Free Republic

President Robert Mugabe's government has attacked the suspense thriller "The Interpreter," starring Nicole Kidman (search), claiming it is part of a propaganda campaign by the CIA that shows "Zimbabwe's enemies did not rest." The Herald, the government-controlled daily newspaper, also linked the film to efforts by Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer (search) last week to have Mugabe indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. In the film, Kidman plays a United Nations interpreter who overhears two people discussing an apparent assassination plot against the president of a fictional Republic of Matobo. The president, Edmond Zuwanie, is...

The reviews of the film The Interpreter have been extremely positive. "Two thumbs up," say Ebert & Roeper. Larry King calls it "spellbinding." Rolling Stone calls it "smart." We agree with that last characterization. As we noted in a column, the film is political propaganda designed to boost the image of the United Nations and make the U.S. look bad for opposing the International Criminal Court. It is one of the smartest pieces of political propaganda to come out of Hollywood. Meryl Gordon's article about U.N. boss Kofi Annan, in the May 2 edition of New York magazine, notes that...

Hollywood has come to the rescue of the United Nations. The new film, "The Interpreter," is political propaganda designed to boost the image of the United Nations and make the U.S. look bad for opposing the International Criminal Court. Most reviews have focused on the part of the plot involving an evil African leader, President Zawani, who is accused of genocide and travels to the U.N. in New York for a speech and is the target of an assassination plot. But the political dimension of the plot involves the opposition by the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. to his trial...

“The Interpreter”: Sean Penn’s U.N. Mash Note April 22, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel The last time I wrote about Jeff Spicoli a/k/a Sean Penn, he sent me an e-mail calling me the c-word. In the past, Penn reportedly shot reporters with a squirt gun filled with his urine, so I got off easy. Classy guy. I critiqued Penn’s absurd interview in the thankfully defunct Talk Magazine. It was just months after 9/11, and Spicoli was deluded from smoking too much pot, again. He didn’t just insist that President Bush, Rupert Murdoch, Howard Stern, and Bill O’Reilly were as bad as...

"The Interpreter," a new movie starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, is a thriller about a terrorist assassination plot at the United Nations. The Wall Street Journal's "Hollywood Report" ran a piece last week detailing how the picture has been "changed" since it was first conceived about 10 years ago. Nothing unusual about that — finished movies almost never resemble their original concepts. There was one major change in the story that I found interesting, however. The terrorists in the story, as originally written by two screenwriters, were to have come from a fictional Middle Eastern country. Throughout the 90's...

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "The Interpreter," a Universal Pictures thriller starring Nicole Kidman and set in the United Nations headquarters, began shooting late last month in New York. It immediately made history as the first movie to gain permission to shoot in the United Nations since the organization built its Big Apple headquarters in 1953. Yet it almost didn't happen. To the dismay of director Sydney Pollack and his New York crew, the production was in real danger of moving to Canada for about half of its 16-week shoot because of the world body's long-standing policy of not allowing...