November 25, 2007
Another anti-American cinematic floater
Brian De Palma -- who used to be a decent filmmaker -- has dumped his latest turd of a film into theaters nationwide, where this anti-American piece of agitprop is circling the bowl, raking in a meager $25,000 this weekend.
Hell, that means even Cindy Sheehan and her friends aren't interested in seeing it.
This review hits on just a few reasons why no one wants to subject themselves to De Palma's latest.
What is there left to say about the Hollywood assumption that Americans are too clueless to realize that war is hell, that the war in Iraq is particularly troubling and that only moral instruction from, well, Hollywood can bring a benighted nation to its senses? Moviegoers have already signaled their disdain.
Three recent antiwar pictures that reflect the film colony's imperious self-regard — "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Lions for Lambs" — have been quickly fitted with box-office body bags. Soon they'll be joined by "Redacted," the talky, torpid, borderline-hysterical new movie by Brian De Palma.
The picture's conceptual incoherence is clear at the outset, when we're told that it was "inspired by an incident widely reported to have happened in Iraq." What can this possibly mean? The atrocity at the center of "Redacted" isn't some sort of rumor; it's a well-established fact. In March of 2006, in a village south of Baghdad, five U.S. Army soldiers broke into the home of an Iraqi family; some of them murdered the mother and father and their 5-year-old daughter, then gang-raped their 14-year-old daughter, shot her in the head and set her body and the house afire. (The blaze was apparently an attempt to make the attack look like the work of terrorist insurgents.)
The movie's implication is that such horrific incidents are not unusual, but that they're covered up by the military and the craven mainstream media. This is possible, of course. But the contention is unpersuasive in this particular case, since all five of the soldiers involved were arrested and charged, and three have been tried and sentenced to 90, 100 and 110 years in prison — information the movie declines to convey. The alleged ringleader of the group, Pfc. Steven D. Green, was discharged from the Army before the crime was reported by another soldier three months after it happened; Green will be tried in a federal court in Kentucky, and prosecutors are reportedly seeking the death penalty.
[...]
The actors here are competent, but they're used mainly to embody war-movie clichés ... The two really bad guys are cartoons, one of them a standard-issue brutal slob, the other — the Green character — a nasty drunk. (We know he's extra-rotten because at one point we see him sprawled on a chair that's draped with a Confederate flag — in the terms of Hollywood iconography, he may as well have the Number of the Beast tattooed on his forehead.)
De Palma's use of an abominable crime as an emblem of U.S. conduct in Iraq is a gross insult to American soldiers who've never done such things — which is to say, the overwhelming majority of them. But the director thinks he's courageously lobbing a truth-grenade into the cultural conflict over the Iraq war, and no doubt he's hoping that any attendant controversy will help sell tickets.
"People will be arguing over this film," De Palma said, hopefully, in an interview with Sky News last spring. Maybe they will. First they'll have to want to sit through it, though.
And what conservative cesspool was the source of this critical hit-piece?
Fox News? National Review?
How about MTV, where Kurt Loder continues in his role as resident skeptic, buying no one's B.S.
Posted by Mike Lief at November 25, 2007 01:11 PM
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