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| Iraq |
| Saddam and Uday go to the movies |
| 2003-05-20 |
| EFL For Uday Hussein, the cutthroat son of Saddam, high culture came to Iraq when Russell Crowe entered the arena, sword in hand, ready to kill. Three days after "Gladiator" was released in the United States in 2000, Uday was "going mad" to find a bootleg copy of the sword-and-sandal epic, his chief movie translator recalled recently. Uday had followed the buzz about "Gladiator" on the Internet, which he checked weekly for U.S. box office tallies, and it sounded like his kind of picture: severed limbs, bloody revenge, and a take-no-prisoners antihero. His translator, Saad Al-Izzi, scoured Baghdad for a tape for five days. His boss wasn't the most patient of men. (Just ask the marathon runners Uday had beaten for lagging on the track.) Uday's men finally found a copy, and Izzi's boss gave him an afternoon to translate, dub and print "Gladiator" in Arabic. Errors of haste were unavoidable: Ten seconds of a speech by Oliver Reed's gladiator-herdsman, rallying his posse before battle, were cut incorrectly, so the character's lips moved without making a noise. Izzi thought he'd be thanked for his quick work. Instead, two of Uday's men came to his office the next day to beat him for the error. Izzi's boss lied that he was out, promising to punish him later. "OK," one of the men said, according to Izzi. "Take off your shoes. We'll beat you just to be sure that you beat him." And they whacked the boss' feet with a sharp wooden reed until they were bloodied. According to Izzi, Uday and Saddam were fixated on American-made movies, directing their representative at the United Nations, Tariq Aziz, to bring back dozens of videos each time he left New York: "Silence of the Lambs," "Casino" and "Rob Roy" for Saddam, and "From Dusk Till Dawn," "The Mummy" and "Bride of Chucky" for Uday. Saddam's favorite movie was "Braveheart," the Mel Gibson Oscar winner, Izzi said. "If I had such a worthy opponent like that man," Saddam was said to have commented, "I could not bring myself to kill him." Uday's obsession was "Gladiator," but he also screened the 2000 indie picture "Deterrence" over and over. In that film, a U.S. president confronts an Iraq apparently armed with nuclear weapons, with an Uday character running Baghdad, threatening to blow away Western capitals. "Uday loved it -- finally in charge!" said Izzi, 28, who now works as a translator for the Boston Globe in Iraq. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #1 Uday.....do you like movies about gladiators??? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2003-05-20 22:22:11 |