We really can’t stand ungrateful, smug people so we’re havng trouble really getting past the front door of this documentary, “Operation Filmmaker.”
The synopsis:
Do-gooder intentions go disastrously wrong when Hollywood gives a young Iraqi film student the chance of a lifetime. Operation Filmmaker tells the fascinating and riveting story of Muthana Mohmed’s odyssey in the West, with uncanny parallels to America’s recent misadventures abroad.
Basically actor/director Liev Schreiber was about to shoot his soon-to-be rather boring adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s celebrated novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” and before he did, he saw an MTV “True Life: I’m Living in Iraq” episode about Baghdad film student, Muthana Mohmed. The poor kids’ school apparently gets bombed out and Schrieber wanting to be a good samaritan plucks him out of war-torn Iraq, flies him out to Romania where ‘Illuminated’ is shooting and gives him a P.A. job. Having a sense there’s a story in their somwhere, he hires a documentarian to shoot Mohmed’s experience.
But apparently the kid is the exact opposite of grateful. Writes the Times:
What Muthana apparently was not accustomed to were the rigors and exhausting banalities that come with working as a lowly assistant on an American movie production. Called on to provide carefully calibrated snacks for the producers and to make copies, Muthana recoiled, refused and then, in very short order, rebelled. Murmuring that these were not his jobs, he stalked off and away, inspiring alarm among his benefactors.
Some are calling the film, a “searing indictment of colonialism in Iraq and the phony do-goodism of Hollywood,” and we haven’t seen it yet, but we really can’t get past the idea of any kid, Iraqi or otherwise, given this opportunity, no matter how shitty or menial it might be and then biting the hands that feeds him. There’s probably some lost in translation cultural difference that makes it harder for us to swallow. It’s surely more complex than that and every review suggets that it is, but that smug look on his face above and the idea that he came from wealth, so P.A. tasks were beneath him? Maybe we’re stirring up a pot we shouldn’t be stirring cause we don’t know all the ingredients involved here, but what can we say, the premise is irksome to say the least.
Now we’re probably obligated to go see this, huh? The filmmaker Nina Davenport sounds rather manipulative and shady too. We don’t particularily care for Schreiber or care that this is Amercicans helping Iraqis (oh, the irony!). What we care about it that it seems to be about people helping people and one jackass, immature kid kind of being the worst about it. Anyone who knows our personal politics, knows that we’re not siding with America, we’re siding with the principal of human courtesy, but whateves. Cue: hail of bullets, but this is what it seems like from the outside. We’ll have to see it for our own eyes.
Are we talking out our ass? A little, but this whole piece is just about what this film seems to be about. Keep that in mind. Take it like a Jeffrey Wells op-ed (i.e., ‘doesn’t this seem weird/strange/unsettling to you?’) [ed. apologist much?] The documentary opens this weekend in limited release. I suppose we’ll have to see it now, but it does sounds fascinating and we’ve been thinking about it all week.
