The Screengrab : osama bin laden

Morning Deal Report: George Clooney’s Challenge

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The Cloon is getting political again. According to Variety, George Clooney “has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler's legal thriller The Challenge, about the long campaign waged by U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift and Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the bodyguard and driver of Osama bin Laden.” Presumably Clooney will play the lawyer and not the driver.

Conan (the Barbarian, not the O’Brien) dons his loincloth again for Lionsgate. Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who have written an Amazon warrior vehicle for Scarlett Johansson, will pen the return of Robert E. Howard’s creation. (Presumably the governor of California is unavailable to reprise his role.) The Hollywood Reporter quotes producer Fredrik Malmberg as saying “We all want this movie to go into production as soon as possible,” so you know quality is priority number one.

Willem Dafoe is a versatile fellow, isn’t he? He played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and now he’s set to star in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. It doesn’t sound like he’s necessarily taking on the title role, however. Variety describes it as a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film,” in which “Dafoe and [Charlotte] Gainsbourg will play a couple who retreat to an isolated cabin in the woods following the death of their child.” That Von Trier, he’s a million laughs.

Related:
George Clooney Leans In and Other Insights
Face/Off: "Breaking the Waves"

Trailer Review: Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

To quote the tagline for last year's awesome The Hunting Party, a movie I'll continue to reference on a weekly basis until you all see it, "how can they find the world's most wanted war criminal when the CIA can't? By actually looking." At least one person has taken this tagline to heart — Morgan Spurlock, documentary filmmaking's logical successor to Michael Moore. In Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, which premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Morgan Spurlock goes on a quest to find Bin Laden, armed only with a camera and a satchel full of culture-clash gags. Most of the trailer is comprised of the latter, as when Spurlock shows up the Middle East wearing traditional Muslim garb while still sporting his trademark trucker 'stache. It also looks like he tries to get a lot of comic mileage out of simply asking people if they've seen Bin Laden, which wears pretty thin by the end of the trailer. All in all, Spurlock's films, while just as reliant on issues-based comedy as Moore's, are less concerned with actual politics, although how you feel about this probably depends on your thoughts on Michael Moore. As far as Spurlock is concerned, I'm still waiting for him to really impress me.

Bin-Laden 2, Documentary Filmmakers 0

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

When you think about it, the movie that made Morgan Spurlock famous — Super Size Me — wasn't that much of an accomplishment. All he did was eat McDonald's food for every meal for a month. There are probably millions of Americans who eat the equivalent of McDonald's food every day for most of their adult lives. His follow-up movie, Where in the World is Osama bin-Laden?, set the bar a lot higher, however. This time, he was going to do something that no one in America — indeed, no one in the entire world — seems capable of doing: finding the world's most sought-after terrorist.

Spurlock's not the first person to give it a whirl. Plenty of journalists make the finding of America's bogeyman their job one, and another noteworthy documentarian, Michael Moore, made a half-assed attempt at it himself in Fahrenheit 9/11. (That Spurlock and Moore's efforts may be little more than glorified publicity stunts doesn't diminish the fact that, unlike a number of right-wing documentarians who make terrorist fearmongering their stock in trade, at least they gave it the old college try.)

We doubt we're giving away much by revealing that, at least according to Slash/Film, Spurlock has considerably less luck in locating Osama bin-Laden than he did a McRib sandwich. According to their man in Sundance, Where in the World ends with Spurlock approaching a tribal camp in Pakistan marked with a huge warning sign telling unauthorized visitors they will be shot. Thinking of his newborn child, the director decides to turn around and head home.

Leaving aside the plausibility of this conclusion (would bin-Laden's people really put up a huge sign alerting strangers to their presence?) and the questionable dedication Spurlock seems to have to his craft (hey, pal, bin-Laden may have as many as two dozen children, and he still finds time to get shit done), we'd like to suggest that America's documentarians are taking the wrong approach in the hunt for Public Enemy #1, with their high-tech recording equipment and expensive digital cameras. We think they should trade down for a cheap hand-held tape recorder and a first-generation VHS video camera; that's what everyone who's actually laid eyes on the guy in the last 6 years or so has used.