Word: afghanistan
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...with itself - that handles its combustible elements with care and gets strong, accurate performances from Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman. The release of the film has either perfect or ominous timing, for it opens just after President Obama's announcement that he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Brothers, written by David Benioff and directed by Jim Sheridan, is about a soldier sent to that perilous region, with dire results for him, his fellow Marines and the family he left behind. (See pictures of Natalie Portman's career...
...October 2007, Captain Sam Cahill (Maguire) is preparing for another tour of duty, this time in Afghanistan. That leaves him just enough time to say goodbye to his loving wife Grace (Portman) and their two bright young daughters and to fetch from prison his wastrel brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal), who is at the end of his sentence for assaulting a bank teller. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan, Sam's plane is shot down and crashes; he and his men are believed dead, and Grace soon gets the awful news. In fact, he and another Marine have been captured by a Taliban...
Maguire, in hero roles like Spidey or indie dramas like this, has always been a thoughtful, watchful actor whose giant eyes seem to be monitoring humans from outer space. Sam's eyes see horrible things in Afghanistan, and when he comes home, he sees something even more threatening: two people in love, one of them his wife. As in some science-fiction parable, here it's the children who sense a mutation in their daddy - to them he's now an alien creature - a foreboding that is complicated by their growing affection for Tommy. Sheridan has shown before, especially...
That trend is sure to be the undertone during discussions between Obama and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday, when the two leaders meet in Washington to discuss a high-stakes list of concerns topped by Afghanistan and Iran. "The U.S. side needs to impress diplomatically on Prime Minister Erdogan how much his anti-Western populist rhetoric damages Turkey's position with its key partners and pro-Turkey constituencies in Washington and Brussels," analyst Hugh Pope wrote in a recent paper for the Transatlantic Academy...
...Before leaving for the U.S, Erdogan said Turkey was already "doing what it can" in Afghanistan, suggesting the Turks will resist Obama's call to commit more troops. Turkey has 1,750 soldiers in the Hindu Kush on a strictly humanitarian, noncombat mission that includes building roads and schools and patrolling Kabul. Ankara is wary of fighting fellow Muslims in a region with which it also has historic ties. "A midway solution could be for Turkey to increase its troops but not engage in warfare in southern provinces like Kandahar and Helmand," says Cengiz Candar, a commentator for the Radikal...