Movie Review: Shooter (2007)

“The Patriot” and “Enemy of the State”
meet Dick Cheney on the grassy glacier (9/10)

ShooterShooter is the ultimate thrilling and inspiring movie for people seeking an end to the depredations of “the Cartel.”  It’s V for Vendetta applied to the real-life cabal in the White House today.  Instead of VP Dick Cheney, “the Conglomerate’s” operational point man for murder and mayhem is a US Senator from Montana (played with a pure dictatorial sliminess by Ned Beatty).

Great timing now that the Blackwater corporate army has been running amok in Iraq and generally showing the real purpose of that conflagration.  As Alan Greenspan states in his recent tome, The Age of Turbulence, it is all about oil, silly! More precisely, it’s about power: seizing revenue from oil and other natural resources for one’s crony-capitalist sleazeballs… all the while chillingly wrapping oneself in the Flag (and/or the Cross).

In Shooter, the Conglomerate’s (C’s) farflung contractor army—as well as coopted US military forces—inflict horrific damage on local populations in their worldwide operations. In particular, C’s merchants of death have wiped out a village in Africa that hesitated to make way for an oil facility.  In the opening scene Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) and his spotter shoot several “bad guys” from a mountain nearly a mile away. Swagger does not know the connection between these targets and the C’s operations. Continue reading

Movie Review: State of Play (2009)

“All the President’s Men” meets modern-media reality (8/10)

StateofPlayDella Frye: Did we just break the law?
Cal McAffrey: Nope. That’s what you call damn fine reporting.


Not being a reader of Variety or really in tune with the machinations behind the scenes of modern film making, I was unaware until sitting down to write this review that the movie State of Play is a two-hour Americanized condensation of the critically acclaimed six-part British television series of the same name. The BBC series State of Play aired in 2003; if you look at the two IMDb records, the movie currently ranks 7.8 with viewers while the TV series ranks a full point higher at 8.8! Continue reading