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Mad about movies

City Times takes to the multiplexes to find out what’s in store for movie buffs this week

Fair Game

JUST WHEN YOU think that cinema has pretty much uncovered every layer worth of murky fallacies that was the Iraq war, a movie like Fair Game hits the screens – it’s plot an unabashed account of how inconvenient truths were ignored, hidden and finally, the movie moans, falsified.

Starring Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Ty Burrell and Sam Shepard, the thriller is helmed by Doug Liman (Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity).

Based on former CIA operations officer Valerie Plame’s memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, the feature follows Joseph Wilson (Penn) an ambassador to Niger at the time, who revealed to the New York Times how the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence to invade Iraq.

Consequentially, in an attempt to discredit Wilson, his wife Plame (Watts) was revealed as a CIA agent.

Fair Game has garnered a positive response from the box office as well as the critics. Roger Ebert writes in his review of the 108-minute film, “What’s effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn’t a lathering, angry attack picture. Wilson and Plame are both seen as loyal government employees, not particularly political until they discover the wrong information.”

Trivia

· Fair Game received a public screening during the Abu Dhabi film festival on October 21, 2010 and it got a generally positive review there.

· This feature marks the third time that Sean Penn and Naomi Watts will be seen working together. The first two were 2003 drama 21 Grams and 2004’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

davina@khaleejtimes.com