Asawin Suebsaeng is the interactive writing fellow at the Washington, DC, bureau of Mother Jones. He has also written for The American Prospect, the Bangkok Post, and Shoecomics.com.
A graduate of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., Asawin came back to DC with hopes of putting his flimsy Creative Writing major, student newspaper tenure, and interest in human rights and political chicanery to some use. He started cutting his teeth at F&M's student-run weekly, The College Reporter, serving as editor in chief. He has interned at The American Prospect, been a reporter for the Bangkok Post, and scribbled for ShoeComics.com. His favorite movie is either Apocalypse Now or Pirahna 3D, depending on the day or mood.
At Any Price, a bleak family drama set against the backdrop of the Corn Belt, is essentially Death of a Salesman, but with genetically modified superseeds.
The film is co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who the late critic Roger Ebert dubbed the new "director of the decade," soon after seeing Bahrani's 2007 film Chop Shop. At Any Price stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (last seen getting peed on by Nicole Kidman in a Lee Daniels art film last year) as a father and son living their lives of noisy desperation.
Quaid plays Henry Whipple (no, not that Henry Whipple), an adulterous farmer and salesman entrenched in the ruthless, multimillion-dollar rivalry between Iowa's big-business farmers. Henry becomes the target of a corporate investigation after illegally washing and reselling patented genetically modified seeds. Efron plays Dean, a local stock car racing champion who dreams of ditching the family business and making a name for himself as a NASCAR driver.
The pair's disenchantment and bitterness result in a wave of betrayal, anger, and violence in their otherwise peaceful Midwestern town. The filmis a quietly disturbing little picture, and features some magnificent acting, especially by Quaid.
The film is not (as Bahrani is quick to point out) in any way political, even though the story prominently involves GMOs, a controversial and extremelypolitical topic these days. The origin of this apolitical film, however, is indeed rooted in Bahrani's very political interests. In a conversation I had with Bahrani and Quaid, the 38-year-old director explained how he went about writing At Any Price:
I was curious where my food was coming from. I was reading authors like Michael Pollan...And I started realizing that farms aren't romantic places anymore—they're big businesses. So Michael Pollan and I became email friends, and I asked him to introduce me to George Naylor, who's a farmer in Iowa who was featured in [Pollan's 2006 book] The Omnivore's Dilemma. So I went out and I lived with George for many months, and when I went out there, all the farmers kept telling me, "expand or die, get big or get out." And I met a seed salesman, [and] I never knew there was such an occupation as "GMO seed salesman"...And [he] made me think ofArthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. And I thought combining these things would be a way to tell a human and emotional story...When you have a lot of race cars and infidelity, it's hard to be an "agenda film."
(So there you have it: You can thank Michael Pollan for indirectly causing the development of Zac Efron's newest movie.)
Bahrani pulled from John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Peter Bogdanovich for narrative and stylistic influences. He also shadowed several Iowa farmers, incorporating their sentiments and commentary into his screenplay. One day, Bahrani noticed that a customer of one of the farmers owned a stock car for figure 8 racing—an observation he used to craft Efron's character. "I YouTube'd [figure 8 racing] that night, and I made a point to keep going to Iowa to go see races," Bahrani says. "I thought it would be a good contrast [for the two characters]...It had a different pace, and a different energy, and a different adrenaline."
Dennis Quaid didn't have time to conduct anything close to this level of research for his role. His learning experiences were all in the midst of production: "We shot it on a real farm," Quaid says. "I didn't have a trailer for this; it was my car or the living-room couch of the Hermans, the family [whose] farm we were shooting on... I spent my time with them, trying to soak up the atmosphere."
Check out the trailer for this tense and surprising drama:
At Any Price gets a wider release on Friday, May 3. The film is rated R for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language.Click here for local showtimes and tickets.
Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.
We're not quite there yet.20th Cenury Fox/Entertainment Pictures/ZUMAPRESS.com
"We are not talking about things that will look like an army of Terminators," Steve Goose, a spokesman for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, tells me. "Stealth bombers and armored vehicles—not Terminators." Goose, the director of Human Rights Watch's arms division, has been working with activists and other experts to demand an international ban on robotic military weapons capable of eliminating targets without the aid of human interaction or intervention, i.e., killer robots.
The bluntly titled campaign, which at sounds like something from a Michael Bay flick or Austin Powers, involves nine organizations, including the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. The campaign is spearheading a preemptive push against efforts to develop and potentially deploy fully autonomous killer robots—a form of hi-tech weaponry that doesn't actually exist yet.
"I'm not against autonomous robots—my vacuum is an autonomous robot," says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (and a fixture on British television). "We are simply calling for a prohibition on the kill function on such robots. A robot doesn't have moral agency, and can't be held accountable for crimes. There's no way to punish a robot."
Michael Bay, on the set of "Transformers" with Airmen at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.Tech. Sgt. Larry A. Simmons/US Air Force
Michael Bay is one of the most intensely reviled filmmakers of the past 30 years.
