A Review For "Movie Monday"

With the announcement of the Academy Award nominations in mind (one day I’ll be able to watch the films again in actual theaters as opposed to home DVDs when the most viewed channel in our house isn’t Nickelodeon), I just wanted to take note of the film “Redacted” by Brian De Palma that I was able to watch over last weekend.

If you want to find out more about it as they say, this link provides more information (more info here). There are also a whole bunch of reviewer comments at the IMDB link that take De Palma and the film apart for a variety of reasons, including the criticism that, in one scene, a U.S. soldier is holding a rifle and then, a moment or two later, he’s holding a rocket launcher (there are about a trillion little continuity errors like that a year in movies; I don’t think your enjoyment of a film should be based on that alone), as well as some of the film’s incidental music (the aria "e lucevan le stelle" is one of hope, see, and this film is tragedy from early on until the very end – actually, a lot of the negative comments read like they’re part of a well-orchestrated campaign to trash the film).

Personally, I thought the film accomplished a lot, and I was not put off by the intermingling of what was supposed to be a documentary by a French filmmaker as well as web clips of the IED death of a U.S. soldier and the girl friend/fiancée of one of the soldiers pleading teary-eyed to hear from him. The film communicated the moments of utter boredom, nerve-jangling terror and sudden horror faced by our troops, as well as the miscommunications that can lead to tragedy for themselves and the Iraqis.

The film puts together a lot of different situations and creates a context that we will never see in anything presented in our media; the last time I saw “connect-the-dots” movie making about the war prior to this was in “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Was it preachy? Yes. Did it put me off? A bit; the photos of the dead Iraqis at the very end were unnecessary, I thought. But it captured the whole dynamic of how the alleged crimes in Samarra could have taken place (De Palma acknowledges the gray area there) and it is absolutely uncompromising in depicting the rape in question and the beheading of a U.S. soldier (a la Nick Berg – it’s actually one of the most sickening experiences in film I've ever encountered).

Oh, and did this movie deserve a 10-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival? Uh, no.

There are some clumsy moments, but the acting was pretty solid I thought, particularly Rob Devaney as Corporal Lawyer McCoy. And regardless of what you may think of this movie, it brought home to me the reason why the Iraq war should be, hands down, the number one issue in this country, even with our crappy economy at the moment.