review: ides of march

(possible spoiler alert ...)

So I'd been hearing a lot about this movie -- for the first time in my life, firstly from my Mom.  The fact that Mom knew about a movie, who the actor in it was (even if she never had heard of George Clooney before, she managed to impart his name to me, which is really saying something) and told me about it before I'd heard of it was really rather staggering, much as if the world had shifted its 23 or whatever degree tilt to the other direction and the Tower of Pisa was no longer leaning.

She'd written to inform me that Cincinnati was very excited about the upcoming movie because this famous actor was from Cincinnati and many of the scenes were shot there, which promptly sent me to Wikipedia to verify that George Clooney had ever actually lived in Cincinnati, which I was amazed to discover was true.  Rumor had it there really were scenes shot there, and I began to get rather excited about the whole prospect of my home town being on screen.

A few people I knew had been to see it and I eagerly asked each if they'd seen Cincinnati in it, and I got a rather muddy, well, um, it was a good movie sort of answer from most of them, which only made me more curious as I hastily tried to describe Fountain Square or Union Terminal.

As it turns out, neither Fountain Square nor Union Terminal is in the movie, though I can attest that it was in Cincinnati.  I was so intrigued I made a list of Cincinnati references throughout the movie:

--the Ohio flag is often on display (it is, incidentally, the only American state flag that is not rectangular)
--clippings from both the Dayton Daily News (which I once had an article published in) and the Cincinnati Enquirer (which I have not)
--9th and Vine
--television channels shown are 5, 9 and 12, which is exactly right
--Miami college gear on people in audiences
--Porkopolis
--they drove instead of taking taxis for the most part -- I've never known anyone to take a taxi in Cincinnati
--Bearcats references
--"the other side of the river" references (i.e., the Ohio River divides Kentucky from Ohio)
--much to my embarrassment, a painted "who dey" sign (I think if I were Australian, I'd deem it excessively bogan)
--a background flag that said Cincinnati
--for that matter, they consistently spelled Cincinnati correctly, which is something only people actually from there can be depended on to do consistently
--Lunken Airport -- but really!  That is not the Cincinnati airport!  Don't worry -- if you come to visit, there is a much bigger, better, nicer airport.  Really!
--a reference to Proctor and Gamble (which has its headquarters in Cincinnati)
--Sibcy Cline relators
--513 area code (which, as I scribbled out, caused me a very odd possible aha moment ... did 5/3 bank name itself such because it was spoofing the area code and just tilted the one to the side to make it a slash??  It's the most logical explanation I've ever come up with for its name in any case.)
--the skywalk! About 5th Street
--Cincinnati Bell
--Xavier
--the license plates were clearly Ohioan
--presumably the Oakley Clinic and the Country Oven were real places, but I'm not actually familiar with either
--shots of the city skyline (not Skyline)

As for the movie itself, I actually liked it -- especially the ending.  I was slightly preoccupied finding as many references as I could (could you guess?), but the story itself was well told.  I thought the title itself was a bit of a spoiler, until I realized that it's only a spoiler if you know the reference.  If you don't, well, the ending might be a bit surprising.

I found the story really realistic in many ways -- rather stretched in others, of course, being a movie -- and it had a good bit of discussion material in it to talk through afterwards.  It does an excellent job of presenting ethical issues, but doesn't exactly solve them.  Which makes it a bit frustrating and a bit of a good movie, I think.