Tariq Nelson

If you want to make a social point in a movie, there should be two rules of thumb.

a) Entertainment Value

b) Not making the message overbearing

Do not continue if you do not want to be spoiled…

AmericanEast is an attempt at mainstreaming American Muslims and attempts to portray the struggles Muslims face in the United States. In my opinion, they overdid it and never established a coherent plot. And on top of that, I found that the characters had no depth and some were cartoonish caricatures.

The main character, Mustafa Marzoke, is an easy going immigrant from Egypt that owns a Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles in a (fictional?) neighborhood called “Little Arabia”. He is an archetypal jolly “just happy to be in America” immigrant with a heart of gold. His character reminded me of the way Russian immigrants were portrayed in the early 1980’s.

Mustafa gets detained at the airport in the beginning of the movie while looking for his son Mohammed. One can understand being afraid of losing a child, but Mohammed was about 13 or 14 and Mustafa was screaming through the airport in search of him as if here a toddler. It just came off as a weird over reaction. But there was no reason for the police to jump and grab him either. The entire sequence was strange. By the way, Mustafa was picking up his cousin Sabir who’d come from Egypt to marry Mustafa’s sister Salwah in an arranged marriage.

Meanwhile, Mohammed, Mustafa’s young son was having some type of crisis of faith and explicitly told Mustafa that he no longer wanted to be Muslim. However, the movie never resolved that that angle was left.

Leila Marzouke, was Mustafa’s dope smoking/dawah giving daughter. She had a scene that was like an infomercial in which she is talking about Islam and Middle Eastern history with her friend while smoking marijuana. That seemed to be her only purpose in the movie. Came off as very forced and as if the movie was preaching to the audience.

Sam, was Mustafa’s Jewish partner in his business. They really wanted you to know that he was Jewish. He had an Israeli flag on his car, wore a Star of David ring and yarmulke.

Salwah Marzouke, Mustafa’s sister, was a nurse that styled hair in the back of her brother’s restaurant and was arranged to marry her cousin Sabir. However she did not like him and they did not get married. But the cousin was never informed (at least not on camera) and the story was dropped. Salwah was also interested in a doctor at her hospital who was not Muslim.

Omar Nasser was an aspiring actor that drove a cab owned by Mustafa. As an Arab, he was only offered parts portraying terrorists. While Omar was getting coffee, someone thought he had explosives in his bag and confronted him. Omar got angry and jokingly told him that he was going to blow up the place to scare him. However, the employee called the police and Omar was arrested for a few hours causing him to miss an audition for a non-terrorist part. This causes him to snap and later he takes his co-workers hostage and is eventually shot by a sniper. The movie was already struggling, but at this point it went completely over the cliff.

Then there was Murad, an angry anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist that cursed like a sailor. I suspect he was there to provide some comic relief, but he was simply annoying.

Every extra in the movie was a bigot that was irrationally afraid of Arabs. The people in the airport. The FBI agents. Omar’s racist co-workers. The newscasters. The customers in coffee shops. The people working in the coffee shops. Everyone. I understand that they wanted to make a point about the struggles of Muslim Arab-Americans, but you can’t make it so blatant that it takes away from the story. And most of all..it must be entertaining.

Even a story like Philadelphia in which I was not fond of the message at all it was still successful because at the end of the day it was entertaining. An example of a movie doing well in making a social point, while being entertaining was Hollywood Shuffle

Here is a scene from the movie. ‘Black Acting School’

Perhaps they should try satire next. I hope that people like Wajahat Ali will do better.

Filed under: Race, Reflections