jay roach's RECOUNT (2008)

if Recount's primary goal was to make me really mad all over again about something that happened eight years ago, then by all means it's a pretty wild success. as a film, though, there's not much more to it than important people (we know they are important because of the generously deployed name/position subtitles) calling each other on the telephone and saying "turn on CNN!"

alright, that's a touch unfair. but how does someone go about making a film about something like this? Roach does his damnedest, and for what it's worth some of it comes across as good drama, particularly where Laura Dern's alarmingly wonderful Katherine Harris caricature is concerned. (Spacey, on the other hand, continues that decade-long sleepwalk of his.) but short of the slumbering ire it wakes so clamorously, there's not much to Recount; we have here the cinematic (or rather televisional) incarnation of a tossed-off nonfiction pageturner, righteously indignant but skewed just enough to shirk definitiveness.