journal features

movie review - Enemy of the State

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 1999.12.15

Silly, but a good flick. It's about a fellow (Smith) who winds up in the possession of some incriminating video footage of some NSA goons (Voigt at all) snuffing a Senator. He winds up losing his job, his credit, his wife, and his home. He becomes the target of a trumped-up police investigation, to top things off, and after the acquaintance that passed him the footage media gets killed, he bolts.

Quickly falling into the world of high-tech espionage, he involves a friend who gets snuffed, and tracks down a former spook who now frelances (Hackman). Smith's presence quickly fucks up Hackman's life, as the satellites peer down and watch them blunder along.

Then the explosions start.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton