ghcheese I shouldn't have even started to watch this seeing Sean Penn was in it. The facts are wrong. Showing clips of speeches to make a point. Most of the data on the Iraq war was collected by Clinton administration. Yes including Kerry and Gore. Clinton just didn't act on it. Which he said literally the day before 9/11. It didn't have to happen. This movie makes the Bush administration look like war mongrels changing facts to justify the war they supposedly wanted.

generationofswine 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.

paul2001sw-1 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.

Adam Peters (43%) Sean Penn's strong supporting performance is a plus point in this so-so political drama retelling the events in the run-up to the Iraq war that in turn has grown into a bit of a ridiculous farce. You really can't help but chuckle as Bush, using total balderdash "intelligence" created by one of Tony Blair's cronies, points the finger at little Niger for handing over nuclear weapons to Saddam. And if that was the case, which it wasn't, then where exactly did Niger get them from? Well chances are if the stuff actually existed in the first place it would have been originally created by Russia, or maybe China, and as they can't be easily pushed around as much lets quickly move on and concentrate on picking away at the little guys. Watching this now it really does raise the question how anyone, never mind millions and millions of people, ever fell for such nonsense. Besides the real-life political stupidity there's not a great deal to be offered here, and anyone with low levels of interest in such things will find this a hard sit.