Watching Movies
I made time to watch SHATTERED GLASS the other day, and I thought it was pretty good. It's the story of Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic in the late 90s who fabricated many quotes, events and entire stories and passed them off as "fact". When caught, Glass covered himself with more lies and more lies and more lies, until nothing he said to the people around him could be trusted. Hayden Christensen does a decent job as Glass, and the cast around him is convincing, too - both trying to find the truth, and still trying to protect him from the fallout, until it's too late and the lies have piled way too high.

I'm peculiar about the way I watch movies. I can lose myself to an extent in a film - letting the story carry me away, while hopefully still retaining a sense of what's being taught or what's being learned. I look for truth, and I look for character traits that need to be formulated in me. I guess what struck me about this film is that it's message might go unnoticed: living a life without truth, and ultimately without integrity and trust, was the bad thing. It's tempting to say that getting caught was the worse thing in all of this. But the film does an excellent job (minor twist at the end, but I won't spoil it) in saying that the underlying integrity that was missing from this young writer's morality was in fact his fatal flaw.

Good review @ Slate of the 60 Minutes piece that's included on the DVD
- posted by Rick @ 08:01