Lights, Camera...umm..wait a min..

The War Within is a movie that should not have been made!

I saw 2 movies last week based on suicide bombers - The War Within is about a terrorist from Pakistan blowing up Grand Central and Paradise Now (my visit to the NY Film Festival this year) is about a terrorist from Palestine blowing himself up in Tel Aviv, Israel. While The War Within presented the hard facts without any sugar coating (or subtlety), I was impressed with how Paradise Now (mainstream Warner Bros released this movie in the US btw!) managed to incorporate a fair dose of humor into such a dark topic and delved more into the terrorist's psyche. Was lucky to sit through for a Q&A session with the director and lead cast of Paradise Now and to hear about the director's extensive research, including reading the Bible (which he claimed cited the 1st suicide attempt in religious texts, that of Samson...I wouldn't know..).

I don't think we are ready for movies like this. With fear being instilled very strongly in most of this country (and NY specifically), with taglines like, "When you see something, say something" doing the rounds, when an abandoned dark bottle or suitcase causes subway evacuations, when a "suspicisous" man with a long trenchcoat makes people call the cops without legitimate reasons for fear, we do not need movies like this presenting us with hard facts on how and why people turn to terrorism and how they could go about blowing places up. But then, freedom of speech says an artist must be able to express whatever he wants to. This, to me, is the 1st signs of suicide bombers and terrorism featuring in movies, post 9/11. Just like the Cold War provoked decades of spy thrillers and such in movies and writing, we may be coming up for a few years of terrorism-themed books and movies (exciting pursuits in Tora-Bora, Arab royalty, you can imagine the kind of stories this theme presents to artists), but are we ready for it? It makes me cringe and feel uncomfortable, I am not!

While on the topic, these terror alerts (thank God they did away with those color codes - that was an insult to human intelligence!) every now & then and warnings of potential subway attacks on a Sunday (!!!) - are these just politicians screaming "wolf!" to use fear as a tool as and when they need, is it anything more than a disclaimer to cover their behinds, can we do anything about it, should they be informing (scaring) the public about these things or handling it efficiently on their own?!