A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin McDonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet McDonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

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Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney.

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Miguel Ferrer had some big shoes to fill before he was even old enough to walk. His father was the Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer; his mother was recording star Rosemary Clooney. His oldest childhood friend is Carrie Fisher, his sister-in-law is Debbie Boone, and his cousin is George Clooney. With expectations that high, it’s probably no surprise that he shied away from the intense pressures of film work and found his niche as a television actor; he’s just signed on to a recurring role in the Bionic Woman remake, but he’s also turned in memorable TV roles in Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, Tales from the Crypt, Crossing Jordan and LateLine (as well as, er, less grand projects like Kung Fu: The Next Generation). He’s also won acclaim as a voiceover actor, doing everything from Disney (he was a featured actor in Mulan) to superheroes (a lifelong comics buff, he’s been in several Superman animated episodes and will play a prominent role in the upcoming New Frontier Justice League cartoon) to video games (he plays the lead in BioShock, one of the moodiest, most dramatic, and immersively cinematic games in history). Ferrer didn’t initially want to be an actor at all; turned off by the hyper-competitive nature of the film industry, he was originally a respected studio drummer (playing alongside the legendary Keith Moon in one memorable session) and took his first acting job only because childhood friend — and current bandmate, in the Jenerators — Billy Mumy talked him into it. Twenty-five years later, Ferrer, whose reputation for playing short-tempered, hotheaded jerks belies his abilities as an extremely versatile actor who can handle as much emotional range as he’s given, has become one of an elite group of television actors whose very appearance in the credits is good enough cause to give a show a chance.  But despite his infrequent big-screen appearances, he’s still done enough with his few and far-between movie roles to make him a That Guy! favorite.

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