These Were My Choices

It was either Fair Game or the movie where James Franco cuts off his own arm. So we went to see Fair Game.

I was very concerned about getting Sean Penned in my face. He only did it one and a half times. He has this 11:59 monologue about Democracy that’ll make you want to eat your empty Goobers box…otherwise, he goes straight forward.

Naomi Watts was full on direct, clear headed, an almost flat affect smart girl forever.

They found “the family story” in all this. Which makes sense. Makes it human. The other way would have been to go really deep into the Washington side of it, all those characters, but even doing that a little, which they had to do, was sort of silly. Karl Rove stand-in and the like. That stuff is always a bit wax-museumy-SNL-freakish.

So, best to stick with Wilson and Plame, the lesser known and of course, victimized ones. And they did. Doug Liman, whom we all know is a great director, directed this beautifully. Somehow, though, the whole thing comes off a bit over important and well, yeah, sermonic.

Not that the Plame case was any small deal. I mean, it was the excrescence of the lie that was lanced. But when it comes to entertainment, well, you have a lot of journalistic truth here. And as I read recently, written by some journalist, “Journalism isn’t art.”---Not that we need art so much in this area. Oh, I don’t know. Let’s get out of this paragraph.

I despised the WMD lies. Plus, I had this egotistical feeling that if I really needed to lie to get into a war, I would have come up with something so much more fanciful and complicated. They went for the simple lie---like, There’s a flesh eating monster under your bed or NAIR really will remove that hair on your back, and you believed it because you needed to so badly.

I would say, honestly, you can wait for Netflix. I hate to do that to a movie. But maybe I can help the economics of Hollywood along by offering a mild time sensitive suggestion. If a movie isn’t doing well after ten or fourteen days, let it hit Netflix by day twenty-one so the movie can still ride on some of the marketing budget already laid out for the plexes or in this case aht houses.

Wilson and Plame now live in Santa Fe. They should. It’s really nice there. And it’s a much more sensitive town to the feelings of human humans. Oh, wink. Do I need to? Damn.