James Maguire's Thought Circus

I skipped The Departed when it played in theaters. It looked like a routine, hyper-violent police procedural. But I added it to my Netflix cue when it won Best Picture.

It starts slow, and does indeed appear to just a bones-breaking-guns-shooting tough guy flick. For the first twenty minutes, I wondered: this won Best Picture? But then the narrative strands start to come together, and the tension begins building. And with a cast of bright lights, most of the scenes are intense curios, full of deep, intimate portrayals that never approach the obvious.

Among films that have won Best Picture, it still lacks some larger value, like the way last year’s winner, Crash, dealt with race relations. Departed is essentially just entertainment, but engaging entertainment. (Although by the end, the body count gets pretty absurd…)

Posted by James Maguire at 08:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Amid all the coverage of Scooter Libby’s conviction for obstructing a leak investigation, a statement by one of the jurors, Denis Collins, says it all:

“What are we doing with this guy here? Where’s Rove? Where are these other guys?’” Collins said. “I’m not saying we didn’t think Mr. Libby was guilty of the things we found him guilty of. It seemed like he was, as [Libby defense lawyer] Mr. Wells put it, he was the fall guy.”

To be sure, Libby took the fall but the real dirty work (or the dirtiest of the dirty work) was committed by higher ups. Libby’s machinations were part of the selling of a war that a recent Gallup poll shows that most Americans realize was a terrible mistake. It’s that war that’s the real crime, and responsibility for it lies with Bush and his inner circle.

Sometimes it’s tempting to think the Bush presidency is a bad dream, but no, the darkness is real. That he is our president is a very, very, very bad thing.

Posted by James Maguire at 07:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)