this is the name of a very beautiful and astonishing movie which i really like , you will see a very strong woman who fights all the bad events she encounter and all she has is her hope , a very emotional woman who is forced to suffer many things ..... after you see the movie you will agree that this is the best performance of Angelina Jolie ..... i really liked this movie and i hope you enjoy it too .
there will be more information about it :
A Mighty Heart
Starring:
Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Irrfan Khan, Adnan Siddiqui, Alyy Khan
Directed by:
Michael Winterbottom
Produced by:
Andrew Eaton, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner
On January 23, 2002, Mariane Pearl's world changed forever. Her husband Daniel, South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was researching a story on shoe bomber Richard Reid. The story drew them to Karachi where a go-between had promised access to an elusive source. As Danny left for the meeting, he told Mariane he might be late for dinner. He never returned. In the face of death, Danny's spirit of defiance and his unflinching belief in the power of journalism led Mariane to write about his disappearance, the intense effort to find him and his eventual murder in her memoir "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl." Six months pregnant when the ordeal began, she was carrying a son that Danny hoped to name Adam. She wrote the book to introduce Adam to the father he would never meet. Transcending religion, race and nationality, Mariane's courageous desire to rise above the bitterness and hatred that continues to plague this post 9/11 world, serves as the purest expression of the joy of life she and Danny shared.
by Roger Ebert :
"A Mighty Heart" begins with shots of the teeming streets of Karachi, Pakistan, a city with a population that seems jammed in, shoulder to shoulder. Terrorists will emerge from this sea of humanity, kidnap the American journalist Daniel Pearl and disappear. The film is about the desperate search for Pearl (Dan Futterman) before the release of the appalling video showing him being beheaded. It is told largely through the eyes of and based on a memoir by his widow, Mariane.
We know how the story is going to end. The real drama is played out with the natures of the people looking for him. They include his pregnant wife, a French radio journalist who conceals her grief behind a cool and calculating facade to help her husband's chances; their friend (Archie Panjabi), whose apartment becomes a nerve center; a Pakistan security official (Irrfan Khan) whose uncertain position reflects the way his country accepts American money and harbors terrorists; an American agent (Will Patton) whose skills are better adapted to American cities, and one of Pearl's bosses at the Wall Street Journal (Denis O'Hare), who offers encouragement without much reason.
Standing at the center of the story is Mariane Pearl, played by Angelina Jolie in a performance that is both physically and emotionally convincing. A few obvious makeup changes make her resemble the woman we saw so often on TV (curly hair, darker skin, the swelling belly), but Jolie's performance depends above all on inner conviction; she reminds us, as we saw in some of her earlier films like "Girl, Interrupted" (1999), that she is a skilled actress and not merely (however entertainingly) a Tomb Raider.
The movie, directed by the versatile British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom ("24 Hour Party People," "The Road to Guantanamo"), is notable for what it leaves out. Although we do meet the possible suspect Omar (Aly Khan), there are not any detailed scenes of Pearl with his kidnappers, no portrayals of their personalities or motivations, and we do not see the beheading and its video. That last is not just because of Winterbottom's tact and taste, but because (I think) he wants to portray the way Pearl has almost disappeared into another dimension. His kidnappers have transported him outside the zone of human values and common sense. We reflect that the majority of Muslims do not approve of the behavior of Islamic terrorists, just as the majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq.
Many thrillers depend on action, conflict, triumph and defeat. This one depends on impotence and frustration. The kidnappers cannot do more than snatch one unarmed man after he gets out of a taxi, and Pearl's friends are lost in a maze of clues, lies, gossip and dead ends. The movie has been described as a "police procedural," but I saw it more as a stalemate.
