The film doesn’t deserve a rebirth on home video. The story is difficult to swallow, and thrillers need far more shocks than the few doled out here. But star Daniel Craig invests so much in the main character that you’ll keep watching just to see how the tortured story resolves.

Craig plays Will Atenton, a writer who leaves his posh publishing gig to write the next great American novel — or British novel, perhaps, given his plummy accent.

Will retreats to his family’s snow-kissed home and a wife (Rachel Weisz) and two daughters who look like they sneaked out of a ’50s family sitcom.

It’s all too bloody perfect, and soon we’ll see why.

The house Will calls home once belonged to a family murdered by the father. Naturally, the real estate agent neglected to mention this fact to Will, but some curious run-ins with a beautiful neighbor (Naomi Watts in an utterly thankless role) and some goth-lovin’ teens fill in the blanks. What’s worse, the home is frequently stalked by strangers, and when Will summons the police for help, they all but shrug their shoulders.

The trailer’s big reveal isn’t the true story here, but the film doesn’t improve when the narrative switches from psychological horror to straightforward mystery.

It’s all too daffy to  gin up our interest, with screenwriter David Loucka (“Borderline”) using Will’s delusional mind to unfairly trick us at every turn. But Craig’s Will is so full of good cheer and so crestfallen when reality sneaks  up on his cobalt blue eyes that we keep rooting for a finale superior to the set up.

Nothing doing. Most horror movies wish they had set designs as gorgeous as what’s seen here, but even the lowest of low-budget shockers are more effective at getting under our skin than this “House.”

The Blu-ray extras manage to transcend the flawed feature film. “Burning Down the House” breaks down how a critical sequence late in the film avoided both CGI and singeing the film’s cast. Special effects maestros describe how some propane tanks, a well placed fireball and some flame-proof paint helped create a firefighter’s nightmare.

Director Jim Sheridan clearly has had enough of computer-aided effects, and in “Building the Dream House” he says as much while exploring how the titular “House” became an uncredited character in the film. In fact, hearing how the location scouts found the structure used in the movie as well as how it was recreated on a sound stage for interior shots is a reminder that even inferior movies require a staggering amount of preparation.

Had the “Dream House” screenplay received such tender loving care, it might have fared better with film goers.

Clint Eastwood is a different brand of director. He’s more nuanced, more reasonable, and he won’t let his knee jerk while telling a complicated story.

—–

Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is all richer for the director’s cautious instincts. We re-learn why Hoover is both celebrated and mocked thanks to a powerhouse turn by Leonardo DiCaprio as the nation’s longest-serving FBI director.

“J. Edgar” ultimately seems disinterested in Hoover as a law man or rule breaker. The film trots out a series of arguments for and against his hard-line tactics, not bothering to weigh in on either side of the ledger. Instead, it frames a love story between two men who cannot act on their urges – or even admit them out loud.

“J. Edgar” opens with the hoariest of storytelling devices – Hoover himself dictating his life story to a typist drone. We flash back to Hoover’s first few years with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, a time when the Communist movement was first commanding his attention. Right away, Hoover sees the infiltration as a movement that must be snuffed out, and it doesn’t matter how many rules must bend to make that happen.

Hoover rises up the FBI ranks with impressive speed, the only roadblock coming when a dainty FBI peer (Naomi Watts) rebuffs his clumsy advances. From there, we get a dollop of American History 101 – from the Lindbergh baby theft to Hoover wrangling with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Even better, we see how Hoover dragged the bureau into the modern age, focusing on fingerprint research and other forensic tools to serve the public good.

The film’s chronological time line gets tortured by screenwriter Dustin Lance Black of “Milk” fame. Some flashbacks make sense, while others keep us at a distance from the subject at hand. That leaves a series of clipped but rewarding sequences, all held together by DiCaprio’s impressive transformation into a man incapable of giving lawbreakers an inch. Yet “J. Edgar” ignores some ripe chapters from the 20th century, like Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Communist hunt.

“McCarthy was an opportunist, not a patriot,” Hoover huffs.

Hoover pours all of his energy into his job, but he’s gobsmacked when he meets a fellow agent named Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). Their bond matures over time, and it’s here where Eastwood takes the utmost of care not to overstep his duty to history. Those who refuse to believe the FBI chief led a closeted life won’t like the bigger picture rendered here, but even in a scene where Hoover and Tolson fight, and then briefly wrestle, Eastwood keeps a steely grip on the proceedings.

“J. Edgar” strips the screen of any color that might distract from Hoover himself, leaving a muted palette full of dark blues, browns and gray. He stages a few tense stand-offs to pump up the storytelling volume, including incidents when Hoover wanted to show he was as tough as the agents who broke down doors to nab the bad guys.

Such gimmickry can’t hide how poorly the screenplay illustrate Hoover’s evolution from young crime fighter to FBI chief willing to smash laws to get the job done. The best Black can do is paint Hoover’s mother (Judi Dench) in uniformly cruel tones, handcuffing the Oscar-winning actress in a role ill-suited for her talents.

