Baghdad Movie: The Challenges and Risks of Filming in a War Zone

As they settle in their hotel rooms, they notice that they are being monitored. The crew report their first story on a young British boy held as a hostage by Saddam Hussein. As they continue to report stories, they get pressured by the Iraqi government. Wiener later meets the Iraqi Minister of Information Naji Al Hadithi, and requests pieces of equipment and an interview with Hussein. As the movie goes on, Wiener and Al Hadithi become friends.

To begin with a story: Our grandson Taylor was deeply immersedin a video game on his laptop. I began to watch "The Thief of Bagdad"on DVD. At first he ignored it. Then I saw him glancing at the screen. Then heclosed the laptop and watched full time. During the spider sequence, only hiseyes were visible above the neck of his T-shirt. "That was a goodmovie!" he told me. "What did Taylor say when he found out it wasalmost 70 years old?" his mother, Sonia, asked me. "I didn't tellhim," I said.

baghdad movie

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This 1940 movie is one of the great entertainments. It lifts upthe heart. An early Technicolor movie, it employs colors gladly and withboldness, using costumes to introduce a rainbow. It has adventure, romance,song, a Miklos Rozsa score that one critic said is "a symphony accompaniedby a movie." It had several directors; as producer, Alexander Korda leapedfrom one horse to another in midstream. But it maintains a consistent spirit,and that spirit is one of headlong joy in storytelling.

An opening like that makes you stop and think, doesn't it, about how cut-and-dried most Hollywood movies are. There would seem to be no place in today's entertainment industry for movies about fat German ladies and homesick truck stops, and yet "Bagdad Cafe" sets us free from the production line of Hollywood's brain-damaged "high concepts" and walks its own strange and lovely path. There is poetic justice in the fact that this movie, shot in English in America by a German, is one of the biggest box office successes in recent European history.

He is saying something in this movie about Europe and America, about the old and the new, about the edge of the desert as the edge of the American Dream. I am not sure exactly what it is, but that is comforting; if a director could assemble these strange characters and then know for sure what they were doing in the same movie together, he would be too confident to find the humor in their situation. The charm of "Bagdad Cafe" is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.

Fire When Ready: Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a warrant officer who helps a CIA operative search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Paul Greengrass' movie is an action flick with a sharply political bent. Courtesy of Universal Pictures hide caption

Damon plays a fictional character, Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, commander of a team of heavily armed weapons inspectors. They move from site to site searching for WMDs that are supposed to be there, guaranteed to be there, but aren't there; meanwhile they're under fire from Iraqi snipers. As in Greengrass' Bourne movies, the hand-held camera shimmies and swerves, using a jittery battlefield-documentary style to drive home the idea that this is real and trigger your fight-or-flight instincts. So after all that sweaty combat maneuvering, when the team comes up empty you're almost as frustrated as they are.

The city of Miami has a hidden treasure in the movie Baghdad. This independent film is a collaboration of first-time director, producers, and no name actors. Yet and still the movie has a talent level that cannot be denied. The cast and crew took on the dangerous challenge of filming in one of Miami's most notorious housing complexes. Where the only cameras permitted are those belonging to news anchors and crime scene photographers. Director Curtis Ballard and his brave camera crew dared to bring in the first movie cameras. Baghdad tells an authentic story of how four kids go from wanting to be somebody to becoming products of their environment. This drama filled cinematic masterpiece plays more like a blockbuster movie than an independent film. The writing is clever, the acting is brilliant and the twist at the end will leave you in tears. This phenomenal film may have missed its theatrical debut but its online following is quickly gaining momentum. Some critics have placed Baghdad in their top one hundred independent films of all time. I don't know about that but I do know that it is well on its way to becoming a cult classic.

At some point during production, it seems that the movie was intended to be a musical. Three songs made it in to the final cut, but lyrics exist for several other songs to be sung by the characters, as well as a recording of Rex Ingram singing one verse of a song intended for the genie.

The source material upon which this film is based is among the most frequently remade "properties" in all of movie history. Starting with the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie, Thief of Baghdad has been adapted about a dozen times as of 2022.

