Greg Mitchell | The Nation

Edward Said, the influential Palestinian-American writer and academic—and longtime Nation contributor—passed away nearly ten years ago, but his legacy lives on in many ways, including musically.

With famed pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999, a unique assembly of mainly young Arab and Israeli musicians, a symbol for collaboration, peace and understanding now known around the world. They performed, in risky and unprecedented events, in Ramallah and in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, for example.

As I’ve often written: the two men deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, even if for Said it would be posthumous.

Well, as the saying goes, “don’t surprise me none.” The new documentary, Dirty Wars, directed by Richard Rowley, and featuring the work (and constant on-screen presence) of The Nation’s own Jeremy Scahill, won a top prize at the Sundance Festival yesterday, gaining the Cinematography award.

It also earned a very positive early eview from Variety. Excerpt:

A reporter for The Nation, Scahill follows a blood-strewn trail from a remote corner of Afghanistan, where covert night raids have claimed the lives of innocents, to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a shadowy outfit empowered by the current White House to assassinate those on an ever-expanding “kill list,” including at least one American. This jaw-dropping, persuasively researched pic has the power to pry open government lockboxes.

Last August, I posted here that I was surprised to read in the New York Times fall movie preview that the Coen brothers (not my favorite directors, to say the least) were coming out with a film called Inside Llewyn Davis focusing on one of my favorite subjects: the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.  

Now, trust me, that was a bit before my time there (though not by much), but I was a huge fan of Dylan and some of the others who haunted the Gaslight, the Bitter End, the Kettle of Fish and other spots back then, when it too was no country for old men.

The film (which didn’t make it for the fall) stars Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan, with Adam Driver (of Girls) and John Goodman, and Oscar Isaac in the title role. The title character is not really Bob Dylan but the film apparently opens in 1961, the year Bob came to the Village, and features a young folkie sleeping on couches and scheming to make it big, but without Bob’s drive. (Actually, it is said to be based partly or largely on the memoir of somewhat older folkie Dave Van Ronk.) Part of it was indeed shot in the Village.

If you watched Stephen Colbert interview Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow last night, on the air, you were probably disappointed. Now, let’s stipulate at the outset that we don’t expect Stephen, whose first goal is to be funny and the other is to maintain his faux right-wing blowhard persona, to conduct a truly probing interview with anyone, especially in a six-minute time span. Still, he didn’t have to be that fawning and seemingly clueless about what criticism of the film and its presentation of torture is really about.

This morning, however, Comedy Central put up online an “extended” version of the interview. When Jon Stewart does this—pretty regularly now—it’s usually just that: some Q&A that continued after the taping for the show ended. But the Colbert/Bigelow was “extended” by restoring a minute or so of parts of the original interview edited for the air.

And it turns out the editors did Stephen no favors in cutting out the questions where he did try, briefly, to “nail” her, as he might put it. Here’s the full interview, with my comments below: