Letters to the Editor
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mscatfu
No, Wentworth Miller, who plays the same character as a young man is.
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Why the movie tanked
1. Angelina Jolie's Lip-Face has been plastered all over tv, and especially last week you couldn't escape it. Why bother paying to see it on-screen? I diagnose Jolie Fatigue.
2. If there was any real interest in telling the story (as opposed to providing another nobility vehicle for Jolie), the release certainly would have been in the fall, not in the summer when moviegoers don't care for heavy themes.
Is it just me? I can hardly bare to look at that mouth. That huge blistery crack always looks like it's going to burst open any minute.
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Mr.Pillhouse: Franz Fanon would agreed with my dialouge and comments he is a mentor..
BTW I never used the phrases and words of a colonialist group such as "traitor" or "uncle tom" or a slew of other underdeveloped words created by racists...
I am not at all angry with Mariane Pearl it is obvious she refuses to have a global opinion on race many people not just her lack the courage to confront and dialouge on race in real time concrete reality..just notice the defensiveness with you and others if one dares to discuss white jewish racism in the USA..
Race is not a construct on this soil it is alive and real..
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Oh BTW, it tanked
You're *not* using this yardstick to make your pathetic points?
It didn't do business. It must be bad.
By that measure, Evan Almighty is the best movie around.
Jesus fucking Christ! Anyone who'd use box office to prove a movie's quality clearly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to make any argument. You should probably be kept in a cage and fed pellets through the fucking bars.
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Movie didn't tank
It didn't tank. It was on only a quarter of the screens that showed the big openers (1000 compared to 4000) and obviously it is not a movie designed for teenage boys. It cost $20 mil to make and in 3 days earned back almost a quarter of its cost. It will easily make a profit in the US alone, not to mention internationally and considering the topic, it is the kind of movie that will do well on DVD - it doesn't need a big screen like action movies do.
Sorry to ruin you fantasy.
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Movie Tanked
Even most objective elitists will admit that..
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Saw it. Liked it.
Whether this movie "tanks" or not (though with DVD sales and Ms. Jolie's starpower, it will definitely make a nice profit), it is very good, and sad.
The complaints on this board are ridiculous.
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The revisionism was cute though
Daniel Pearl wasn't killed, as it said on the videotape because "I am a Jew" but because he was an American. Niiiiiiice
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watch the hbo documentary instead - much better
If the subject of this film interests you, I would recommend seeing the HBO documentary about Daniel Pearl, the journalist and the jihadi, narrated by Christiane Amenpour, instead. It is much better and tells, for the most part, the same story about the same period of time covered in the film.
I didn't like the Jolie film at all. After reading the book and seeing the aforementioned documentary, it is clear just how much the story was tweaked for hollywood storytelling purposes. And after watching interviews with Mariane Pearl in the HBO documentary, watching Angelina Jolie try to emulate her is really grating...she messes up the accent quite a bit. Daniel Futerman, though he admittedly bears a passing resemblance to Daniel Pearl, is similarly miscast. He has absolutely no charisma in this role and there is zero onscreen chemistry between the two.
As well, there is very little about Daniel Pearl as a person in the film. I think this is critically absent omission. One doesn't get much sense of Pearl as a person and the only reason one has to feel for him is because something really bad has happened to him. Apparently he was quite a remarkable, multi-talented person, and this isn't explored at all. Asra Nomani is similarly portrayed as a quite one-dimensional character in the film when my understanding is that she had a much more significant role in the events and there are many interesting facets to her story that are covered in the book but not addressed in the film (for instance, she learned that she was pregnant from a jilted lover during the period, something that is punishable by death in Pakistan, etc.)
I found the movie made a very interesting story about a pretty incredible bunch of people just boring and almost unwatchable. Virtually the whole film involves chases scenes through Pakistan. Very hard to follow and not interesting to watch. It came off to me as a confusing mess.
I'm quite surprised that Ms. Pearl so publicly supported this project, and Angelina Jolie's portrayal of her, especially when the HBO documentary is so similar and gives a much broader (and in my opinion better) portrayal of all of the characters and the overall story.
Watch the HBO doc (it's presently available on HBO on demand, at least in NYC) and read a Mighty Heart if this story interests you. The Jolie film is really second rate compared to these other sources.