Better late than never: 'Green Zone' trailer arrives

The long-awaited trailer for Paul Greengrass' long-delayed "Green Zone" has finally hit the Web. The action thriller, due out next spring, stars Matt Damon as a CIA operative trying to get to the bottom of the mess in Iraq. So far, the Web buzz has largely focused on how much the trailer looks like -- ahem -- a "Bourne Identity" knock off (not surprising, since Damon and Greengrass teamed up for two of the three films in the series.)

But let's get to the important stuff. After having to endure a series of Hollywood films in which journalists are total losers and scuzzballs (or in the case of Russell Crowe's swaggering investigative reporter in "State of Play" a chubby scuzzball), finally we get a movie that makes journalists look like real pros. In the "Green Zone" trailer, when Damon tries to wheedle the identity of a source out of crack Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Lawrie Dayne -- played by the estimable Amy Ryan -- Dayne gives him the old 10th Avenue freeze-out, frostily replying, "I'm not discussing sources."

Amazing, isn't it? A no-nonsense reporter in a Hollywood movie. Wonders will never cease. Watch for yourself:

Photo: Matt Damon in "Green Zone." Credit: Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures.

Comments

[Twister Murchison]

I wouldn't be saying that about the perception of the reporter if you've read the script....I recall her character coming off in a significantly more negative, even duplicitous, light and in no way a no-nonsense reporter.

[Octave Tockfield]

Mr. Goldstein, I think you're reading this short, fragmentary trailer wrong. The movie's logline is that Damon's character has come to search for the elusive WMD... and wonders why they can't be found. The stone-walling journalist then might be a stand-in for the NYT's journo, and putative friend of the neo-cons, Judith Miller... albeit here transferred to the WSJ, a part of Rupert Murdoch's empire, thus "extra evil."

Alas, I fear your journalist brethren will only be further frowned upon here.

Who though is the Iraqi Damon has come to arrest? Hard to tell. Seems like a conflation of Achmad Chalabi and dodgy intelligence source dubbed Curveball.

It's only a trailer but this seems to have departed markedly from the nonfiction book that was its source.

[Reni]

Perhaps your lot gets a bad name due to writing articles such as this where you base your "oh finally, a good depiction of journalists" one a single line from the whole movie?
And really, the relatively insignificant about the journalist is "the important stuff"?
Your article is more counterproductive to the cause than anything else mate.

Cheers,
RT