Alaska Employment Law

If you (1) need a laugh, (2) consider international politics to be a highly suspect endeavor, (3) condone vicious satire, and (4) don’t mind being f-bombed to death verbally, then get yourself to see In the Loop, one of the funniest, cleverest films I have seen in years.  In fact, I really need to see it again, because it’s an incredibly fast-paced film, about two-thirds of the dialog is British English, and while I was laughing I missed the funny lines that played when I was laughing.  The British part is no surprise; In the Loop is an adaptation of the BBC television series The Thick of It, which mocks Anglo-American politics.
 
The premise:   during an interview, the British Secretary for International Development, the distressingly ineffectual Simon Foster (played by Tom Hollander), accidentally states that war in the Middle East is “unforeseeable,” whatever that means.  Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi), the Prime Minister’s Secretary of Communications, tells Secretary Foster off in unprintable language, but the cheshire cat is out of the bag, and various American and British factions try to exploit Foster’s statements either in furtherance of, or opposition to, the unnamed (but contemporary) war.  Mimi Kennedy is horridly wonderful as the American Karen Clarke, an Assistant Secretary of State with bad teeth.  Her lovely but callow assistant Liza (Anna Chlumsky) writes a position paper on the war that by the end of the film seems to drive the entire international debate.  And James Gandolfini sheds his Tony Soprano image with a cantankerous performance as 3-star General Miller, a soldier who has seen it all and believed none of it.  Shot with hand-held cameras in London and Washington, this film is a hoot.  Strongly recommended, and guaranteed to get you out of that bad mood — unless your bad mood is about the sorry state of international diplomacy, in which case you may want to leap from an upper story.  You were warned.