Vanity Fair article on film producer Megan Ellison.

Is Megan Ellison an independent financier with vision or just funding the cool kids’ movies to hang out with them? After producing Zero Dark Thirty, the young daughter of the country’s third-richest man can afford to ignore her critics....

After long shoot days, Ellison and Chastain would watch old episodes of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. “We’d order food, pig out, watch Game of Thrones together, and relax,” the actress recalls.

Sounds like an ideal evening. (see masthead) I liked True Grit, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, and Killing Them Softly. 

I'd recommend people see Zero Dark Thirty. It's moving, entertaining and thought-provoking if troubling. Many stupid people who see it will believe the torture was justified since it provided intel. But it's questionable that it did. Torture doesn't work. And it will backfire as it has many a time. See for instance the Sha's torture regime in Iran. See Argo. Plus it's morally reprehensible. However after seeing the film, I don't believe it's as straight up of an endorsement of torture as I was led to believe. It's seem to just say it happened. (Which is a scandal for the Senators who were responsible at the time and is a scandal for the Obama administration which wanted to look forward.*) But I don't have any doubt that stupid people will see it as they want to. I don't know if you can blame Bigelow and Ellison and the screenwriter for that. It's a complicated movie which is partly why it's entertaining, if troubling.

Some common themes or elements in these films. True Grit and Zero Dark Thirty both are stories of young women on a manhunt. Killing Them Softly and Zero Dark Thirty both have images of Obama proclaiming high ideals via the television while those ideals are being betrayed in the rest of the film. It's interesting how Philip Seymour Hoffman's L. Ron Hubbard-type "Master" and Osama bin Laden both have cultish-followings - see the detainees and Joaquin Phoenix - and both are being hunted by authorities.

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*Something that struck me about The Americans: Keri Russel's Soviet spy takes it for granted that they would be brutally tortured if caught. I was 20 when the Cold War ended and I guess I naively never considered the fact our country tortures as a matter of policy until the War on Terrorism arrived.  It just wasn't discussed or I was too young to think about it.