Best movie of this year hands down!

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Picking up three Emmys from 10 nominations, and being nominated for several Golden Globes as well as many more award wins and nominations, this film shows a realistic and memorable performance of the CNN crew in Baghdad during Desert Shield and Desert Storm.I was very interested in what they did as I was providing support to the B-52 crews as they prepared during Desert Shield, and then I had to go back to the States and watch desert Storm on TV. It's not like I hadn't seen Desert Storm before, only they called it Reforger every time we did it in practice.Michael Keaton and Helna Bonham Carter were fantastic as the leads, and they got incredible support from Lili Taylor (Rudy), Paul Guilfoyle (CSI), and many, many more.

I watched Live from Baghdad as part of a research project. It was slightly different to most 'warcorrespondent in foreign and dangerous country' genre films in as much as it followed TV news-journalists and outlined some of the technical and administrative difficulties faced by them. Also it went to some efforts to outline the historical context of the first gulf war. However, I did not like this film, it was predictable, exceptionally formulaic and dull, the frustration of the news-team in trying to cover the build up to the war does not make for good watching and when (as everybody knows) war does come to Baghdad and the film reaches its supposed climax, the result is underwhelming, a few overblown special effects are thrown into the stew at this point but do little to rouse the viewer from their slumber.

Some would try to pass this off as a good movie/documentary about the Iraqi war... It is actually trying to pass off as established facts testimonies that were already denounced at that time as being false such as the girl Naira testifying as to what she saw, when she in reality had never set foot in Kuwait. But who cares?? As long as very few people hear the denial, the propaganda has worked...If you watch this, stay alert and just watch it like you would watch "Broken Arrow"... fiction... or else you will end manipulated by the spin doctors who do their job perfectly well...

I guess this is a story based on real characters. You would have to be a real news junkie to say for sure, but I seem to recognize many aspects of the story as real history. And there is some real journalism history that shows up as news items in this movie. Sometimes journalism is news too.But history is the only worthwhile story here offered up by the script. Dialog is very weak and our two lead actors clearly have a hard time with it.Way down in the credits here at IMDB is David Suchet who plays Naji Al-Nadithi, a contact with the Iraqi ministry of information. He is only the actor who seems to have any fun with his part. I remember him from the excellent spy thriller, "The Falcon and the Snowman".