Syriana

Syriana was so good. Clooney acted his pants off. Not literally, because he was fat in the movie and that would have been disturbing. Well, he was 35 pounds overweight with a big beard. But he was very convincing. Damon's subplot seemed a little unnecessary, but the oil company merger subplot and the suicide bombers more than made up for that weakness. The torture scenes were extremely painful looking, and I never want to see another fingernail pulled off with pliers ever again. The merger subplot was, I think, the most important one in it, because it had Tim Blake Nelson, and his rant about why corruption is important was just amazing ("Corruption charges. Corruption? Corruption ain't nothing more than government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around here instead of fighting each other for scraps of meat out in the streets. (beat) Corruption... is how we win."). This movie won't make a lot of money, because it's so damn comlicated and depressing (not just the content, but mainly what it predicts for the world), but it is a must see movie. Apparently, Gaghan made it confusing on purpose, but I found that it wasn't all that difficult to follow, although it took a while to get all the Arab characters straight. And most reviews by lay people who have said it was confusing were missing things that I saw or heard easily. So just pay attention, and it'll be fine.
After watching the movie, the Sierra Club (from whom I heard about the free preview and got the tickets) brought out their special guests, who just happened to be Bob Baer and Stephen Gaghan. Which was absolutely awesome.
Stephen was extremely funny narrating the closing credits ("These are very long", "I picked this very readable font from a menu at a restaurant I liked, and then I found out it was used on road signs", "Just wait a bit for the timpani", "This guy is responsible for us being able to continue to film in Dubai because he stood up to a general who tried to shut us down after a couple days"), and then told stories about how some of the things in the movie had happened to him, including the kidnapping to meet with Hezbollah, except that he said the leader of Hezbollah said that he loved Traffic, which was just bizarre. Apparently, he got a call within a couple minutes of stepping off the plane in Beirut, and a friend of a friend of Bob Baer's tells him he has a surprise for him but that he needed to come immediately, so Stephen decides to do it, and then gets everything taken from him and a hood put over his head, and starts to think that he's stupid because it took less than fifteen minutes in Lebanon before he got captured. He also told a great story about trying to get Richard Perle to say who they'd turn Iraq over to when they'd gotten done with the war, if Perle's preferred choice of Chalabi was rejected (as he clearly was because he hadn't lived in Iraq for years and was a puppet of both the Iranians and the US Government). So Perle steepled his hands and waits for a bit, until someone comes in and says Bibi's here. Then he says Excellent, just like Mr. Burns. Perle apparently has a dog named Reagan, and it went for Bibi's crotch, but Gaghan was pulling it off. Not the crotch, but the dog. So when Stephen was leaving, he goes out to the cab to see his Lebanese cab driver surrounded by Mossad agents with guns, and the cabbie just says, "Can we go now?" Absolutely insane. I'm telling the stories in a poor fashion, but Gaghan was absolutely mesmerizing with a microphone. I completely understand how he can pitch his movies. But he said that he has better stories he couldn't tell in the movie because no one would believe them.
Bob was a little more subdued, but much scarier because he clearly had experience and was talking about how the invasion of Iraq had set back our cause decades, and that it was only a matter of when a lot of countries in the Middle East would collapse. Very scary thought. He talked about a friend in Iraq who was completely right about what would happen after the main phase of the Iraq war, with no real fighting and then guerrilla war for a long time afterward. As an ABC reporter, Bob was trying to get into Iraq without a visa in the early days of fighting to see this friend, and, apparently, have the head of Iraqi intelligence surrender to him, and he eventually got in when the border guard was bribed with 100 goats, but about 12 hours from this guy's house in Ramadi, he heard that the Air Force had bombed the house and taken out some of Saddam's cousins who were staying there, but also took out all their wives and children as well. And he told the story like it was nothing. They also talked for a bit about how much they couldn't put in the film, due to legal issues, saying that at least one Arab country had successfully sued a movie when it was used in a derogatory fashion or something. But that Warner legal was scared of this happening to them over this firebomb of a movie. They said that the unnamed Persian Gulf state was made into an amalgam to avoid legal issues. He also explained what Syriana meant, which is fairly close to what I thought, but didn't say when he asked what we thought it meant: Syriana is a think tank term for the remade Middle East that has countries that help with the oil interests. I was going to say that it was a state of mind, that it was the idea that the Middle East could be remade. So instead of it being a state of mind it was sort of the actual Middle East.