Reviews

A political movie does not have to be deep, but it should take place in a universe that exists outside of a Hollywood fantasy world. This does not. It is awful.

Conservatives are evil. Business and the military are the source of everything bad. All we need is a noble black president who just promises to be nice, the world will lay down arms and sing Kum Ba Yah. Awful. Stoooopid. Insipid.

The only thing worse is that there are so many politically naive enough to take this even semi-seriously.

I am not sure there are spoilers in this review or how there could be. The baddies are all telegraphed in the first ten minutes of the movie.

Ghost Writer is another big-screen bust by a renowned director featuring a talented cast. The film had an unremarkable budget by today's standards and only grossed a fraction of it.

The reason is simple. Hollywood seems to take it as a badge of honor to produce films pushing it's political agendas and have them rejected at the box office.

The villains are predictable: Tony Blair, George Bush, the C.I.A., Haliburton, Condi Rice, and America as a whole. The heroes are likewise so: the United Nations (and it's subsidiary court), angry grieving parents of war veteran's (ala Cindy Sheehan) no matter how unhinged, noble newsmen with a conscience, and terrorists who had water forced down their throats to extract information that saved innocent lives.

The fact is, the film is technically great--remarkable cinematography that sets a sterile tone without being overtly noticeable, more than capable directing, and fine acting. But the storyline is laughable for all but those irrationally wedded to its political ideology.

***SPOILER**** C'mon--the C.I.A. has a college student seduce a want-to-be student actor in order to marry him and secretly direct his career so that decades later he would become a puppet English P.M. of the U.S.? And people are assassinated for discovering this? The fact is, they would have already died of laughter had they been told something so ludicrous.

Just what we needed--a lecture about morality from a director still in exile because he drugged and sodomized a 13-year old.

What drivel. Will Hollywood ever learn?