One-Liners: Fact

WE STEAL SECRETS: THE STORY OF WIKILEAKS (B+) - This is just as much the story of Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning as it is the story of Julian Assange. Director Alex Gibney certainly knows the drill here, having covered Enron, Ken Kesey, and Freakonomics and making the classic Iraq doc "Taxi to the Dark Side." He excels again here with a sharp portrait of the WikiLeaks movement.

Gibney's biggest challenge is to illustrate the key text and email communications between the various sources here: WikiLeaks, the leakers, and the journalists.  Gibney keeps it simple, with words typed out over a dark background, making Manning's lonesome dispatches especially seem like a single voice out in (cyber)space.

We get drama, with the saga of Assange, the (trumped up?) sex scandal, and the breakup of his team, plus a few bizarre interview segments with his rival, the hacker Adrian Lamo, who handed Manning to the feds. Several talking heads raise an interesting question: Why is Assange a demonized persona non grata while the mainstream publications that published the information -- the Times, the Post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel -- remain on the U.S. government's good side.

The film ends before the unfolding of some key recent events -- such as the sentencing of Manning -- but Gibney smartly takes a snapshot of an important ongoing story and whips up a hell of a story. 

ICEBERG SLIM:  PORTRAIT OF A PIMP (B-minus) - This is an occasionally fascinating -- but just as often disturbing -- look at the life of Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim, a hoodlum and pimp turned author. He's a rather obscure figure, but he stands as one representative of the black experience in the middle of the 20th century. His classic books of street life from the late '60s and 1970s established him as a serious author, whose books are still read and celebrated today.

Celeb talking heads who celebrate the onetime brute include Ice T (quite the fanboy), Chris Rock, Snoop Dogg and Quincy Jones, and all contribute key perspectives on Slim's story or his place in modern culture. As Leon Isaac Kennedy (!) notes, the point of paying tribute to a man who used to whore out women and beat them is not to glorify his past but rather to tell a story of redemption.

The film is too often visually weak; it suffers from a dearth of archival footage and has to rely on photo tricks that fall flat and on animation to fill in the early years. The interviews with Beck himself are taken from previous productions (he died in 1992 at 74); one interview in a bar is immersed in the look and the texture of the 1970s. Those scattered interviews, however, leave the proceedings feeling choppy and a bit random at times. Whatever the limitations of journeyman filmmaker Jorge Hinojosa, the story of Iceberg Slim is worth checking out.