Syriana

I saw it this weekend, and recommend it. By chance I had an extra ticket, and sold it for a refund at the ticket booth; as the theater was completely full about twenty minutes before the film started, I probably could have scalped it outside for a nice markup over face value. The pre/post-film buzz in the Upper West Side crowd was not surprisingly slightly conspiratorial, as if everyone was about to learn/had just learned some deep, dark secret. There are no secrets in this one---unless you don't know that oil is big business and our insatiable thirst for it forces us to compromise our own values. I'm more interested in why that thirst exists, why the price of oil is rising (no, it's not just because demand is increasing or that we are "running out") and the implications for the future. Of course I'm partial to my own take on all of this, which I wrote about in this post a few months ago. But that's beyond the scope of a mainstream Hollywood movie. Given that, it's certainly timely and worth seeing.