Brad Takes Maddox to Mars 2112 — Again!

A Mighty Heart

CASUALTY OF WAR The tragic story of Daniel Pearl’s abduction and murder is obscured by the star (Jolie, as Mariane Pearl) on screen
Peter MountainBy Lisa Schwarzbaum Lisa Schwarzbaum
Lisa Schwarzbaum is a film critic for EW
Wish though we might for another option, we know the terrible ending of A Mighty Heart before the movie begins. While investigating a story in Karachi, Pakistan, on ‘’shoe bomber’’ Richard Reid in early 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter and South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered, and his beheading was documented on camera with sickening cruelty of purpose. Pearl’s wife, Mariane, herself a freelance journalist for French radio and television, was pregnant at the time, and after her husband’s death, she wrote a book about his life and work — and their happy time together — with the couple’s son, Adam, in mind. If today even strangers refer to the Pearls as Danny and Mariane, it is because, through the intimate accessibility of her prose and the fresh glamour of their photogenic images, Mariane Pearl has succeeded so well in personalizing the dangers that accompany the necessity of a free press. Scores more journalists have since died in the line of duty.

The shaping and shading that turned Mariane’s book, subtitled The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl, into A Mighty Heart, the noble project starring Angelina Jolie, qualifies in itself, I suppose, as a kind of media success. This respectful, committed, on-the-side-of-right dramatization got made because it stars one of today’s most headline-grabbing actress-celebrities. (As a promotional bonus, Jolie’s equally eye-catching partner, Brad Pitt, is one of the producers.) And because Michael Winterbottom directed, drawing on his blunter global docudrama style (The Road to Guantánamo) rather than his fanciful playtime style (Tristram Shandy: A **** & Bull Story), the movie strides ahead with a good sense of rhythm, rocking backward just when relief is needed to create vignettes of happier moments in the Pearls’ life as an attractive couple to offset the despair of the present and horror of the future. (We know it’s coming; thank goodness we’re spared the full documentation.)

But because A Mighty Heart stars Jolie — her skin somehow polished to reflect Mariane’s Afro-Cuban/Dutch complexion, her wig a masterpiece of a casually corkscrewed updo, her accent the work of a good student — it’s impossible not to be conscious of her performance at every turn. Her intensity, combined with the aura of her celebrity, becomes the story — and the character of the actual Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman, a spot-on physical match) recedes in importance. Thus when Mariane expresses frustration with the investigation, even though a team of Pakistani counter-terrorism officers, led with devotion by a man called only Captain (The Namesake’s terrific Irrfan Khan), are working around the clock, we focus on her pain rather than their hard work. When Mariane turns for support to Danny’s boss, John Bussey (Half Nelson’s fine Denis O’Hare), to friend and colleague Asra Nomani (Bend It Like Beckham’s Archie Panjabi), and to Danny’s parents (allowing screenwriter John Orloff to emphasize Danny’s pride in his Jewish heritage), her needs dwarf the value of their compassion. And when Mariane receives the news she’s been dreading and to which the entire movie has been building, the actress in the role dissolves into a keening grief so busy that audience attention wanders at exactly the wrong time to thoughts about how many takes the shot required, and why a moment so obviously devastating affects us in the head but not in the gut.

Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart focuses on the grim stretch between the time Danny Pearl never returned for dinner (he had set off to interview a shady source) and the time, weeks later, when grisly confirmation of death arrived. Mariane Pearl surely wasn’t passive during that time — she worked her sources and attended to her health for the sake of the baby growing inside her — but neither was she the real story. Daniel Pearl was, and the kind of work he did, and the reasons for the seething unrest in the country in which he was a visitor. At the very least, the story is the search to find one missing journalist, just one among hundreds in peril around the globe. The twisting of narrative perspective that pushes the missing man’s wife so insistently into the foreground makes A Mighty Heart a mighty challenge. Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture. B-

Fans, please stop responding to any bad post until you know that it is true and let Brad and Angelina take care of this like they usually do.

Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture. B-
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Joile-Pitt’s fans should come together and celebrate AMH like we’ve been doing.

AP report: Jolie & Pitt Attend NYC ‘A Mighty Heart’ Premiere

I see the troll is working hard today, it must be drinking redbull to keep it going. Having to read through all the positive reviews to find the negative once.

Asra Nomani is really just slapping Marianne Pearl in the face, which I’m damned sure Danny Pearl wouldn’t like either. But you know what, a slap for Marianne is indirectly a slap for Angelina, so I expect that this will get blown out of proportion by some haters just as the premiere ‘contract’ was. I don’t understand this woman’s beef - she’s a bit discombobulated for a ‘writer.’ She’s basically saying she didn’t see Daniel Pearl in Daniel Futterman’s portrayal (’didn’t see her friend onscreen’) and that’s why she’s regretting the movie (way to make Futterman feel like sh*t lady), then she talks about the mythology of movie making, then she mentions the marketing and PR (Dear ms. Nomani, the studio gives producers 20 million dollars to make movies in the hopes that they make it back and then some - what planet are you on that you didn’t know THAT going in?) — BOTTOMLINE, she is ALL over the place. At the end of the day, I can guarantee you, she has an ulterior motive, even if it’s just of the emotional immature kind. She has decided to stick it to Marianne out of jealousy, or perhaps she doesn’t like that Marianne herself is the focal point (I get the feeling she is, and WAS, VERY proprietal about Daniel Pearl, which is kind of creepy sounding considering she was not his wife - though perhaps that’s her problem eh?).

