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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Saturday, December 7, 2002

'Live from Baghdad' is this evening's must-see television drama

If you're staying home tonight with your cable TV, take some advice from the experts: "Live From Baghdad" (6 tonight, HBO) is the must-watch option.

In the show, it's 1990, and something nasty is brewing in Baghdad. Hotshot CNN producer Robert Wiener Michael Keaton) wants to be in the thick of things when war breaks out, so he sets off for Iraq with cases of vodka (for himself), boxes of cigars (for bribes) and a female coproducer, Ingrid Formanek.

Trying to beat the big networks, Wiener ingratiates himself with the Iraqi information bureau while under immense pressure from the fledgling network back in the States to come up with news.

He stumbles — older viewers may actually remember that the CNN crew was given access to fallen Kuwait, only to be handed a sham of a story — but he gets back up. He drinks, he pushes people, then he drinks some more. And every once in a while, he questions his own anticipation of war. When the bombs eventually begin raining down, that question looms all the larger.

Bursting with energy, wit, timeliness and, ultimately, bombs, "Live From Baghdad" is the perfect vehicle for Keaton's return from whatever hermitage he's been hiding out in recently —Êand a great entertainment, too.

A bundle of nervous energy, Keaton provides this drama about reporting the news from Iraq at the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War with just the right queasy balance of drive and questionable ethics, moving between rabid determination to cover a war and sudden realization of the horror he's reporting.

Director Mick Jackson lets "Baghdad" build like the war it portrays, a slow burn to cataclysm.