Hollywood routinely tries – and fails – to convincingly age actors to tell tales that span the decades. Here, DiCaprio is burdened with layers of latex, and yet both the presentation and the actor underneath are darn near flawless.

For all of Hoover’s accomplishments, his life story doesn’t translate into a sweeping epic of consequence. Instead, “J. Edgar” is like a Merchant/Ivory romance, one told with furtive glances, the occasional caress and the knowledge that love isn’t enough to beat back societal expectations.

]]> http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/cftoto/2011/11/09/j-edgar-review-eastwoods-ode-to-an-fbi-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/feed/ 57 http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/hollywoodland/2011/11/02/naomi-watts-and-valerie-plame-wilson-re-team-to-scrap-nukes-save-the-budget/ http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/hollywoodland/2011/11/02/naomi-watts-and-valerie-plame-wilson-re-team-to-scrap-nukes-save-the-budget/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:46:36 +0000 Hollywoodland http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/?p=534576 Naomi Watts and Valerie Plame Wilson are teaming up – again – but this time it’s about more than whitewashing history via the big screen.

Watts portrayed the former CIA operative in ‘Fair Game,’ the 2010 feature on Wilson’s famous outing by a member of the Bush administration.

—–

Now, the two women are joining forces to compel the Obama administration to “cut nuclear weapons instead of education and other priorities.”

Their new Public Service Announcement asks citizens to sign a Global Zero pledge found at CutNukes.org. Global Zero is an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Here’s some text from the just-released PSA:

Naomi: This fall our kids start the new school year in the middle of an economic crisis.  There are fewer teachers and extra curricular programs, and more overcrowding in our schools.

Valerie: In the face of this global economic crisis governments around the world are slashing funding for education, and the things that really matter to most of us.

Naomi: Meanwhile over the next decade, governments will spend one trillion dollars on nuclear weapons globally.

Valerie: We’re both mothers, and along with Global Zero we’re urging our government to invest our tax dollars in essential things like education, jobs, health care and not in useless, dangerous weapons that belong in the dustbin of history.

I was a bit of a fraidy-cat when I was a kid.  I used to sleepwalk after seeing scary movies, or if that didn’t happen, I would awake-walk into my parents’ room for a hug from Mom.   In order to confront that embarrassing—if amusing—childhood demon, I became a bit of a horror buff.  Hopefully my pain is your gain.

Five Movies to Watch This Halloween

“Return of the Living Dead” (1985)
In this “cult classic,” a group of punk rock-loving teens venture out to pick up a friend from his job at a medical supply shop in Louisville, Kentucky.  When a foreman opens up a military drum that was accidentally sent to the shop—which, oh-by-the-way has an UNDEAD BODY IN IT!!—all zombie-hell breaks loose.

The film is genuinely funny, has a couple of good scares, and a rockin’ soundtrack, but it also injected life into the genre because all the zombies run (fast!) and most of them talk.  Like this one:

Doesn’t she look familiar?  Check out this zombie from “The Walking Dead.”

The B-plot, featuring an Army Colonel on a mysterious, tedious, yet seemingly extremely important mission, is tied up brilliantly in the frightening, apocalyptic conclusion.

But what really puts this film over the top is that it features the best zombie of all time, Tarman.  Gruesome, evil, and with just the right amount of camp, the zombie that first exclaimed “BRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSS!!” before chowing down on the cerebral cortex of some young punk deserves a place in cinematic lore.

One of the least scary on this list, “Return of the Living Dead” is good for non-horror fans.

“Let the Right One In” (2008)
One of the best vampire films of all time.  It’s a coming-of-age love story—imagine a Swedish pre-teen “Twilight” with a lot less sparkles and a lot more blood-sucking—that has become more relevant today thanks to the left’s obsession with bullying.  Unlike Hollywood celebrities who think whiny PSAs and hate-crime legislation are the ways to snuff out bullies, “Let the Right One In” takes a slightly different approach: fight back with all you have.  I guarantee your jaw hits the floor when the bad guys get their comeuppance.

“Let Me In,” the inappropriately titled American remake, is nearly as good as the original.

“Zombieland” (2009)
Much like how marijuana is a “gateway” drug, “Zombieland” is a gateway horror film.  If you have a significant other who is uneasy with monster movies, show her this to win her over to the genre.  Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin journey across America to an amusement park, hilariously slaughtering the undead in the most creative ways possible.  “Zombieland” is the funniest zombie film I’ve ever seen, and unlike “The Walking Dead,” for example, you become emotionally attached to its unique and sympathetic characters.

It also features one of the greatest cameos ever.

“Dawn of the Dead” (2004)
George Romero’s original is perhaps the ultimate zombie director’s best film, but Zack Snyder’s remake may be the scariest living-dead flick.  Though it’s a massive departure from Romero’s classic—Snyder’s version is lighter on social commentary and heavier on gore—the visionary director of “300” and “Watchmen” (and “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole“) proves there’s clearly more than one way to skin a cat… or reanimate a corpse.

