In what promises to be our last, great hope to rally that fractured and dispirited nation, Bill Murray is headed to Afghanistan—though fortunately for Murray, only in a movie. The Hollywood Reporter says that Murray is reteaming with Scrooged writer Mitch Glazer and director Barry Levinson for Rock The Kasbah, the story of a “a burned-out music manager who goes to Afghanistan on the USO tour with his last remaining client. When he finds himself abandoned, penniless and without his passport, he discovers a young girl with an extraordinary voice, who stows away with him back to Kabul to compete on the popular television show The Afghan Star, Afghanistan’s equivalent of American Idol.” The Sharif, one presumes, doesn’t like it.
What with its story of an entertainer adrift in a foreign land, finding a new lease on life through a chance meeting with a young girl, it superficially sounds like Lost In Translation And Also The Quagmire Of Unending War, were it not for the promise of Levinson and Glazer’s “lunacy.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like it’s actually going to film in Afghanistan, a country that is surely only one “It just doesn’t matter” Bill Murray monologue away from achieving peace.