Moviefone Copyright 2011, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. Moviefone Good old fashioned elbow grease. Redacted, most during a horrific rape scene right in the center of the picture. The bulk of those who stayed gave the HD dramatization of the real-life rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers an overwhelmingly positive reception.

DePalma, who is currently in Venice, participated via video chat in an after-screening Q & A that danced dangerously close to DePalma hagiography from the outset. Moderator Larry Gross (amazingly, the screenwriter of both 48 Hours and We Don't Live Here Anymore) set the tone with his introductory statement, directed at DePalma: "Thank you for making this film, which seems like a real act of moral integrity on your part."

That kind of language would have drawn a eye roll from me even if I agreed with Gross' assessment of Redacted's moral pedigree. It's hard not to be cynical about a fictional film based on real-life events, made by a brand-name director, shot with documentary and "amateur" methods as a model, but saddled with that famous filmmaker's self-serving ideological assumptions about the military and the war. But on some level, it almost doesn't seem to count as a "movie" at all. It's more of a narrative aggregation of pre-existing elements aimed at serving the purpose of a singular ideology. Or, in two words: opportunistic propaganda.

Which is too bad, because conceptually, it's a fascinating project.

Chatting after the screening, the director contextualized Redacted as a drama derived from a composite of internet detritus: blogs, videos, images describing the general situation in Iraq, and specifically, the actual rape of a teenager and the murder of her and her family by four soldiers in 2006. DePalma changes names, transfers the action to Samarra, and presents the single story through at least seven different filters. These include a soldier's video diary, an artsy French documentary (complete with a sweeping score which DePalma admitted is a deliberate allusion to Barry Lyndon), surveillance-cam footage, videotaped depositions, terrorist propaganda videos, civilian video blogs, Al Jazeera-like news broadcasts.

When the multiple modes are used to draw attention to the way each party is mediated by different gazes, it works. There's also some nice subtext about the ways in which the soldiers (mostly under-educated and poor) filter their world through their only reference points for human experience: pop culture. Frustration over an extended tour of duty is "just like" the frustration of working overtime as expressed in Clerks, and a lost soldier is "our very own Private Ryan." Typical of the film's cynicism, we're supposed to imagine that from that point, it's only a small jump to the realm where some combination of exposure to hardcore porn and the ideology fueling the invasion could lead to the justification of rape as "part of winning the hearts and minds."

But DePalma is such a master of the dynamics of looking that his ability to pull this off shouldn't be a big deal, and it surely doesn't make up for the fact that Redacted totally fails to consider the dynamics of being looked at. Real people consciously or unconsciously tailor their behavior in direct relation to who they're being watched by. But almost across the board, the non-actors playing the soldiers here aren't up to the challenge of adapting their performances for each media mode. This is especially glaring in the film's final scene, in which an impassioned speech ostensibly caught by a camera filming a party for posterity is played as if the speaker is trying out for a school play. It's like a Max Fisher production of The War Tapes.

At the Q & A, DePalma became defensive when asked if he cared that about the fact that his fictionalized, extremely subjective film is surely going to distract attention away from the actual documentaries and video blogs in which soldiers and/or Iraqis tell their own version of events with minimal mediation. "We're all on the same team here," he barked in response to the suggestion that there's something not quite ethically kosher about making a $5 million remake of existing DIY journalism. "We all hate this war and want it to end."

But regardless of his intentions, it's hard to imagine the film DePalma has made having any positive impact on the anti-war movement. With the exception of the final montage of real photographs, which DePalma indicated may be "redacted" from the final cut for legal reasons, it's far too stagey to have any real emotional impact. If anything, it's going to further enrage the side that continues to insist that anyone who questions the war or the way it has been fought loves the terrorists, hates our troops, should be executed for committing treason, etc. DePalma aims to hit the jugular, but his approach makes someone like Charles Ferguson seem all the wiser for aiming for the brain.

