Posted on 03/29/2011 6:02:42 AM PDT by shortstop
'Fair game' a box-office flop
The movie Fair Game, about the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair, was in theaters and then it seemed to disappear. Any reason?
Poor ticket sales, basically.
Fair Game was a generally well-regarded movie (it got a good 79 percent favorable rating on the movie website Rotten Tomatoes) that starred big-name actors in Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It was about CIA operative Valerie Plame (played by Watts) whose cover was blown in Bob Novak's widely read Washington Post political column.
The information was allegedly leaked to Novak by White House officials to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson (played by Penn), who had written a column in the New York Times in 2003 that said the Bush administration distorted intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The movie, based on books by both Plame and Wilson, opened Nov. 5 in 46 theaters. It drew a paltry $651,082 in the opening weekend. As a comparison, Watts' 2005 movie King Kong drew more than $50 million in its first weekend.
Fair Game's total domestic gross ticket sales were just $9,540,691, and it closed on Feb. 17 after being in theaters 15 weeks. Its foreign ticket sales totaled $13,004,731, and the combined total barely covered the movie's $22 million production budget.
Valerie Plame was a CIA agent who was supposedly outed from her covert assignment by the Bush admin to get back at her husband, Joe Wilson, who had written a dishonest book purportedly discrediting the Bush admin’s claims about Iraq seeking wmd material in Niger. In fact, at the time Plame was not covert and was in charge of a desk at Langley. The person who outed her, Richard Armitage, worked at the State Department, and was opposed to the Bush admin’s Iraq policies. In short, the libs cooked up the whole Bush admin conspiracy. Wilson turned out to be an incredible liar about other things as well. Most of the claims made in his book about Bush wrongdoings didn’t stand up to close scrutiny.
I did not like her use of a agency cover company,Brewster Jennings & Associates, to give $1000.00 to the Gore campaign in her married name, Wilson. It is a misuse of the Agency’s money and resources and misuse of government resources to influence the political process. I understand that it had to be seen as a normal company but she was a desk jockey working at Langley using a cover company to hide her giving money to a campaign. She and her husband masquerading as political neutral and honest “government” workers is fallacious and sickening. The movie is just one more sham for the liberals to feed on to bolster their fabricated worldview.
During the “investigation” into the “leak” her former supervisor described her as an analyst. She drove to, and parked her car at the CIA building in Langley. Operatives don’t do that; clerical agents do. Operatives don’t do interviews and photo spreads for Vanity Fair magazine. Operatives don’t hop into bed with a lackey like Joe Wilson on the second date and then proclaim during pillow-talk “I’m a spy for the CIA”. A clerical agent who thinks her low-level position at the CIA makes her a female James Bond might do something like that and then boast about it in a Vanity Fair interview; but not a real operative.
Don’t give up on the movie yet.
There’s still RedBox sales to consider :-)
All $7.00...
No doubt. I don't want any part of paying Sean Penn's cocaine and hooker tab.
A newspaper trying to pump up DVD or PPV rentals of a bad movie?
I hear the movie also left out that every time this case got to court, it lost.
Still fixated on political conspiracy based fiction, trying to pass it off as fact and spending countless millions to offset their dishonest intent.
No wonder the British and the Aussies are blowing Hollywood away at the box office. They are actually still making movies people want to watch without being indoctrinated in the process.
The ticket sales both foreign and domestic might be close to production costs but they left out the 10’s of millions spent to market the movie which makes the movie a bomb.
But this movie and series of books was not made by Hollywood, Sean Penn, or the Wilson’s to make money, it was propaganda to shape how the history of the Bush years is to be written.
Believe it or not, even the Washington Post admits the movie is full of lies.
“Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120306298.html
Critics, lost most of the press, are liberal. Quite often one will see a good rating by the critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a poor rating from the public (and vice versa).
Anyway, this was an esoteric, unsexy scandal that almost nobody knew anything about and probably a dull movie.
Without looking, I would bet ten bucks that Roger Ebert gave it 4 stars.
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