Papa Pitt’s Daddy Duties in Prague

Happy Friday to all! AMH today! Best of luck to Angelia…bless the family! :)

A wife’s courage
ANGELINA JOLIE CAPTURES HEART AND DETERMINATION OF MARIANE PEARL
By Bruce Newman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 06/21/2007 03:33:51 PM PDT

The subtitle of Mariane Pearl’s memoir about the kidnapping and murder of her husband - “The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl” - would surely come as a surprise to anyone who sees only the film adaptation of her book, “A Mighty Heart,” in which Angelina Jolie plays Mariane. Such is the force of Jolie’s performance, and the blinding effect of Hollywood star power, that the mighty heart of the story has been transformed from his to hers.
Jolie wears Mariane’s determination, her fierce French indignation and her cool calculation on the sleeve of her hijab, in full view of a houseful of Pakistani policemen who show up soon after her husband disappears. Daniel Pearl, then the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, had come to Karachi in pursuit of a story about shoe bomber Richard Reid, who had been arrested a month earlier for trying to blow up a passenger jet.

Pearl (played by Dan Futterman) is following a lead from a shadowy informant named Bashir (Alyy Khan) when he goes missing. Like many foreign correspondents, Pearl works the frontier between outrageous risk and reward, so when Mariane - herself a seasoned reporter - sets out to find him, she is told by people who don’t appear to mean a word they’re saying that he will be fine. Don’t worry about a thing.

Most of “A Mighty Heart” is taken up with Mariane’s struggle to keep her husband alive, and for nearly two hours, Jolie does this with a performance at once as subtle and ferocious as any in recent memory. With the year now half over, can it possibly be too early to unblushingly nominate her for an Oscar?
Director Michael Winterbottom has given his film the look, and sense of urgency, of a documentary. This undoubtedly isn’t as easy as Winterbottom makes it seem, because Danny Pearl’s disappearance was followed by five agonizing weeks of waiting. Shooting in what often appears to be available light, and with a handheld camera that he has tamed sufficiently to prevent motion sickness, Winterbottom keeps the picture moving along like a thriller.

He also manages to maintain a degree of suspense about Pearl’s fate, even though the story made headlines around the world in 2002. Daniel Pearl’s abduction and brutal execution by terrorists - a videotape revealed he was beheaded by his captors - marked a turning point in the global drama that was set in motion on Sept. 11, 2001. Mariane Pearl had become pregnant at almost the same time the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, and was nearly six months pregnant when her husband vanished into the slums of the world’s second-most populous city.

Through Jolie, she maintains a steely equanimity during the crisis. Following an interview on CNN in which she talks about her missing husband without obvious emotion, someone observes how well she has “held herself together,” a remark which has about it a faint whiff of disapproval: A more obviously loving wife might have cried.

The investigation is conducted by a newly formed Pakistani counterterrorism unit, led by a taciturn cop called Captain (the Indian star Irrfan Khan). When Mariane later approaches the American embassy for help, it appears for a time that the Pakistanis may be shown up as bumblers. And, in fact, one government official declines to assist in the search because he believes the kidnapping is a plot cooked up by India’s intelligence agency to embarrass Pakistan.

The film uses actual news footage from the event sparingly, and always in ways that not only heighten the feeling that these terrible events did happen, but that they are happening again, right before our eyes.

When the kidnappers send word that Danny Pearl’s treatment will be no better than the terrorist prisoners at Guanta`namo Bay - America’s own Devil’s Island - then-Secretary of State Colin Powell is shown insisting that the detainees at Gitmo are being treated humanely. (Just this month, Powell seemed to have reversed field, and said that the prison should be closed down immediately.)

Winterbottom does a wonderful job of showing the tumult and teem of the Karachi streets, the density of the chaos that any investigator would have to peer through to find the missing American. Like the team that is chasing Danny Pearl, we get only glimpses of him, bound and with a gun to his head. Writer John Orloff uses brief flashbacks of Danny and Mariane to give us some sense of who he was. But as “A Mighty Heart” continues pulsating in real time, Danny begins to feel like a construct more than a person, remaining as elusive on screen as he does in captivity.

This is Mariane’s story, and no matter how hard she tries to hold him close, she can feel her husband slipping away. When Mariane reveals to the Captain that Danny is Jewish, you can see his shoulders slump slightly, and her spine stiffen. The exchange is almost imperceptible, and it passes in an instant, but Jolie and Khan manage to make it say everything about Danny’s chances.

Jolie’s work as an actress often has been a captive of her celebrity, making it difficult to see past her pillowy lips to the craft. Perhaps it took the constraints of docu-drama to uncage her less-obvious gifts, but this is her finest performance, and likely to be the equal of any given by an actress this year. She holds herself back for as long as she must, and then in one great howl of grief and rage, lets us into Mariane’s broken heart. Her mighty heart.

