When the little boy who’s befriended him spots the attractive wife of a local kingpin from out of Jay’s window, Jay exclaims, “You’re a good wingman, Assad,” and we are meant to be charmed. The film means for us to delight in Jay’s flouting of conventions. Aside from it being another how-I-made-out-in-an-“exotic”-locale narrative. There is no hope for a journalistic groundbreaker of the present or future: it is only the recent past that contains viable models. The cool journalistic customer chronicling the end of colonialism has less and less place in a world that’s ever more post colonial. Jay’s aspirations constantly take him into the past, a past that really IS dead, and getting more dead. Late in the movie, when Jay is introduced to Somalia’s president, that man jokes “You are the next Bob Woodward?” and Jay replies that he always identified more with Carl Bernstein. Despite its ostensible mission to shed some life on Somali culture and the precarious situation of its democracy, the movie is really all about a white guy trying to earn cultural currency in an era when what he represents is on an ever-more hurried wane.

There’s an interesting subtext in this movie. F**k more girls instead.” After looking at Bahadur’s writing, he offers, “You’re not the second coming of Hunter S. Instead, he offers pearls such as “You read too much. Tobin is played by Al Pacino in what amounts to a slightly extended cameo Pacino handles the role in the mode he used when he interrogated Hank Azaria in “Heat.” You keep expecting him to say things like “I’ve got a GREAT LEDE!” But the script, by director Bryan Buckley, never accommodates him in this respect. After a snow-shoveling mishap, he finds himself in a doctor’s waiting room and learns the crusty old guy in the chair across from him is Canadian journalism legend Seymour Tobin. Jay ( Evan Peters, coming off like a much less wholesome version of Patrick Fugit in “ Almost Famous”) nurses his journo dreams in the basement of his parents’ home (he’s got a poster of “All the President’s Men” on a plywood wall down there), while his younger brother steals his Red Bull and his bro buddies taunt him as they embark on a trip to a local bar called Parrots.

More accurate would be “The Bro Who Wanted to Get in with the Pirates of Somalia.”īased on a book by Jay Bahadur, the movie opens in the Great White North. This movie’s title is more than a little cheeky when you consider that the lead character, a young Canadian wannabe journalist who hits on the idea that he can really make a name for himself by courting danger on the other side of the world, barely makes it on board a boat in the picture’s nearly two-hour running time.

The pirates of somalia jay bahadur