I was surfing IMDB last night, in search of new/upcoming movie for blogging material on another blog actually. Then I came across this movie The Devil’s Double. The golden poster attracted me immediately. I read the plot but didn’t get what it’s all about & watch the trailer on Youtube, still didn’t get it. Duh. Guess my mind was working pretty slow at late night.

I took time to digest the two similar person in the movie and the title “double”, it clicked! Then only I understood that it’s about the late dictator’s son from Iraq – Uday Hussein and his body double (Latif Yahia). What more? It’s a true story! Wow, interesting fact that the ignorance me never know about.

All I remember from the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that, the regime of the long time dictator Saddam Hussein was finally ended. Something pretty similar to my home-country Indonesia back in 1998, except ours wasn’t a war and Saddam was much cruel. Other than that, I didn’t really dig the Iraq’s story. Guess I was too caught up in my final year’s exam -> about to graduate from high school that time, and ignored the world. -__-”

Since my interest was sparked, I googled and wiki-ed to learn more about body double this term, who Latif Yahia & how his story was, and most importantly I learn the cruelty of the late Uday Hussein. How he tortured the country’s sportsmen who lost in the game, how he ended someone’s life like killing an ant, etc.

One article leaded to another article. I was like having an impromptu history class, but not the boring one, and share the findings with hubby. All thanks to the powerful wonderful internet, I get to search news back in 2003, just a click away. So great! Imagine if it’s way back then I might need to go to national library and dig their archive.

I used to heard about how sadism their regime was, but never really dug into it. So this is really an eye opener. Besides, I’m always a blog person means my daily read is mostly blogs, where the language is more casual, seldom a news site. Reading articles from news site means formal English and lots of new vocabulary that I didn’t understand, but lucky I got English to Indonesian dictionary program to help me out.

Self note: need to start checking out international news site more often to broaden the vocab.

Another interesting finding came from the term body double or political decoy {wiki here} :

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had planned to bring down Indonesia’s first president Sukarno by portraying him in a pornographic film in the late 1950s.

The agency put together a pornographic film starring a Sukarno look-alike in bed with a blonde playing a Soviet agent. The humiliation caused by circulating the film was supposed to drive Sukarno from office but the plan was unsuccessful.

I ended up read all those articles for hours. If you’re tired of Royal wedding’s hoo hah, then take a time machine back to year 2003.

Movie will be out around July (for USA), can’t wait!