Mariane Pearl reminds us in her book, and the movie reminds us, too, that some 230 other journalists had lost their lives at the time of Pearl's kidnapping, most of them during the conflict in Iraq. That means they proportionately had a higher death rate than combat soldiers. That's partly because they are ill-prepared for the risks they take and partly because they're targets. The Americans who complain about "negative" news are the ideological cousins of those who shoot at CNN crews. The news is the news, good or bad, and those who resent being informed of it are pitiful. More Americans are well-informed about current sports and auto-racing statistics, I sometimes think, than anything else.
What is most fascinating about Mariane Pearl, in life and in this movie, is that she is not a stereotyped hysterical wife, weeping on camera, but a cool, courageous woman who behaves in a way best calculated to save her husband's life. Listen to her speak and sense how her mind works. While you experience the fear and tension that Winterbottom records, see also how she tries to use it and not merely be its victim. (In the same sense, the statements of the parents of Blair Holt, the boy who died in a senseless shooting on a Chicago bus, have glowed with intelligence and sanity, despite their grief.)
What is best about "A Mighty Heart" is that it doesn't reduce the Daniel Pearl story to a plot, but elevates it to a tragedy. A tragedy that illuminates and grieves for the hatred that runs loose in our world, hatred as a mad dog that attacks everyone. Attacks them for what seems, to the dog, the best of reasons.
We know how the story is going to end. The real drama is played out with the natures of the people looking for him. They include his pregnant wife, a French radio journalist who conceals her grief behind a cool and calculating facade to help her husband's chances; their friend (Archie Panjabi), whose apartment becomes a nerve center; a Pakistan security official (Irrfan Khan) whose uncertain position reflects the way his country accepts American money and harbors terrorists; an American agent (Will Patton) whose skills are better adapted to American cities, and one of Pearl's bosses at the Wall Street Journal (Denis O'Hare), who offers encouragement without much reason.
Standing at the center of the story is Mariane Pearl, played by Angelina Jolie in a performance that is both physically and emotionally convincing. A few obvious makeup changes make her resemble the woman we saw so often on TV (curly hair, darker skin, the swelling belly), but Jolie's performance depends above all on inner conviction; she reminds us, as we saw in some of her earlier films like "Girl, Interrupted" (1999), that she is a skilled actress and not merely (however entertainingly) a Tomb Raider.
The movie, directed by the versatile British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom ("24 Hour Party People," "The Road to Guantanamo"), is notable for what it leaves out. Although we do meet the possible suspect Omar (Aly Khan), there are not any detailed scenes of Pearl with his kidnappers, no portrayals of their personalities or motivations, and we do not see the beheading and its video. That last is not just because of Winterbottom's tact and taste, but because (I think) he wants to portray the way Pearl has almost disappeared into another dimension. His kidnappers have transported him outside the zone of human values and common sense. We reflect that the majority of Muslims do not approve of the behavior of Islamic terrorists, just as the majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq.
Many thrillers depend on action, conflict, triumph and defeat. This one depends on impotence and frustration. The kidnappers cannot do more than snatch one unarmed man after he gets out of a taxi, and Pearl's friends are lost in a maze of clues, lies, gossip and dead ends. The movie has been described as a "police procedural," but I saw it more as a stalemate.
Mariane Pearl reminds us in her book, and the movie reminds us, too, that some 230 other journalists had lost their lives at the time of Pearl's kidnapping, most of them during the conflict in Iraq. That means they proportionately had a higher death rate than combat soldiers. That's partly because they are ill-prepared for the risks they take and partly because they're targets. The Americans who complain about "negative" news are the ideological cousins of those who shoot at CNN crews. The news is the news, good or bad, and those who resent being informed of it are pitiful. More Americans are well-informed about current sports and auto-racing statistics, I sometimes think, than anything else.
What is most fascinating about Mariane Pearl, in life and in this movie, is that she is not a stereotyped hysterical wife, weeping on camera, but a cool, courageous woman who behaves in a way best calculated to save her husband's life. Listen to her speak and sense how her mind works. While you experience the fear and tension that Winterbottom records, see also how she tries to use it and not merely be its victim. (In the same sense, the statements of the parents of Blair Holt, the boy who died in a senseless shooting on a Chicago bus, have glowed with intelligence and sanity, despite their grief.)
