That Minneapolis Connection - One

That Minneapolis Connection - One of the fascinating things about September 11 is the involvement of the Minneapolis FBI office. The office generally had very little terrorism to deal with - and they came ever so close, apparently, to finding the whole thing. If whistleblower Colleen Rowley is correct, it's very possible the FBI's central office spiked the effort that could have uncovered significant elements of the plot.

In the days immediately after the war started, the Onion ran a grimly hilarious piece - "American Life turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie". This story feels more like the very technical middle-pages of a Tom Clancy novel...

Speaking of Which - Why on earth did Hollywood hack up "Sum of All Fears" the way it did?

The hero, Jack Ryan, was played by the the thoroughly adequate Alec Baldwin in Hunt for Red October, and Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. In October, we didn't learn much about Ryan, but in the other two movies, he was portrayed as in the books - a family guy, middle-aged, "too old for this stuff".

Now, Ryan is a twenty-something, single guy...well, he's Ben Affleck. Not nearly as interesting a character.

Which isn't necessarily a problem, if you have a story like Sum to put on. A ten year old novel about Arabs using a recovered Israeli atomic bomb to blow up the Super Bowl in Denver, the movie makes the perps Nazis in the pre-9/11 interest of PC, and moves the attack to...

Baltimore?

Why is that? They had to make the movie resonate with people on the coasts who didn't know where Denver was?

I'd love to know the reasoning...