12/16/2023 0 Comments Movie called shattered![]() ![]() "Shattered Glass," the story that director Billy Ray tells from a Vanity Fair article by Buzz Bissinger, functions primarily as a cautionary tale about charm, that most unctuous of workplace lubricants. But they didn't hate the precocious Steve: How could they? He was so talented, so far ahead on the fast track, yet also funny and disarming and supportive, and he wrote such great stories.įor the most part, he was making them up. He was the magic boy, and he got to take calls from bigger, higher-paying magazines while his workaholic colleagues sat around in a rictus of envy and longing. ![]() He loved the editorial meetings, where with his easy charm and quick wit he dominated, turning them into Steve-fests. He loved the rush of the victory lap, the slow stride down aisles and the casual encounters in hallways, flush with the ripeness of his own superiority. He seemed to love the moments when he walked into the newsroom after the appearance of the Big Story - the one about the Republican party animals cavorting with the prostitute at the Young Conservative convention, or about the punk hacker who wound up hired by a software company he had penetrated and humiliated - and people crowded around him and told him how great he was. Who knew he was an addict? He was enslaved not to drugs, not to money, not to sex, but to something far more destructive: glory. His stories, usually set in the margins of political or pop culture, were funny, ironic, superbly written. Glass, as some will know, was an extremely bright young man who found himself on the staff of the New Republic, that estimable, always provocative journal where incisive journalistic pieces are much and properly valued. Why did he have to sully everything he touched? There's no answer, other than this chilling mandate: That which nature doesn't forbid is mandatory, and every imaginable freakish moral permutation will, sometime or other, spring to life. Instead it was a film called "Shattered Glass." Here's the difference: Harry Potter is fiction but his stories are joyous and inspiring Stephen Glass is nonfiction, but his story is sad and dispiriting. In fact, for a twisted minute or so, I thought I was watching a cheap video I had ordered off an obscure cable channel late at night: "Harry Potter Gone Wild!" With his big round glasses, his hypersensitive brown eyes, his unruly tendrils of hair and his air of earnest, probing intelligence, his fabulous likability, Hayden Christensen's Stephen Glass reminds me of nobody so much as a certain famous, magical schoolboy. ![]()
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