Roosevelt's secret war

After reading Jack 1939, I picked this one up: interesting, detailed. Stopped at p. 360

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Murky remake of the Alec Guiness's serialisations of two novels by John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. A little difficult to follow, for the slow twists and subtle turns, as well as the at times thick accents, but, ultimately, good cinema.

The Debt

Anthony Lane (not David Denby, as I mistakenly misremembered) reviewed this film in the New Yorker 21 September 2011 issue.
As with Spielberg’s “Munich,” there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie’s urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to “The Debt”? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.

It received a 6.9 rating in IMDb.com, and a 76% - 67% rating in RottenTomatoes. I have a calendar entry on 26 August 2011, moved up from earlier. I finally got it yesterday, and watched it last night. I rather liked it.

I liked it quite a bit. The three less renowned, younger, actors do much better work than the older, more renowned actors. All six rather botch the Israeli accent, but, again, the three younger ones do better with it.

A.O. Scott in the Times: The labors of the cast help to make “The Debt” a compact, reasonably clever and sometimes piquant entertainment, but they also make you aware that it could have been more.

Increment

Ignatius, David. (2009). The increment. New York: W.W. Norton.

A nuclear scientist with a conscientious objection to the regime ruling Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon contacts the CIA through its website. A virtual walkin, or VW, he comes to the attention of Harry Pappas, an agent with his own conscience who wants to stop the Administration from hurtling toward imposing an embargo on, and perhaps bombing, Iran.
     Ignatius writes a believable tale, an enjoyable what if?

One review in the Washington Post offers a compliment: It may lack fireworks, but it bears the hard weight of both political and personal history and recognizes the seriousness of what might come next.
One in the Guardian is a bit more reticent: well paced and suspenseful, and the attention to local detail (downtown Tehran is rendered as vividly as top-level CIA briefings) convincing enough to excuse the occasional stereotype.

Operation Mincemeat

Checking for Operation Mincemeat : Macintyre, Ben, and came across this:  Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat by Smyth, Denis.

Curiously, I read the original and saw the movie based on it after coming across a mention of it in one of David Ignatius's books.

Operation Mincemeat

Courtesy of Jeremy Montagu/From “Operation Mincemeat” - Charles Cholmondeley, left, and Ewen Montagu in April 1943, about to put their ruse in motion.


Excellent westerns have been composed by people who could barely ride a horse, and the best writers of sex scenes are often novelists you wouldn’t wish to see naked. But when it comes to spy fiction, life and art tend to collide fully: nearly all of the genre’s greatest practitioners worked in intelligence before signing their first book contract. “W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand,” Ben Macintyre writes in his new book, “Operation Mincemeat.” “For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.” Both are lurkers, confounders, ironists, betrayers: in a word, they’re spooks.

Mr. Macintyre himself writes about spies so craftily, and so ebulliently, that you half suspect him of being some type of spook himself. It is apparently not so. He is a benign-seeming writer at large and associate editor at The Times of London, a father of three and the author of five previous, respected nonfiction books, including “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal” (2007). Perhaps he is also controlling predator drones and a flock of assassins from a basement compound. But, alas, I doubt it.

“Operation Mincemeat” is utterly, to employ a dead word, thrilling. But to call it thus is to miss the point slightly, in terms of admiring it properly. Mr. Macintyre has got his hands around a true story that’s so wind-swept, so weighty and so implausible that the staff of a college newspaper, high on glue sticks, could surely take its basic ingredients and not completely muck things up.

I first read about this in David Ignatius's book, Body of Lies. That was after seeing the film with Leo DiCaprio. In turn, I went to the film, The man who never was, with Clifton Webb, and its eponymous book.

Breach

Rather good. Suspenseful, gripping. Chris Cooper does his usual superb job of understatedly portraying a character; Ryan Phillipe is excellent. Laura Linney's character is drab, and her talent is wasted.