Again, peeps can keep yapping about A Mighty Heart - at this point it really doesn’t matter what kind of ‘personal issues’ Ms. Nomani has, nor does it matter what kind of talk surrounds this movie - the fact that there are good reviews, and that there’s TALK period, is a GOOD thing…I predict this picture will be HUGE. :lol:
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159 lounter | 06/15/2007 at 3:56 pm
OMG when will this be over? These FRAUDS really want to take every penny they can for this movie. I’d rather die than donate into their luxurious lives (10k/night villa, private jets, 20+ household help, etc). This anorexic is manipulating the media any way she can. At the end of the day she is still America’s Homewrecker.

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Yet, you’ll watch ‘Friends’ for 10 seasons and contribute to a no talent worthless FUG TV sit-com hack’s lifestyle of the BORING, BANAL, and FAMOUS…a dull BORE of a b*tch whose idea of charity is tipping her colorist and extra 5%.

Yeah that’s it you dumb evil HO…keep stabbing the lady that’s visited 30 some odd war torned, impoverished areas of the world and brought attention to impoverished AIDS babies who are dying, and genocide that is occurring - not to mention giving 1/3rd of her income away to causes hoping to end and alleviate the death and destruction, not to mention, raising the babies that she’s seen suffering alone without parents, as her children….

Yeah go right ahead you piece of SH*T rank excuse for a human being, settle your fat lard ass down with a big ol’ BLIZZARD from Dairy Queen and watch the 1998 season of ‘Friends’ aka ‘6 rich white people who complain in NYC while chillaxing in their Loft.’ One dumb useless ***** deserves another I guess.

Oh and one more thing, ‘America’s Homewrecker?’ Maybe you call, a sad DULL REBOUND relationship where Brad was beleaguered by a DUMB cheesy big schnozzed TV sit-com hack and her 27 cackling hen friends/lackeys/goddesses, who drank too much, snorted blow, and toked weed every other day, a ‘home.’ I call that a WASTE OF HIS F*CKING LIFE!! If someone told ‘Brad Pitt’ right now, to leave the Oscar winning actress and most beautiful woman in the world and mother of his babies….to go back to Maniston and her FELLOW old dried up chickens who spent the bulk of their day cackling and squeeing over him in between pilates classes and new layer cuts….

Brad would off himself in quite the spectacular fashion, weeping for Angelina right up until the very end.

I haven’t seen the movie, but reading these movie “critics” made me wonder whether the listened to what the writer, the director, and the actors have said over and over in their interviews. The movie is not mainly about DP, his is a supporting role. The movie wants to emphasize the idea of cooperation between people of different races, and religions to help a woman looking for her husband in a foreign and hostile country. It’s not a film about DP’s life.

Happy Father’s Day, Brad!! You have 4 very, very, very, very lucky kids. Your beautiful Angelina is the luckiest mom in the world because of you!!! :-)

It’s often suggested that the films of Michael Winterbottom are so varied that it’s hard to find a common thread running through them beyond their diversity and frequency, yet the director’s latest film ‘A Mighty Heart’, which had its world premiere in Cannes last night, is further evidence of this British filmmaker’s growing desire to apply an urgent and committed cinema to some of the more controversial and pressing areas of current world affairs.

His new film is an energetic reconstruction of the disappearance of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002 and the tense five weeks that followed as his wife Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) remained at the centre of a fraught international investigation until the discovery that Pearl had in fact been murdered by his kidnappers early in his captivity. With its extensive location work, a visual style that feeds on the appearance of news footage and documentaries, use of archive footage and its journalistic attention to precise details, ‘A Mighty Heart’ should be seen as the third film in a loose trilogy that includes ‘In This World’ and ‘Road to Guantanamo’. Jolie is impressive as Mariane Pearl, portraying her as a calm, intelligent presence amid an investigation that was flawed by bureaucracy and differing attitudes to her husband’s disappearance among, for example, the FBI and the Pakistani security services, the first of which were questioning of the latter’s reaction to Pearl’s disappearance. Indeed a strong theme of the film is the downside of global communication and co-operation as different interests and ideas and prejudices collide in the search for Pearl.

Before the kidnapping itself, Winterbottom immediately presents the chaos and uncertainty of Daniel Pearl’s existence in Karachi, throwing us into busy street-scenes of traffic jams as Pearl (Dan Futterman) fights his way around the city as part of his research into potential Pakistani links to the British ’shoe bomber’, Richard Reid. Within 15 minutes, Pearl is gone and the rest of the film leads up to the inevitable discovery of the news that its characters all dread. Winterbottom adopts a ‘war room’ approach to the story, largely basing its telling within Pearl’s Karachi home, which fills with colleagues, police and other officials. This scenario is constantly punctuated with brief interludes elsewhere, such as flashes of Pearl’s parents back home in America and of the Pakistani’s forces applying torture to a suspect. The film is speedy and never lingers on one scene for long. Edits are fast and close-ups are abundant.

We don’t see Pearl being kidnapped or during his incarceration apart from a reconstruction of some moments of the tape that his kidnappers released following his death. Instead, this is Mariane Pearl’s story and we are left to ponder the Pearls’ previous life together from several flashbacks (such as their wedding) and their life apart from both the terrible, wrenching screams that a heavily pregnant Pearl lets out when she is finally told that her husband is dead and the final shot of her walking alone with her child down a quiet Paris street.

As an American co-production, ‘A Mighty Heart’ feels like a bigger affair than those comparable earlier films mentioned above - ‘In This World’ and ‘Road to Guantanamo’ - and as a result it lacks some of their sense of improvisation and close connection to the grit of the real world but gains a wider, international canvas of political intrigue. It’s never less than compelling and has a special, sad potency as the disappearance of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston now reaches its tenth week.

214 CLINIQUA
Damn* that was funny!!!

#23: briseis! ang bilis mo namang maglaho. I was just answering your greeting on the other thread, andito ka na pala!

Even mummummu is here so fast, posting her usual dribble. Her broom must have a jetpack. Nice!