Review of "Shattered Glass"

This is one of the movies I checked out from the library. I was a little surprised they had it because it's not very well known. This is an independent film about the true story of Stephen Glass who worked for the New Republic magazine and fabricated stories on a consistent basis. Of course, I wanted to see this movie because it starred Hayden Christensen AKA Anakin Skywalker. I had previously seen his work in Life As A House which was really good and once again, he performed well in this movie by contrast to Star Wars acting. I think his main problems with his acting in Star Wars is the fact that there's no backgrounds. It's all CG. In his other performances, you can see he kinda works with his surroundings and is able to act. He's very good at doing angst.

The film is not epic in scale and it's not supposed to be. It's a very limited story with a limited cast but the cast is really good. What makes this character fun is not how he gets away with lying but how he reacts when everything falls apart and it's fun to yell at him for being stupid. When you rewatch it, you notices several things in the film that you may have missed the first time around which is nice. What makes this film (or DVD) worth watching is the special features. It has a 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephen Glass which is amazing how twisted he is and how calm he is about what he did. The commentary has the director and the real editor Chuck Lane (who Peter Sarsgaard does a great job emulating) discussing the film and illustrates its amazing attention to detail. They tried to get as many people as possible involved and if they couldn't they created compsoite characters that were similar to the real employees. Some of the scenes are verbatim from the actual conversations which is so cool. You can only get factual events like that from an independent film. The ending was a little lofty but all-in-all it's a very enjoyable movie and a good rent. I fear the layman couldn't watch this movie because there's a lot of drama and dialogue but if you enjoy that then you will enjoy this movie

My rating: 8-9 out of 10, I'm trying not be too generous but I can't help it.
DVD-worthy: Yes! I liked this movie a lot and it's probably cheap because it's only a few years old.