Conrad Veidt, whose portrayal of the evil Jaffar is one of the great villains of movie history, had been a star since the silent era. He first came to public attention for his appearance in the German expressionist classic The Cabinet of Caligari, and died only a few years after making this film.

For two weeks last summer the Egypt-born founder of RA Vision Productions shot "on a shoestring" his 40-minute movie at local sites including the Danforth Museum of Art and a vacant Southside warehouse which had been converted to resemble an Iraqi market with narrow streets and vegetable stalls.

In order to give his film an authentic Middle Eastern feel, Zaki traveled to Egypt last January to shoot street and background scenes which were then incorporated into the movie using special "green screen" techniques.

"This film addresses the United States' relationship with the Middle East. I boil inside when the media shows Arabs as nuts or fanatics. That just furthers how disconnected we've become with each other," he said. "By making a movie about a Muslim family trying to celebrate a Christian holiday in Baghdad, I want to emphasize the commonality between Americans and Iraqis despite religious and cultural differences."

Featuring a unique collection of archival images, home movies and family photographs from Iraq, Baghdad Twist is a short film that pulls back the curtain on Iraq's once thriving Jewish community. Baghdad-born filmmaker Joe Balass takes us on a journey through the fragmented memories of an Arab exile. This powerful collage forms a portrait of a time and place that no longer exists.

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Our film covered WWI, the first war that was captured with movie cameras. However, as we reached out to over 25 archives around the world, we realized that although there might have been footage of Gertrude Bell at some point, its survival was questionable.

One thing has become clear in the past week. Despite the comic book movie news flowing fast and furiously, the heroes were all familiar faces. The studios investing the most in bringing comic books to life have lost the plot a bit when it comes to the next few years of heroes to cultivate. Marvel tapping Black Panther is a nice start, but the studios are going to need to find alternate comic books to adapt in order to bring new life to the genre and surprise the fans who think seeing Spider-Man again will be fun but unnecessary.

For opening night, conductor Leon Strashun, who had studied under Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, led the theater's twelve-piece orchestra. Helen Ernst entertained on a $25,000, three-manual, Kimball pipe organ designed especially for the Bagdad to accompany silent movies and vaudeville acts.

Mike and Brian McMenamin bought the theater in 1991 and reopened it as the Bagdad Theatre and Pub. The balcony wall was dismantled to return the theater to a single screen, with seating for 590. Alternating rows of seats and long tables face the movie screen to accommodate the serving of food and beverages. Portland writer and director Gus Van Sant, Jr., had the screening of My Own Private Idaho at the Bagdad soon after it reopened. In 2006, the McMenamin brothers remodeled the back stage, renaming it the Back Stage Bar.

Abboudi Abou Jaoude is the owner of the posters and curator of Thief of Baghdad: Arabs in World Cinema, an exhibition comprised of movie posters made between the 1910s and 1990s for films set in the Middle East but made, overwhelmingly, in the West.

Walking through Thief of Baghdad, what is striking about these movie posters is not necessarily the individual genius of the artists, or the intriguing regional or temporal differences among their work, but rather how similar their output is.

Those interested in appearing as extras in "Santa Claus in Baghdad," can join at 20 Tripp St., off Herbert Street in Framingham on Saturday, June 30, and Sunday, July 1, from 10:30 a.m. to about 6 p.m. They can also call 508-788-0221 or email santainbaghdad@rcn.com.

Deadline got the exclusive that the two will work together for the first time in the upcoming film EX-BAGHDAD, a Chinese production with a reported $80 million budget. Said budget is apparently one of the largest in all of Chinese film history, and word is this was the movie that Stallone was supposedly keen on doing most after he left EXPENDABLES 4.

After Sylvester Stallone backed out of the fourth and final Expendables sequel back in March, the actor had a big hole in his schedule, which has now been fillled. The actor will be teaming up with international action icon Jackie Chan on a new action-thriller entitled Ex-Baghdad, which is said to be one of the biggest movies ever to come out of China. After Expendables 4 fell apart, Sylvester Stallone looked to this project to take on next, although it hasn't been confirmed when filming will begin. 2ff7e9595c