State of Play

State of Play is a well-done political thriller. Russell Crowe did a really good job, as did Ben Affleck (mild surprise there); Helen Mirren was hilarious in her role as the chief editor. It kept our attention throughout, and it really does a good job of memorializing the classic newspaper. It's not clear from the screenplay whether they think that the greater threat to newspapers lies from their large corporate owners or the Internet.

Anyway, it was entertaining, which is all I expect these days. High art it was not.

2 comments:

P Cheng said...

If you enjoyed the movie, go find the original BBC miniseries. It's about 3 times longer, and the story is dense and just gets better as it goes. I haven't seen the movie version so can't compare but I can say that I couldn't stop watching the original-I would've sat through 6 hours straight if it wasn't for needing sleep!

Wilson said...

We started watching the miniseries, which definitely is better than the movie. Unfortunately, since the movie did a good job of capturing a lot of the essence of the miniseries, there aren't too many surprises left for us.