Obama Anak Menteng
Jul 1st, 2010, in News, by Patung
“Obama Anak Menteng” a new film on the Jakarta childhood days of the US president.
A film based on the book of the same name “Obama Anak Menteng”, or “Obama the Menteng Kid” opened in Jakarta cinemas on 30th June.
“Obama Anak Menteng”, although filmed in the West Java city of Bandung on a RP 1 billion budget, is set in the posh Jakarta suburb of Menteng, where Obama aka Barry Soetoro lived from 1967 to 1971 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro.
Co-director and book author Damien Dematra says the film shows the US president in a light that non-Indonesians might find odd, doing such weird things as
eating chicken satay, not hamburgers. They’ll see his neighbours and friends wearing chequered sarongs and Muslim caps
On the Islam issue movie producers avoided controversy by not filming a planned scene showing boyish Obama performing sholat, or the daily prayers of a Muslim, because, as Dematra says, it was
too political
And
He was just imitating other kids when they were praying but it didn’t mean he wanted to be Muslim. That scene wasn’t even shot because I didn’t want people to take it out of context and use it against him
The film is said to be 60% fact – based on interviews with Soetoro-Obama’s surviving neughbours and school day chums – and 40% down to the fertile imagination of Dematra.
The youthful Barack Hussein Obama is played by 14 year old American lad Hasan Faruq Ali, who himself is the son of a mixed-race couple and moved from Indonesia to the United States, although as a toddler.
Some lines from the film:
A neighbourhood tough makes some cutting remarks about ‘Barry’s’ appearance:
You’re from the West, but black. You’ve got weird hair and a big nose
While the hero himself has wise words
We have to stick together to achieve our goals and resolve our problems and fights
“Obama Anak Menteng”, made by Multivision Plus Pictures, is likely to be internationally released in September 2010.
43 Comments on “Obama Anak Menteng”
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Oigal says:
Which brings me on to Oigal aka Wickerman again, and his feeble attempt at straw man tactics, setting up a test threshold ‘what communist legislation has Obama passed,’
Dearie me, Ross..if you are going to quote me at least use the quote button so you quote what I actually said. Still of no matter, one assumes from your response you have got nothing then. Which is what I expected, although I confess where I may have missed where he passed being a paid member of the gay, muslim, communist, terrorist, blackk panther, socialist party was complusory.
You may wish to look up what a strawman point is, if you intend to refer to it as you are embarrassing yourself.
in fact you only have to look at his sponsors, his upbringing and his appointments to high office to understand that he is an enemy of all that is best in America.
His sponsors..mmm that would be the Democrats right? His upbringing..that would be that dang Indonesian influence (suprised you would bring this up, G. Bush was a spoilt, rich kid drunk, or is that would you mean by fitting upbringing?). I kinda figured an upbringing which exposed one to the rest of the world might indeed be a plus and something new.
As for the rest of the evil sponsors of which you speak, it would appear they are not getting their monies worth because short of a few normal Dem programmes you would be pretty hard pressed to indicate any great departure from the previous government. Happy for you to point out the legislation sponsored by the white house that is the undong of the USA tho.
And as the man says, thanks for the giggle.
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Ross says:
You’re rambling again, Oigal, his Illinois state senate sponsors included Weatherman terr, Ayers, right?
His upbring included Frank Marshall Davies as his boyhood mentor, a well-known Communist actiivist.
He’s already had one top-dog forced to quit because the Communist connection was exposed.
Now he wants Kagan on the High Court despite her disgraceful conduct at Harvard.Your scoffing at known facts goes on and on, and does you little credit. I wonder whose game you are playing.
BUT this thread should be about the movie. Come across to my blog, where I’ve just posted a link to the latest Obama Admin scandal, his racist Justice Department.
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timdog says:
So Ross, if this thread should be about the movie, and presumably also about its attendant manufactured “controversy”, may I please redirect you make to my last post.
In said post I attempted to draw your attention to the object of my earlier post, in which my tongue-in-cheek “it didn’t happen” jibe unfortunately distracted you from its main argument (namely the idea that even if there was a “conspiracy” to supress the mythical footage of little Obama headbutting the carpet and waggling his bum in the air, it wouldn’t actually prove anything, or have any sinister implications).
Sadly you pointedly ignored it.So to reiterate, just suppose the footage really exisits, and just suppose someone from Obama’s image team really managed to get it cut out of the movie, in what way is that in any sense different from the effective Tory efforts to get the Bullingdon Club photo out of print media circulation in the UK because of the deleterous effect it was having on the efforts of Cameron and co to present themselves as “ordinary blokes who understand what the man on the street wants”?