“The Orphanage” (2007)
An ominous, morally sophisticated character study of a woman coping with the sudden disappearance of her young child.  There isn’t much violence beyond a finger being broken in broad daylight (a truly horrifying scene) and there are no cheapo scares, but impeccable direction from first-timer Juan Antonio Bayona, a moving performance from Spanish actress Belén Rueda, and a monstrous boy wearing a gunny-sack mask make “El Orfanato” truly captivating cinema.

***

More Scary Movies of Note

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974)
John Nolte’s favorite horror movie, and for good reason.

“28 Days/Weeks Later” (2002/2007)
“28 Days Later” should score points with conservative moviegoers from the very start, when we learn the fastest zombies on two feet are a product of environmental activism gone horribly wrong.  Unfortunately, “Days” squanders that good will in the third act when the military starts trying to rape the women.  The ship is righted with a briskly paced and beautifully shot sequel.  Both are very frightening.

“The Ring” (2002)
The premise of the film sounds gimmicky: teens watch a videotape with a bunch of (really really) creepy images on it, and then they die seven days later.  Stupid… right?  Nuh uh… Start to finish, this is one of the scariest movies ever made.  A never-better Naomi Watts and gorgeously-eerie cinematography make the momentum build to what you think is a satisfying ending, until… what did that creepy little boy just say!?!

“Day of the Dead” (1985)
The third film from the “Godfather of all Zombies” may be a left-wing screed against the military (though a very well done one), but the semi-socialized zombie Bub—who listens to headphones, salutes, and shoots guns—makes “Day” a must-see.  Watch this one after “Return” and let us know whether you think Bub or Tarman is history’s top zombie.

“Gigli“ (2003)
Not a traditional horror film, but this Bennifer vehicle is every bit as ghastly as anything on this list.  There are movies that are so bad that they’re good, there are movies that are so bad that there is no amount of entertainment to be gleaned from them, and then there’s “Gigli.”  Scary.

***

One More to Watch… Any Time

In terms of horror/scary/Halloween movies, “The Exorcist” (1973) is in a class by itself.  Not only is it the scariest movie of all time, it’s a clear articulation of what it means to be a Catholic and the power of faith in God.

More than anything, the story is about Father Damien Karras, a Priest struggling with his own faith, who is called to perform an exorcism on a young girl whose body and mind have been inhabited by a demon.  The demon picked this innocent child to make us despair, and it’s only by overcoming his doubts and putting his full trust in God that Damien is able to triumph over pure evil.

As Christians, all of us question our beliefs periodically, and this portrayal of a priest challenges professors and other left-wing intellectuals who largely consider religious people blind dogmatists.  In fact, I’d argue atheists tend to be much more dogmatic than Christians and Jews because they are more frequently than not unwavering in their denial of God.

“The Exorcist” is vulgar, disgusting, and unrelentingly terrifying, and it’s also one of the greatest stories of faith and sacrifice ever portrayed on film.

That’s why any day of the year is an excellent day for an exorcism.

Happy Halloween!

Liman introduces Plame as a Jack Ryanette, a CIA field agent undercover in the big bad Middle East muscling bad guys, recruiting spies, and at the center of much of the activity involving the pre-Iraq War intelligence gathering  with respect to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. Her husband, a former diplomat with extensive experience in Iraq and Africa, runs some sort of international business out of the couple’s lovely home with two young children constantly underfoot.

As part of the case for war, the CIA and the White House are both eager to verify a British intelligence report (that the British stand by to this day) that claims Saddam sought the purchase of enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Because of Wilson’s experience and contacts, Plame is asked by her superior to draft something up explaining why her husband would be qualified to go to Niger and report back on the lay of the land. She does, and in 2002 Wilson goes and finds no evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping.  Afterwards, in his State of the Union, President Bush uses those now famous 16 words that seem to contradict Wilson’s report and in turn Wilson decides to go public with a New York Times op-ed that essentially claims the president knowingly lied.

According to the film, what follows is that the White house — specifically Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby (who has the only memorable scene in the film) and Karl Rove — set out to destroy Wilson’s credibility by leaking to columnist Robert Novak that his CIA Operative wife got him the Niger gig, which effectively blows Plame’s cover to everyone from her closest friends to the many field operatives she handles throughout the world. The human toll is both on her marriage and in putting those she’s worked with in Iraq in mortal danger.

In the vacuum of a straight-forward film, the first half of “Fair Game” actually works quite well. The various dynamics involving Plame’s field operations, the tensions between the White House and the CIA, and Wilson’s personal struggle to not feel like a nanny as his wife globe-trots into the center of real-time history makes for a compelling story. Once Plame is outed, though,  the whole structure collapses into Lifetime Movie melodrama, speechifying, a mind-numbing amount of exposition, and of course a dizzying array of lies, both big and small.

Rove passes something sinister to Libby…

Liman’s first Big Lie is also the most comical. Despite all the sinister White House doings Liman puts on display, it is just a fact that no one at the White House leaked Plame’s name to Novak or to anyone else. That information came to the late columnist through Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in the form of offhand gossip. Armitage was not only no fan of the Iraq War, he was frequently and publicly at odds with the Bush White House over it.

