“Dinner and a movie” is basically my favourite date. For today’s awesomeness, I had to go by myself. Luckily, I’m a cheap date, and could take myself to the ANU Film Group to see “Fair Game”.
First, dinner. The Iron Chef in Mawson is as liberal as I am with sweetness and crispy oil. Also, they give you free honey sesame peanuts when you dine in.
I had boneless lemon chicken. It was a beautiful combination of crispy, sauce-laced skin and sweetly ordinary moist chicken. Much nom. On a Wednesday evening – the night before public service payday – it was fairly quiet, and the service was lightning fast (you can tell, because my peanuts are still there).
Happily sated, I went and saw an equally excellent movie. “Fair Game” (starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn) is definitely an intellectual movie.
It’s about the CIA investigations into the possibility of nuclear weapons being produced in Iraq in the early 2000s. More importantly, it’s about how the overwhelming findings of the analysts (ie that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) were ignored, and the USA government lied to its citizens and invaded a country that was no threat to their safety. It’s also about a CIA agent’s husband who wrote the truth (he’d been hired as an analyst himself, and had discovered that Iraq almost certainly had no uranium whatsoever) and threw it into the mainstream media. Finally, it’s about how the government then exposed his wife as a CIA agent, putting all her active projects in jeopardy including the innocent Iraqi scientists she had contacted in order to get the information that the government had ignored.
The story is incredibly compelling and the acting is top-notch. I recommend the film to anyone who doesn’t require movies to be silly. My one criticism is that the preview implied that most of the story was about the CIA agent Valerie Palmer’s personal life. Actually it was a more well-developed story of the entire conspiracy to invade Iraq (focusing on her personal investigations). Her personal life is vital, however, and was what made the movie great.
Conclusion: I’m okay company for a date, but I’d prefer eating and seeing movies with friends and/or CJ.