Salon.com > Fair Game

“Fair Game”: Ready for a Bush-era flashback yet?

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 00:30:00 +0000

Well, so maybe November wasn't the perfect month to roll out "Fair Game," director Doug Liman's handsome mixed-bag drama about the Valerie Plame affair and the Bush administration's war buildup, which stars Naomi Watts as the defrocked CIA agent and Sean Penn as Joseph Wilson, her ex-diplomat husband. Recent history, especially when it's this unpleasant, is often a pretty tough sell in the movies. And the filmmakers' efforts to turn l'affaire Plame into a rousing, Capra-esque populist fable were ruthlessly undercut earlier this week, with powerful evidence that We the People are incapable of learning anything from any kind of history, and just lurch from one pole to the other like drunken rats in an electrified maze.

Early Oscar odds: “Inception” vs. “Social Network”

Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:01:00 +0000

Question: Is it too unbearably early to begin thinking about the annual winter circus that is Oscar season? Answer: Never! Or at least not after the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, the unofficial starting gun of award-mania, have gotten us started.

Let me save your comment-typin' fingers a workout and stipulate the following: No, the Oscars are no indication of quality, historically speaking; yes, the best films of the year (whether by my standards or yours) are often overlooked; and yes, covering movies by focusing overmuch on the Oscar race resembles the horse-race coverage of American politics and signifies the downfall of journalism in particular and civilization in general. But you want to know about it anyway, so let's move on. (Check out my Movie List for an utterly subjective and totally non-market-driven ranking of the year's best and worst movies.)

“Fair Game”: Relive the Bush-Cheney wonder years

Thu, 20 May 2010 17:30:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- Travel with me now back to the glorious days of 2002 and 2003. Remember what a great time it was? The Bush administration lied to us over and over again, on a vast scale, about the reasons it was going to war in Iraq, and the media repeated it all with the deep and sincere conviction of robots trained as Method actors. Massive international protests, among the largest in history, accomplished nothing (or so it seemed at the time). When the White House was called on its lies, it set out to bulldoze those who were telling the truth.

What's that you say? You don't want to go? Everything about that dismal epoch makes you want to drink absinthe until you vomit? Therein lies the problem for "Fair Game," an engrossing and briskly paced drama that stars Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent outed by the Bush White House, and Sean Penn as her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson. (The screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth is based on Plame and Wilson's memoirs.) To care about this unusual and highly sympathetic central couple, one must risk reawakening all the painful emotions surrounding America's ill-fated rush to war in Iraq, very likely a top-10 entry on the list of Things This Country Has Really Fucked Up.