Posted on 11/11/2005 2:28:46 PM PST by RWR8189
Nov. 11, 2005 - Hany Abu-Assad is nervous. In just two hours, his new film, “Paradise Now,” will premier in Tel Aviv. But there’s more to it than just opening night jitters for Abu-Assad. The director is Palestinian, the audience is Israeli, and his film is about the lives and moral struggles of two suicide bombers. “I’m trying to take deep breaths,” he laughs. “But it doesn’t seem to be helping.”
It wouldn’t be the first time a film about terrorists, or freedom fighters (depending which side of the wall you’re on), has shown in Israel. But “Paradise Now,” a film distributed in the United States by Warner Independent Pictures, is one of the first feature films that tries to show the potential killers/martyrs as people. Childhood friends Said (Kais Nashif) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) drink tea at work, play and quarrel with siblings at home, develop crushes on women out of their league and discuss such mundane things as water filters with their mothers just hours before they’re chosen by a militant group to carry out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The young men, who reside amongst the rubble, rocket fire and curfews of a Nablus refugee camp, face the most intense 48 hours of their already tough and heavy lives.
<SNIP>
Just before the Tel Aviv opening on Thursday, Abu-Assad says he’s pleased with the reaction he’s received on the film. It’s won an Amnesty International Award, a Blue Angel for best European film and is now Palestine’s official entry for the Academy Awards (this is only the second year Palestine has been allowed contribute to the Oscar’s foreign film competition). It opened in New York and Los Angeles two weeks ago to glowing reviews in The New York Times
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Bet the movie bombs.
BARF
Sure would be news if the crowd at this opening was the target of as suicide bomber.
Evil sick twisted
Paging Michael Moore.
Springtime for Mohammed Atta and Palestine.
Of course, the deranged American Left embraced the film. I’m not surprised at all.
and I thought you were talking about this guy:
When you brutally murder a couple dozen people and injure dozens more, who really gives a flying ______ if you were nice to you little sister, loved your mother, made great or biscuits or worked for the ASPCA.
Look, I have no problem with people who want to kill themselves by blowing themselves up. It's when they want to take other people with them, that I have a problem!
I'm all for sending these losers to allah, if that's where they want to go, but I don't want them taking anyone with them!
Mark
Why not make a sympathetic movie about jeffrey Dahmer...he was a person too, except he killed homosexuals, so I guess a movie is out of the question.
BTTT
Has anyone here seen the film? Just curious.
I'm not sure the dogs cared much for being picked up by the ears!
The thing is that this stuff works with a lot of people. BS meters ought to be going off all over the world, but I'm sure a lot of people will buy into it. I read "Mein Kampf" when I was in high school, over thirty years ago. There's one detail I've always remembered about it. Hitler was describing a job he had as a young man and how he would have his lunch -- a small loaf of bread and a bottle of milk -- while sitting in a park. I guess the reason it sticks with me is that I just never thought of him as somebody who would be doing something like that. It didn't change my opinion of him as a monster --it was just an unexpected touch of humanity on a thoroughly diabolical character. But I'll bet photos of him with dogs or kids swayed plenty of people to believe that he was an okay guy -- and that's what they were intended to do.
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