Charlie Rose

esantoro  03/18/2010 01:21 PM Report

It's important to take films at their face value and separate the private lives and politics of actors from their fictional works, but I've lost a lot of respect for Matt Damon ever since his celebrity endorsement of Bloomberg in the recent NYC mayoral election. So, which is it, Matt, Bloomberg or Zinn? Top-down or bottom-up?

winter  03/15/2010 09:54 PM Report

Republicans really play hard ball and thats a euphemism. That that bunch so bent on world domination if only by obstruction of the alternatives control how events will unfold its no wonder the rest of the world hates us. Oh, right thats envy; how naive of me.

onceandagain  03/10/2010 10:46 AM Report

I am looking forward to this film. It seems as though Damon is tackling the action genre, but with some intriguing nuance concerning the wielding of power. He didn't play an action role, but was in Syriana, one of my favorites.

As far as the WMD intelligence snafus, executive branch lies, gaps in the IC, etc., I really think it was crappy the way they let Tenant fall on his sword for that. After the fact, we see that it was actually Mr. Cheney himself making those visits to VA, pushing for borderline fabrication, etc. If there is one lesson that should arise from bringing attention to such wielding of power, it should be the same lesson any moviegoer gets from a movie like this or Clear and Present Danger. That is: the balance over government is dependent upon the competence and courage of those serving to balance it. The Executive Branch should have been checked and re-checked by the congressional committees concerning the IC. They have plenty of IC professionals to speak with and consult. It is as much the failure of Congress not to have checked the Executive Branch back in 2002-2003, as it is Cheney's fault for such a snowjob.

cfairch  03/09/2010 11:06 PM Report

Charlie, you need to read Michael Ishikoff and David Corn, Hubris, pages 12 to 15 (paperback edition). Valerie Plame and the JTFI compiled compelling evidence again WMD in the summer of 2002. Why else would Cheney send Libby and Rove to blow Plame's cover? This was a fraud from the start, paid for by thousands of our men and women and millions of Iraqis.

REMant  03/09/2010 12:00 PM Report

What possible point could there be for this except to justify or atone for their own support for this fraud? Is Hollywood really going to deny having pushed this war as much as the Bush admin? In any case, I can tell you no actual combat veterans want to watch films of this sort, anti-war or not. I remember sitting sometime in early 1970 on the Song Be laterite watching John Wayne and The Green Berets projected on several sheets of dusty plywood, the grunts in the audience howling with laughter. There were no good movies made about Vietnam, the only ones remotely realistic being Jane Fonda's Coming Home about disabled, disillusioned vets, and Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, about Marine PIO's, not counting the swirling latrine smoke in the opening minutes of Oliver Stone's Platoon, and I doubt any vets liked those those either if they watched them. I can't imagine what they may have thought about The Deerhunter or Apocalypse Now. I doubt even WWII vets watched any of the pictures made of that war until well after their memories of it had faded and they wanted to believe there was something laudable about what they had done. These things are intended as propaganda for another generation. If ppl are really interested in revisiting this, I suggest they view Frontline's Bush's War and Bill Moyer's Buying the War, which would also be a lot cheaper. The other thing that's wrong with this kind of thing is that no men, not John Wayne, Matt Damon or Brad Pitt, ever won wars by themselves. History is never a matter of the acts of great men. Story-telling is, but not history.