On the couch

In a week when the jostling for position before next year’s Republican Party primaries in America was in the news, comes the release of Fair Game, a timely reminder of what a charming example George W Bush’s administration set for scumbag politicians and operators the world over.
Directed by Doug Liman, it’s based on the memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House by Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA operative whose identity was revealed in the New York Times due to an illegal information leak from by a US government official.
The film lays out how Plame came to the attention of the White House after her husband, a former ambassador to Africa, spoke out about how talk of weapons of mass destruction being built and amassed in Iraq was what could best be described as “a crock” and that America were being led into a war on false pretenses.
It turns out if it’s taut, densely plotted political intrigue you want – with or without an amnesiac super assassin – Doug Liman is the man for the job because Fair Game is quality right from the start.
Avoiding the twin traps of being either politically topheavy and boring or being a preachy,  90 minute “I told you so” dance on behalf of the political left in the US, Liman serves up a fascinating, infuriating and largely believable story that focuses as much on the damage the Plame Affair, as it became known, did to the life and relationship of Valerie Plame and her husband as it did to the American political landscape.
Sharply scripted and excellently acted by  Watts, Penn and a who’s who of American character actor, the action barrels along briskly, packing a lot of story into a small amount of time. Like a really bleak episode of The West Wing.
For a film about politics, Liman steers clear of making a “statement” with Fair Game. None of the characters are portrayed as overtly good or evil and the events are allowed to speak for themselves.
Thought-provoking, exciting and interesting Fair Game is a intelligently made film that will leave you reaching for google to read up on the real events surrounding it almost as soon as the credits role.
There’s something deceptive about Super. On the surface it looks like a vague knock-off of Kick-Ass only with a a weird-looking grown-up in the lead and that funny girl from Juno as a sidekick.
Like Matthew Vaughan’s flick, the story is about a loser who suffers something traumatic and decides that lycra and vigilantism is a reasonable way to fill the hole in their soul. There are scenes of cartoonish violence and a thread of pitch black humour. Sound familiar? Where the films diverge, however, is that Super isn’t just dark in its sense of humour. It’s dark every way you look at it.
Rainn Wilson plays Frank, a cook whose recovering addict wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) has just dumped him for a drug-dealing gangster in the form of Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Impotent, rage-filled and uncomfortably crazy, Frank constructs the alter ego of The Crimson Bolt to fight crime and win back the heart of his wife.
On the way he’s joined by Libby (Ellen Paige) a kookie comic store worker who becomes his sidekick – Boltie.
Paige is brilliant as Libby/Boltie. Far from the typical crazy but cute foil for the hero, she plays a young woman so uncomfortably nuts that she’s hard to watch sometimes.
In a similar vein, Wilson is brilliant but sometimes hard to watch as Frank. Occasionally his antics reach Office-worthy levels of cringe-inducing hilarity while other times his violent outbursts are shocking. 
Without the darkness, Super could have still been a very silly but entirely enjoyable flick. What you actually get, however, is so much more.
The Crimson Bolt isn’t some loser with a moral compass who decides to fight back against an unfair world, instead Rainn Wilson’s anti-hero is a truly damaged individual that happens to be focusing his rage and desperation toward targets that are, for the most part, more antisocial than he is.
No matter how entertaining things get – and the do get pretty entertaining – director James Gunn never loses sight of the fact that he is making a film about  damaged people.
Great to watch but take a deep breath before you press play.