Regardless of this well-known fact, at no time does Liman tell his audience this…  until after the final fade with a short paragraph that finally identifies the leaker as Armitage and effectively undercuts all the sinister goings on that came before. Imagine “All the President’s Men” ending with the acknowledgement that all the president’s men had no knowledge of the Watergate cover up. Then, in a laughable attempt to salvage what little is left of the film’s credibility, Liman adds a second paragraph informing us that Armitage learned of Plame’s identity through a White House memo — as though that means a goddamn thing.  

Liman’s second Big Lie is one of omission. It is yet another fact that Wilson’s repeated assertion that his wife didn’t recommend him for the Niger job is a lie, as were his repeated statements claiming he had thoroughly discredited all claims of Saddam seeking uranium from Niger. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe those famous Bush-lovers over at the Washington Post:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

“Fair Game’s” plot might be simplistic and melodramatic, but if Oliver Stone’s taught us anything it’s that facts don’t matter when it comes to telling a compelling story. At its core this is a movie about the relationship between Plame and Wilson. So in order for the film to work, we have to be emotionally invested in these characters, believe in the turmoil they’re going through as a couple, and be rooting for them to find a way to stay together. If we don’t believe, nothing works, but because Liman just can’t stop lying, he destroys this element — the only one that matters — by refusing to deal with the Vanity Fair elephant in the room.

The film that will now be known as “The Good Fair Game’”

The signature moment of the this entire non-scandal/story was Wilson and Plame’s narcissistic decision to appear (photographs and all) in the January 2004 issue of Vanity Fair. Everyone in the world knows the globe-trotting, undercover, CIA. operative with important ongoing field operations agreed to do this, but in the film when Wilson asks her to, the scene plays out as though this request was the final breaking point in their marriage. She’s appalled he would consider such things and soon after she moves out of the house, divorce is in the air, and the elephant looks directly into the camera and says, “Can you believe this shit?”

Then it gets worse…

Plame’s entire character arc is based on her coming to the realization that her reluctance to publicly fight back against the White House was wrong and that her husband was right all along. In the film’s final reconciliation scene, she comes to this conclusion and makes her teary-eyed confession but only after Libby is indicted (not for leaking Plame’s name but for lying to investigators, which he was likely guilty of), which happened in October of 2005, almost two years after the Vanity Fair spread!

No one’s liberal enough to sit there and believe that the same woman who we all know posed for Vanity Fair is the same woman we’re watching in that scene. And it’s at this moment where the lies, big and small, finally overwhelm even the story’s artistic integrity and topples it all into a smoldering pile of failure where once a monument to liberal wish-fulfillment proudly stood.

ADDED: Be sure to read the Daily Caller’s much more in-depth, wonky, and just plain devastating takedown of “Fair Game’s” serial lies.

“What about the person we show it too? What happens to them?”

As we reach the heart of my top ten you’re going to discover that (for the most part) the purer the horror the more satisfied I am. Films that end on a mystery solved/ danger over/group hug beat, like “The Sixth Sense,” make for splendid ghost stories but lack something in The Department of True Horror. And most films that try to fool you into thinking that you may now exhale and roam about the cabin, simply don’t work. You see the final “shock” coming a mile away.  Then there’s director Gore Verbinski’s relentlessly creepy and atmospheric remake of the Japanese horror film “Ringu” (1998) which, thanks to a very well-crafted piece of misdirection, succeeds where so many others fail with what you might call its fourth act; a stunner of a final plot turn that leaves you a little breathless.

It sounds like an urban legend (and a hokey concept for a movie), one of those tales teenagers tell to scare one another. Out there somewhere is a VHS tape of what would otherwise come off as a pretentious short art film if not for the fact that when it’s over your phone rings and someone informs you that your life expectancy has just been reduced to seven days. When the legend becomes fact for Rachel Keller’s (Naomi Watts) teen-aged niece, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reporter sets out to uncover a mystery she’s sure will involve something worldly (like drugs) but instead finds herself embroiled in an enthralling, supernatural puzzle involving, among other things, insanity, horses that commit suicide, and an unsettling little girl named Samara who might have been killed by her own mother.

Watts is superb carrying the film all on her own lovely shoulders. As the stakes steadily increase and as time runs out, Rachel is never anything less than capable and resourceful – only a step or two ahead of the audience (as it should be). Nothing contrived occurs to artificially move the plot and best of all, Rachel never does anything stupid. She’s a formidable protagonist and Ehren Kruger’s intelligent screenplay doesn’t let her down.  

Wisely, Verbinski takes his time in telling the story. The quiet, steady pacing of the slow-reveal plot and the expressive cinematography that beautifully captures the moody weather of the American Northwest combine to create a somewhat hypnotic effect while watching. This, of course, plays well on some level of your subconscious with the story’s overall concept of a cursed film.

Best of all, there are no cheap scares. No screeching cats jump from out of nowhere and what at first might appear as seemingly random happenings meant only to fulfill some mid-level producer’s [insert scary moment here] note, in the end make perfect sense. The purpose of each of these events is eventually revealed (usually without explanatory exposition) and the net-effect is an even more satisfactory experience as you mentally rewind these moments and put that particular part of the puzzle together for yourself.

