terrorism Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Another day, another intriguing project from Ryan Kavanaugh and his Relativity Media shingle. According to Variety, their latest script acquisition is D. B. Weiss' Kashmir, which has already attracted the interest of director Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Weiss' script revolves around three ex-mercenaries who receive a tip as to the location of a terrorist who boasts a $30 million bounty on his head. For that kind of money, they decide to brave a trip into Kashmir, the volatile region between Pakistan and India. And because nothing is ever so simple as heading into a dangerous region to hunt a terrorist, all three men have their own reasons for the journey, and their working relationship is sorely tested.

The idea comes from those early days of the War on Terror, when the U.S. government actually was putting up wanted posters -- it's a sign of how much has happened that I can't remember if anyone ever collected on them. Annaud, ever the adventurist, has every intention of shooting as close as he can to Kashmir, and is traveling to Pakistan with Weiss for research.

While I'm a bit tired of terrorism plotlines, the story has all the classic marks of a Western -- and I'd love to see it tackled as such. Annaud certainly does grueling journeys (inner and outer) and sweeping vistas well, though the final result can be wanting. Here's hoping he can take the best parts of Enemy at the Gates and combine it with his eye for landscapes, and give us a good old fashioned bounty hunt.

Adam Sandler's movies haver never represented the apex of cultural awareness, but they do tend to grapple, if somewhat brashly, with the finer points of human relations. In his latest raunchfest, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the insolent comic creates "his stupidest character ever" (as an audience member muttered five minutes into last night's New York preview screening), but it's also his most symbolic one: Sporting a hyperbolic flair for disco music and using hummus as toothpaste, hardened Israeli soldier Zohan is a bloated creature of Semitic extremes.

Overall, however, the movie uses metaphors more than stereotypes. When Zohan and a furious Palestinian terrorist (John Turturro) use paddles to bat a live grenade back and forth, the result is a lowbrow editorial cartoon.

The folks at New Line very kindly provided us this exclusive first-look at the one-sheet for Rendition (click the image for a larger view). I caught the trailer for Rendition when my husband and I went out on a date night to see The Bourne Ultimatum. We were in one of those theaters with the ridiculously enormous screens, and the Rendition trailer looked amazing. The film tells the tale of Isabella El-Ibrahim (Reese Witherspoon), whose Egyptian-born husband (Omar Metwally) disappears on his way home from a business trip. He's caught in the web of "rendition," a policy that allows the US government to transfer terrorism suspects to another country for interrogation. While Isabella tries desperately to find answers to why her husband has disappeared and where he is, CIA agent Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself questioning the interrogation methods being used to extract information from El-Ibrahim.

The film also stars Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin, two of my fave actors, and in the trailer, Streep is really turning on that icy-cold superbitch mode that she does better than just about anyone on the planet. Cinematical will have a review for you from the Toronto International Film Festival; if you're not going to Toronto, you'll have to wait until the film's October 12** October 19 release date to see it. Meanwhile, you can check out the trailer over on Moviefone.

**The release is indeed October 19. IMDb lists it as the 12th -- I guess that's what I get for not checking Moviefone's listing, which had the correct date.

In this delicate era when entertainment in America is bogged by indecency concerns, political correctness and discussions of "how soon is too soon", it isn't surprising that a foreign comedy has bettered us in being more amusing, more respectful and more insightful about the touchy subjects of war, terrorism and racism.  Only Human is above all an innocent farce detailing your typical fiancée-meets-parents setup, but it uses the conventional plot for more than just a spotlight on wacky family members and screwball situations, serving also as a simple statement about some absurd perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The engaged couple in this Spanish-UK co-production is a pairing of a Jewish woman and her Palestinian beau, which undeniably takes on allegorical significance, yet doesn't lend itself to any overt political deliberation. Instead it deals with the conflict through an outsider's point of view, concerning itself with problems of generalized and accepted perceptions rather than deep, involved interests.

This morning's Variety reported that Universal, along with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment, has acquired the rights to The School, an article in June's Esquire Magazine about the September, 2004 terrorist takeover of School #1 in Beslan, Russia. They plan to turn the story into a fiction film, with Grazer producing. According to Grazer, The School "captures for the first time the human aspect of a horrendous event." Which he can believe only if he's read and seen nothing about the story except that one article -- hell, even Three Days in September, a thin, American cable doc on the event clearly conveys the individual human suffering that was central to the siege. And come on -- how can a tragedy in which over 300 people, most of whom were children, died NOT have a "human aspect?" Give me a freaking break, Grazer.

Maybe I'm just a pansy who is too wrapped up in Russian history and culture, but I haven't heard about a feature film that made my stomach crawl this much in a while, particularly given how totally clueless Grazer obviously is about the actual event. What good could possibly come out of the Hollywoodization of a tragedy so huge it's often called "Russia's 9/11?" I realize that United 93 has been praised and appreciated by those who have seen it, but it was made five years after the events it depicts, and by an American studio. So why don't we just let Russia deal with Beslan in its own time, in its own way?

