Remember when Congressional Republicans like New York's Peter King were outraged about the alleged access that Katheryn Bigelow and Mark Boal — the director and writer, respectively, of the new film Zero Dark Thirty, detailing the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden — were granted by the CIA and (perhaps) members of the Obama administration?.
That outrage was based on seemingly selective leaks coming from the government of favorable actions by the Obama White House. King and others thought that Zero Dark Thirty was going to be an expensive commercial trumpeting Obama just before last November's election, and called for hearings on the issue.
Sony Pictures later opted to release the film after the election, and Zero Dark Thirty is now out across the country (opening nationwide this past weekend after a month of limited release in select U.S. cities). The film's critics are mostly (but not exclusively) comprised of liberals in Congress angered by what they see as the film's implication that torture yielded information that helped us find Bin Laden.
Unlike in some other American cities, there were no protests outside the Hyde Park CineBistro where this reporter caught the 2:40 p.m. screening on Saturday afternoon.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2013.