger people. Perhaps because they’re afraid of aging, the young and middle-aged tend to stereotype older people as grouchy, frumpy, slow, forgetful. Yes we do change as we age, but not in stereotypical ways. What’s more, because these ideas are ingrained in the culture — in the language we use and the images we see daily — it’s easy for us to buy into them. But even if you’re mostly able to resist the mythology, it’s hard to make a case against it if you don’t have the facts.

So we talked to gerontologist Joan T. Erber, co-author with Lenore T. Szuchman of “Great Myths of Aging” — a book that mixes rigor and humor in smashing 37 myths about growing older — to find out which myths are the most common and why they’re not true.

Here are her top eight.

1. Older people are suckers — easy prey for scam artists

Before you assume that older people are suckers, consider how many affluent, supposedly well-informed young and middle-aged people fell for Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Yes, people today in their 80s and 90s may be more trusting, having grown up in a time when trusting someone was the polite thing to do. But on the whole, older people don’t so much fall for scams more than younger people, but are targeted more often — possibly because, as the FBI reports, we’re less likely to report a fraud. We may be ashamed of being conned or afraid that relatives will think we’re losing cognitive abilities (another myth). Also, con artists know that older people are likely to have profitable nest eggs ripe for targeting. Despite all this, Erber and her co-author point out, AARP and other organizations that serve seniors are forever trying to “educate” us about how to protect ourselves. And that’s infantilizing.

2. If you live long enough you’ll wind up in a nursing home

In fact only a small minority of old people wind up in nursing homes. In 2011, only 3.6 percent of people aged 65 and older lived in institutional settings: 1 percent of people 65 to 74; 3 percent of people aged 75 to 84; and only 11 percent of people 85 and older. The odds of dying in a nursing home do increase as you age, but those stats have started decreasing recently as more and more people “age in place” and choose to die at home.

3. Older people are grouchy

This stereotype is so pervasive that a film like “Grumpy Old Men” doesn’t seem politically incorrect. A study of Disney characters found that 25 percent of the older characters were angry, grumpy or stern. Actually the opposite is true. According to one study, if you were agreeable to start with, you’ll only grow more so, despite any physical or health challenges you might be faced with (although chronic pain can make us grouchier). Furthermore, older people tend to focus on the sunny side of things more than younger people do. We pay more attention to positive than negative information — the opposite of many younger people. In fact, if you’re looking for grouchiness, look no further than your latest interaction with tech support.

4. Older people would rather live with kids or grandkids than alone  

The assumption here is that older people are lonely and given a choice, they would move in with adult children or grandchildren. Being away from family means being incomplete. Not true! In previous generations, this was a common arrangement, but surveys show that older people today place great value on maintaining separate households, even in different cities, as long as they’re in good enough health to be independent and can afford it. Many of us would like to spend time with our network of friends while sustaining family relationships at a distance, especially now that technologies like email and Skype make it easy to stay connected. The exception is if you belong to an ethnic group with a tradition of multigenerational households.  Click here to continue reading.

Movie Review—Our Kind of Traitor

Our Kind of Traitor

by Peter J. O'Connell  

Our Kind of Traitor. Released (USA): July 2016. Runtime: 108 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence throughout, some sexuality, nudity and brief drug use. 

For over 50 years, British author John Le Carre has been bringing forth bleakly brilliant novels dealing with espionage, terrorism, and international crime and politics. Many of his works have been made into films, some for theatres, some for television. The latest for theatres is Our Kind of Traitor, directed by Susanna White.

The movie's protagonists are introduced in a sequence set in Morocco that might be a hommage to Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Man Who Knew Too Much. A young couple on vacation there becomes caught up in a web of dangerous events that they struggle to understand. The couple consists of Perry (Ewan McGregor), an Oxford poetics instructor, and Gail (Naomie Harris), a successful barrister. The vacation is partially to deal with some stresses and strains in their relationship.

In Marrakech the couple become acquainted with Dima (Stellan Skarsgard) and his family. Dima, a Russian oligarch, is a charismatic bear of a man who throws spectacular parties to which he invites the Brits. At one of them, he confides to Perry that he is the “world's number one money launderer” but is being forced by his criminal brotherhood to turn over his money-laundering operations to them soon in Bern, Switzerland. Dima fears that once that happens, he and his family will be killed. To avoid that fate, he seeks to give a “memory stick” to British intelligence in return for their protection. The memory stick contains information on those in Britain, including important government officials and businessmen, involved in his laundering.

Dima says that because he is being watched, the only way to get the memory stick to Britain is to have Perry take it and deliver it to British intelligence. Perry agrees to do that, partially because he is under Dima's spell, partially because he feels the need for some excitement in his life, and partially because it will give a boost to his sense of manhood, which has become somewhat wilted by the greater success if Gail. 

Upon returning to London, Perry turns the memory stick over to British intelligence, which places Hector (Damian Lewis) and Like (Khalid Abdalia) in charge of a secret semi-official investigation. The intelligence establishment is reluctant to believe that a certain high-level decision maker (Jeremy Northam) implicated by the stick is actually guilty. 

The action then shifts to Paris for the first meeting of British intelligence with Dima. Dima has insisted that Perry and Gail be present for this meeting. As tension mounts, the action shifts to Bern, where Dima signs over his “assets” to the new criminal leadership and then is taken by British intelligence to a supposed safe haven in the Alps. There in a dark night on cold and isolated heights, the events that began in the heat and colors of Morocco come to an explosive climax as various characters undergo tests of love and loyalty. 

Our Kind of Traitor addresses an important issue, the influence in the West of the criminal/capitalist oligarchs of post-Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, the “willing suspension of disbelief” necessary to enjoy fiction is hard to achieve with this story. Dima, despite Stellan Skarsgard's skillful portrayal, is just too gentle a “bear” to accept as the “world's number one money launderer.” And Perry is just too gullible a character for an audience to believe in, even if he is an Oxford instructor of poetics. Naomie Harris' performance as Gail is solid, though she doesn't have much to do, and Damian Lewis is interestingly quirky as Hector. As for director White's work, she could have done much more with the material supplied her by Le Carre's novel, despite some of the flaws in it.       

How to Make a Family Notebook

Do you know how to make a family notebook? We all need a notebook of emergency information in a convenient spot in the house — just in case. As we age, the need for a family notebook is even more pronounced. In this post, I will tell you how to organize a binder so that in the event of emergency, your family can be contacted or your neighbors alerted.

I recently rearranged my notebook to include emergency numbers, family history and stories, “wisdom” I want my children to know, last wishes and funeral plans. Click here to continue reading.