Other than the closing scene and Brian Cox’s awesomely staged suicide, my favorite moment is a disarming one (in a horror film, at least) that comes just as Rachel’s life has turned a terrible corner. Standing on the balcony of her high-rise apartment, she takes a moment for herself and is eventually drawn to the various goings on in the adjacent apartment building. Wordlessly she watches as her neighbors live out the mundane practices of everyday life, and wordlessly Watts the actress communicates perfectly the poignancy of a woman witnessing what’s truly precious and wondering if her own life hasn’t passed a point of no return.  

—–

What didn’t make the list: Friday the 13th 1980

Even at fourteen, I expected more from a horror film than creative kills and well-staged butchery. What’s there to be scared over if you don’t care about the characters? To me it was all spectacle, somewhat diverting, but also a little redundant and repetitive. My friends and I only bought tickets to make fun and ogle at the naked chicks. Though I’ve personally never found any of them entertaining on any level, there is a place for these kinds of films. Just not on this particular countdown.

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.”

Actually, the problem isn’t that adhering to the facts obscures the truth. The problem is that “overweening literalism” bogs down the storytelling. Bringing a fact-based story to the screen necessitates all sorts of manipulation of messy and inconvenient facts in order to compose a compelling, well-ordered tale: compressing time and events, creating composite characters and/or omitting others, putting imagined dialogue in the mouths of historical figures, etc. The trick, and the goal, is to manage all these creative techniques in a way that might “fudge facts,” as Ms. Hornaday says, but stays faithful to the truth.

She quotes The West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as calling nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread. When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph.” Exactly so, and I believe most audiences do view nonfiction dramas, or docudramas, that way. I believe most people understand that what they’re seeing is not a documentary or an exact record of facts, but an “artist’s rendition” of historical reality. (Even documentaries are not strictly collections of facts, of course; they too are carefully pieced together and shaped to tell an entertaining story from a particular point of view).

About All the President’s Men, which Hornaday says is considered the masterpiece of political drama, she notes that “it barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue – ‘Follow the money’ – was never spoken in real life”:

Contrast this with the Left’s response to the 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which dramatized the chain of events that led to the Islamic attacks of that terrible morning almost exactly nine years ago (a morning the Left would like us to “get over”). As I’ve written about before, and as John Ziegler’s documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 brilliantly depicts, Democrats hallucinated that the $30+ million miniseries was a hit job on the Clinton administration, concocted by a cabal of conservative filmmakers and somehow financed by a non-profit, Christian (gasp!) relief mission.

Without having seen a frame of The Path to 9/11, Democrat pit bulls like Senators Harry Reid and Louise Slaughter went into pre-emptive attack mode to protect their legacy, claiming that the miniseries was a pack of libelous lies, and threatening to pull ABC’s license if the show aired. Meanwhile an internet-fueled smear campaign spearheaded by the unscrupulous character assassin, blogger Max Blumenthal, ramped up a mob mentality among the lonely and the impotent in the blogosphere. Ultimately, Bill Clinton himself boiled over about it in his infamous interview with Chris Wallace.

They pulled out all the stops not only to censor The Path to 9/11, but to bury it, because the Left knows how critical it is to control the “consensus history,” that “usable past” that Ann Hornaday mentioned. In the end, none of their threatened lawsuits materialized, because the miniseries was faithful to the larger truth and they knew it. But the damage had been done – the show aired only once, and it remains unavailable on DVD.

This is the third time I’ve written about Fair Game for Big Hollywood. Why bother to devote so much space to a movie that’s fated for box-office oblivion anyway? Because it’s important to call out the Left’s persistent efforts to establish their ideologically correct narrative when the historical evidence doesn’t conform to it. Facts may be stubborn things, to paraphrase John Adams, but they don’t stop the Hollywood Left from spinning a “larger truth” out of a lie.

Marriage Encounter? Or propaganda?

Anyhoo, Sean Penn dusts off his acting chops — more like jowls these days — to play Joe Wilson, wannabe high rolling diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts), who claims her CIA cover was blown by the Bush White House in an attempt to make Joe Wilson look like a fool for his op-ed in the New York Times that claimed the Bush administration misled Congress and the public on the need for war with Iraq.

But you all know the story. Suffice it to say, there was no conspiracy to “out” her, and it was Richard Armitage, a State Department staffer and noted Bush critic – not Bush chief of staff Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, or Darth Cheney – who casually mentioned her name to the late Robert Novak. The whole incident, which should have been a big fat nothing, turned into a huge political bombshell that dominated the headlines for weeks and months, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, VP Dick Cheney’s assistant of national security, ended up being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Regardless of where you stand on the “he said, she said” aspect of this whole affair, you’ll likely agree that what transpired publicly after Robert Novak’s column that mentioned Plame’s name was published was politically motivated.

