All hail great satire: Armando Ianucci’s In the Loop is a riotous transcontinental political farce, a policy-wonk answer to The Front Page with characters jetting back and forth between London and Washington and enough scatological invective to make David Mamet say, “Whoa — that’s over the line.” The most outlandish thing about this sleeper comedy is its accuracy: From what we can glean, this is pretty much what happened in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the Brits were drafted to supply bogus intel to help the Cheney administration make its case to the U.N. Security Council. Ianucci uses characters from his BBC comedy In the Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, a relentlessly abusive Scottish government communications chief based on Alastair Campbell, who did the same job for Tony Blair. But his principal inspiration is the leaked Downing Street memo, which reported that the U.S. was determined to go to war and that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” This is the story of The Fix That Was In. At least the funny parts: The tragedy would come later, after “Mission Accomplished.”

Although some readers e-mail to ask why I can’t get to the point more quickly and also give star ratings (bleh gak ptui), others actually complain my reviews are too short — at least compared to my long and winding ones at the webzine Slate, where no trees died for my sins. The problem is, my columns are designed for print, and in these leaner times I have a choice of covering fewer films or paring away the non-essentials — my darlings. On occasion I’ve used this website to run untrimmed “director’s cuts.” But this week, still smarting from last week’s surgery, I’m taking my cue from the great David Foster Wallace.¹ Behold the column annotated [NB: The easiest way to return to the text after reading the footnote is to hit the back button on your browser. Or so I'm told]: