The Ayatollahs Have Caught On
A few days ago, I mentioned an exciting new film that was playing to sold-out crowds in Iran–a satire of the religious establishment. Well, the Ayatollahs have caught on. The movie’s going to be withdrawn.
A few days ago, I mentioned an exciting new film that was playing to sold-out crowds in Iran–a satire of the religious establishment. Well, the Ayatollahs have caught on. The movie’s going to be withdrawn.
Speaking of media war, I heard an interview of Jehane Noujaim with Lisa Mullins yesterday on PRI, in which she discussed her new documentary, Control Room. The film is about Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite TV station, the one and only Al-Jazeera. Noujaim spent several weeks in Al-Jazeera’s control room, interviewing anchors, reporters, and producers for the station, as well as American reporters and press liaisons. The movie is coming this month in select cities. Startup.com, Noujaim’s previous documentary, won her the DGA award.
Additional links: A feature on Control Room in the Village Voice. Another NPR interview, this time with Tony Cox. Jehane Noujaim’s website.
Mizna has sent around a call for their second annual Arab film festival. Work must be submitted in VHS, DVD or MiniDV format by May 15. The festival will be held in September 2004.
“The Lizard,” an Iranian movie poking fun at the Islamic Republic’s clerics has become a huge box office hits, with tickets selling out days in advance.
In the film, thief Reza Marmoulak (Reza the Lizard) slips out of a prison hospital in his clerical disguise and takes up the life of a man of the cloth. As a preacher, his irreverent style — cracking suggestive jokes and referring to “brother (film-maker Quentin) Tarantino” during a sermon — has cinema audiences unaccustomed to open mockery of the clergy in stitches.
I hope this comes out here at some point, it’ll be a refreshing break from all the serious (fantastic, but dead serious) movies put out by Iranian filmmakers.
Japanese ‘cute’ is a curious and very contemporary aesthetic, a style, a taste, an affectation: it denotes anything small, vulnerable and childlike that induces a feeling of pitiful love. There are cute expressions, cute gestures and cute ways of standing, with toes turned in. There are cute ways of dressing, too, especially for girls and young women: shoes with buckles, crinolined mini-skirts, mittens, toys worn as accessories, and the ubiquitous socks, some ankle-length, others longer and worn as if in the process of falling down, an effect achieved with special sock-glue.
Kitty Hauser reviews two books on style in Japan: Fruits Postcards by Shoichi Aoki and The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan by Donald Richie.
A few years ago, at the height of the O.J. Simpson trial, I remember walking down Watt Way at USC, and seeing all the TV cameras looking for “reactions” from the students. The journalists would ask people what they thought of O.J. and how his actions reflected on his alma mater. If someone answered, “I don’t care,” then they moved on to the next person, until they had a Trojan on camera saying how outraged they were about the trial and/or the verdict.
I was reminded of this when I saw this story, about the opening of Mel Gibson’s The Passion in Egypt. The first person quoted is a cretin who seems to not understand that, according to Islam, the crucifixion never happened and since there was no Deicide it doesn’t matter who is responsible. Of course, there were other people quoted in this article. There’s the scholar who thinks people shouldn’t see the movie because it portrays a prophet in the flesh (Islam shuns graphic images of prophets.) There’s the cleric who sees this controversy as involving Christians and Jews, and that it’s irrelevant to Muslims. There’s the Aramaic speaker who is happy to watch the first ever Aramaic-speaking movie. But these people are buried halfway down the article, so you’d have to read past the anti-Semitic idiocy first. Of course, this article is already getting linked everywhere by people who were convinced that The Passion was going to unleash a torrent of anti-Semitic feelings in the Arab world and needed a handful of quotes, like those in this article, in order to feel vindicated. As for whether the movie is a hit in the Arab world, I’m not sure why people expect the average Arab/Muslim movie goer to be any less curious about a controversy-laden movie than the average American movie goer.