In the city of Jerusalem, soldiers patrol the streets and perform routine ID checks. It is a place on constant terror alert, and the military presence helps to maintain a defense against the Palestinian threat. In the Israeli film Close to Home, most of these female soldiers are like Smadar (Smadar Sayar), a woman apathetically serving her compulsory duty who would rather goof off during her shift than confront Arabs. Recognized by her superiors as a possible slacker, Smadar is partnered up with a goody-goody named Mirit (Neama Shendar), who none of the women like. Just as in every other story of a mismatched pair forced to work together, the two slowly become friends.

Close to Home is no buddy-cop, action-comedy, though. Basically it follows the same pattern of the genre, but it leaves out the action and the comedy so all that is left is a predictable narrative with no entertainment appeal. Even with its likeable, attractive leads, the film is a lifeless effort from writer-directors Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hagar.

In the film's first ten minutes, there is an epic story of smugglers, mutiny, gang violence, a dangerous global sea voyage, a rescue by the Coast Guard, and the imprisonment of almost 300 "bad guys". No, this isn't a new action blockbuster out of Hollywood. It is a documentary called Golden Venture, and it is a damn near perfect one.

On June 6, 1993, the coastal freighter Golden Venture ran aground in New York City with the largest shipment of illegal aliens ever recorded. The 286 Chinese expatriates (minus 10 who died and 6 who escaped), who were part of a usually routine operation handled by immigrant runners called "snakeheads" and the Chinatown gang Fuk Ching, had the misfortune of being caught too soon after the World Trade Center bombing. They were all made an example of, and many were detained for over four years.

On September 1, 2004, Chechen terrorists took over School #1 in Beslan, Russia, capturing both the school grounds and the 1200 children and parents who had gathered there to celebrate the first day of school. What transpired over the next 54 hours for those hostages -- sandwiched together in a sweltering gymnasium without food or water -- and their helpless loved ones gathered outside was a tragedy so incomprehensible that any film that attempts to tell its story is practically guaranteed a degree of success. Such is the case with Three Days in September, a Showtime documentary that will air on the channel in May, after premiering at Tribeca.

Narrated by Julia Roberts, the film tells the story of the Beslan school siege through the eyes of those who were involved, including three adults who were hostages, a girl who spent the entire three days outside the school with her mother hoping her little sister would make it out alive, and Rulan Aushev, a former president of Ingushetia who was the only person allowed inside to negotiate with the terrorists. Their interviews are inter-cut with news footage of the crisis, limited video from inside the school (shot by the terrorists), and images of the ruined school as it looks today, and provide details as Roberts’ voice-over takes viewers the through the chronological events of the siege.

Bernd Eichinger, the writer-producer whose masterful Downfall broke the long-held German taboo against the portrayal of Adolf Hitler on the big screen, will be undertaking another source of national shame for his next project. According to Variety, Eichinger is currently working with writer Stefan Aust on an adaptation of the latter's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, an examination of the 1970s terrorist group (also known as the Red Army Faction, or RAF) that has been described as "the most important standard work for the history of the left-revolutionary terrorism in Germany."

Though Eichinger spent nearly two decades in total on Downfall, he says the Baader Meinhof project is coming along with surprising speed, and feels the film will be made "in the foreseeable future." The producer suggests that the immediacy of this new film's subject matter may make it ultimately even more controversial than his Hitler work, if only because "This is a chapter in German history that's not really been dealt with and a lot of historical facts are only being discovered or disclosed now."

Eichinger has a LOT on his plate right now and is notorious for his slow script-development, so it's anyone's guess when Baader Meinhof will start shooting. That said, however, given the depth and seriousness of Downfall, he seems to be the prefect man to undertake this issue, and his effort will probably be well worth the wait.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

-- W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Steven Spielberg's Munich begins at the 1972 Olympics, where a group of men hesitate at the locked gates of the Olympic Village. A group of American athletes also approaching the gates laugh – should have gotten back from the beer garden earlier, guys – and then help the men over the gate so they can get into the compound. Once inside, the men take off their athletic jackets, put on ski masks, take AK-47 rifles from their bags, enter the building where Israel's athletes are housed … and enter history.

Munich is not the story of what happened that day – although Spielberg captures the tension and terror of the subsequent siege and deaths like the master craftsman he is. That story has been told – and told superbly – in the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September. Munich is the story of what happened after: how Israel determined that such an affront could not go unpunished, and created a group – a hit squad – to find, and kill, the men responsible. Driven by recent history, many filmmakers and films  – including Spielberg's too-swiftly dismissed War of the Worlds – are trying to construct allegories for the realities we now face. With Munich, Spielberg's trying something far riskier, and far more audacious: Turning the real into an allegory. Spielberg doesn't attain greatness here, but the attempt is fascinating to watch.