User Reviews

Not to be confused with Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams, Nice Bombs is the sophomore effort of Iraqi-American filmmaker Usama Alshaibi. Alshaibi, who left his native Iraq as a child in 1979, returned in 2004 to see what changes had been wrought by the American "liberation", and this film documents that visit. Shot as a video diary, the film follows the director, his wife, and his father as they travel to Baghdad and reunite with their extended family, still celebrating the overthrow of Saddam and relatively happy in the immediate wake of the invasion. The "nice bombs" of the title are, of course, those dropped by the Americans on insurgents and dead-enders, but by film's end, those same bombs have begun to wear down the Alshaibi family, and Usama finds himself all too eager to get out of town and return to the safer environs of Chicago. It's a fascinating time capsule shot when a better future seemed possible for educated, cosmopolitan Iraqis, rendered all the more bittersweet by the cruel lessons we've since learned.