Word: belfasters
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Before there were webcams, there was Frederick Wiseman. Like the Internet cameras that film cubicles and street intersections nonstop, Wiseman creates unblinking images--exhaustive, exhausting, narration-free cinema-verite documentaries. The 4-hr. 8-min. Belfast lingers over daily life in a small blue-collar town: marriages, doctors' exams, factories, a read-through of Death of a Salesman. While Wiseman's vignettes can be mesmeric, they're too often simply tedious and excessive. And it smacks of self-congratulation for the public-TV gentry to do these working-class commoners the mere favor of acknowledging--as the Salesman reference suggests...
...welcome to debate the violence and the presentation of a Southern black (Jeffrey Wright, impeccably conflicted) fighting for the flag of slavery. But for all the period dressings, this could be a deadpan study of why kids in Sarajevo, Belfast or South Central pick up guns and start spraying the street. And for all the carnage, Lee's tone is contemplative. He pines for those quiet moments when a wounded man can sit holding a baby, the newborn sucking on the man's nubbin of a blasted-off finger...
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON West Bank visit offends Israelis and Palestinians. C'mon, do Belfast...
...players might be forgiven a little cockiness, having just returned from a tour in which they played on hallowed cricket grounds in London. They dropped in on peace talks in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and presented a cricket bat to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. ("It's a little like presenting a menorah to Saddam Hussein," Haber says.) And they took tea at Windsor Castle with Prince Edward. In a landmark moment of cultural exchange, they performed The Hip-Hop Cricket Rap for His Royal Highness. Says Hayes: "I don't think they'd ever seen or heard the likes...
...attitude and respect. He leads a boot-camp jog, yelling out "Compton Cricket!" as they answer "U.S.A.!" For Hayes, the highlight of the trip to Britain was having young men "who grew up in all this violence" preach the gospel of peace to Adams and the wannabe gangsters of Belfast, who were planning a tribute to the violent rapper Tupac Shakur (gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996) until the homies told them that ain't cool. One of their ex-teammates is doing hard time for a drive-by shooting. "Our brief engagement," Adams later wrote to Hayes, "livened...