JackRiddler » Fri Jul 29, 2011 12:42 am wrote:.
Not intimidated to say I liked Syriana and much else besides involving Clooney, so there. Burn Before Reading is a screwball comedy. There is no requirement to view it as an endorsement of incompetence theory in all things CIA. It's more a light touch on the (middle class) human condition. Men Who Stare at Goats is more problematic. Its heart may have been in the right place at some point but it ends up as an upbeat comedy about Abu Ghraib, not funny. Very much appreciated Good Night and Good Luck.
Here were my thoughts on Syriana, from Old RI, where it is apparently impossible to link to individual posts:
JackRiddler wrote:.
Syriana sprawls over multiple plotlines in a way that was criticized as too complex or didactic for a movie, but I liked it. It circumscribes the machinations of the CIA and financial actors around the merger of two giant oil companies and a related power struggle for control of a fictional Gulf principality. Future oil depletion is among the themes cited in the geostrategic justifications for various actions, but without a definitive statement for or against the idea of peak oil. It's made clear that the dominant motive for most of the key players is a combination of greed and narcissistic self-advancement.
Two attacks occur at the end, both of which would be classified as terrorism in the current reckoning.
One is a "genuine" suicide attack by young men who have been pushed into jobless desperation and who have chosen fundamentalist religion as their organizing principle for resistance. They use a US missile that was sold to a different cell earlier in a botched CIA sting operation. However, the missile's warhead is delivered at the prow of a small boat crashing into a tanker facility.
The second is a straight-up CIA assassination of the nationalist leader who is trying to overthrow the corrupt elites allied with American interests (and, if I remember, seeking a deal to supply China). He is kept under constant surveillance by satellite and killed by a missile shot from a drone plane.
Both of these scenarios reflect events that have happened in real life. I felt there was a cop-out at the end in not showing what would have surely followed: an official attribution of responsibility for the attacks as conveyed by the mass media. All that was missing to complete the film's "map" was 10 seconds of CNN in the background reporting that the two attacks in the nation of ____ bear the hallmarks of al-Qaeda, "including the use of sudden, simultaneous strikes," using the familiar footage of Bin Ladin and his followers hoisting rifles in the desert.
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The thing about Syriana, which I only saw once, many years ago, is that it marked the Hollywood debut of an Egyptian actor, Amr Waked. Waked played the Islamic terrorist preacher, who recruits young Arab men to blow themselves up. It wasn't a huge role, but it was surprising that he got it, given that Waked's only notable role in his career thus far in Egyptian cinema had been in one movie in 2002, where he played the role of a Palestinian suicide bomber. Anyway, after his Hollywood debut in Syriana, Waked began to get more roles in American films, and his career is going quite well, though he travels back and forth between Los Angeles and Cairo.
In 2011, Waked was at the forefront of the January 25th revolution in Tahrir Square, and was involved in all sorts of media agitation against not only the Mubarak regime, but also against the police and army. That wasn't so unusual. What was unusual, especially for a celebrity, were his activities in Tahrir Square. He kept company with the Muslim Brotherhood's "popular committees", armed thugs charged with "arresting" and "interrogating" suspected police infiltrators or informants. The Muslim Brotherhood ran two "interrogation centers" off the Square: one in a mosque that they had taken over, and another one in the offices of a tourist agency owned by a Brother. Both were off-limits to non-members of the Brotherhood, and nothing about them was known by the general public or even the demonstrators who were in Tahrir, until much later.
There, individuals were taken, stripped, searched, tied up and blindfolded, and tortured. Amr Waked, the actor, filmed the torture and tried to elicit confessions from the prisoners. In 2014, one of these films was aired by a television program, "The Black Box", and widely viewed. In the film, his voice can be clearly heard roughly interrogating a badly battered lawyer, and trying to get him to admit that he is really a police officer as the man's broken hands are roughly pulled behind his back, causing him to scream in agony. After the program was aired, Amr Waked sued the show's host and the owner of the tv channel for defamation, claiming that he was only documenting the torture, not participating in it.
Waked never explained for whom he was 'documenting' the torture, nor why this film, which not only exposed the torture but also the faces of those committing it, was not ever aired by him, but by "The Black Box". Nevertheless, he won the lawsuit, because the judge ruled that there was no evidence that Waked had physically tortured anyone.
Meanwhile, although he has become something of a public pariah in Egypt, his popularity in Hollywood seems not to have suffered. His last Egyptian movie was released in 2012, but he's been steadily working in Hollywood movies until today. His opinion on Egyptian politics is frequently sought out by Western media. Not surprisingly, he has continued to try to agitate against the Egyptian government, though few here care what he thinks, unlike the Western reporters who are very interested, but who never, ever mention the little incident with the torture chamber.
I'm not sure if he's even still a member of the Egyptian Actors' Union. The EAU had threatened to ban him from working in Egyptian cinema back in 2008, when he worked in a BBC/HBO co-production called "House of Saddam", which starred an Israeli actor in the role of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The EAU enforces a strict boycott against any actor who collaborates with Israel in any way.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that Syriana happened to be the movie that took a rather obscure Egyptian actor with minor roles in only two previous films, and gave him his big Hollywood break, and at the same time gave him the international exposure and platform for his anti-Egyptian views.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
