Most reviewers are missing what insiders would recognize as a very credible scenario for the various assassinations that have taken place in America. I found this movie compelling and I certainly do not subtract anything for any of what others found to be “bombs, babes, and booze.” News flash: that's what it's like.
The movie kept me guessing until the end, and I like it so much I am adding it to my list of “Great Spy DVDs” and palcing it second after only Breach. This movie has a real message that most miss: privatizing our spies and our military is absolutely the fastest way to out-source and lose our national honor.
Four books I especially recommend, for those who want to reflect on just how ugly it can get when money or ideology rather than honor talks:
Former Spy and Top Amazon Non-Fiction Reviewer Loves This Movie
July 26, 2007
Wesley Snipes
This is a *grerat* movie and a feel-good film to boot. Ignore the negative reviewers, they don't have a life.
Bottom line is that this movie combines an excellent depictiion of the amorality of US covert operations, with a lovely juxtaposition of Wesley Snipes at his best, and two English lovlies, one a Scotland Yard inspector whose father is murdered by the Americans “on official business” and the other a lost young lass who is a good liar, loves horses, and saves the day.
Wesley Snipes is in my top ten action heros, and I am adding this DVD to my list of Great Spy DVDs.
This is a World-Class Book and DVD for Serious People
June 30, 2007
Robert Christopherson
Edit of 5 Feb 08 to add emphasis comment and links.
Coment of 5 Feb 08: This amazing professional product has pride of place in my 3000 volum library. It is the permanet owner of the teacher's lecturn, always open to chapter. I include an image aboe to emphasize this point. This book and its author, are GOLD STANDARD.
This is the only DVD I watch weekly on background, stopping my work at each song. This is an incrediblly gifted rendition and integraration of reality art, technology, and directoriaq craft. Wow, wow, wow.
I picked this gem up at the University of Colorado bookstore. I do not have the time for a third graduate degree, but if I did, it would be in Environmental Science.
Unlike most textbooks, this hardcover version is worth every penny, and the paperback is a bargain. This is a large book, 8.5 x 11, crammed with photos, extraordinarily well organized, illustrated, and presented, and it includes a CD ROM that the previous owner never opened that I find to be priceless: a series of illustrations and animations keyed to every chapter, with a non-punitive self-test. Also provided free are an online study guide. Supporting materials include a Student Study Guide and a Student Lecture Notebook that provides illustrations and diagrams to be integrated into the class binder. All are identified by ISBNs, but if you miss page xviii, which outlines “the package,” you will be unaware of the other resources.
Each chapter has the base material, a focus study, a news item, and more often than not, a career link. Each chapter ends with self-study questions. My bottom line: this book, taken seriously, *is* a self-taught graduate program in Geosystems.
The only think I do not see in the book, and it may be in the study guide, is “Recommended Reading.” BUT a complete array of current sources are fully cited as easily visible footnotes on most pages.
The only gap in this book, and it could probably be quickly developed as a supplementary paperback guide and CD, is the avoidance of an integrated discussion of costs and consequences. The entire study of Geosystems is irrelevant unless it can be explained to people in “true cost” terms. While the book excels, for example, at showing the severe drop in aquifers across specific places, it does not provide a guide to calculating current and future costs to society for ignoring these problems and allowing corporations and individuals to continue to externalize to the public and to future generations, the costs of being stupid and greedy today.
First rate book. One of the most serious textbooks, one of the best illustrated, explained, supported, and presented, I have every seen. For serious adults and emerging adults only–this is not a book, nor a class, for dolts just trying to meet a requirement for graduation.
This is a world-class film with subtlety that may be lost on some. It is easily five stars for its blend of real-world filming of Bush and Cheney, its use of “interviews” supposedly after the fact, and its extremely subtle ending: without appearing, Dick Cheney gets to be President and passes Patiot Act III which finishes trashing the Constitution and our concept of “Liberty & Justice for All.” Nailing a passing Muslim for the crime, even after a black man committed suicide, left a note, and had a copy of the detailed schedule that could only have come from Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby, one can only ponder the near term.
I abhor the death penalty, assassination, and secession, but I also abhor war crimes and what is being done in our name, all of which give Vermont and others serious grounds for secession. It will take a quarter century to undo the damage done by Dick Cheney and his witless “decider.”
See my varied lists on serious DVDs, impeachment, Iraq after action, and evaluative books on Dick Cheney, the best two of which are listed below. In my reviews, mostly in the second, I itemize 25 high crimes and misdemeanors that Dick Cheney should be facing charges on as I write this. He has, virtually alone, destroyed the Republic.
This movie got me through a long delay while waiting for air transport. It is utterly brilliant, chock full of world class actors and actresses, not least of which are Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave.
This is some of the most serious gifted acting I have seen. O'Toole brought nuance to this role that was unexpected and all the more appreciated for being so.
It struck me as a wonderfully new and refreshing mix of Pygmalion (My Fair Lady), My First Mister, and Love Story, with just a hint of Debbie Does Dallas without the sex.
It makes very good use of fast forward “life in review” in a couple of places.
It addresses love at multiple levels, including old men platonicly loving one another in old age; old men discovering their love for their old wives, and of couorse Peter O'Toole as an old man discovering platonic love with a rough younger woman who is brought out of ugly duckling status by his attentions and coaching. They teach each other how to get the most out of the lives they have.
I served as a spy for CIA on three clandestine tours, and one of my headquarters tours was in counterintelligence, where I got to know just how un-seriously CIA takes that topic. The dirty little secret at CIA is that Ames was not the only traitor, a brand new career trainee gave up ten or so of our Soviet agents in place, all killed. In this movie, the damage that Hansen did is severely over-stated, and the facts of the matter are not as they should be, but I still give this a five star rating because the movies is absolutely top notch on the personality details.
This movie is much superior to The Good Shepard. The only other spy movies that really come close are those featuring Alec Guiness as George Smiley.
The reviewers that cannot understand motive will never understand spys and traitors. One line in this movie really grabbed me–in it, Hansen talks about how “the US can be likened to a powerfully built but retarded child.” Throughout the movie, Hansen is cast as a devout even obsessive Catholic who cannot get people inside the FBI to realize how vulnerable they are, and ultimately I would conclude from the movie that the motivation may have started as a desire to prove a point, then a slow burn into addiction–making fools of those that would not listen.
The movie misrepresents the clerk as counter-spy. The FBI actually caught Hansen by going through his trash and finding the one note that he failed to destroy. Still and all the individual depictions, from the hardened solitary female senior special agent with no one in her life, not even a cat, to various others, are excellent. Especially meaningful to me is the depiction of the loving wife that becomes suspicious and then unloving because she confuses her husband's loyalty to duty and secrecy with inattention and being scorned, and of course that is rarely the case. Spies need loving trusting wives.
This and “The Falcon and the Snowman” are first rate. Anything with Alec Guiness as George Smiley is first rate. For amusement I like the more recent James Bond films, the Smiths, and True Lies.
Former Spy and Top Non-Fiction Reviewer Applauds