I will say that Redacted, intentionally or otherwise, raises serious, scary questions about the make-up of an over-taxed volunteer army. The two soldiers directly involved in the crimes come off as inherently nasty sacks of shit; the sweet kid who felt compelled to videotape the rape (as an extension of the stab at class mobility that put him in Iraq with a video camera to begin with) meets a fate far worse than time in prison. Born criminals go over there and get the chance to indulge their most inhuman tendencies; good-natured poor kids looking for money for college go over there and get massacred. It's one of the base horrors of the war churn, and even when telegraphed by an extremely faulty film, it never loses its impact.

This post first appeared here.]]> Sun, 2 Sep 2007 21:27:00 EDT 62860 Rescue Dawn on July 4 was more than just a clever Transformers counter-programming gambit: it was an implicit attempt to mark the German director's POW drama, a dramatic remake of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, as a red state-targeted tribute to American patriotism.

And to some extent, it worked: conservative film blog LIBERTAS called Rescue "a good old-fashioned patriotic war film", but reserved their highest praise for the film's director: "Herzog is a genius and a true iconoclast. He's a rebel and a free-thinker. The lemmings desperate to be loved and fit in make the other kind of war film, the true counter-culture makes this kind." And in a blog post dated July 27, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel named Rescue Dawn "the best movie of the year."

Less than a month later, Schlussel has changed her tune considerably. In a post on her website dated August 16, Schlussel points to site called Rescue Dawn: The Truth, which claims that Herzog altered facts in Rescue Dawn in order to make Dieter Dengler appear to be more of a hero than he actually was. The site bears the signature of Pisidhi Indradat, who says he was imprisoned alongside Dengler but was omitted from Rescue Dawn; and Jerry DeBruin, brother of Gene DeBruin, who was played in the film by Jeremy Davies.

DeBruin and Indradat are primarily upset that Herzog gave the Dengler character the bulk of the credit for planning and executing the escape from Laos. They insist that, in real life, these plans were already in the hopper before Dengler ever got to the camp. In fact, they say they waited a few weeks to tell him about the escape because they didn't know if they could trust a guy with a German accent. DeBruin is also angry at Herzog's depiction of his brother as an antagonist to Dengler, played by Davies as a "deranged and derelict Charles Manson type entity." Schlussel adds fuel to *that* fire by pointing out that Davies played Manson in a 2004 TV movie. It's clearly a conspiracy!

Originally posted posted here.]]> Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:38:23 EDT 61307 Recently, IFC's Evan Shapiro defended his company's production and distribution of new chapters in R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet saga by comparing the "hip hopera" pioneer to postmodern trash god John Waters. Trapped, according to Shapiro, "challenges the traditional mores and sexual stereotypes of the current climate as boldly -- and hysterically -- as many films coming out of Hollywood or the indie movement."

In the current climate of posture-as-polemic, it's impossible to gauge exactly how seriously Shapiro intended us to take that provocation, but I certainly kept it in mind whilst watching Chapter 13 of Trapped (the first Chapter to be produced under the IFC deal), which premiered on IFCTV.com Sunday night. New episodes are set to premiere every evening on the site for the next ten days.

From the first shot, it's immediately apparent that Trapped's production values have been elevated somewhat since Chapter 12 was released two years ago. The story has moved out of the closets and cupboards and kitchens of Slyvester and crew, and on to the streets of Chicago (or, at least, a decent facsimile thereof). There are sophisticated camera movements, and lush, dissolve-heavy montages. Whereas the soundtracks of previous episodes barely allowed Kelly the time to take a breath, Chapter 13 concludes with a musical interlude that's actually about the passing of time.


Although Kelly still reads and/or sings each actor's lines for them, he seems to be trying to create distinct vocal characters for some of the players in the story. In the previous twelve chapters, the only character that Kelly seemed to make an effort to differentiate was Bridget, the overweight white woman who has an affair with (wait for it) the midget. In Chapter 13, his new attitude towards acting is most noticeable in a scene in which the nosey neighbor glimpsed briefly in Chapter 7 fights with her husband. This is, I guess, a natural progression, as the shorts move from being primarily R. Kelly songs to being primarily mini-movies, but if it continues, it could have profound implications on Trapped's signature, quasi-Brechtian manner of storytelling.

