Brad & Angie Jet Out of Prague

Hmm. They wont be gone long if their kids are not with them.

#94 Anustin

i mean a new one! We always get new ones for brangelina. lol

LA Times article related to A Mighty Heart.

The Pearls harness activism to grief
By Tina Daunt, Times Staff Writer
June 22, 2007

Benefit
click to enlargeGrieving parents have two choices: They can lose themselves in pain, or they can work to create meaning out of tragedy.

Ruth and Judea Pearl have chosen the latter.

But after choice comes struggle.

Five years ago, their son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped while investigating Al Qaeda activities and financing in Pakistan. His captors, who selected Pearl as their victim because he was Jewish, ultimately murdered him, leaving not only his parents to grieve but also his pregnant wife, the French-born journalist Mariane Pearl.

Their story is the subject of “A Mighty Heart,” which is based on Mariane’s memoir. The film, which opens today, stars Angelina Jolie. (At a recent screening of the movie at the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, Jolie told Daniel Pearl’s parents that she hoped she and the cast “have done right by you.”)

“We are hoping the movie will bring curiosity about Danny,” said Judea Pearl, a UCLA professor who started a foundation with his wife to promote greater cultural understanding in the wake of his son’s death. “We want people to learn about his legacy. We can’t let this happen again.”

On a recent afternoon in their San Fernando Valley home, Ruth and Judea Pearl talked about the son they once sent off to Stanford University with a duffle bag of clothes and his beloved violin on his back.

“When he got there, what we didn’t realize is they didn’t have any bedding,” Ruth Pearl said. “He didn’t have a pillow. He didn’t have a car. But he had his violin.” (Of course, she sent a huge care package — overnight — with a note telling him she loved him.)

“He loved life. He loved people. Everywhere he went, he made friends,” she said. “He connected with people through music in every city he lived in. When he got married, six bands played at the wedding.”

Daniel Pearl, a classically trained violinist, became an equally accomplished journalist with a profound and empathetic interest in all the cultures of the Middle East. It was that hunger to understand other people and their motives that sent him on that fateful reporting trip though the dangerous streets of Karachi in 2002.

The story of that day and its aftermath remains so wrenching that it casts a shadow across a sunny afternoon at the hillside Encino house where Ruth and Judea raised their family.

The Pearls’ hospitality is cosmopolitan. They offer their visitor Turkish coffee and a comfortable seat in a living room filled with art and books. There are visual memories of their son everywhere, poster-size pictures propped against walls and family portraits, including pictures of Daniel Pearl’s son, Adam, now 5 and living in Paris with Mariane, in frames on tabletops.

It is a kind of quiet shrine not only to Daniel’s memory but also to his values. It’s the values that Ruth and Judea Pearl are hoping to make his legacy.

Within days of his murder, they started the Daniel Pearl Foundation (danielpearl.org) to “promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music and innovative communications.”

As sophisticated people who understand the power of media, they’ve been searching since their son’s death for Hollywood allies who will help them get their message out.

“I see many celebrities involved in social causes,” Judea Pearl said. “Many them are interested in fighting diseases and responding to natural disasters. Very few, perhaps even none, is addressing the tsunami of hatred that has swept our planet in the past decades.

“It’s not a fight of medicine. It’s a fight of ideology. Of ideals. I wish we could see more interest in that struggle.”

The Daniel Pearl Foundation has undertaken several projects, including holding a music day in October with concerts around the globe; offering internships at various U.S. newspapers to foreign journalists, particularly those from South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa; and sponsoring an annual lecture series at UCLA and Stanford to discuss ways to further cultural understanding.

Certainly, Jolie and Brad Pitt have taken up the cause, but will there be others? Judea Pearl asked.

“I never let myself think this is a therapy,” he said. “If I had known this is a therapy, I would have stopped doing it. I’m doing it because it’s effective. We’re trying to harness the goodwill and energy to contain the tsunami.”

Ruth Pearl says, “I worry about the next generation. If we don’t address this now, what will become of us? What will become of our children?”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/celebrity/la-et-cause22jun22,1,4168210.story?coll=la-celebrity-news&ctrack=2&cset=true

argh!ggrrrr!happy long weekend to the canadians.

MAMS,that is why they have to search the archives”lolz!

I just seen a picture of AJ and BBT sitting across from BP at the Cannes film festival 2001.WOW FATE.

thanx j@r3d for the new B&A pix! i love their smiles!

I’m sooo jelousy the movie is doing great.

I fell like killing myself now that she’s got Brad to herself. Anyway i give up and am going to my toy boy Paul now!

Hello everyone.Angie looks so elegant and beautiful.As for his legendary hotness……..!!It’s already 38 degrees here in Greece,I don’t think I can stand any more heat.Thank God the beach is near!

I’ll come back later with a new interview that Angie gave to one of the most serious film critics here in Greece during the promotion in Cannes.I just got the newspaper and I haven’t read it yet,but I can give you the title.”I bow to you Angelina!”.More later.

LA Times review of A Mighty Heart.

