You've got to like Bob Weiner, at least as acted by Michael Keaton in this film. He has got a subtley peircing sense of humor, and a gentle yet persistant way of getting what he needs to get the story for CNN, where he worked, producing, during the 1991 Gulf War.
He was sent to Iraq soon after they invaded Kuwait in 1990, and worked with his friend, coproducer Ingrid Formanack.
Formanack--Helena Bonham Carter here-is a gypsy with a sense of the ironic like Wieners, but with more of an edge. The relationship forms a counterbalance that works wonders for Live From Bagdhad. When Ingrid provokes an Iraqi goon, being a women in a Muslem nation bold enough to say "well f--k me with a hot poker," Wiener shrugs his shoulders and almost winks as if to say "yeah, alright. Isn't she something?"
It is this kind of paitance that gets Wiener in the door with the Iraqi Minister of Information: he waits hours with a smile while other jounalists blow in and out, entitled and indignant.
Keaton's acting is smart here: his easy going way IS his agression--his foot in doors-- and makes for a fancination contradiction in the way he sketches Wiener. It is almost the antithesis of Sam Waterson playing Sid Shoenberg in The Killing Fields, who gets his story through bravado and confontation. Both portrails are facinating to see for the oppposite reason. I would love to hang out with Wiener in a war zone, but keep Shoenberg around for back up.
There is a reason we like to see docudramas as well as documentries. If you are watching a film about a topic, chances are it is a topic you know something about. It is the actors bringing these charactors to life that makes the film intersting, and Live From Bagdhad does this perfectly
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Inaccurate Film Peddles Propaganda
Added 3/31/2009
This film is well acted and, if you're not interested in history or truth, suspenseful as a work of fiction. However, since it it supposed to be based on factual events, anything that might be a blatant lie within it would mar the veracity of the rest of the material.
Forget the fact that the U.S. was friends with Saddam and helped fund him and give him weapons that our government was well aware that he was murdering people with. Forget, too, the fact that at the same time the horrors of Saddam were transpiring, the US was supporting other dictators, most notably Suharto in Indonesia--we gave him weapons knowing that he was also slaughtering people. This film ignores all that to portray Saddam (not unfairly) as a monster, by relying in part on a story that was a public relations invention. A 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified at the time as Nayirah "to protect her from reprisals," in August 1990 told a story of Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators, a story invented for the London Daily Telegraph by a Kuwaiti housing minister and then spread by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, which received $10.7 million from the Kuwaiti government for this and other services.
The girl spoke at a faux congressional hearing located in Hill and Knowlton's Washington, D.C., office. Craig Fuller (George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff when Bush was VP) ran the PR firm. Nayirah, a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, daughter of Kuwait's Ambassador to Washington, was coached by the firm, and her testimony was used by Bush Sr. to help sell the war. The story was revealed as false after the war by ABC's John Martin and denounced as a hoax.
The events of this false story are never challenged in the film but are portrayed as if true. It's interesting to note that this film was released in 2002, when Bush Jr. was just beginning his attempts to again turn attention to Saddam and use false stories to justify a new war on Iraq. Given the pro-Bush media sentiment of the time, one wonders if this film was HBO's contribution to the war effort.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Fantastic movie!
Added 2/6/2007
This is a great movie because it is about the first Gulf War. I think people forget what happened then and how it relates to today. It is also an interesting accounting of the beginning of 24 hour news. All actors do a great job.
1 out of 3 people found this helpful.
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Reaffirms my opinion
Added 5/18/2006
While this movie was well written and acted, it did strengthen my opinion about those in the media. I know alot of people may disagree with me on this, but in this film I saw nothing more than sick, egotistical vultures scrambling around trying to find "the next big story" with little regard to the people they hurt. For those of you who view the media of being comprised of elitist know-it-alls, watching this movie will assure you that your assessment is correct.
There are many examples throughout the course of the movie. The obvious fear of the British child being held hostage by Saddam being reduced to merely being a great story. The members of the other networks basically saying that it is their job to tell viewers what is important and why. The CNN crew agreeing to keep quiet about atrocities they saw in Iraq and Kuwait to avoid being thrown out of the country (so much for "we report, you decide"). Weiner sympathizing with the Iraqi propaganda official despite the fact that a hostage he interviewed was kidnapped, most likely under the orders of the same official. And on, and on.
Bottom line, this movie does a splendid job of showing how most of those in the media are legends in their own minds who will stop at nothing to exploit any human tragedy and suffering in the hopes of making it big, although I'm sure that this is not what the makers of the film were going for. There is nothing honorable about them. They were, and are, vultures.
4 out of 6 people found this helpful.
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Sound and Fury
Added 5/11/2006
This is probably a fairly accurate representation of how newscasters operated in Iraq during the Desert Storm War, and of how they operate in general in front-line, crisis situations. I think the movie was aiming at evoking viewers' admiration for the newscasters' courage and stamina in "getting the story." It was supposed to be a paean to CNN as it established itself as a credible, round-the-clock news source during this War. But for me, the movie had the opposite effect. It showed how rash and ultimately futile most of the media people's actions on the scene were.