Read the whole post here.]]> Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:49:22 EDT 60465 the car crash, the arrest, the by-now-infamous passenger seat pass-out captured by paparazzi for posterity -- celebrity-ologists rushed to place the 20-year-old's bad behavior in proper context.

Sharon Waxman, a (former?) Hollywood beat reporter for The New York Times, situated Lohan at the end of a starlet line reaching past Britney Spears to Marilyn Monroe. In all three cases, according to Waxman, the "spectacle of a young woman's self-destruction seemed to demand expressions of sympathy along with the requisite scorn." That sympathy wasn't on display at the celeb blogs -- The Superficial, for instance, joked that the police who arrested Lohan for the DUI had the constitutional right to "shoot her in the head" -- and even professional finger-wagger-to-the-stars Dr. Drew Pinsky saw no need to sugar coat Lindsay's predicament. When asked on MSNBC last week to estimate Lohan's chances of successfully making it through her second stay in rehab, Pinsky cited Lindsay's family history of addiction and said that, statistically speaking, a terminal cancer patient would have a better chance of long-term survival.

Everywhere I go, people are talking about whether or not Lindsay will be the first of her generation of stars to die, and in some ways it feels as though that's exactly what we all want. When stars get to this point, teetering on the brink of total self-destruction, it's a lot easier for us as spectators to see them die young, beautiful, with some kind of potential unfulfilled, than to watch them go on and get old and ugly and disappoint us. River Phoenix is only River Phoenix because he's dead; if he hadn't overdosed in front of the Viper Room, at best he'd be Robert Downey Jr. At worst, he still would have died, but only after failing to make good on the promise as an actor -- and at that point, nobody would have cared about an older, far less good-looking corpse. With female stars -- particularly those who have yet to prove themselves as unequivocally talented -- the public's need for relief is even more intense. With nothing to offer the world beyond the spectacle of the slow decline of her waxwork-perfect approximation of blonde beauty, Anna Nicole Smith died at exactly the right point in her career (of course, ever the contrarian, Camille Paglia declared Smith's death a great cultural loss).

Unlike Waxman, I don't see Lindsay as a Marilyn Monroe figure -- I see her falling squarely in line with the legacy of Judy Garland. Lindsay and Judy have an awful lot in common. Both were child stars, raised by stage mothers far more interested in their daughter's fame than in their actual well-being. Judy's life-long drug addiction began when her mother (in cahoots with Louis B. Meyer) put her on uppers to lose weight; if Lindsay's mom isn't actually doing drugs with her daughter, she's at the very least accompanying Lindsay to clubs and turning a blind eye on her daughter's substance abuse. Lindsay's bad behavior (and thus, tabloid reign) seemed to stem from her desire to rebel against her Disney image; Judy, sick of being treated like a child three years after strapping down her breasts to play Dorothy at age 17, married a bandleader to piss off MGM. Judy's drug use finally led to chronic lateness and absenteeism -- when that letter from the producer of Georgia Rule leaked, all I could think of was Garland's famous suspension at MGM in the late 40s, which inevitably led to the end of her career in movies. The drugs that kept her slim and energetic in musicals as a teen and 20-something had taken their toll by her 30s, and through a combination of her declining looks and her inability to show up on time, she became virtually unemployable. She lived out the last decade of her life broke, semi-homeless, and all but forgotten by the producers who made millions off of her as a teenager.

The typical endnote to these "Wither Star X?" stories is always, "She better shape up, or all that talent will go to waste!" In terms of her own personal vanity, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Lindsay Lohan would be for her to end up like Judy Garland. But I think the jury's still out as to whether or not Lindsay has anything to offer us as a culture beyond Terry Richardson shoots and salacious headlines. I do know one thing: I enjoyed Lohan's work in Mean Girls and A Prairie Home Companion, but if she's going to be stuck making films like Georgia Rule and Just My Luck for the rest of the career, she's probably better off dead.

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