Hey! Remember the 2000s?

Damn. I'm not set up for grabbing stills from Blu-Rays, I just remembered. And on top of it, my copy of Burn After Reading's gone MIA, so I'll have to settle for a still off the internet. Phooey.
Anyway, the film Fair Game... I never thought they'd be able to make a better film named Fair Game since 1995's Fair Game with Cindy Crawford, as long-time readers of this blog might recognize, but I must admit... I'm starting to change my mind! Anyway again, Doug Liman's Fair Game has characters asking a lot of hypothetical questions about sticky subjects: aluminum tubes, nervous Arab men on airplanes, nervous Arab men inside aluminum tubes, what have you. Here's the one the film poses: say you had to out a CIA agent in order to sell the case for war with the snooty, big-city New York Times-reading crowd. Who do you pick? Do you pick a low-level CIA member, or do you pick our equivalent of James Bond? And why? If only we were living in times when such a thing was the stuff of Michael Crichton fiction... no, wait, I guess it would be Tom Clancy or John Le Carré. Incidentally, I still cling to the belief that if this were a Tom Clancy movie, someone would go to Karl Rove's house and shoot him in the head at the end of the pic. It's still not a federal crime to blog that last sentence, is it? Rove's got a small part here, and I agree with my viewing companions: his hair was totally wrong. Rove's hair is flesh colored, not whatever normal colors the actor's was. Also, he wasn't scarfing down eggies. Sloppy direction.
I'm trying not to take this review too seriously, as one can tell, but it is a serious film, very well made, and it's still a sign of our politically dumbed-down times that this received no Oscar nominations. At all! Not even one for best director slash cinematographer. That's right, Peter Hyams, my one-blogger campaign starts today. Spota forever! Well, there's still Steven Soderbergh ahead of you, but still, that field's pretty small. Naomi and Penn are excellent as expected, but I gotta give some props to the dude who played Scooter Libby. I thought maybe it was the creepy guy from The Forgotten who then played Bruce Wayne's dad in Batman Begins, but it's a different guy... Thomas from Fight Club! Nice... For some reason, I thought of the scene from Jaws where the small town mayor makes sure that the sheriff and the shark expert aren't 100% sure about their findings. But I can't make an absolute straight-line comparison between the two, admittedly. One thing I think I can say for sure: the extreme right wing and the extreme left wing in this country have something in common! They BOTH hate the CIA! But only one has actual access, and can actually act on their beliefs. I'll leave it at that.

Good double bill with: Green Zone, Eagle Eye

****
-so sayeth The Movie Hooligan