Word: winterbottom
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...film, directed by Michael Winterbottom, dramatizes the relationship of two journalists: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) and his Franco-Cuban wife Mariane (Jolie), a freelancer for French TV, who's five months pregnant with a child Danny wants to call Adam. While researching a story on the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, Danny was abducted by Islamic radicals. Five anguished weeks later, Mariane learned that he had been brutally slaughtered. The film is based on Mariane's memoir, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl, which she wrote to explain her husband...
...Winterbottom is a past master at lending the traditional story-telling format to real stories of the modern world at war. Welcome to Sarajevo, In This World and The Road to Guantanamo all mixed documentary footage with either fictional scenes played by professional actors or reenactments by the actual participants. A Mighty Heart is a more straightforward docudrama, following the horrific tick-tock of Mariane's ordeal. As played by Jolie, she is a demanding, nails-tough woman, while Futterman's Danny is more easy-going but no less tenacious at his job - a good reporter, and a mensch...
...worthy as A Mighty Heart is, it can't compete as riveting drama with Terror's Advocate, the Barbet Schroeder documentary also showing in Cannes. Like Winterbottom, but long before him, Schroeder has compiled an imposing resume of fiction films (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female, Murder by Numbers) and documentaries (General Idi Amin Dada and Koko, a Talking Gorilla). His new non-fiction study is a biography of Jacques Vergès, a lawyer who defended some of the most infamous activists of the 20th century, from the terrorist Carlos the Jackal to the Nazi executioner Klaus Barbie...
Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story Michael Winterbottom Warning to college students: Don't rent this movie as video Cliffs Notes for that Laurence Sterne "classic" you have no intention of reading. Do rent it to see what happened to Brit humor after Monty Python. TV eminences Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon star in this postmodernist jape, which keeps interrupting the novel's tale to focus on the offscreen agitations of the cast. Since the Coogan-Brydon banter gave the film much of its brio, their very funny commentary on the DVD amounts to a second deconstruction...
...Michael Winterbottom, who co-directed the movie with Mat Whitecross, has fashioned a most adventurous filmography. He has made period tragedies (Jude) and comedies (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), but his true métier is the political docudrama set in lands scorched by war: Bosnia for Welcome to Sarajevo, Afghanistan for In This World. The Road to Guantánamo is his most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer...