The Mistake Carter Didn’t Make: Why America and Israel Should Listen to Jimmy

April 18, 2008 – 5:50 pm

It’s a sad commentary on international affairs and an insult to the human mind when the terrorism scapegoat is continuously allowed to negate important issues.

The Pope should issue a global fatwa banning newspapers and policymakers around the world from engaging in this infantile, overused discussion of “but what about the terrorists.”

Perhaps then the American citizenry can read about Jimmy Carter man-hugging Hamas official Nasser Shaer with enough neutrality to form an informed opinion.

Carter paid tribute to Arafat by laying a wreath on his grave, before meeting Hamas officials in Egypt after Israel denied him access to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Undeterred, Carter said he would meet with exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal in Syria on Friday. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in current affairs, palestine | Comments (4)

Notes from the Dubai International Film Festival: Things We Lost in the Fire

December 18, 2007 – 8:39 am

This is our final article on DIFF this year. Related stories are here and here.

As the festival wound down, I found myself needing an injection of Hollywood, and Susanne Bier’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” was the ticket. Well, maybe. Susanne Bier is actually Danish, and this movie is somewhat unconventional. I’m not sure if it’s going to get a wide release in the Middle East, but I’m not holding my breath.

The one consistently terrific thing about this film is Benicio Del Toro and his brand of awesome. I’m not exactly sure how he manages to take the familiar role of a recovering heroin addict and transform it into something this charming and unpretentious, but I like to think it has something to do with being charming and unpretentious in real life. Either way, this is one performance any self-respecting Del Toro fangirl or fanboy cannot possibly miss out on, no matter where you are.

The rest of the movie oscillates between genuinely grounded, thoughtful material and occasionally coma-inducing melodrama. Halle Berry’s turn as shell-shocked widow Audrey is solid, but her obligatory moment of meltdown and surrender felt as thought it could have come off a check-list. While Del Toro’s heroin withdrawal scene has similar overtones, his inventive facial contortions alone create something original to watch.

David Duchovny, the dead husband who is the link between Berry and Del Toro’s characters, has some potential, but he disappears halfway into the film. The story is fragmented (much like a grieving person’s mind – which I thought to be a nice touch overall), and Duchovny’s character is seen in flashbacks. But the flashbacks just stop all of a sudden, and the film is the poorer for it. We understand that Brian was a righteous dude unjustly taken from his family in the prime of his life, but aside from the great dynamic he has with his drug addict friend, we don’t really get to know him as a human being.

The deadpan John Carroll Lynch is a source of comic relief as a weird but good-natured neighbor, but it’s a bad sign when you realize his character is actually more likeable than Brian’s.

Bier is drawing a fascinating parallel between addiction and grief however, and she does succeed in raising serious questions about the way human beings deal with both phenomena. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, dubai, entertainment | Comments (0)

Notes from the Dubai International Film Festival: The Battle for Haditha

December 13, 2007 – 7:41 am

This article is part of a series on various films at DIFF 2007.

Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” has not yet gotten enough press. In some ways, this is understandable. Despite the explosive subject matter, this is a low-key film. There are no big-name actors, no enormous budget, and, most importantly, the picture’s stylistic elements tend toward a stark, bare-boned simplicity. Nevertheless, this is a film to see.

Broomfield cast many amateurs for key roles, among them some ex-Marines and Iraqi refugees, and this is both good and bad. There is a definite air of authenticity surrounding the film, yet the acting occasionally appears forced. Some of the dialogue struck me as contrived- although this may have something to do with the subtitles. I do not speak Arabic, but having been accompanied by an Arabic speaker at the screening, I discovered that the subtitles are not as good as they could have been.

This movie is earnest, but, in some scenes, it also comes across as didactic. Do we really need to see the chief insurgent character, a disgruntled former member of the Iraqi army, spelling out the message with lines such as: “The Americans created the insurgency by dis-banding the army”? Does the chief insurgent furthermore have to opine stiffly on the future of Iraq, noting (in a manner that suggests that he is channeling Fukuyama) the bleak possibility of the country inheriting a new leader, someone who will be a helluva lot worse than Saddam?

Yet in spite of a few missteps, this is a haunting picture. I can’t get it out of my head, and I probably won’t for a long time. Broomfield captures the comings and goings of the residents of Haditha, people whose lives are about to be shattered, with intimacy and grace. I was floored by the character of Rashied (Duraid A. Ghaieb), a young man besotted with his pregnant wife (Yasmine Hanani – who attended the screening alongside the director, and ex-Marine actors Elliot Ruiz and Eric Mehalacopoulos), keenly aware of the growing danger of staying with his family in Haditha, and yet unable to do much about it.