Everyone is either on an adrenaline rush in this movie, or else is waiting it out in a tavern getting sloshed and sloppy. There is no happy in-between when any sane, informative reporting can take place. During their "on" periods, newscasters are seen rushing down corridors, pushing each other, jostling, jockeying to get the story before other broadcast networks can get it. And the story is usually some canned speech by Saddam Hussein or one of his cabinet members. People stoke their sense of self-importance by surrounding themselves with ringing phones. They agonize over power outages. It's all frenetic activity - signifying nothing.
Because when the War really starts, all that we get out of these many reporters' efforts are exclamations announcing another SCUD missile hit. We get "Wow! That was a big explosion! Wow, another one! The sky is lit up!" People risked their lives to tell the listening American public that a bomb just lit up the sky?
It seems there would have been opportunities for intrepid reporters to go out into Baghdad and get stories that would really have mattered - stories that would have enlightened the American public about the climate of opinion there, about conditions among Iraqi citizens, and about reasons for going to War or not going to War. But virtually nothing like that comes across. In the end, it all comes down to, "Wow, that was a big one!"
So I do think this movie is worth watching, but probably not for the reasons it was made. Instead of coming away from the film with an illustration of how good and worthy our reporters are, you, like me, may come away with an illustration of how far our news coverage needs to advance in order to be a really useful tool in the democratic decision-making process.
8 out of 10 people found this helpful.
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You've got to like Bob Weiner, at least as acted by Michael Keaton in this film. He has got a subtley peircing sense of humor, and a gentle yet persistant way of getting what he needs to get the story for CNN, where he worked, producing, during the 1991 Gulf War.
He was sent to Iraq soon after they invaded Kuwait in 1990, and worked with his friend, coproducer Ingrid Formanack.
Formanack--Helena Bonham Carter here-is a gypsy with a sense of the ironic like Wieners, but with more of an edge. The relationship forms a counterbalance that works wonders for Live From Bagdhad. When Ingrid provokes an Iraqi goon, being a women in a Muslem nation bold enough to say "well f--k me with a hot poker," Wiener shrugs his shoulders and almost winks as if to say "yeah, alright. Isn't she something?"
It is this kind of paitance that gets Wiener in the door with the Iraqi Minister of Information: he waits hours with a smile while other jounalists blow in and out, entitled and indignant.
Keaton's acting is smart here: his easy going way IS his agression--his foot in doors-- and makes for a fancination contradiction in the way he sketches Wiener. It is almost the antithesis of Sam Waterson playing Sid Shoenberg in The Killing Fields, who gets his story through bravado and confontation. Both portrails are facinating to see for the oppposite reason. I would love to hang out with Wiener in a war zone, but keep Shoenberg around for back up.
There is a reason we like to see docudramas as well as documentries. If you are watching a film about a topic, chances are it is a topic you know something about. It is the actors bringing these charactors to life that makes the film intersting, and Live From Bagdhad does this perfectly
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Inaccurate Film Peddles Propaganda
Added 3/31/2009
This film is well acted and, if you're not interested in history or truth, suspenseful as a work of fiction. However, since it it supposed to be based on factual events, anything that might be a blatant lie within it would mar the veracity of the rest of the material.
Forget the fact that the U.S. was friends with Saddam and helped fund him and give him weapons that our government was well aware that he was murdering people with. Forget, too, the fact that at the same time the horrors of Saddam were transpiring, the US was supporting other dictators, most notably Suharto in Indonesia--we gave him weapons knowing that he was also slaughtering people. This film ignores all that to portray Saddam (not unfairly) as a monster, by relying in part on a story that was a public relations invention. A 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified at the time as Nayirah "to protect her from reprisals," in August 1990 told a story of Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators, a story invented for the London Daily Telegraph by a Kuwaiti housing minister and then spread by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, which received $10.7 million from the Kuwaiti government for this and other services.
The girl spoke at a faux congressional hearing located in Hill and Knowlton's Washington, D.C., office. Craig Fuller (George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff when Bush was VP) ran the PR firm. Nayirah, a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, daughter of Kuwait's Ambassador to Washington, was coached by the firm, and her testimony was used by Bush Sr. to help sell the war. The story was revealed as false after the war by ABC's John Martin and denounced as a hoax.
The events of this false story are never challenged in the film but are portrayed as if true. It's interesting to note that this film was released in 2002, when Bush Jr. was just beginning his attempts to again turn attention to Saddam and use false stories to justify a new war on Iraq. Given the pro-Bush media sentiment of the time, one wonders if this film was HBO's contribution to the war effort.
0 out of 1 people found this helpful.
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Fantastic movie!
Added 2/6/2007
This is a great movie because it is about the first Gulf War. I think people forget what happened then and how it relates to today. It is also an interesting accounting of the beginning of 24 hour news. All actors do a great job.
1 out of 3 people found this helpful.
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