June 22, 2007

MOVIE REVIEW
‘A Mighty Heart’
‘A Mighty Heart’ moves the heart and head
By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer

“A Mighty HEART” has to serve a number of masters — the somber story surrounding the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, the magnetic star quality of actress Angelina Jolie, the quasi-documentary style of director Michael Winterbottom — and it does so remarkably well.

That’s a lot to juggle, but the resulting film, both moving and frighteningly real, so plays to everyone’s strengths that it’s clear that none of the elements would have fared as well without their connection with the other two.

The narrative of the doomed search for Pearl, for instance, taken from the bestselling book written by his widow, Mariane Pearl, could have turned maudlin and treacly in other hands. Left to another story, Winterbottom could have fallen victim to a weakness for being excessively chilly and distant, which he’s displayed before. And with a different plot and director, Jolie could have ended up with an earnest but plodding film like 2003’s “Beyond Borders.” Instead, these various elements kept one another honest and on point just by being who and what they are.

Making “A Mighty Heart” a compelling experience is quite an accomplishment given that anyone who cares enough to see the film will know the outcome of the story. Abducted on Jan. 23, 2002, in Karachi, Pakistan, Pearl was brutally murdered by his captors, a fact revealed about a month later when a grisly video was released by the killers.

That awful denouement imparts a palpable sense of dread and dismay to a tale that, with its focus on religions, cultures and political systems in conflict, is in many ways a paradigmatic story of our times. As written by John Orloff (Emmy nominated for HBO’s “Band of Brothers”), it’s a narrative that maintains a keen balance between reasons for despair and causes for hope, a story for which Winterbottom was an excellent choice.

For though his directing career has taken some strange turns (”Code 46,” “9 Songs”), Winterbottom’s strength, witness “The Road to Guantanamo” and especially “In This World,” is his ability to create a phenomenal sense of place, especially where southern Asia is concerned.

Working with his usual cinematographer, production designer, editor and costume designer (Marcel Zyskind, Mark Digby, Peter Christelis and Charlotte Walter), Winterbottom is truly expert at manufacturing reality, at making us feel that we are right there among the crowds, the chaos, the complete foreignness of a remote part of the world. Christelis’ quick, decisive editing, which lets nothing linger on the screen, is especially helpful in calling up a sense of verisimilitude that is hard to shake.

Though it doesn’t neglect the emotional component of the Pearls’ story, “A Mighty Heart” is most accurately viewed as a kind of political film noir, a tense and elaborate police procedural investigation of both what happened to Daniel Pearl and the herculean efforts expended by Americans and Pakistanis to try to rescue him before it was too late.

Using a mixture of professional and nonprofessional actors and Winterbottom’s technique of improvisation within a scripted structure, we are once again made to feel as if we are right there at the Pearls’ house when key decisions are made and information disclosed.

Critical to the emotional connections “A Mighty Heart” makes is the performance of Jolie as Mariane Pearl. The Oscar-winning actress, whose significant skills have been eclipsed by her position as a tabloid favorite, puts the emphasis back where it belongs with a forceful, immediate and convincing performance.

Though a series of big close-ups often places her front and center, Jolie resists the temptation to push too hard or overplay her part. Rather she uses her charisma and skill to express not only weariness and fear but also the hard-edged fierceness and lack of patience that are crucial to seeing Mariane as a real person, not a biopic saint.

It is Mariane we hear on “A Mighty Heart’s” voice-over introducing us to the Pearls’ situation in early 2002. Both journalists (she works for French public radio) are in Pakistan to cover the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath. She poignantly describes Karachi as a city with “so many people, no one knows how to count them. How do you find one man among all these?”

With Mariane now nearly six months pregnant, the Pearls are a day away from leaving the country. Danny (nicely played in an abbreviated role by Dan Futterman) just has one last interview to do, with a hard-to-find man named Sheikh Gilani, a cleric with ties to militant Islamic groups. He heads off in a taxi, but he never returns.

Once what has happened to Pearl is known, a mixed group of Americans and Pakistanis comes together, not without difficulty and misunderstandings, to try to ascertain who took him and why. The ins and outs of the prolonged investigation, the sense of chaos and confusion joined with determination and hope, are the center of “A Mighty Heart’s” drama.

At the heart of that quest is Mariane Pearl, someone whose refusal to give up not only on Danny’s fate but also on the quest for truth and the power of communication he believed in is the film’s most hopeful element. Early in “A Mighty Heart,” those ideals are mocked at a dinner party as “a romantic idea of journalism,” but they finally turn out to be ideas both Daniel Pearl and this committed film believe are worth making a dreadful sacrifice for.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

MPAA rating: R, for language. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes. In selected theaters.

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-mighty22jun22,1,4575048.story

“91 MAMS | 06/23/2007 at 11:12 am

#84 s’r”

you’ve made your point so you can go now since there is no thread for maniston!!!!”

pathetic bradangelina fans it’s not because im telling the truth about angelina’s sick body that i am a jennifer aniston fan.

My favorite couple. Love them.

yes
r u still there?

me am off back in 30 min.

i guess if u r off u’ll not come back but i would love u to if u dont mind.

Whats new in London then?