• A Minute With: Reese Witherspoon on going to "War"
• Oscar red carpet off limits for "Artist" dog Uggie
• Lucille Ball stars in "I Love Lucy" Facebook game

go

• 30 Minutes- Does Arizona History Matter? Part 1
• Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey: I'm glad that I wrote this valentine.
• Growing Native with Petey Mesquitey: we shall overcome

Flicks - State of Play State of Play is a smarter-than-average suspense thriller centered around the capable star performance of Russell Crowe. by Chris Dashiell - The Film Snob In evaluating a film, solid professionalism counts for something, and with his latest picture called State of Play, director Kevin Macdonald has given us a smarter-than-average suspense thriller centered around the capable star performance of Russell Crowe. But the film is also an example of one of the oldest and most venerable Hollywood genres: the newspaper film. Now that we're threatened with the death of print journalism, it's interesting to see how important the story of the intrepid reporter is to our national mythology.
Crowe plays Cal McAffrey, a scruffy, long-haired, old-fashioned journalist for a Washington newspaper. When an old friend, now a Congressman, played by Ben Affleck, is plunged into scandal when the death of a female staffer reveals that he was having an affair with her, Cal senses that the young woman's death was no accident, and he ends up linking it to the mysterious shooting of a street hustler and an innocent bystander the night before. To pull the pieces together, he needs to cooperate with a fledgling reporter named Della, played by Rachel McAdams. She works at the online section of the paper as a blogger, which prompts a lot of satiric banter on Cal's part about the superiority of print journalism to blogging, and creates a lot of tension between the two. It's a pleasure to have Helen Mirren on hand as the tough chief editor, who of course gives Cal nothing but grief, and we also have Robin Wright Penn as the congressman's estranged wife, whom Cal once had an affair with.
It's all based on a British TV series of the same name from a few years ago, with everything Americanized and brought up to date by a group of screenwriters that includes Tony Gilroy. Not having seen that show, I can't make comparisons, but naturally the film focuses more on action than character. The mystery at the center is a complex one involving a government outsourced mercenary outfit that is a thinly disguised version of the infamous Blackwater, a company involved in numerous human rights violations in Iraq. This political element adds a little charge to the movie, although it isn't dwelled on very much. Macdonald handles the twists and turns of the plot with skill, and Russell Crowe is solid in another one of his rumpled, anti-establishment good guy roles. The plot may have too many twists for its own good, actually, but that doesn't spoil things too much.
The newspaper film is a uniquely American genre in which our love of the loner tilting against the system takes the form of a resourceful journalist who will do what it takes to get the story. Mainstream journalism in the last few decades has looked a lot more like stenography than serious investigation, so it's nice to have a Hollywood film that entertains while reminding us of the vital importance of real reporting to our national well-being.