Fair Leaks

Speaking of Wikileaks and remembering that journalists are supposed to be about Free Speech, not Free Lunch…

I saw Doug Liman’s Fair Game (2010), with Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as her husband Joe Wilson.

The film is about their marriage and other things, but the sweeping backdrop of it is the Bush administration’s heroic efforts to invent a war.

Leaving the theater, no film came more to mind than Roger Donaldson’s decade earlier film, Thirteen Days (2000), about the Kennedy administration’s heroic efforts to prevent a war.

Fair Game probably doesn’t tell you any new facts, but it does manage to raise your blood pressure once more with its big-screen depiction of the limitless obscenity to which money and power can aspire.

In Thirteen Days we see America as it always dreamt that it was; in Fair Game we see America as it fears that it has become.

Fair Game is a glossy and compelling film, a disturbing tale of avarice, corruption, betrayal and death. Yet as long as there are “actors” like Watts’ Valerie Plame and Penn’s Joe Wilson on the global stage, there is, at least, hope.

—VB

As a virtual public artist my work invites avatar communities to express their identity, explore their culture, and demand their civil rights.

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