2006/02/22

George Clooney Movie Again Makes the Cover of a Leading French Daily

What is the most important event on the past 24 hours, one that warrants an over-sized photo on the cover of Le Monde, i.e., a supposedly serious and objective newspaper dealing with vital international affairs?

Well, if there is a Hollywood movie castigating America's reigning neoconservatives coming out, then that would be it. And so we have an oversized picture from the Participant Productions movie Syriana with an accompanying article on the "cinema of responsibility". (Notice that the translator has mistranslated a phrase in the final paragraph of Thomas Sotinel's interview of George Clooney: the actor must have said "We [liberals] were against the witch trials" in the McCarthy era, but this has been translated as "We… were against the trials of witchcraft.")

The only other photo on the cover is an ad for the Terrence Malick movie The New World; the only other image, a Plantu cartoon.

This, of course, is only the second Hollywood-movie-that-happens-to-demonize-Uncle-Sam's-policies to make the cover of a French daily in seven weeks.