aw. RE: The Nobel Prize for War 2009 goes to ...

[David Morris]

>On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 2:43 AM, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:
>I think he co-wrote the screenplay for a dodgy Bruce Willis movie which contained some pretty unpleasant stereotyping of muslims?

Maybe so?  I think he tried to have it both ways (fear & moral high-ground):

His own bio:
"Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The
Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening,
which appeared in November 1998."

Amazon.com review:
"A high-profile action/exploitation thriller set in the present, The
Siege is really a fantasy that extrapolates from major terrorist
attacks. Denzel Washington is FBI special agent Hubbard, "Hub" to his
friends, whose anti-terrorist task force must track down the terrorist
cells responsible for a spate of bombings in New York. His partner is
an FBI agent of Arabian extraction (played convincingly by Tony
Shalhoub), proving not all Arabs are bad guys--a point the film should
be lauded for making again and again. "

New Yorker Review:

"New York is terrorized by Islamic militants. Bombs go off everywhere;
casualties climb into the hundreds; no one can go shopping. A
hard-driving F.B.I. agent (Denzel Washington) kills some of the bad
guys, but not all of them, so a sardonic, fascist U.S. Army general
(Bruce Willis) declares martial law and seals off Brooklyn with tanks
and troops. Director Edward Zwick turns on the sorrowful spectacle:
The Army rounds up every young Arab-American male in the borough and
herds them all into an open-air stadium. The F.B.I. agent then
lectures the general on civil liberty. Torture is bad, he says.
Shredding the Constitution is bad. "The Siege" offers an improbable
set of circumstances and then gets all hot under the collar as it
rejects the preposterous situation that it has set up for itself. The
filmmakers peddle fear and then try to claim the moral high ground;
the treatment is foolish, confused, and borderline irresponsible. With
Annette Bening as a shady C.I.A. agent who has ambiguous relations
with terrorists, and Tony Shalhoub as an Arab-American federal agent.
Screenplay by Lawrence Wright (a New Yorker contributor) and Menno
Meyjes. -David Denby "