Alongside U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians, Broomfield dares to portray the members of the Iraqi insurgency as human beings. These people are not just fundamentalist foreigners, they are also ordinary locals who are infuriated with what has happened to their country. This simple truth is about as inconvenient as anything Al Gore can come up with, and is bound to make American audiences squirm in their seats. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in arts and literature, dubai, entertainment, iraq, terrorism | Comments (3)

Things Don’t Work Out

September 5, 2007 – 12:20 pm

I knew when I was in my teens that I wanted to have kids. I would raise them right, they’d grow up to be productive and moral people, and I would feel proud of having raised perfect children.

When I started having kids in 1988, I read the right books, fed them the right foods, bought them the right toys, always put them in a car-seat and went to church every Sunday. And everything went well. They did well in school, they had friends, and people congratulated me on my well behaved children.

And then, something happened. I’m still not sure what, but something definitely happened. My perfect 1st golden boy decided to go his own way. My perfect second boy knew beyond any doubt that he knew more about stuff than I did. My charming and attractive third boy was diagnosed with ADHD, had to repeat the second grade, and endured several summer school sessions in order to proceed to the next grade. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in parenting, society | Comments (0)

Rudy Giuliani: Just How Far Will His Dance Take Him?

August 16, 2007 – 12:19 pm

On August 9th of 1997, a young Haitian immigrant by the name of Abner Louima in the New York City Borough of Brooklyn was brought to a police station after being arrested for his role in a brawl at a popular night club. While he was punched, beaten with a stick, had a plunger brutally inserted into his backside causing severe damage to his colon and bladder, while he agonized in a pool of blood, an officer from the New York Police Department told him: “it’s Giuliani Time.”

Two years later, a West African Muslim immigrant by the name of Amadou Diallo had his turn to experience Giuliani Time. The encounter would be brief, and it would cost him his life. The unarmed man was walking home in his Bronx neighborhood and was approached by the NYPD. When he made a gesture to reach for his wallet the officers fired 41 shots, killing an unarmed, hard-working man with no criminal record in cold blood. This was Giuliani Time in New York, a time when the rules and regulations on the police had been loosened and residents of many African-American, Latino and immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of mostly white elite units in the department who, under the direction of Giuliani, often cracked down brutally on any perceived threats. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in election 08, society | Comments (0)

The U.S.: The Reform of the Public Warning System

April 12, 2005 – 12:08 pm

In the near future in Washington , D.C., at the beginning of rush hour, a highway overpass collapses. An ominous cloud of dust billows and drifts towards the city.

Commuters panic, wondering if they are exposed to a radioactive or biological agent. An emergency radio broadcast describes a detour to get everyone off the highway quickly. Some commuters have weather radios stashed in the back seat that automatically turn on and broadcast the same message. Those at home watching television see the alert crawl across the bottom of the screen; those still in the office receive an email or pop-up window. Cell phones and pagers ring with automated voice mail and text messages. People are advised to stay indoors until the nature of the dust cloud is known, to check into a hospital if they feel ill, and to call a hotline with any information about the collapse. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in science & technology | Comments (0)

The Kindness of Strangers

February 22, 2005 – 11:35 am

President Bush wants me to be excited about the recent elections in Iraq while the news shows lines of Iraqi voters, segregated by sex. I’m supposed to be thrilled, elated, waving an ink-stained finger around a pasty version of E.T., while the ballots specifically asked the voter to disclose his or her sex. Smug American politicians repeat the word “freedom” like a broken record, while already on the streets of Baghdad women are harassed for wearing pants.

It funny, for all the current saber-rattling going on about Iran at the moment, Bush seems completely ignorant of the fact that he himself has just helped create a new Iran: a battered, bitter post-Saddam Iraq at the risk of succumbing to fascism in the guise of moral authority. Oh sweet irony. Read More »

By Natalia Antonova | Posted in current affairs, iraq, muslim women | Comments (0)

A Rebel’s Guide to the World – Part 2 (weirder, angrier & uncensored)

March 31, 2004 – 11:40 am

My dreams always haunt my sleep in two opposite but equally strange extremes.

Sometimes I have these totally unintelligible hallucinatory visions that I wake up actually believing I must have severe brain damage to be able to come up with such convoluted shit.

On the other extreme, sometimes I make so much eloquent sense inside a dream that I wake up thinking I could have hardly been asleep at all. I compose long articulate sentences, remember things I couldn’t recollect during the day, solve mathematical problems, even compose original musical tunes. And I wake up remembering every single detail. Come to think of it, this also could be the result of severe brain damage.

Anyway, last night I had one of the latter, elucidated kind. Read More »

By Zaid Nabulsi | Posted in current affairs, humor | Comments (2)