A 'Mighty' movie

Last night I went over to Paramount for a screening of "A Mighty Heart," the story of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter (and Encino's own) Daniel Pearl as related by his wife, Mariane, above left, who was portrayed by Angelina Jolie. (The other part of the tabloid twosome, Brad Pitt, was a producer.) The film, which opens today, is very, very good, and faithful to the facts of the case. Considering it was directed by Michael Winterbottom ("The Road to Guantanamo"), the movie resists descent into condemnation of the U.S. War on Terror -- in fact, in one scene where the Pakistani authorities hang a guy from the ceiling to obtain needed info about Pearl's kidnappers, the American security services official is clearly disturbed (though also says later that he, like many of us, would like to see Pearl's kidnappers and beheaders strung up and flogged). There are a few clips of Gitmo throughout the film, clips that related to the kidnappers' demands that the U.S. release terror suspects. The film was done before the hairified Khalid Sheik Mohammed claimed in March that he was the one who killed Pearl, but there was a footnote stating at the end that Mohammed reportedly committed the slaying -- and that he currently sits in Gitmo.

So the film was good. The panel discussion afterward was not. Hosted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the panel also featured a rabbi from the Progressive Jewish Alliance and the executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting. If you're noticing a pattern, you're right: Pegged as a diverse discussion, it was instead people who all thought the same yet listed different religions on their curriculum vitae. My "date," Dan from Gay Patriot, referring to a recent report that CAIR's membership has dropped 90 percent since 9-11, wondered aloud if CAIR's entire membership was there in the Sherry Lansing Theatre.

I don't want to spoil my next column, so I won't go too much into the evening here. One highlight of the night, though, was a short address by the Pakistani consul general, who congratulated the film's producers "for finding the worst slums of Karachi!"