River Road Entertainment, Participant Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ

Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Bruce McGill, Michael Kelly, Ty Burrell, Noah Emmerich, David Andrews, Sam Shepard, Tim Griffin, Jessica Hecht

NOTE: WARNING. THIS FILM MADE ME VERY ANGRY AND THIS IS NOT REALLY A REVIEW BUT MORE OF A RANT. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK, AND I’M SORRY ABOUT THIS IN ADVANCE.

This is a very one sided somewhat documentary film that discusses the “outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts)” and the anger and frustration felt by her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn). I can understand why Sean Penn is in this, as this is what we would expect from him, but Naomi Watts dropped a lot in my eyes from taking on this one sided propaganda film. This is nothing less than an attempt to attack the Bush administration based upon their side of the story without really having much in the way of facts. It is a fact that someone published the information that Valerie was a CIA agent. This is not nice, and it is a crime. And whoever did it should have been punished. But these guys take A=B and C=D, therefore A=D and make a huge jump in who’s to blame. They come out and say things that have no evidence other than they “feel it must have been like that”. For example, someone at a lower level claimed that they leaked the information, and that they saw it in a memo at the white house. Now I’m sure this was a good topic to be discussing in top secret memos at the White House, “Who is this woman and why does her husband now claim that it is false information?”. Valerie goes to her management and recommends her husband is the right person to fly to Africa to investigate aluminum tubes that are used to enrich materials to make nuclear weapons which were being shipped to Iraq. Turns out that Joe later decides there is no evidence, but that information has been sent over to the White House and compiled with other evidence that Sadaam has WMD’s or is close to making them. The largest of this evidence is the fact that he will not allow UN inspectors to do their job of checking, and is constantly defiantly marching around threatening everyone, (especially other Muslim leader) that he is willing and able to take them out in an instant. (A guy walking around with his hand in his pocket and bragging to the police that he has a gun and is ready to use it cannot be surprised if a cop shoots him. You put your hands up and follow the directions and you’ll be fine. If Sadaam had let the UN inspectors see that his WMD program was kaput, he’d still be in power there. I can still remember Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine captain who has been a frequent military expert for the media and who is a frequent Hollywood consultant to make films about the military realistic and credible, saying the he was positively certain that the military WOULD find WMD in Iraq based upon Sadaam’s threats and posturing and past history. Basically everyone was certain that it was true, and it was a surprise to find out that though he was living in a golden palace, his WMD program had been destroyed in the first gulf war.

Then Valerie protests that she did NOT send her husband to Africa. Well, of course not, she didn’t have that authority, but she recommended to her superiors that he be sent. And for what that’s worth, we don’t really care whether she sent him or not. The problem that I have with this film is that it’s about as reliable as a film made by Michael Moore. His distorted view on the world ruins his message because he has proved that he will say ANYTHING whether true or not, to prove his view of things. Therefore, though he may have a valid message, it is lost because of his whacked out view on everything makes us unwilling to trust anything he says.

They tried to make a decent spy story here, but the fact this is a biased one sided view makes me doubt what is true and what is their hopes and wishes that are true. I understand that Valerie is mad as hell, and wants to fight for the rest of her life to put George W Bush in jail for being on the other side of the political spectrum and to have the evil Dick Cheney beheaded, but this movie would have been much more useful if it was not simply one side of the story. It’s possible that most of the stuff in this film may have happened the way they described it, but at the same time, it could just as easily be true that very little of it is what actually happened.

That is why I can’t recommend a propaganda film that is told from an extremist point of view. If they had tried in the least to balance the story with some of the other side it might be worth something, but at this point it’s useless. I watched this DVD a while ago, and I expected a fair dramatization of the story and wanted to know more about it. It made me very angry with it’s one sided viewpoint and I wanted to wait a while before trying to write a review. I have still failed, as I’m still angry that they are trying to pull this, and I really wished I had deleted this from my queue before I wasted my time watching it.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

 

 

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