So how on earth could a movie about so recent an event in American history that created so much controversy be viewed as anything but political? I mean, who cares about “the episode’s impact on [Wilson's and Plame's] marriage”? In his Sucker Punch squad post about the Fair Game script, BH’s Mark Tapson lays out the narrative:

Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

But if you ask filmmaker Doug Liman, Fair Game is not political, but just an all-around great film:

I think it’s in the spectrum of “It’s a really great movie.” And a lot of other movies that have been about the war or dealt with the war have not been great movies. In fact, they’ve been motivated more by politics than by story, and that’s been a turn-off to audiences. This is sort of the first political movie that’s been made where I feel like the commitment was there from the first moment to story and character, and not to politics. (emphasis mine)

Yeah. Like I said before, who cares about how this affected Plame and Wilson personally? If that was the case, this should have been a Lifetime Television movie of the week, with all the saccharine-like emotion for which those movies are known.

Sean Penn’s attempt at looking like a ”distinguished, older gentleman”

This kind of baloney is about selling a “we hate George Bush and his foreign policy” film to a public that has already turned thumbs-down to other anti-war, anti-Bush movies over the past decade. Face it – Hollywood thinks you’re as dumb as a box of rocks.

Yet a number of reviewers aren’t quite ready to jump on the rebranding bandwagon and are willing to call the movie exactly what it is – some in quite gleeful terms.

Jeffery Wells says it’s one of those films that ”expose[s] right-wing scumbaggery” that gives him an “all-is-right-with-the-world feeling.”

Roger Ebert’s quickie synopsis of the film says little about the trials and tribulations suffered by Plame and Wilson in their marriage as a result of the chaos and focuses on – guess what? – the political aspects of the story.

Pete Hammond of Boxoffice Magazine starts his review this way: “After directing big crowd pleasers like The Bourne Identity and Mr and Mrs. Smith, Doug Liman takes a 180 degree turn in the politically explosive thriller, Fair Game.” He doesn’t exactly make it seem like a chick flick, does he?

Justin Chang of Variety writes:

Following “Green Zone” as another slightly dated attack on the Bush administration’s mishandling of Iraq, “Fair Game” serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama. Doug Liman’s film does a respectably intelligent job of spinning the Valerie Plame affair into a sleek mainstream entertainment that means to rouse one’s patriotic ire and at times stirringly succeeds. But the overall conception feels too streamlined to maximize the impact of leads Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, spelling an uncertain fall B.O. reception by a public that’s proven none too game for topical fare.

And Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter wonders, “Whether moviegoers even today can look at this real-life couple, extremely well-played by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, without the distortion of political beliefs is uncertain.”

I’d take it a step further and say that it’s quite certain anyone who goes to see this movie, right or left, will see it through the distortion of their political beliefs. But what about those who don’t follow politics or even world events (I have a relative who brags about how deliberately uninformed she is about what goes on in the world outside her front door), will they be tempted to see this film because it’s supposedly all about story and character?

We’ll have to wait for the box office receipts come autumn to find out. So good luck to you, Doug Liman — I have the feeling you’re going to need it.

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair.

Once again, people: there is no evidence that the “Bush White House” conspired to leak Plame’s name to the media, or that it was done to discredit her husband or expose her identity. Even the Obama Justice Department dismissed the Wilsons’ attempt to sue Rove, Cheney, and Libby, stating flatly that Joe Wilson had provided no evidence that the three officials had caused him harm.

But back to the media sleight-of-hand. Ms. Abramowitz then refers to “the eventual trial and conviction of ‘Scooter’ Libby, a top aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney,” without clarifying what he was convicted of. Her phrasing, and the screenplay itself, suggest that Libby was guilty of the leak (and Cheney as well, via guilt-by-association). No, Libby perjured himself to investigators by concealing what he knew and when he knew it; it was State Dept. official Richard Armitage, by his own admission, who leaked Plame’s name. And he did it not in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the administration, but inadvertently, claiming he didn’t realize she was covert. But as I wrote before at Big Hollywood, his name does not appear in the script. That’s because it would utterly suck the wind out of the movie’s already limp sails to admit that “the Bush White House” did not conspire to punish the Wilsons.

Abramowitz says that, according to Liman, “events in the movie follow the facts.” Yes, if after “the facts” you add “according to the anti-war Left’s willful delusion.” Having thus established for her readers that the film is “true-to-life,” Ms. Abramowitz then gets to the article’s astonishing central claim: that in Fair Game, “ Liman pushed the politics of the events into the background.”

Yes, if by “background” she means “foreground.” The Valerie Plame story is political in its very essence. The whole point of the Wilsons’ story is their claim that they were targeted for retaliation for challenging the administration’s justification for war. Removing that linchpin by “pushing the politics into the background” would simply cause the entire story to vanish.

Armitage: left on the cutting room floor

The filmmakers “leave the political debate largely off screen,” Abramowitz continues, “and much of the activity of the Bush White House officials is presented in news clips.” True, as I noted in my previous piece, top figures like Bush and Cheney are presented in Fair Game only in film footage; but those clips are carefully selected to suggest a White House cover-up, and the script itself hammers that theory home. The scenes that do fictionally depict White House officials show Rove’s and Libby’s characters conspiring to “out” Plame’s CIA identity.