And in what way does it imply anything more sinister?
Please supply rational, evidence based arguments – on this matter and on this matter only; no reds under the bed please – that amount to more than “Obama is an evil Marxist and therefore different rules aply to him than those that apply to the British Conservative party”. -
timdog, the last person I’d be defending is Cameron. If he had some agent of his try to interfere with the production of a movie or TV show, then he is as bad as I’d expect him to be.
If he used Conservative Party Central Office henchmen to do so, he should be exposed and subjected to criticism. If, now Prime Minister, he were to use government employees to do so, then that would be outrageous.
The point I’m making, if you didn’t grasp it, is we don’t know who gave the ‘word to the wise’ in regard to cutting scenes from the movie about Obama.
If you look at my blog entry on RRA today, you’ll see that his Justice Department is just a tool for partisan politics. letting thugs off the hook on racist grounds.
If that’s the case, and the big media are doing their best to hush it up, then we here on blogs etc. should be spreading the news.
Re the movie, what we want, as Sgt. Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet, is ‘the facts, just the facts.’ Was the producer/director just trying to get attention? Possible, very possible. Was he pushed by outside forces? Possible too. So let’s keep asking him. In fact, I think I will. -
I wonder whose game you are playing.
Cool, does this mean I am part of the great conspiracy? If so I gotta tell ya the pay sucks..
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You tell us, Oigal.
Why this relentless, fact-dismissing ‘crusade’ on Obama’s behalf.
You are not American, and neither am I, but my comments are based on a traditionalist conservative’s natural dislike of far-leftism.You claim not be far-left but are ever-ready to spring to defence of their causes.
Much the same with timdog, tho as for Odinius, who knows, I thought he was a Dutchman, but he is vociferous in support of American leftery.As a troika, you are the only left-lib commenters here who don’t vary the theme.
Like Obama Attack-Dogs, you constantly savage anyone to the Right of Al Gore. -
Odinius says:
Hmm, so who’s really on a crusade here:
1) those desperately seeking scandals they can tie Obama to, even to the point of absurdity, and propagating them on the internet with the zealotry of a religious fanatic;
2) those who respond by pointing out how ridiculous most of these assertions are, and laugh at the propagators?
Honestly, each one is sillier than the one that came before it. Ross, you need a new horse.
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So apart from the birth certificate, which has yet to see the light of day, and you guys don’t find that fishy, which scandals are absurd – the Justice Department’s racism, or the murky enticements to Democrats not to stand for certain seats, or….do tell, Odinius!
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besok saja says:
Multivision Plus and Damien Dematra, what a perfect combination!
I wouldn’t want to watch the movie, not even if I’d get paid to watch. -
Anyway, I’ve emailed Mr. Dematra and asked him to amplify his comments. How be we wait and see if he replies.
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rustyprince says:
Well done on the news links David, it brought me to this comment by VoNguyenGiap to the Tisdal Guardian article on Obama and US military links to Indonesia. Maybe this should be on the ‘Barry Soetero’ but I’m interested in it via what it says about Barry’s step-Father and Mum vis a vis Machines comment above that Lolo Soetero was someone that you just didn’t mess with. The comment below, if true, clearly puts pay to the Obama Commie nonsense, but I wonder again does it open up an area I speculated about in my above comment that could Obama’s brief interlude in Menteng have instilled the necessary conditioning to become a serious candidate for achieving the highest office in the world. Ruthlessness, ambition, success…..why return to the US and settle for middle class mundanity after tasting power?
VoNguyenGiap
3 Aug 2010, 8:41AM
Not just another Obama betrayal – this one is personal
Human Rights Watch called Obama’s resumption of US military assistance to Jakarta’s murderers and torturers “a stunning betrayal of the standards the U.S. has.” HRW said that Obama’s decision will “have ramifications well beyond Indonesia, in effect telegraphing to abusive militaries worldwide that the Obama administration’s human rights standards are up for negotiation.”
Well gee, we sort of figured that out when Obama bad-mouthed Thailand’s democracy protesters as they were being gunned down by the military junta.
Human Rights Watch thinks along Tisdall’s lines, that it’s all about the US trying to preserve its Sou?theast Asian empire from Chinese encroachment:
‘In the Bush administration, we saw them seek military allies regardless of human rights abuses in pursuit of the war on terror,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. This administration, she said, ”will seek military alliances regardless of human rights abuses – in response to China”.
