Word: witwiobl
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Dates: during 2008-2008
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...headline-making but often entertaining docu-travelogue Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (henceforth acronymed as WITWIOBL), Spurlock resolves to comb the Islamic world in an attempt to locate al-Qaeda's CEO. Taking a cue from Hollywood action movies - that in impossible missions, where armies and statecraft fail, one lone hero can succeed - he travels to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking to and occasionally learning from street vendors, pundits, schoolkids, government officials and U.S. soldiers. To most of them he poses the simple question that is the movie's title. Will anyone...
...neighborhood in Israel, he actually addresses one Hasidic man as "Dude.") Here's this guy doing these nutty things - all those McNuggets, all those Muslims - and behaving as if he'd just taken a toke of something stronger than a Marlboro Lite. In the recent history of nonfiction films, WITWIOBL, no less than Super-Size Me, occupies the fairly extensive, if unexplored, territory between Fahrenheit 9/11 and Jackass Number Two. (Spurlock's earliest claim to fame was the webcast and MTV show I Bet You Will, in which contestants did ugly things to win prizes...
...WITWIOBL Spurlock hears thoughtful comments from people who've lived under the scythe of war all their lives. A young Palestinian man laments that "9/11 legitimized the American presence in the Middle East" and insists that "We are fighting to make our homeland. It's none of their [al-Qaeda's] business." An Israeli journalist, discussing the Palestinian problem, mourns that "We're being held hostage by extremists from both sides." In Afghanistan, one fellow says of OBL, "If we find him, we'll tear him apart." Then Spurlock asks an old man about bin Laden's whereabouts...
...movie has a weird parallel plot. At the start of the film, Spurlock learns that his wife Alexandra Jamieson is pregnant with their first child. He seems zazzed about the prospect - he just has to make his movie first. So WITWIOBL crosscuts from Spurlock in the Middle East to the increasingly bulbous Jamieson in Manhattan, understandably fretful that her beau might die before her baby is born. Spurlock's rationale is that he's got to at least try to make sense out of this crazy geopolitical mess we're in, so he can someday tell his child...
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