Word: bbc
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...laureate Russell Crowe as a crusading newsman and Ben Affleck as a prominent Congressman whose career is threatened by a sex-and-murder scandal. This is my kind of cinema sirloin, organic and artfully prepared. Yet something in me anticipated leftovers. The film is a distillation of a 2003 BBC miniseries, also called State of Play; and I'd recently seen and revered that show. Not that the American movie couldn't have improved on the British series. It's just that, lately, a decent film has trouble matching the best...
...This is straight from Paul Abbott's BBC script for the BBC series, which has a beautiful narrative shape, gradually expanding from the two murders to a wider conspiracy, then narrowing to reveal the killer. The movie is seriously compressed, as a 2-hour film must be from a 5-hour 41-minute TV show, but not fatally crippled. It reduces the number of reporters on the story from five to two, as well as ditching the subplot of a tryst Cal has with Anne. In the TV series Cal has two houseguests. Stephen and then Anne; it seems just...
...lines correctly. The showy role - of a public-relations creep named Dominic Foy, a friend of the murdered woman and a pusher of questionable corporate agendas - goes to Jason Bateman. He's most entertaining, in a squirm-inducing way, but lacks the preening, queening elan of Mark Warren, the BBC's Dominic...
...Sources: BBC; AP; Daily Telegraph; New York Times; Los Angeles Times; New York Times; Chicago Sun-Times...
...obstacle course, circus edition. As he was preparing to leave for an interview across town for PBS's Nightly Business Report, someone grabbed his arm and steered him into a room to talk to a woman named Paula, an extremely earnest reporter from the Finnish Broadcasting Company (the "BBC of Finland," as she put it), who was dressed all in black, with a tight blond ponytail. The lights dimmed, a camera was pointed at them, and Paula started firing off questions about bank nationalizations and Barack Obama's budget. "In a perfect world, what would you do to save...