“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” stays smart on politics – one character’s cynical appraisal finds Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and the British Empire equally at fault for the mess in Afghanistan – while remaining largely apolitical. The movie was filmed not in Afghanistan, but New Mexico.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is based on The Taliban Shuffle, a memoir by investigative print reporter Kim Barker that concerns her life as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Pakistan a decade ago.
Tina Fey didn’t hold back her thoughts on attending the Oscars on Sunday.
Fey took the project to producer Lorne Michaels and writer Robert Carlock and, now, five years after the book’s publication, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” arrives in theaters on Friday.
Fey plays Kim Baker, a 40-something New York TV producer summoned to a meeting of “unmarried, childless personnel” to consider a three-month assignment embedded with US troops in Afghanistan.
In between freelance acting jobs, Tina Fey likes to make things happen for herself. “I really believe that in many ways, those things are impenetrable for people from the West to understand completely”. But there are also exactly two red flags: the casting choices for primary Afghan characters Fahim Ahmadzai (Christopher Abbott) and Ali Massoud Sadiq (Alfred Molina).
It’s been twelve whole earth years since Mean Girls first came to the big screen, but we still talk about the pitch-perfect high school comedy like it was yesterday. “That’s just insanely amusing”.
Kidding aside, she knew who she wanted for the role. And also, like, “You’re all rich. Why are you yelling at me about corporate greed?”‘ Tina said.
Ultimately, Barker is “really happy” with the finished product. “She said, ‘I saw your nip slip!'” “What I like about the movie is that I expected to laugh, but I didn’t expect to tear up”. WTF isn’t exactly a comedy, but it has plenty of amusing moments, showcasing the gallows humor that reporters rely upon when faced with death all around them. She befriends gorgeous Brit correspondent Tanya Vanderpoel (Margot Robbie, a woman who can make a correspondent’s uniform khakis and button-down shirt look chic and sexy) and starts a relationship with a roguish Scottish photographer (Martin Freeman).
The 30 Rock star said she didn’t bring up Justin Bieber though.
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Not one of the film’s flaws is Fey’s fault. How accurately did she capture the real Kim Barker? “You would go see that, right?” Of course, Fey not long ago also had to do a press tour for her film, Sisters, in which she co-starred with Amy Poehler. (The people) are very friendly, very direct with very good sense of humour.
