Not Yet Paradise

I just finished watching Paradise Now, a 2005 film that won the Golden Globe and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film as a submission from Palestine. I remember hearing about it when I was in college, putting up a postcard of it on my wall (along with other movie postcards) to remind myself to watch it. (I didn't, obviously, until now.)

At 90 minutes, the movie is tightly crafted and does an amazing job of pushing forward the tense plot. (Wow, that was a lot of adjectives and adverbs.) I think what struck me most was its presentation of the suicide bombing operations as...mundane, like any other project that has to be planned and carried out in order to achieve a practical goal.

And I think, despite the political weight of the issues addressed by the film, what made the film for me was the two actors playing the protagonists: Kais Nashef and Ali Suliman in the roles of Said and Khaled, respectively. To me they were pitch-perfect in portraying the anxieties and also the ordinariness of the two characters. Um...yeah, I'm making it more difficult than it is...

Anyway, I love watching movies in the summer—this is my 11th annual summer film festival, and I intend to keep up the tradition.