Plot
Lyle (Beatty) and Chuck (Hoffman) are inept songwriters who dream of becoming a popular singing duo like Simon and Garfunkel. Their songs, with titles like "That a Lawnmower Can Do All That" and "The Echo Song," are performed badly and poorly-received. Their agent, Marty (Weston), books them as lounge singers in a hotel in Morocco to entertain troops stationed there. They unwittingly become involved in a plot to overthrow the Emir of the fictional neighboring country of Ishtar. A mysterious woman named Shirra (Isabelle Adjani) has a map she needs to get to the leftist guerrillas opposing the government of Ishtar. A CIA agent (Charles Grodin) gets involved when Shirra contacts Lyle and Chuck. He attempts to prevent the overthrow.
Read more about this topic: Ishtar (film)
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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