This Blob is not like other Blobs ("No kidding," you're saying). It believes in modernity when it suits its purposes, and clings to anachronism when it doesn't.
Which is to say, in a world of Netflix and Hulu and watching the latest Hollywood blockbusters on the inside of your eyelids -- that's coming, trust me -- it still loves going to the movies.
It loves getting in the Blobmobile and driving to the local Whatsaplex, but only after stopping at a convenience store for illicit Junior Mints to smuggle in. It loves buying a ticket and finding a proper seat and silencing its phone as the lights go down and the sound comes up. It loves seeing a film the way it was intended to be seen, on the big screen, and making up its own mind whether it's any good or not.
That last is important. Because it explains why the Blob will probably go see "Richard Jewell," anyway, despite what the Atlanta Journal Constitution says.
The AJC has denounced the film and director Clint Eastwood, and not without reason. In presenting the story of Jewell, the security guard who was falsely accused of setting off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Eastwood apparently smears the reporter who ran with the story that Jewell was being fingered by the FBI as a suspect.
The reporter wasn't wrong. The FBI was investigating Jewell. But in the film, it's apparently strongly hinted that she slept with a source to get her tip. The AJC calls this a blatant invention, and it's made even more heinous by the fact the poor woman's been dead for almost 18 years. Artistic license is one thing; deliberate defamation of a dead person is quite another.
The word "gutless" comes to mind. Also, "a punk move."
That said ...
That said, I'll go anyway. I want to see if the film really does make a cardboard villain out of this reporter, so I can rip it for clumsy stereotyping from a position of informed opinion.
Look. There is no question Jewell was done a terrible wrong, and the media facilitated that process. The authorities jumped to conclusions, and the media used those conclusions to tear apart the poor man's life. If the entire episode isn't taught in J-school as a cautionary tale, it should be.
The problem here is "Richard Jewell" comes at a time when a disturbing segment of our nation has fallen under the spell of a ranting demagogue who regularly assails the free press as "the enemy of the people." If the film plays into that phony narrative -- if it makes you walk out of the theater cursing the free press as recklessly as the Ranting Demagogue does -- it does a disservice not only to all the good people with whom it was my honor to work for five decades, but to one of the pillars of our democracy as well.
I won't know if it does that unless I go see it. So I will.
Stay tuned.
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