"The crassest hack in the business," Rolling Stone's Peter Travers—perhaps Bay's least generous critic—said of the director after watching 2003's Bad Boys II. "Is Michael Bay the Devil?" an Entertainment Weeklyheadline read in 1998. SouthPark co-creator Trey Parker wrote an entire love song for Team America: World Police about how much he thinks Michael Bay is terrible.
Bay has been nominated for four different "Worst Director" Golden Raspberry Awards—a near-record. "Michael Bay is quite the perennial!" says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards. "I don't think he's an adult filmmaker. He has this tendency to revert to the model of, 'It's Been 7 Minutes, Something Has to Blow Up Now.'"
This near-constant stream of criticism and condemnation of which the director is fully aware.
And he insists he couldn't possibly care less about it.
"I really, really don't care," Bay tells me, calling from Los Angeles. "For instance, you look at the box office returns: Break it down, and you see that 120 million people went to see Transformers 3. So, you know, 500 critics are not going to take the fun out of it for me. I make movies for people. I make movies for audiences to enjoy. A few sour apples are not going to spoil my fun."
Forget Zero Dark Thirty. Instead, check out director Greg Barker's intimate look at the dogged nerds and tough-guy CIA officials who spent decades on Osama bin Laden's trail. This doc (based on Peter Bergen's 2012 book) has the pulse of a Michael Mann thriller, tracing the hunt from long before Al Qaeda became a household name. It offers a fascinating glimpse at "the Sisterhood," a crew of female CIA analysts who were "borderline obsessed" with nailing bin Laden in the 1990s. Details of their vital desk work are contrasted with interviews with former CIA higher-up (and torture advocate) Marty Martin, who refers to his "gangsta"-like role harvesting intel overseas.
Manhunt premieres Wednesday, May 1 (the two-year anniversary of the mission that killed bin Laden) at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT. Check out the trailer:
Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones.
This review originally appeared in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.
On Monday morning, the New York Times ran a story reporting that for the past decade the CIA has been funneling tens of millions of dollars, off-the-books, directly to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The payments, occasionally dropped off in plastic bags, were part of the intelligence agency's attempts to buy access in Karzai's government and encourage support for the war against Al Qaeda and extremist elements. The CIA continued to transfer hundreds of thousands in cash, even as it became increasingly clear that the cash wasn't doing much to curb Karzai's tendency to defy and frustrate the United States government. Afghan officials have used the payments for an assortment of expenses, including underwriting "informal negotiations" and buying off warlords, some of whom are connected to the Taliban.
"We called it 'ghost money,'" Khalil Roman, Karzai's former deputy chief of staff, told the Times. "It came in secret, and it left in secret."
Since the news broke, Karzai released a statement admitting his office accepted the funds, but claiming that the small fortune was used only for legitimate and noble purposes, such as rental costs and helping "injured people." (Years ago, it was reported that Karzai's now deceased half-brother was a paid CIA asset.)
The Times report notes that though intelligence agencies will often pay foreign officials for information or influence, pouring satchels of "ghost money" directly into a foreign leader's office is a less common practice. However sketchy this sounds (and however corruption-infected the Karzai government may be), such transfers do not violate American law. "Under US law, there are statues that prohibit the payment of bribes in securing contracts, if you're [a part of] a corporation; but such laws don't necessarily apply to the US government itself," John Prados, a senior research fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, says. "There is no provision in any executive order that governs the intelligence community that prevents this kind of thing...Cash is the mainstay of American covert operations in Afghanistan."
And this is not new. Here are a few other episodes in recent history in which the CIA has secretly sent wads of "ghost money" to the offices of foreign leaders:
Iran
Following the Western-backed coup in 1953 against democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, CIA officer Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, Jr. (grandson of Teddy) sent over $1 million cash to General Fazlollah Zahedi, who replaced Mossadegh as prime minister.
South Vietnam
As American intervention in Vietnam deepened, the CIA lavished three-quarters of a million dollars on South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu between 1968 and 1969. He had come to power following years of chaos caused by the CIA-supported coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.
The Congo/Zaire
Being a vicious anti-communist authoritarian, President Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire received CIA dollars of appreciation during several decades of the Cold War. He rose to power in the early 1960s with the help of a lot of foreign-supplied guns and cash, much of which was provided to him by you know who.
Jordan
Between the 1957 and 1977, the CIA allegedly paid millions of dollars to King Hussein of Jordan. Accounts of how these annual payments were used vary greatly. Some reports detail payments for extra security for the royal family, sports cars, and intel gathering.
Panama
Manuel Noriega, former US friend and military ruler of Panama, was on the agency payroll during his epic streak of racketeering, drug running, and money-laundering, as he turned Panama into his own private piggy bank. Shortly before Christmas 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion that got rid of him.
This is the kind of thing that "ghost money" buys you.
