Anybody seen "The Insider?" It raked CBS over the coals pretty good for allowing corporate business considerations to unduly influence CBS News, in this case to kill a Mike Wallace interview with the former research VP spilling the beans on his former employer, Brown & Williamson. Needless to say, Big Tobacco didn't fare well either as B & W was portrayed as a lying and sinister corporate malefactor. Al Pacino was credible as Lowell Bergman the courageous producer who fought the cowardly CBS news and legal and corporate hierarchy to get the interview aired; and Russell Crowe, unknown previously to me, was quite good as the conflicted Jeffrey Wigand whistle blower character. And nobody could have played Mike Wallace as well as Christopher Plummer. At times I forgot that Wallace was not playing himself. The woman CBS lawyer who helped kill the Wigand interview was the slimiest movie character I can recall at the moment, right up there with Lady MacBeth.
|