{"id":949,"date":"2009-07-09T11:04:04","date_gmt":"2009-07-09T01:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=949"},"modified":"2009-08-13T15:35:45","modified_gmt":"2009-08-13T05:35:45","slug":"in-the-loop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=949","title":{"rendered":"In The Loop"},"content":{"rendered":"

“War is unforseeable”
\n– Simon Foster, Secretary of State of International Development, speaking to BBC 4.<\/em><\/p>\n

Simon Foster, a hapless and ineffectual government official, strays ‘from the line’ in a prime time media interview and accidentally asserts that the British government is considering military involvement in the Middle East.\u00a0 This leads to a chaotic chain of events as both pro and anti war proponents in the halls of British and American government scramble to manipulate Foster for their own agenda.<\/p>\n

In The Loop<\/em> is a fast-paced political satire that is deeply cynical with barbed jokes that come in at an impressive rate of knots.\u00a0 The cast is predominantly made up of political lightweights: assistants, secretaries, young temps and washed up generals.\u00a0 And yet their actions often have significant consequences for the whole country.\u00a0 A lot of the humour in the film comes from their desperation to feel important and have their input validated and how cruelly they are put back into their place.\u00a0 In one instance, Foster is excited to be invited to attend a meeting involving White House undersecretary Karen Clarke.\u00a0 He feels its his shot in the big leagues and looks forward to participating in the dialogue.\u00a0 Shortly afterwards he is told that he is there to serve as ‘human meat’ to pad out the room so it looks full to please the visiting American staff.<\/p>\n

The film is like the antithesis of The West Wing<\/em>.\u00a0 Almost all of the characters are self-serving, vulgar and inept.\u00a0 The camera work often employs the same corridor tracking shots as The West Wing<\/em> only they are rough handheld shots.\u00a0 There is none of the structure or organisation seen in The West Wing<\/em>: in one instance, the British emissaries to the White House stage an impromptu meeting so they can pretend to look busy when their American counterparts arrive to meet them.<\/p>\n

This is a terrific ensemble performance.\u00a0 Peter Capaldi excels as the foul-mouthed Scottish politician Malcolm Tucker.\u00a0 He effortly strings together putdowns and verbally decimates his co-workers with language that would make Al Swearengen blush.\u00a0 Tom Hollander is also hugely entertaining as Simon Foster.\u00a0 He is perfect playing a man who is well and truly out of his depth, who craves importance and validation of his opinions, though he freely changes them to suit whoever he thinks might listen.<\/p>\n

There is a diplomacy to the humour:\u00a0 it spares no one.\u00a0 The film riffs on the British government’s inferiority complex with their American counterparts, mocks the mundane concerns of Foster’s constituents in his hometown and ridicules the shallowness of the American politicians who constantly preen and arbitrarily like to have meetings with lots of people attending them.<\/p>\n

Despite being a comedy, and a particularly cynical one at that, this film rather accurately surmizes a lot of the public perception of trans-Atlantic political relations in the past ten years.\u00a0 It delivers an exceptionally high level of laugh out loud moments and is one of the funniest films of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When America and Britain want to go war in the Middle East, what happens behind the scenes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[336,335,50],"class_list":["post-949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","tag-in-the-loop","tag-peter-capaldi","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}