Liman chimes in, describing how producer Janet Zucker “was particularly impassioned about the behavior of the Bush administration… It was actually very helpful to have this incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer in the mix because it put me in a very reactionary mood, which ultimately drove the politics out of the movie.” (A liberal-minded producer in Hollywood? Who knew?!)

Drove the politics out of the movie? Not the movie I read. Liman is claiming that he and Zucker balanced each other out and created a compromise in which politics is merely a walk-on character. I find it impossible to believe that an “incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer,” whose driving motivation for pursuing this story was to expose Bush wrongdoing, would accept such a compromise. I also find it impossible to believe the Wilsons themselves would be happy having the crux of their story redacted from the film (the real Valerie Plame, by the way, went to Cannes to promote it).

Politically neutral?

And what about the star Sean Penn? Raise your hand if you believe that the openly far-left activist Penn would cheerily go along with a politically neutral take on this affair… Uh huh. As I expected, not a single hand.

In all fairness, I haven’t yet seen the movie, so perhaps it now bears little resemblance to the openly partisan script I previously examined on Big Hollywood. But based on that screenplay, to say that the movie is about the Wilsons’ strained relationship and only marginally about politics is, well, let’s be charitable and call it disingenuous. After all, no sooner does the Times article claim that Fair Game is a politics-free zone, when Liman contradicts himself with a revealing analogy to Spielberg’s Jaws: “The shark is a lot scarier when you see less of it. I decided to apply that approach to the White House.” Sounds like the politics hasn’t so much been driven out of the movie as elevated to a central, ominous presence.

The Bush White House

Lest one question why we shouldn’t take Liman at his word, he helpfully points out that “I’m used to manipulating people. That’s one of the main criteria of making it as a director in Hollywood… You have to be a con artist.” With this in mind, one can’t help but wonder if he and L.A. Times enabler Rachel Abramowitz are trying to pull off a con themselves: to reassure readers that Fair Game isn’t just another leftist, politicized attack on the Iraq War – because they know, as I have written before, that that would be met with even greater audience indifference than was Matt Damon’s dud The Green Zone (Abramowitz herself raises the fearsome specter of that movie’s failure.)

Audience indifference except at Cannes, of course, where international cinema sophisticates gather to congratulate themselves on their anti-Americanism, and among the media leftists like reviewer Jeffrey Wells, who giddily predicts Cannes-and-Oscar glory for a ”film which exposes right-wing scumbaggery.” 

They eagerly embrace Fair Game’s political slant – a slant the L.A. Times denies the movie has.

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see).

But the thought of bringing Fair Game to a theater near you or anyone else must have the producers quaking in their Kenneth Coles. After all, they’re facing the almost certain prospect of their political thriller going down in flames a là the recent cinematic Hindenburg known as The Green Zone, which many are claiming is the final nail in the coffin of Iraq-war-themed movies. The Plame project is a joint production of Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation Entertainment and Participant Media, which describes itself as focusing on “socially relevant, commercially viable” projects.

I think they need to adjust their focus. Fair Game not only is socially irrelevant to everyone except obsessive Bush-haters, but isn’t commercially viable either, since American moviegoers have rejected Hollywood’s anti-war propaganda over and over again. Actually, “anti-war” is a misnomer, since if the Hollywood Left were truly anti-war, they would denounce the actual aggressors like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas et al. But they’re usually too busy heaping moral condemnation on the U.S. and its allies to protest against real evil in the world.

And the concept of evil is too simplistic anyway for the Hollywood Left, which believes the world is more nuanced than conservatives are capable of comprehending, much less admitting. “There are no bad guys or good guys,” say writer/director Stephan Gaghan and George Clooney about their 2005 movie Syriana, in which Americans are clearly the bad guys and radicalized Muslims are the moral center. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s morally inverted view of the world, in which leftists are pillars of truth and integrity, bad guys are simply misunderstood, and conservatives are utterly Satanic. “Bush lied, people died” – you know, nuance.

This isn’t the place for a thorough re-examination of Plamegate or of the justification for going to war with Iraq, which have been written about exhaustively elsewhere: check out Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors, for example, in which he discusses the scandal and eviscerates the Wilsons in the process, or Party of Defeat, in which David Horowitz and Ben Johnson concisely lay out the reasons for going after Saddam. But in case you didn’t keep up with the mainstream media’s four-year, off-and-on front-page obsession with the Plame scandal, here’s a quick recap:

In 2003, the White House sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead that Iraqi maniac Saddam was trying to purchase fissionable materials from Niger. Wilson reported back that the rumor wasn’t credible; but when the Bush administration proceeded to put forth the suspicion as part of the case for going to war, Wilson wrote a controversial editorial entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the wake of which journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of the war, undermining morale and the war effort, although a Senate investigation ultimately discredited the Wilsons’ accusations.

