Word: slum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Abbas seems friendly enough and laughs easily. As his car breezes through Iraqi army checkpoints at the entrance to Baghdad's notorious and sprawling Sadr City slum, he talks about killing Sunnis. "We caught Takfiris [members of a fundamentalist Sunni Islamist sect] who were [working] with the Americans. We didn't want to kill them, but the government was too weak to do anything at the time. So we killed them all and put them in a big grave...
...palpably as this one does. We're in the late '50s, when TV had come into even the poorest homes and a gallon of gas cost 30 cents. We get a glimpse of the Victorian houses that had once been Bunker Hill's elitist pride and were now slum abodes. The Angels Flight railway, the movie theater, the Ritz Bar are seen in their full functioning glory. Since the people in The Exiles rehearsed some of their scenes, the movie may not fit the precise definition of a documentary. But it is a precious document of a vanished culture...
...your life experiences affect the way you make movies? Deanna Woo, Riverside, Ca. I was raised in a slum. Almost every day, I had to deal with gangs. I always got beat up and I had to fight very hard to survive. At that time, I felt like I was living in hell. Whenever I got hurt, or was feeling sad, I liked to go to church. The church gave me a lot of comfort, which is why I became a Christian. I put that experience into my movies. You can see it in A Better Tomorrow or The Killer...
...opposition leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched the campaign last month under the banner of "imposing the law" and wresting control away from militias operating "outside the law." Similar campaigns in Basra, the chaotic port 100 miles away, and Sadr City, the huge Baghdad slum, initially met fierce resistance from al-Sadr's followers, but the cleric ordered his fighters to stand down in the Amara operation, allowing it to proceed peacefully. "The previous operation that happened in Basra really hurt the fighters," Harbia says. "Now they prefer to flee rather than to resist...
...currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...