This HBO movie was pretty good, telling the story of those CNN reporters who got caught in Baghdad when coalition forces began to bomb the city at the begining of the Gulf War and in the process scooped all the other networks by reporting the story live. Michael Keaton was good, but boy he spent the whole movie lighting cigarettes, fucking aqualung. Helena Bonham Carter was in it as well, looking really hot and smoking a lot of cigarettes. [but not as many as iron-lung Mike] The relationship between Robert Wiener [Keaton] and Naji Al-Hadithi, the Iraqi information officer, was particularily interesting. Naji Al-Hadithi was/is part of the evil Iraqi government, yet still has a human relationship with this American news producer. Hard to reconcile the two.

I can remember when the bombing started, I was delivering a package to some office at the end of the day and there was no receptionist so I went to the back and there was some suit there watching TV. He just glanced over at me and said 'They've started bombing Baghdad' and went back to watching the show. My jaw dropped and I just stood there watching the green night-vision pictures of the bombing. After awhile he offered me a seat and I sat there for a some time, trying to figure out what it all meant. Then I thanked him and left, he was still sitting there in shock watching the TV. It was weird back then, I think it was the first major military action involving the west for a long time and we really didn't know if it would remain contained or spread like wildfire into a world war. Luckily, it turned out to be a short and relatively painless war, at least from a western perspective. Too bad our current war on terrorism couldn't be resolved as quickly. *sigh*