“The Good Shepherd” (2006)

This is the kind of movie I should love. A fiction- alized version of the birth of the CIA, it ranges over the world, with lots of period scenes handled well. OK, so it unsympathetically ends with the Bay of Pigs disaster, one of the CIA’s worst moments. The Bay of Pigs is, after all, part of the agency’s history.

Here’s what I really didn’t like. The movie included a long torture scene, complete with waterboarding and ending in an innocent’s death. So the movie’s really a slam at today’s CIA.

At the end of the scene, just before the wrongly-tortured KGB defector defenestrates himself and while he is still on “truth serum,” he shouts the U.S. is artificially keeping the Cold War going in order to support its military-industrial complex, even though the Soviet Union is a weak enemy hollowed out from within, as the CIA well knows. Not a correct description of a time when the U.S.S.R. led the U.S. in the space race, possessed long-range rockets able to wipe out entire U.S. cities, and was still allied with a China that had fought us to a draw in Korea. So why the distortion? Because producers want to whack anyone currently proclaiming al-Qaeda a major threat in order, in the eyes of the producers, to keep America’s military-industrial complex healthy.

The movie also gives great attention to Yale’s secret “Skull and Bones” society, letting us know it was anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and fairly perverted. The movie did not say George Bush was “Skull and Bones.” Flatter yourself for figuring that out on your own.

Ah, Hollywood.