But there’s more to it than that. Remember Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetero? He was a big cheese in the Suharto military junta: He was the guy who handed out the oil contracts to Mobil. He met Ann (Obama’s mom) at the University of Hawaii East-West Center, just like Obama’s first dad did, when he and Ann were taking Russian language courses there. Russian language? What, she was going to do anthropology in the Soviet Union? Err, not exactly:
According to legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein [of Vietnam fame], it was there that Scotton was recruited into the CIA.
About the CIA-sponsored East-West Center, Scotton said, “It was a cover for a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to create agent nets.”
So Ann dumped her first CIA hubby – her agent, actually – who worked for Shell and was assigned a new one, this one working for Mobil. The Suharto junta had just finished toppling Indonesia’s famous nonaligned prime minister Sukarno, murdering over half a million “communists” – or at least that’s what the CIA told them they were – and locking up at least half as many in concentration camps. That’s when Ann turns up with a Ford Foundation grant, a fact that tells Sukarno’s thugs that she has CIA clearance. I highly recommend this study of Ford’s activities in Indonesia:
Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia
Ford launched its effort to make Indonesia a “modernizing country” in 1954 . . . An interesting example of the effort was Guy Pauker’s study of “political obstacles” to economic development, obstacles such as armed insurgency.
In the course of his field work, Pauker got to know the high-ranking officers of the Indonesian Army rather well. He found them “much more impressive” than the politicians. “I was the first who got interested in the role of the military in economic development,” Pauker says.
While many Indonesians have charged the professor with having CIA connections, Pauker denies that he was intimate with the CIA until 1958, after he joined the RAND Corporation. Since then, it is no secret that he briefs and is briefed by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Highly placed Washington sources say he is “directly involved in decision-making.”
But it is the foreign-investment plan that is the payoff of Ford’s twenty-year strategy in Indonesia and the pot of gold that the Ford modernizers — both American and Indonesian — are paid to protect.
But the real prize is oil. During one week in 1969, twenty three companies, nineteen of them American, bid for the right to explore and bring to market the oil beneath the Java Sea and Indonesia’s other coastal waters.
Let’s get back to Obama’s latest pat on the back for Indonesia’s military death squads – of which you’ll never guess who is the current commander:
Kopassus is currently headed by Maj.- Gen. Pramono Edhie Wibowo, brother-in-law of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
Obama’s daddy No 2 was a henchman of the CIA-backed Suharto regime. His mom was a CIA agent with the mission to “modernize” Indonesia – i.e. get rid of the commies – to keep those oil leases that Lolo handed out in US hands. Kopassus was founded jointly by the Suharto junta, the CIA, and the Pentagon in order to do just that: Keep the commies – i.e. regime opponents – from acting up again. Giving the Indonesian death squad a big warm hug is really just Obama’s way of reuniting his family.
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Sebatian says:
Where can I get a copy of the movie? I missed it in the cinemas? is there a DVD release?
Comment on “Obama Anak Menteng”.
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Nothing here so far on the background, talents of the film maker. So can we expect a sentimental idyllic portrayal of childhood bliss or a revelation on what makes an outsider with the appearance that everything is stacked against him rise to the pinnacle of global authority.
Thus Machine’s comments are interesting as he suggests there are worthwhile avenues for discovering the origin of this ruthless ambition. The stepfather a ‘warrior intellectual’ was the pivotal figure in Barry’s early life and the given Menteng milieu of ambition, connections and success a clever kid couldn’t but have been impressed and imbued with the same sense of entitlement and perhaps instinct to achieve.
If this thesis has any legitimacy then suburban Hawaii wouldn’t have proved too onerous for a child who had just navigated the equivalent of Eton, Georgetown and all that snobbery and vindictive jealousies- very scary Indo mums – that must have been all enveloping within Jakarta’s narrow elite.
For alas us more humble souls from the former Rich world can be drawn into a false sense of arrogance towards the former colonies and thus disparage someone with an Indonesian childhood being installed as US president. But I believe our privileged/influential class have moved way beyond such conceitful delusions of superiority – what with the globalised elite and all that and with hindsight given his disappointing Presidency maybe we just have a more exotic GWB now on the reins.
Finally, maybe a few Markists were able to go undetected and survive the bloodbath in some obscure peasant backwaters, but in the next house over from Suharto, very doubtful.
Much more likely to have been Hawaii, damn beach-bums and smoking ganga all day and contributing nothing; sounds like a definite hotbed of leftist extremism