Fair Game (2010)

Touches You

Simply Perfect

Awesome Movie

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

(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.

Could a government be so-shortsightedly stupid as to out one of its own special agents as a punishment for her husband offering them some advice they didn't want to hear? Apparently so, when the government was the G.W. Bush administration, and what was at stake was the justification of a war in Iraq that the government had already decided to undertake regardless. That story is told in this film; but the movie is limited, because almost inevitably, it paints Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame as heroic, truth-telling victims - which may be true, but the scope for real drama is limited. At times in the story, when events are putting a strain on their marriage, the couple seem to be fighting over the principle of their two different visions of the noblest way to respond to the crisis they've been plunged into. The greatest tragedy, the betrayal of Plame's agents in the field, is relatively underplayed in this Washington-centred story. Sean Penn as Wilson (Plame's husband) plays his role as a self-righteous prig (in a way that I don't think is intended); Naomi Watts seems too super-cool as Plame to be believable, until the film cuts to actual footage of the real Plame giving testimony before Congress, and the likeness turns out to be exact. The film's worth watching if you want to learn the details of the scandal (and you should); but it's something less than Shakespearian in the telling.

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.

Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) was a covert operations officer at the CIA. In the run up to the Iraq war, she worked at the counter proliferation division gathering intelligence and developing sources. Her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) is sent to Niger to investigate one particular claim. The president uses misinformation in his speech, and the country goes to war. Joe Wilson writes in the New York Times to dispute the report, and the White House targets the couple. Eventually they leak her identity and jeopardize her sources.This is based on Valerie and Joe's account of the events. The best is that they didn't jazz up the CIA with dozens of flat screen TV. The story is a little too familiar, and there aren't many surprises at the end. Director Doug Liman should probably have added a scene at the end with those diner guests. The movie starts out strong, but fizzles a little towards the end. The biggest mistake is casting Sean Penn. It gives an obvious target for those who claim that this is a left wing bias movie. Penn is a brilliant actor. He's not needed here. A more adorable guy with a softer image would probably work better. I'm thinking Oliver Platt.