ghcheese
I shouldn't have even started to watch this seeing Sean Penn was in it. The facts are wrong. Showing clips of speeches to make a point. Most of the data on the Iraq war was collected by Clinton administration. Yes including Kerry and Gore. Clinton just didn't act on it. Which he said literally the day before 9/11. It didn't have to happen. This movie makes the Bush administration look like war mongrels changing facts to justify the war they supposedly wanted.
Madhav Gupta
This movie is in league with a slew of other politically driven plot lines which open with a lot of promise but fall flat on their faces thereafter as midway approaches. The way they show sean penn's assessment in iraq and build the story promises to be very interesting but ends up being being only that-just a build up. The director could have focused on the real plot and the political aspect more rather than the mundane honky-tonk of a troubled relationship and media-havoc wreck on an otherwise happy and functioning family. This was similar to kill the messenger where the intense storyline is dumped in pursuit of some sold-out monotonous repetitive and over explored melodramas of family unison with all the emotional jargon. So what if the central government proclaims information completely opposite to one article written by a comparative nobody (compared to them)in the daily papers. There's lot of intelligence on important matters being leaked, misinterpreted and falsely reported over through different channels of media for which there is no accountability. It seems ludicrous and over the top to me how the media's backlash creates unsettlement in the family-when you are in positions that they both are this kind of stress comes with the job- its nothing to loose sleep and break-up over. Boring and presumptous facets of the story are tweaked in lieu of the bigger picture.
SnoopyStyle
Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) was a covert operations officer at the CIA. In the run up to the Iraq war, she worked at the counter proliferation division gathering intelligence and developing sources. Her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) is sent to Niger to investigate one particular claim. The president uses misinformation in his speech, and the country goes to war. Joe Wilson writes in the New York Times to dispute the report, and the White House targets the couple. Eventually they leak her identity and jeopardize her sources.This is based on Valerie and Joe's account of the events. The best is that they didn't jazz up the CIA with dozens of flat screen TV. The story is a little too familiar, and there aren't many surprises at the end. Director Doug Liman should probably have added a scene at the end with those diner guests. The movie starts out strong, but fizzles a little towards the end. The biggest mistake is casting Sean Penn. It gives an obvious target for those who claim that this is a left wing bias movie. Penn is a brilliant actor. He's not needed here. A more adorable guy with a softer image would probably work better. I'm thinking Oliver Platt.
rowmorg
It's a great thriller, reality based, with fine performances from Penn and Watts, but the latest news now makes this picture seem dated and somewhat superficial. The State Dept translator turned whistle-blower, Sibel Edmonds, alleges that the Turkish ambassador (and corrupt official) Marc Grossman in 1997 revealed to the Turkish American Association that Valerie Plame's front company was CIA backed and to have nothing to do with it. In other words, he "outed" Plame and all the other agents who used that front. The company was immediately wound up. It has also been revealed that Grossman was a personal friend of Plame & Wilson, and that the pair met each other during a meeting of the suspicious Turkish American Association, which is a front for Turkish police and criminals to do deals with Americans. This really widens and deepens the Plame story, raising several urgent questions, and bringing into question the actions of the special prosecutor who found nobody guilty in the Plame outing. This film is therefore highly provocative, if for reasons it did not suspect. Needless to say, all Plame's subsequent efforts to get justice have been turned down flat by both the Bush and Obama justice departments. She now is writing a series of "thrillers", the first emerging last week, entitled Blowback.
AD
