Fair Game (2010)

Redundant and unnecessary.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This movie is what Oliver Stone's "W." should have been. That is to say that it holds the Bush administration accountable. And it should be.The fact is that our invasion of Iraq was held under false pretenses and the fact is that the Bush Administration attacked any Americans that disagreed with it. There was even a bill that never passed the House, was never voted on, that would have made anyone that disagreed with the Bush Administration a domestic terrorist.Those are just facts. If you disagree with it for some sake of partisan loyalty, just look at the Dixie Chicks. All they said was that they wished Bush wasn't from Texas and look how badly they went after them.Look at the amount of openly anti-war Democrats in congress that found their way onto the no fly list.It's just a shame more people don't go to see movies like this. It should make you angry.The facts don't have to be 100%, this is a Hollywood movie, not a documentary, but it's not one that doesn't have a valid meaning behind it.So valid that it makes a great companion piece for "Good Night and Good Luck." It's that whole doomed to repeat it thing.The fact is, we live in extreme times. We live in times when people are extreme and they attack anyone that disagrees with them. It is still happening.We are still getting called "unPatriotic" and "unAmerican," for simply not agreeing with the far right. Just like we were when that junior senator from Wisconsin of all places was doing his level best to assure that anyone that wasn't militantly on the right was black listed.The same happened under Bush and "Fair Game" is a wonderful illustration of the levels extremists will go to, to undermine anyone that doesn't lockstep with their beliefs.Welcome to the new America, same as the old America.

(Some Spoilers) True story of the efforts of the Bush/Cheney Administration's underhanded and lying efforts to convince the American public that Iraq was building nuclear weapons to use against its neighbors in general and the USA in particular. It turned out that the man that was sent to find out about that threat the former US Ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson, Sean Penn, proved just the opposite and his life as well as that of his wife's CIA district chief Valeria Plame, Naomi Watts, would never be the same again. The movie shows just how desperate the Bush Administration was in getting a war going on in the middle east against Iraq and went as far as openly lying to the American people, in Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union Address, to get it going.It's when Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times about him not finding any evidence of Saddam's Iraq having gotten 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Nijar his wife not him became "Fair Game" by the Bush Administration and outed as a CIA operative. That not only put her and her family including her husband Joseph Wilson and children lives in danger but all those she worked with as well. Treating the Wilson's as if they were the enemy the media for the most part overlooked what the Bush/Cheney gang got the country into by lying it into a war that is still going on now 13 years later that has turned out to be the biggest both military & financial disaster in US history!It was little compensation for both Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame that in the end they were proved innocent as well as accurate in all their assertions of the lies and duplicity that the Bush Administration, and it's flunkies in the US media, pulled off to get us into a war that has cost the lives of thousands of US servicemen and women as well as hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The only good thing to come out of all that is that the American people have gotten a bit smarter in them not blindly willing to believe everything that top government officials, from the President on down, tells them at face value. Which is why the now Obama Administration utterly failed 10 years later in 2013 , despite all its lying and underhanded efforts, to get us into a war with Syria by claiming that the country's President Assad was using poison gas against his own people much like were we told about Iraq's Saddam that proved, in both cases, to be totally false. Where in one case-Saddam-the public fell for it and in the other case-Assad-in didn't.

Life against false behavior is hard. If you don't suck it up you pay. Especially when the government is the liar. I don't know why nations have to go to war, it escapes me. We already spend billions of rupees and dollar to keep on matching others artillery. It has always been a vicious cycle. You make weapons , we make weapons. You build nuclear weapons we need that to feel secure from you. What are we all going to with all the weapons god only knows. Lets see we might use it on innocent countries and drink there juice. In this case oil. Russia is doing such right now drinking Ukraine's blood. All for what power wealth and GDP. No one thinks of lives that are spent on this false conquests. Aren't we well passed people like Hitler. We don't need wars that are shameful. On no grounds. It is sad that Mr Bush being America's president collaborated in a false war. Coming back to FAIR GAME decided to discredited the only two who would have stood up for the truth. Their story is The unraveling of the cover up by the United states Government into going to war against IRAQ.

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.