What is best about "A Mighty Heart" is that it doesn't reduce the Daniel Pearl story to a plot, but elevates it to a tragedy. A tragedy that illuminates and grieves for the hatred that runs loose in our world, hatred as a mad dog that attacks everyone. Attacks them for what seems, to the dog, the best of reasons.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In a sense, "A Mighty Heart," the story of the search for Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl, is "All the President's Men" for the 21st century.
Granted, it isn't as good as the Dustin Hoffman/Robert Redford Watergate classic. Still, it celebrates that same sort of journalistic courage, integrity and resolve — albeit in more tragic circumstances.
Further, it echoes the style of the earlier film. That is, a painstaking two-step-forward, one-step-back procedural, leading to a foregone conclusion.
Everyone knew what happened to Nixon. Almost everyone knows what happened to Pearl. In case you don't, while in Pakistan on assignment for the Journal, the former Atlantan (he started at the paper's Atlanta bureau in 1990) was kidnapped and later beheaded by terrorists.
"A Mighty Heart" takes Danny's (Dan Futterman) abduction and eventual execution as its starting point. But it takes its power and plotline from the memoir his wife, Mariane (Angela Jolie), also a journalist, wrote after he was murdered.
The Pearls were living in Karachi, Pakistan. Before they left the country, he wanted to chase down one last story on Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber. On Jan. 23, 2002, Danny left for a fatal last interview. Heeding the warnings of others to meet at a public place, he had his driver drop him off at the Village Restaurant. Then he vanished.
The film charts the five-week search that ensued as U.S. government agents led by Randall Bennett (Will Patton); Pakistani authorities headed by a man only known as Captain (Irfan Khan); and Danny's old colleagues at the newspaper, John Bussey (Denis O'Hare) and Steve LeVine (Gary Wilmes), converge on the house where Mariane is staying. They all want to help, but the city is a jungle of dead ends and false alarms, stale leads and treacherous men.
As they scour the dangerous political maze and the Byzantine back streets, of Karachi, the rumors fly: Danny was a CIA agent. He was with the Mossad. Or, as one Pakistani official insists, he was working for India against Pakistan. And there is always the persistent whispered fear: Do his captors know he's Jewish?
Michael Winterbottom, the prolific and eclectic director of everything from "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" and "Jude" to "24 Hour Party People" and "The Claim," goes back and forth between two realities. There's Mariane's stoic composure as, housebound but still a journalist, she works her contacts via cellphones, e-mails and the Internet (the film gets to the point where the constant ringing of someone's cellphone is like an electric jolt).
And there is crowded, gridlocked Karachi, where cabs and cars share the street with sheep and goats while brightly painted buses lumber through the madness like brightly painted elephants. Winterbottom shows us how easily Danny — or anyone — could be swallowed up in this teeming maelstrom of poverty, fundamentalism, terrorism and whatever else the unstable region has to offer.
Winterbottom uses a terse, almost docudrama style that works better on some levels than others. His rigorous, unsentimental approach mirrors the journalistic ethics and need to know embodied by the Pearls. Still, he makes it difficult for us to find an emotional center with which we can identify. A lesser filmmaker would've focused on Danny or on one of the men conducting the search. Winterbottom hones in on the woman left behind to wait — the Penelope to a doomed Odysseus, fending off not suitors but unspeakable fears.
Jolie, who won raves from the tough crowd in Cannes, uses an Olivier-like external approach: disguising herself in Mariane's coal-black Mediterranean curls, slightly darker skin and unique accent (she is part Afro-Cuban, part Dutch and was raised in France). The actress and Winterbottom make Mariane the mighty heart of their movie, and Jolie plunges into the role — whether she's demonstrating a heroic self-possession or wailing in the dark like some mortally wounded animal.
sources : yahoo movies , rogerebert.suntimes.com
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