You are hereBlogs / jimstaro's blog / Fiction meet Reality, Reality - Fiction
Fiction meet Reality, Reality - Fiction
WHEN Robert Harris's cracking political thriller The Ghost was published in 2007, nobody doubted that the author's former friend, Tony Blair, was the model for Adam Lang: a former British prime minister who embarked on an illegal war in the Middle East and who faces extradition to The Hague, if he leaves the US, for his complicity in the capture and torture of alleged terrorists. The book wasn't a roman-a-clef exactly but pretty damned close to one.
Three tumultuous years later comes a gripping new film of the novel that, Harris says, seems "more like a documentary than a fantasy".
The Ghost Writer -- co-scripted by Harris and director Roman Polanski -- stars Ewan McGregor as the unnamed ghostwriter hired to rescue Lang's memoir after the mysterious death of the original author. Pierce Brosnan also stars as the beleaguered Lang. Continued
- jimstaro's blog
- Login to post comments
-
- Email this page
- Printer-friendly version
People who want to check out reviews of "The Ghost Writer" can find around 175 of them at www.IMDB.com, where plenty of users gave the mystery, ... film a high average rating of nearly 8 out of 10.
Go to the website, enter the title of the film for the search term, then, in the resulting page, open the page for the film, and the external reviews page is then linked down the left-hand-side of the page a little.
There are reviews by Roger Ebert at Chicago Sun Times, someone at Salon.com, and very many others. I usually only look for his and if there isn't one for a film, then I just check what imdb users say. The latter can take longer though because some users of imdb are not competent film reviewers, or reviewers of anything, and it can take a little while before coming to competent reviews. But I check for the competent user reviews.
Anyway, Ebert rates "The Ghost Writer" fiction 4 of 4 stars. His readers give this an average 3 of 4 stars.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100224/REVIE...
When the rating is high at imdb, Ebert gives a top rating and his readers give a good average rating, then we can be sure the film is well made, et cetera. And they also review documentaries.
So we have this and the clearly favourable review from The Australian to be able to realize that this is a film certainly worth seeing, for anyone wishing to see a film that's fiction while strongly depictive of or similar to reality. According to Ebert, even the person in the Washington role that Condoleeza Rice held during the first Bush-Cheney term looks enough like her.
It's definitely like this film was meant to send a real message about ugly reality.