Seersucker Wednesday

The U.S. Senate has an annual tradition each third Thursday of every June, where they don the lightweight, striped fabric known as Seersucker in the spirit of traditional Southern clothes.  It's called Seersucker Thursday.  So you might be asking yourself why TMMC has decided to don his own Col. Sanders apparel on a snowy winter Wednesday.  No, I'm not having fried chicken for lunch, but rather I'm celebrating the new political thrillers I have to share with you today.

As I was perusing the aisles of the world wide web in search of new releases this week, I stumbled across two that jumped out at me.  By coincidence, they're both politically driven, but one is based on real events and the other is complete fiction.  While checking out the trailers, I came to the realization that if you're younger than 35 and couldn't stay awake during high school history, you may not be able to tell which is truth and which is fiction.  They say if it looks like a pig, and smells like a pig, then it's probably a pig.  Well if it seems outlandish and if it smells like a hoax, then it's probably political.

Just in time for his grand appearance back on U.S. soil, Roman Polanski's latest, and perhaps last, movie gets ready to open in theaters.  While he probably won't be doing to many appearances on Access Hollywood, at least not without an orange jump suit on, his movie does appear to be something worth taking note of.  Starring Pearce Brosnan, Ewan McGregor and an English accented Kim Cattrall, if you can imagine her wearing clothes for a change, this is the story of a ghostwriter who's hired to complete the memoirs of a prime minister who has more than a few skeletons in his closet.  As the writer falls down a lethal rabbit hole into a political chess match, he soon discovers his adventure is not nearly as fun as Alice's and may even cost him his life.  Full of suspense, The Ghost Writer is high on my list of upcoming movies, with a limited release date of Feb. 19.  If you like political thrillers, this appears to be right up your dark alley, so check out the trailer.

Our next tall tale strikes a little closer to home.  The Most Dangerous Man in America is a 2010 Oscar nominated documentary about Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971.  Blowing the lid off the truth behind the political lies about the U.S.'s involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers was a monumental political scandal that you'd expect to see on the big screen rather than unfold in real life.  Ellsberg has been called both a hero and a traitor and now you get the opportunity to hear his story from some of the players themselves.  Unfortunately, because this is such an underground and low budget documentary, it doesn't appear to have a national opening, so you'll have to check out the Web site to see if you're one of the lucky cities with the opportunity to check it out.  If you can, I recommend you do, and if you can't, go ahead and save it in your Netflix queue as I already have.  Check out the trailer.

Well it's a good thing we don't have a big election coming up, because I'm sure I've helped you take one step closer to hating politics more than you already do.  Maybe it's all this nonstop news about Washington being buried under snow (come on people, it's called a shovel), but politics was obviously on my mind when I chose these two trailers to feature today.  Needless to say though, they both look more than interesting and worth a mention.  And, if you see the documentary, you can cross one more movie off your Oscar list this year.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's review of another Oscar nominated movie, A Serious Man.  Not to be confused with A Single Man.  This one's about a Jewish man, not a gay man.  Insert your own punchline.