Syriana

Well, it snowed last night. I got up at 5.15am and called the number with snow closing information and was delighted to learn I didn't have to go to work today. I woke up late, had some coffee (that's a treat since I'm almost completely a tea drinker now) and breakfast, got a bunch of errands done, and then went to see Syriana at the movies.

Great movie. It's by the same guy who did Traffic and it shows. The same idea of multiple plotlines that somehow connect late in the movie shows one key issue from many different points of view and illustrates quite effectively how that one mega-issue can change the lives of many different people in completely different ways. In Traffic, that issue was drugs and drug trafficking. In Syriana, that issue is oil. This movie is also a little like Crash where you don't see how the various plotlines are related until near the end of the movie. It's unlike Crash because in that movie, your interpreation of events is altered once you know how various people are connected to each other. In this movie (and Traffic), the various plotlines don't change their meaning once you see how things are connected - it's just different ways these issues touch the lives of these characters. The best explanation of this is in a CNN article about a conversation with the writer/director, Stephen Gaghan.

• Gaghan "mentions the front page of a recent New York Times, with articles about disgraced congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Nigerian corruption, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Iraq war."All this stuff seems different, but it all seems the same. So [with] multiple narrative you go ... I don't know how all this fits together. That's the first hour of Syriana."

And that's what it feels like. Go see Syriana.