Paul Yim: (paulyim-deleteme[at]-deleteme-direman [dot] com) 2010-03-24 14:36:27

Dubya-MDs

Saw Green Zone the other night and I was reminded of how important it is for world leaders to be...oh, I don't know...smart. By "smart" I don't mean Yale educated, because Lincoln was quite clever for a Kentucky Hill Billie. "Smart" means being on top of things. When you're dealing with the balance of nations (read: power) and millions of lives you can't afford to be off your game, or misinformed, or have a string of bad luck. Put another way: if you're playing poker, and you're stacking your hand with aces, make damn sure nobody else has an ace in their hand. Dubya, et al. were caught with five aces in a hand and nobody batted an eyelash. I seem to remember a few news reports about there being no WMDs in Iraq and that the original source of intelligence saying that there were was from a CIA intern's scenario document NOT from a reliable source deep within the Ba'ath party. By then we were waist deep in the muck and the new rhetoric was "focus on winning the war".

I'm a horrible cynic who believes that America was sold to corporate interests long ago so the movie didn't have quite the shock factor as it should have for me. The more idealistic and hopeful may find that part to be quite gripping and interesting but I found the direction and acting to be more noteworthy. Keep in mind, however, that the movie was directed by Paul Greengrass so there's going to be some elements of "shaky cam". He did a good job of restraining himself until a chase sequence near the end where they seemed to have shot the sequence during an earthquake.