`A Mighty Heart’

Rated R (profanity)

Cast Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi, Irrfan Khan, Will Patton

Director Michael Winterbottom

Writer John Orloff (based on the book by Mariane Pearl)

Running time 1 hour, 43 minutes

http://www.mercurynews.com/movies/ci_6196615?nclick_check=1

Movie review: ‘A Mighty Heart’ a mighty jewel

Angelina Jolie, left, and Dan Futterman star as Mariane and Daniel Pearl in “A Mighty Heart.” (Handout/MCT)

The murder of Daniel Pearl inspires an engrossing suspense movie.

By Colin Covert, Star Tribune

Last update: June 21, 2007 – 2:42 PM

The kidnapping and videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by Islamic militants in Pakistan has been the subject of numerous news reports and a memoir by his widow, Mariane.
Now it’s the focus of an almost intolerably exciting docudrama. Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman star as the couple whose personal tragedy offered a harrowing look at a religious-ideological clash between cultures. British director Michael Winterbottom tells the story with an intelligence and restraint worthy of the subject.

Filmed on location in Pakistan, India and France, “A Mighty Heart” succeeds both as an engrossing police-procedural suspense movie and a challenging political film. Pearl approached his profession with humanist goals, reporting with the aim of increasing cross-cultural understanding. In January 2002, he visited a Karachi restaurant where a fixer promised an interview with a Muslim religious leader concerning Pakistani ties to the attacks of Sept. 11. Mariane, hugely pregnant, remained home awaiting his phone call, impatience mounting to anxiety.

When it became clear that he had vanished, security attachés at the U.S. Embassy, Journal executives and Pakistani police mounted an urgent effort to get him back. Irr-fan Khan (”The Namesake”) is superb as a tough, dedicated Karachi officer committed to finding Pearl and protecting his nation’s pride.

The film doesn’t push for melodramatic excitement or advance manipulative political points. It requires us to sift the meaning out of the rush of objective details, like the investigators trying to trace Pearl’s whereabouts in the chaos of a sprawling Third World metropolis. It’s thrilling to watch.

The film, produced by Brad Pitt, was conceived as a prestige project for Jolie, and it succeeds by underplaying its hand. Mariane was emotionally at the center of the search for her husband, but at the farthest edge of the investigation. Jolie is onscreen less than you’d expect, which gives each scene more impact. Through her stoic grief and anger, you can see her psychological need to believe in the authorities, alongside her professional suspicion that they’re insulating her from the harsh truth. Winterbottom doesn’t provide his star with opportunities to showboat: her most emotional scenes are shot from a discreet distance.

For Winterbottom, the real mystery at the heart of the film is the fateful connection between Daniel Pearl and Omar Sheikh, the key player in his kidnapping and murder. Pearl, a Jew, used his career for humanist ends, reporting from Muslim countries to promote cross-cultural understanding. The British-born Sheikh, the product of a comparably cultured, middle-class, educated background, became a jihadist militant in response to what he saw as global persecution of Muslims. How two men so similar could have ended up on a path that made them victim and murderer is a story Daniel Pearl would have wanted us to work at understanding.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186 • ccovert@startribune.com
http://www.startribune.com/412/story/1255530.html

Did someone video the interview on The Early Show? Here they don’t broadcast the entire show, which why I don’t watch it. It doesn’t start until 8:00 am. They show local news until 8:00 so I think I missed it. Peace.

A Mighty Heart

By Harry Forbes
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) — The facts about the 2002 kidnapping and eventual brutal killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan were so widely reported a viewer might understandably approach the film at hand with a certain dread.

And yet, “A Mighty Heart” (Paramount Vantage), the tense recounting of the frantic search for Pearl, played here by Dan Futterman, not only holds your interest, but emerges as a testament to fortitude in the face of tragedy. The story is told mainly from the perspective of his pregnant wife, Mariane (Angelina Jolie), a journalist on whose memoir, “A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl,” the film is based.

With his on-location shooting (India as well as Pakistan), director Michael Winterbottom superbly captures the chaos and tumult of Karachi.

Near the film’s start, Danny, the South Asia bureau chief for the paper, seeks expert advice on the advisability of meeting a man with whom he has only corresponded via e-mail in the hope of gathering information on would-be “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. He’s assured that as long as the assignation takes place in a public place he should be safe.

On the appointed night, he takes a cab to the Village Restaurant, dismisses his driver, but later (we don’t see quite how) he is persuaded to enter a car and driven off to his fate.

When he fails to show for the dinner party Mariane is hosting for their friends, it is clear something has gone terribly awry, and hasty calls are made to the American embassy, starting a manhunt that will soon involve the Pakistani authorities, the CIA and Danny’s co-workers.

Mariane’s support group includes Indian friend and journalist Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), at whose house she and Danny had been living; a Pakistani counterterrorism expert known only as Captain (Irrfan Khan); Wall Street Journal colleagues John Bussey (Denis O’Hare) and Steve LeVine (Gary Wilmes); and American security chief Randall Bennett (Will Patton).

The presumed motive for the abduction by the jihadis, we learn, is the perpetrators’ notion that Danny was a CIA operative.

Acting in a naturalistic style without undue histrionics (except for one searing outpouring of grief), Jolie deftly submerges her own persona, capturing both Mariane’s physical appearance and French accent.

