Recco of the week: Shattered Glass

REAL DRAMA: The film is a true life, fall-from-grace story of a promising 20-something journalist.

Other stories in the section:

Bollywood stars to make the tour truly 'Unforgettable'

The Unforgettable tour kicks off in Canada on 18th July.

• I liked some portions of Tashan: Shahid

Featured Blog

Sagarika Ghose

Red Letter Day

Featured Slideshows

Related Headlines

powered by

• Bollywood stars to make the tour truly 'Unforgettable'
• I liked some portions of Tashan: Shahid

Keywords: Recco of the week, Shattered Glass

It's not often that you get to see a really good expose film so when you do, you have to share it with the world. That's exactly what I'm doing right now as I recommend Shattered Glass, the true life, fall-from-grace story of a promising 20-something journalist Stephen Glass who was discovered to have fabricated dozens of stories for the leading political journal The New Republic which he worked for.

Hayden Christensen plays Stephen Glass as an amiable kid, too eager-to-be-liked, a bit of a suck-up if I might say so. Now Glass is popular among his colleagues and his editors like him, and he comes up with all these interesting stories.

But the bubble starts to burst when a journalist from another publication begins an investigation against Glass on discovering that some of his facts have been cooked up in one of his stories.

When called upon by his boss to verfiy his sources, Glass complies, and that's really the scariest thing about Glass -- you discover he's covered his tracks for this entirely fictionalised story by inventing all these fake phone numbers and websites.

Subsequently it's learnt that Glass has been faking stories left, right and centre and even then he doesn't seem entirely repentant. Now the reason I recommend Shattered Glass is because it's such an engaging film, and because this incident itself is so dramatic that it makes for such a dramatic film.

In many ways, the film itself is an honourable effort, but I urge you to watch it for different reasons -- watch it for Hayden Christensen's fantastic performance as Stephen Glass, for Peter Sarsgaard's layered performance as Glass' editor, but really watch it mainly because it's such a gripping story. You'll find it on DVD at your local library, rent Shatterd Glass and trust me, you won't be disappointed.