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Showing posts from August, 2008

Traitor

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Don Cheadle is one of those actors who can say volumes with a simple expression. Maybe it’s his dark, contemplative eyes set into a face that the audience wants to trust. Someone told me that director Steven Soderbergh once said that if you wanted to make your movie better, put Don Cheadle in it. Whatever it is that makes Don Cheadle a believable character actor does not fail him in this summer’s political thriller Traitor. Traitor is yet another one of those moralizing post-9/11 films that attempts to make a statement at the expense of character, story and dialogue. I have no problem with films with a message, and the message here is one we have heard before: Muslims are wonderful people, except for the few nuts who misinterpreted the Koran and became terrorists, and the US government is a lot like those aforementioned terrorists – good people who lost their way. And there is plenty of blame in Traitor for both Islamic terrorism and American Imperialism to share. Aside from the over