What stays with you is the remarkable fact that Mariane refuses to succumb to bitterness or hatred, making “A Mighty Heart” an inspiring portrait of courage (both hers and Danny’s), resilience under adversity and the triumph of the human spirit.

The film contains several uses of the f-word under duress, and a few other crude or crass words, fleeting newsreel footage of bombings and some dead bodies including a grim morgue image, a discreet torture scene, a brief nongraphic bedroom scene and a verbal description of Pearl’s gruesome death. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

- - -

Forbes is director of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. More reviews are available online at http://www.usccb.org/movies.

END

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/movies/07mv119.htm

Powerful performance by Jolie in `A Mighty Heart’
New York, June 22 (AP): When you’re an international superstar - when you’re Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, for example - it can be difficult for audiences to accept you in challenging roles, difficult for them to dissociate the persona from the performance. Lately this phenomenon also has been true of Angelina Jolie, with her well-documented adventures in adoption and globe-trotting with Brad Pitt.

But in “A Mighty Heart” as Mariane Pearl, the wife of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, Jolie reminds us that she really can act, that the supporting-actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted” wasn’t a fluke, that there is indeed substance beneath the sex appeal. She deeply immerses herself and, as a result, stands tall as the film’s graceful heart and soul. It’s pretty hard to imagine that her name won’t be at the forefront again come awards season this year.

(Likely to get overshadowed in the mountain of praise Jolie will duly receive is Dan Futterman as Pearl himself. The Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of “Capote” only gets about a half-dozen scenes to give us an impression of who this determined journalist was, mostly in flashbacks, and he does so with subtlety and intelligence.)

Director Michael Winterbottom (”24 Hour Party People,” “Welcome to Sarajevo”) wisely applies his trademark documentary-style approach, making us feel the building tension and dread as a multicultural coalition of investigators and journalists drops everything to track down Pearl’s kidnappers. (The unadorned, fly-on-the-wall camerawork comes from longtime Winterbottom collaborator Marcel Zyskind. John Orloff wrote the no-nonsense screenplay based on Mariane Pearl’s memoir, “A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny.”)

Like the stylistically and thematically similar “United 93,” this is a film that clearly needed no dramatic embellishment. And like “United 93,” we know the devastating ending from the moment we walk in, yet may find ourselves silently, futilely hoping that things will turn out otherwise. Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by Islamic militants because he was Jewish, and the killing was videotaped. Thankfully, though, we don’t have to see it.

But being aware of his outcome makes each early moment sadly meaningful _ the image of Danny pulling away in a taxi for his fateful meeting while researching shoe bomber Richard Reid, a casual mention that he might be late for dinner, a perfunctory “I love you” on the cell phone before saying goodbye.

Once Danny fails to return to the home where they’re staying in Karachi, Pakistan, on the night of Jan. 23, 2002, Mariane _ herself a journalist for French radio _ puts her skills to use trying to determine what might have happened to him. She is six months pregnant with their first child, a son Danny wanted to name Adam, but she moves quickly and efficiently. At her side from the start is his longtime friend and colleague, Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), but as the hours tick away and the situation grows more grim, their circle expands to include investigators, editors and ambassadors.

Winterbottom puts us smack in the middle of them, gives us a seat at the table as they piece together names and faces, times and places. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll always be clued into what’s going on. The sensation of realism that permeates every frame of this film means that we also experience the same chaos these people endure; it can be frustrating but, then again, making us omniscient wouldn’t make any sense.

Leading the investigation is the head of Pakistan’s counterterrorism unit, a man known as Captain (Irrfan Khan, with tremendous presence) who turns out to be more caring and sympathetic than he initially appears. He orders his men to scatter through Karachi’s crowded streets, dark alleys and hidden back rooms, rounding up the usual suspects.

This, by necessity, takes us away from Jolie. We truly miss her presence, and when she’s gone, “A Mighty Heart” can get a bit draggy. For a big chunk in the middle it feels like a standard crime drama _ though it’s a strikingly crafted and stirring one.

“A Mighty Heart,” a Paramount Vantage release, runs 108 minutes. Three stars out of four.

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/009200706220940.htm

ok fine ill be the better person..im sorry for starting things , i shouldnt have made that stupid list anyway.it wasnt worth it and it only made haterz add to the list anyway….and again i dont need trolls orpolls ,im a fan and thats that..any way missouri fan i liked the video you posted it was really nice

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323 never like him

thank you for proving my point.

Where’s Her Man???
Filed under: Jennifer Aniston

Where has Jennifer Aniston’s new model boyfriend been hiding?

The pair have not been seen together since last weekend, raising many questions about the status of their non-relationship.

On Wednesday (above), Maniston’s BFF and yoga guru, Mandy Ingber, paid a visit to the actress at her home.

Later that night, Jen went to The Police concert at the Staples Center - without her British Bradd Pitt-lookalike.

What’s going on lady???

ok forget the haterz…..i love brangie

Z is so cute and loveable. I am coming around to loving this family.