Remake of the BBC series, but of course they chucked out the fantastic source material — the only Brit Americans care about is James Bond, and Hollywood almost made him CIA. This is as it should be, but annoying to the rest of the world.

The Touching the Void director shoots Crowe and Affleck playing at journos and politicos. Despite the praise in the “making of” featurette, I find documentary filmmakers shoot drama like dogshit: The camera keeps its distance and we end up too detached (sorry — four hours’ sleep — I’ve been swearing horribly all day).

The featurette sold me on DVDs as a format, but only for movies I really like and only for discs with good making-ofs. Here’s my flick-viewing hierarchy:

1. Star power sells. I have my own A-list (fuck the star machine — publicists aren’t arbiters of talent), and I will see any picture with any actor or by any director on that list in-theater.
2. Big special and visual effect films I see in-theater. This includes IMAX and 3D, if I think they’ll be especially cool. I have yet to see a threedee talkie — anyone want to go?
3. Movies my people tell me to see in-theater.
4. Good movies with good featurettes I’ll bop down to Hollywood Tonight or one of Victoria’s other immensely fine rental outlets (Yo Video, Pic-A-Flic, etc.) and try to get a copy on disc. Fuck NetFlix and Zip, if I want a disc I want it now.
5. Most everything else I watch free. Just bein’ real. I’m not a lost client, I’m broke. If I had to pay to watch four movies per day, which is where I’m getting to, I’d be even more homeless.
6. Once in a blue moon, if something really strikes my fancy, I’ll pick up the disc. This is usually reserved for classics. Currently my private stock has been lost in my many moves. If I were to build it from scratch I’d probably start with a collectors’ edition Casablanca. I can watch that picture on repeat.

Lots of game programmers and other creative nerdy types amass walls and walls of DVDs but I just think they’re inconvenient and, frankly, it’s a terribly consumerist bad habit. I’d rather lug around a USB enclosure, and if I wanted an artifact of the film I’d rather frame a poster for the home office (my big “why so serious?” poster is waiting for this treatment). That’s just me though — I can’t stomach spending thousands and thousands on cheap plastic discs when the bits thereon are what I crave.

That featurette category is new as-of this morning because of State of Play, which I didn’t rent but which was lying around the gallery and goes back to Hollywood Tonight tonight. From it I picked up this useful tidbit:

Affleck’s scenes were shot digital with wide depth of field (and, I think, a red-balance so they look colder) to simulate how people see politicians on television now. Crowe’s scenes were shot in analog, anamorphic with shallow depth of field in order to flatten the frame and give him a closed-in, personal feeling (and a blue-balance to look warmer, if such a thing is possible analog — I should research that [Yup!]).

Jason Bateman shows some depth as an actor in a minor role, a bisexual Cadillac salesman PR agency rep. Fucking GM product placement, they’re so bad at it — so behind the times. Have you seen their ads on YouTube lately? Hello, GM? The Internet is not an interactive brochure. You have to participate.

Anyway, I got pulled right out of the action when Crowe and Bateman took a moment to list the options on the new Caddie bourgemobile Jason’s character is tooling around in. Crowe drives a shittily authentic Saab, yet another GM product. Just awful, really awful — a car commercial in the middle of the film and the worst part is that the car fucking sucked, and Bateman still plays his stereotypical loser. At least in Bond films the good Europeans drive BMWs, the bad ones drive Mercs, and they all do it while being stylishly charming.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good characterization — just probably not what GM wants. “He drives a Caddie? What a douche.”

“State of Play” is a useful concept for writing thrillers. Basically characters gyrate around your MacGuffin trying to strategically control it until the conspiracy is revealed. Example: Head to this arms market and secure the nuke for sale before the three terror groups bidding on it. Whoops, the nuke disappeared in the confusion! Now it’s “in play”, but it turns out you were just sent there as a diversion so your boss could steal it and bomb an American city to obtain more funding.

Easy.

In this film some convenient events put Affleck “in play” and hilarity twistyplotz ensues.

Some fast notes:

• One of the antagonists is a thinly-veiled Blackwater, the single most sinister organization operating in the world today. At least they didn’t care to hide behind euphemism: “Blackwater” is a pretty badass name for an evil organization.
• The film patriotically shows why public control of large organizations is a good thing. This is a good trick in America, timely. Corporations make good anti-populist villains.
• Calling a white girl “Nubian princess” — brilliant. White girls don’t have that gymnastic ethnic edge, unfortunately.

One of the underlying currents in the film is blogging versus “real” journalism, mostly characterizing bloggers as character assassins, as if papers have never been used for a personal agenda. I don’t claim to be a journalist, but this distinction strikes me as fishy.

The closing credits are a neat little old-tech industrial film vignette and might be your last chance to see a working newsprint press. It’s pretty sweet, way more hypnotic than WordPress. The subtle message is that newspapers are jam-packed with thrilling coverage and The Public Record thereof: The Truth.

Aside from the ridiculousness of this (“getting newsprint on your hands” doesn’t make information accurate), imagine how much reportage an organization could afford if it didn’t have to maintain all that old industrial garbage, and how many more trees we’d save.

The director says the ending credits are a last hurrah for the power of the press. That’s just empty romanticism and technofear. If you want to read The Times over your morning coffee buy a fucking Kindle.