(no subject)

[jfb]

I really enjoyed Shattered Glass, the movie about Stephen Glass, who fabricated dozens of articles for The New Republic in the mid-90s. It covers a couple of my favorite topics--journalism and lying--and is itself interestingly journalistic in tone. The DVD commentary track, featuring director Billy Ray and Chuck Lane, Glass's editor, is also great. The movie doesn't claim to be non-fiction--there are composite characters and made-up dialogue--but it tracks real-life events closely enough that the commentators slip back and forth between talking about actors, characters, and the real people on which they're based. At several points Ray asks Lane to talk about "what you were thinking during this conversation," and it's a conversation that really happened, so it's a question that actually makes sense.