Not to be dissuaded by the facts, Hollywood is dipping into the well again in Fair Game. My own undercover source deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast (okay, it’s Big Hollywood editor John Nolte and his Whistleblower) has slipped me a copy of the script, written by Jez and John Butterworth. I don’t know whether this is a first draft or the final shooting script or some version in-between, but based on what I’ve read, the movie is more than just a desperate attempt to turn this already overblown scandal into a nail-biting political thriller; Fair Game is a full-out assault on Bush’s “war of choice” and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls “neocon evildoing.” (There’s that nuance again).

Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a “coordinated” coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea. He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to “bury” Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being “fair game” – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).

But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation. In other words, as Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, “the entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.” Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush – the whole criminal pantheon of the Left’s fevered imagination – were not responsible for Plame’s outing (Libby was found guilty, though, of perjuring himself during the investigation). Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Penn and Watts play the Wilsons as a couple whose only character flaws are their unshakeable professional integrity, love of country, and willingness to risk everything to speak truth to power. The script highlights the personal cost to Valerie Plame; even her friends turn on her for the “betrayal” of keeping her CIA job secret. “You lied to me for 20 years,” says her best friend in the script. “Who are you?”

Except that this isn’t what happened. Valerie says in her own autobiography that her close friends, without exception, were generously supportive and understanding, and that even old friends, distant relatives and long-lost acquaintances came out of the woodwork to offer their support. But hey, in fairness, the filmmakers have to ramp up the drama somehow.

Meanwhile, Penn’s worldly-wise Joe Wilson is busy speculating about government lies, fending off vicious “right-wing reporters” and lecturing captive audiences about having fearlessly confronted Saddam himself. “Have you met Saddam?” Wilson snaps at dinner guests casually discussing the Iraqi threat. “Have you looked him in the eye? Did he threaten to kill you? You don’t know Saddam. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Later, Penn/Wilson complains to the press that “those in the Highest Office sought to destroy the career of a public servant to punish me for speaking the truth.” If Penn, an actor who says journalists should be jailed for criticizing Hugo Chavez, can deliver a line like this with conviction, then perhaps he should get another Oscar.

To make sure we get the message that Penn’s Joe Wilson is a true American hero, one character tells him, “You’re a true American hero.” And modest too: “The real heroes,” he replies, ”are in Iraq right now fighting a war which was prosecuted on lies and falsehoods.” He got that half-right – the real heroes are fighting in Iraq (and Afghanistan), not here in the comfort of home undermining the war effort.

The anti-war Bush-bashing (yawn) continues to pile up. While driving Penn/Wilson in a taxi to the White House, a West African immigrant expresses his gratitude at being in the “Land of the Brave, Home of the Free” and out of war-torn Sierra Leone: “Over there we have no truth. Just power. Over here it’s a different world.” Apparently this praise for America wasn’t “nuanced” enough for Penn/Wilson, who tells the driver, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Leave it to an immigrant from an anarchic hellhole to appreciate America’s freedoms, while the comfortable leftist broods about the “threat” of “right-wing reporters” and speechifies about imaginary Republican abuses of power. In a later scene, Valerie’s father tells her, “One day this country is gonna look back on these years, and it’s gonna hang its head. It’s gonna weep. Then it’s gonna stand up straight and walk on.” That “stand up and walk on” bit feels tacked on, considering that the Left seems to think America should be in a perpetual state of shame and apology.

Coincidentally, Valerie Plame Wilson is back on the fringes of the news again, thanks to the release of politico Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. This prompted terrorist sympathizer and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans to attempt to handcuff Rove at a recent book signing, shouting, “Look what you did! You outed a CIA officer! You lied to take us to war!” (Um, if Evans is going to attempt citizen’s arrests of war criminals, perhaps she could start with her associates in the Taliban and Hamas). Rather than just trashing the book with a one-star Amazon.com review, the Wilsons actually released a statement, dismissing Rove’s book as

a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.

Yes, very nuanced. But ultimately it’s hard to see the real-life Wilsons as victims. They ended up as the toast of the elitist, anti-war Left, with a glamorous Vanity Fair spread, a $2.5 million book deal for Valerie, and a feature film glorification starring Hollywood A-listers – albeit a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.

One has to wonder if Sean Penn simply doesn’t care whether this movie does well at the box office – after all, how could he expect it to?  Back when anti-war activist Robert Redford directed the 2007 talky bore Lions for Lambs, it was still possible for Hollywood to delude itself into thinking that America would flock to see such superstars as Redford, Cruise and Streep in a sanctimonious plea for pacifism.

But Lions for Lambs fizzled, as did every other Hollywood attempt to flagellate America for the supposedly pointless waste of Bush’s wars, all the way up to last month’s disastrous The Green Zone. (Meanwhile, the 2006 movie 300, an unabashed celebration of warrior virtues and love of country, has racked up $457 million without a single bankable star). If the American people can’t be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood’s leftist morality tales even by a Bourne-style thriller featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?

Americans aren’t buying it. They simply aren’t the morally unsophisticated, uninformed dullards that a condescending Hollywood believes them to be. Or is that too nuanced for the Hollywood Left to grasp?