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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Cinema: the state of play in Obama's US

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18/06/2009Cinema: the state of play in Obama's US

Picturenose’s James Drew wants to be a journalist like Russell Crowe in 'State of Play', while Jeremy Slater tells you why you shouldn’t miss Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, 'Synecdoche, New York'.

State of Play (2009)
It’s an interesting phenomenon – cinema, down the years, has by and large served the Fourth Estate very well. Choice examples such as Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), All the President’s Men (1976) by Alan J. Pakula, and Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) are very much ancestors to Kevin McDonald’s State of Play (2009), which was itself originally a very highly rated Paul Abbott-written BBC mini-series directed by David Yates, back in 2003.

In short, the best films about the noble hack’s art deal with the importance of getting the story right, getting it first, and the price that often must be paid for finding out the truth.


Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland (2006)) proves himself more than adept at getting the best from his ensemble cast, led by Russell Crowe as maverick but principled Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey and his hard-bitten editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren), who stumble upon a link between two seemingly unconnected deaths, a petty thief who is gunned down in an alley and the beautiful assistant to Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who ‘falls’ in front of a subway train on the morning of the new Congressional hearings. McAffrey, of course, spots a conspiracy in the wings – he has a turbulent past connection with the Congressman involving Collins’s wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn), but he wants to help and protect his old friend. However, as he and his ambitious young rookie-writer sidekick Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) begin to get closer to the truth, involving a corporate cover-up packed with insiders, informants and assassins, the risks to the investigators’ very lives become increasingly apparent. How much is a story worth?

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1 reaction to this article

Francesco Sinibaldi posted: 22-06-2009 | 7:26 PM

J'espère qu'à l'avenir....

Le soleil,
quand le chant
du matin couvre
le sourire avec
tendre poésies,
paraît la lumière
qui éclaire la
chanson d'un
monde solitaire,
et d'un rêve
infini.....

Francesco Sinibaldi

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