Fair Game (2010)

Chronologically, at the begging and end of this thread, you'll see the same 1 star post in 2010 and 2018 ...bashing Sean Penn and calling this movie 'political lies and half truths'...and actually blaming Clinton, using what he doesn't realize are lies, to do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's stuff like that, that gave us our problems today and why movies like this should be seen by everybody. I know a review that talks about another review is not what this is supposed to be about, but anything like that post which is full of the exact things he complains about, and may keep someone from watching an excellent movie that shows is just how corrupt an administration can be and the damage and deaths it causes, is a big deal to me. The movie shows exactly why this country lost the respect of the entire developed world because of our invasion of Iraq. Millions of people, our allies, protested it in the streets all over the world.If you followed this story closely at the time like I did, you'd know that this movie is exactly the truth .. and Penn, considered one of best actors today, couldn't have been better in it.If this was all lies, why did Scooter Libby go to prison, indicted on five felony counts for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice?Even more ridiculous, the commentor says this is just propaganda to make Bush look like a war monger.....ignoring everything that came out later and all the proof that came out that showed us that the entire Iraq war was based on lies...from the Bush administration and the real fake news was on the you know what news station.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn were magnificent as Valerie Plame Wilson and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the t-i-g-h-t film by Director Doug Liman (who also did "The Bourne Identity"), is s-e-n-s-a-t-i-o-n-a-l! The DVD has awesome reality to it and includes much actual material extras from Valerie and Joe - who stood up against hideous White House lies - particularly over invading Iraq - and who both deserve much credit as national / public heroes. Geo. Bush, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove all could have gone to jail for their acts and their lies r/t Iraq (and r/t the Wilsons) - as could quite a few others. Scooter wound up as the sole 'patsy'.Scooter Libby interestingly, was sentenced to a few years in jail, a couple in paroled supervision, and about 400hrs. of community service and he was fined a quarter million (not a problem as he was worth as much as 25 million) - but Bush kept him from going to prison. He was / is the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since John Poindexter, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the Iran–Contra affair. My theory is that like with Nixon, Libby was made the "fall-guy" partly because he was Jewish. Nixon had failed to shift much blame for various things onto Kissinger, but clearly had planned to and even attempted it a few times.

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.

It seems to me that they had to fill the first half of the movie with a bunch of Plume's CIA operations - though these really had little to do with the Plume affair and were probably made mostly up - because the Plume affair itself didn't have enough meat/drama to make a movie from. Or maybe it did - they rather rushed through most of the later stuff.On the other hand, I appreciated that they reminded the viewer of the affairs' core issue in the scene near the end in which Plume's husband is talking to students and points out that they all know his wife's name at the expense of knowing the key sentence of Bush's speech. It was a bit heavy handed but it drove home the movies' point quite well.