Word: shia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...week shy of his 21st birthday in June, Shia LaBeouf spent a morning learning to drive bizarre, top-secret vehicles alongside Harrison Ford. This fantasy gig started, as Hollywood fairy tales often do, with a summons to Steven Spielberg's office two months earlier. "Steven said, 'You ever seen Indiana Jones?'" the boyish-looking actor recounts, while chain smoking outside the Burbank, Calif., strip mall where he buys his daily Boston Market chicken and Robek's fruit smoothie ("The parking lot of dreams," LaBeouf calls his suburban stomping ground). "I said, 'Of course I've seen Indiana Jones.' He said...
...when potential action heroes seem to be either rugged '80s relics like Ford and Sylvester Stallone or sensitive thespians willing to double up on their bench presses like Tobey Maguire and Orlando Bloom, LaBeouf is that rarest of screen creatures, the scrappy kid next door. "Shia is within everyone's reach," says Spielberg. "He's every mother's son, every father's spitting image, every young kid's best pal and every girl's possible dream." With his giant brown eyes, lanky frame and indiscernible ethnicity (he's Jewish), he is a relatable foil for shiny robots and iconic heroes...
Another film about penguins? They've marched and danced; now they hang 10 in a funny, hip cartoon mockumentary--sort of Capturing the Penguins-- that goes behind the scenes in a Hawaiian surfing contest to expose the romance, dirty deals and ultimate triumph of the underbird. Shia LaBeouf voices the little hero. Jeff Bridges, as the kid's mentor, reprises his Dude character from The Big Lebowski. Not a comedy tsunami, just consistent ripples of laughs and good vibes...
...What Iraq needed were Arabists and Foreign Service officers who understood the country's tribal allegiances, or who at least knew a Sunni from a Shia. What CPA seemed to be getting were people anxious to set up a Baghdad stock exchange, try out a flat-tax system, and impose other elements of a lab-school democratic- capitalist social structure. One of my officers returned from a trip to Iraq a month or two after CPA had taken over and told me, "Boss, that place runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody's ever...
...moves the U.S. government was making were driving a wedge between the various factions in Iraq. [Longtime US weapons inspector] Charles Duelfer was told by an Iraqi friend that, in the past, Iraqis were not accustomed to thinking of themselves primarily as Shia or Sunni. But the way we implemented democracy had led people to believe that they deserved a piece of the pie based on their membership in a certain group. So the whole dynamic was to pull away from the center. The decisions we made tended to fracture Iraq, not to bring it together...