Well, it was certainly not as bad as I expected.
The director has made some really good movies and most of this movie is good, sometimes really good. Interestingly shot, a great palette of hyper crowded Pakistani cities, strange sights not lingered over but shown to give a real sense to the movie goer of what it is like to be there. Actually there, though sitting in a seat in a multiplex among about twenty others in a quarter filled theater. And, a decent script (I never read Marianne Pearl's book so I don't know how much is fact or fiction), some well rounded characters, some good acting where you lose yourself in the scene and character and the movie does what good movies should and must do. A Pakistani police captain who is especially good and an American CIA agent who is not painted in the classic two dimensions of evil that is the template for anything having to do with the CIA in contemporary movies.
Yes, he is caused to smirk and sometimes smile in deep satisfaction as the Pakistani security forces are able to Jack Baur suspects and cause fear merely through questions, but he too, is made, through acting, script, and direction a human rather than just light on a screen.
As a side note you can go to You Tube and see the actual CIA agent involved in a lengthy interview describing what you are about to see on screen and he is an impressive presence and makes you feel as if there are some Americans out there doing their jobs competently in the War on Terror.
The problem with the movie is Angelina Jolie. The movie misses greatness because ultimately it is a star turn more than it is an honest movie about a good man's slaughtering and police procedural of the rescue attempts and how his killers were pursued. I have thought for a long time that Angelina no longer looks remotely human and perhaps is an alien. In close ups one wonders first at what's left from her parents DNA, then at the skill of her surgeon (s), and then, when even surgical skill seems incapable of producing what we see on screen, one wonders about circuit boards and UFOs and whether she is more Fem Bot or more similar to the female assassin in Mars Attacks.
There is no remaining part of Angelina Jolie that is possible in nature. Her presence on the screen is disconcerting, she sucks the life out of a scene as we wonder at her all. In A 'Mighty Heart' this is especially true as she portrays a mixed race French woman with a southern Vesuvian accent. A nine month pregnant alien, not a refugee from Rosemary's Baby, but supposedly carrying the child of the mighty heart whose heart is stilled by Islamic terrorists and may or not have been found in one of the ten parts of his body that they carved from what was once a seemingly wonderful man after making him confess that he was a Jew, and the son of Jewish parent, before sawing his head off with a knife live on video.
But, when that moment arrives on film, we are not shown his agony, or the reality of what happens when the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, liberality, humanism, Western thought, civilization, all that we take for granted as being the world we inhabit collide with the fanaticism of a religion expressed by some in 9th Century terms. No, the director decides or is forced, to turn to his star and give the movie goer the scene that she and her boyfriend/producer hope will be the winning clip used just before the acceptance speech for best actress in next year's Oscar ceremony.
It is almost pornographic and the camera and boom mike linger over it all and I sat there and wondered: why are we hearing her rehearsed and acted screams of agony and pain while the real agony and pain of a real person, Daniel Pearl, graduate of Stanford University, stand-up journalist and soon to be a father, why his murder on tape, his actual butchering is understated to the level of a passing incident, with a raised eyebrow or two and a reddening of a face, and, I think I recall an epithet...maybe?
Angelina, an alien in distress, the classic star turn, the dailies parsed, and screams and cries done again and again, the film cut for Oscar effects and for Oscar viewers. Yet, just off screen and off script, and beyond the world of this movie, a real tape of a real person is ignored. A tape viewed even today on the Internet posted there by people as alien to me and you as Angelina is to most living women. Angelina's scene, like Scorsese telling Robert De Niro that his death scene in Mean Streets was his to have, Angelina was allowed to wallow in her attempt to portray loss while the Daniel Pearl is viewed silently in fake home movies. There, right there, the movie lost me.
The irony of the same cries and agony at the birth of the son never to be seen by Daniel Pearl was a coda to a movie that could of been important but isn't.
The director has made some really good movies and most of this movie is good, sometimes really good. Interestingly shot, a great palette of hyper crowded Pakistani cities, strange sights not lingered over but shown to give a real sense to the movie goer of what it is like to be there. Actually there, though sitting in a seat in a multiplex among about twenty others in a quarter filled theater. And, a decent script (I never read Marianne Pearl's book so I don't know how much is fact or fiction), some well rounded characters, some good acting where you lose yourself in the scene and character and the movie does what good movies should and must do. A Pakistani police captain who is especially good and an American CIA agent who is not painted in the classic two dimensions of evil that is the template for anything having to do with the CIA in contemporary movies.
Yes, he is caused to smirk and sometimes smile in deep satisfaction as the Pakistani security forces are able to Jack Baur suspects and cause fear merely through questions, but he too, is made, through acting, script, and direction a human rather than just light on a screen.
As a side note you can go to You Tube and see the actual CIA agent involved in a lengthy interview describing what you are about to see on screen and he is an impressive presence and makes you feel as if there are some Americans out there doing their jobs competently in the War on Terror.
The problem with the movie is Angelina Jolie. The movie misses greatness because ultimately it is a star turn more than it is an honest movie about a good man's slaughtering and police procedural of the rescue attempts and how his killers were pursued. I have thought for a long time that Angelina no longer looks remotely human and perhaps is an alien. In close ups one wonders first at what's left from her parents DNA, then at the skill of her surgeon (s), and then, when even surgical skill seems incapable of producing what we see on screen, one wonders about circuit boards and UFOs and whether she is more Fem Bot or more similar to the female assassin in Mars Attacks.
There is no remaining part of Angelina Jolie that is possible in nature. Her presence on the screen is disconcerting, she sucks the life out of a scene as we wonder at her all. In A 'Mighty Heart' this is especially true as she portrays a mixed race French woman with a southern Vesuvian accent. A nine month pregnant alien, not a refugee from Rosemary's Baby, but supposedly carrying the child of the mighty heart whose heart is stilled by Islamic terrorists and may or not have been found in one of the ten parts of his body that they carved from what was once a seemingly wonderful man after making him confess that he was a Jew, and the son of Jewish parent, before sawing his head off with a knife live on video.
But, when that moment arrives on film, we are not shown his agony, or the reality of what happens when the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, liberality, humanism, Western thought, civilization, all that we take for granted as being the world we inhabit collide with the fanaticism of a religion expressed by some in 9th Century terms. No, the director decides or is forced, to turn to his star and give the movie goer the scene that she and her boyfriend/producer hope will be the winning clip used just before the acceptance speech for best actress in next year's Oscar ceremony.
It is almost pornographic and the camera and boom mike linger over it all and I sat there and wondered: why are we hearing her rehearsed and acted screams of agony and pain while the real agony and pain of a real person, Daniel Pearl, graduate of Stanford University, stand-up journalist and soon to be a father, why his murder on tape, his actual butchering is understated to the level of a passing incident, with a raised eyebrow or two and a reddening of a face, and, I think I recall an epithet...maybe?
Angelina, an alien in distress, the classic star turn, the dailies parsed, and screams and cries done again and again, the film cut for Oscar effects and for Oscar viewers. Yet, just off screen and off script, and beyond the world of this movie, a real tape of a real person is ignored. A tape viewed even today on the Internet posted there by people as alien to me and you as Angelina is to most living women. Angelina's scene, like Scorsese telling Robert De Niro that his death scene in Mean Streets was his to have, Angelina was allowed to wallow in her attempt to portray loss while the Daniel Pearl is viewed silently in fake home movies. There, right there, the movie lost me.
The irony of the same cries and agony at the birth of the son never to be seen by Daniel Pearl was a coda to a movie that could of been important but isn't.