Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007)

[pemmican]

Just how does one go about liking the Black Dahlia film, anyhow? I made time in a Toronto vacation to see it when it opened, so excited was I. I don't think I've resented a bad film more.

P.

[Roger_Thornhill]

Just how does one go about liking the Black Dahlia film, anyhow?

A six pack of Czech Budvar beer and a fine cigar should do the trick.

In all seriousness, I think the first forty-five minutes or so are brilliant (right up until Aaron Eckhart loses it), and while it goes downhill after that I still found myself enjoying it, even the campy hamfisted acting of Fiona Shaw. I don't think it's a great film but I'd take it any day over more highly regarded recent noir Hollywoodland.

[malcolm1980]

Redacted sounds like Casualties of War set in Iraq.

[lady wakasa]

Redacted sounds like Casualties of War set in Iraq.

I read an interview in which De Palma more or less said that was intentional - basically, nothing has changed.

[chizbooga]

i found The Black Dahlia to be pitifully tired and unoriginal to the point of decrepitude. with de Palma lavishing his visuals on that lame rotten apple of a script, with its pitiful attempts at chic, it was like a long-expired box of cheap chocolates - an extravagant dungheap, incredibly musty and depressing, full of fake highs. if you went through it frame by frame you would probably find that, yes, the plot was explicable, but i can't imagine anyone giving a damn. hilary swank, that earnest girl scout who only seems at home cuddling up to an old pro (al pacino in insomnia, clint eastwood in million dollar baby) as a femme fatale, supposedly, was the emblem of this movie for me - extremely, haplessly bad, and not in a fun way whatsoever. i found it to be the sort of aesthetic experience that dulls my senses and makes the world seem like a turd. but i'm stoked for Redacted although i know nothing at all about it and haven't bothered to read anyone's posts. has anybody seen it?

[domino harvey]

Since I'm assuming you're a huge fan of the Black Dahlia-- I didn't bother to read your entire post but I saw you mentioned it-- you'll love it!

[chizbooga]

well gosh, now i don't know what to believe

[pemmican]

In no way did I respect the Black Dahlia. It was an ill-conceived LA Confidential cash-in that had none of the obsessive grittiness of the Ellroy novel. It was completely unconvincing, my vote for de Palma's career low. Bonfire of the Vanities was quite good, by comparison.

As I say in the review I linked back there, I saw the film at the VIFF with high expectations, and though I can abundantly see why it's being hailed as a welcome return to form, by the end, I was quite disappointed, and a bit depressed by how little it moved me. I don't know if that's the fault of the film - it's well-crafted and pissed off and it SHOULD have an impact, and the fact that it doesn't... I don't know why that should be. For one, I really just don't think movies are a valid form of protest these days; our experiencing the world through so many media filters, addictively consuming violence and sensory stimulation while ignoring what we do in the real world, is part of the PROBLEM, not the solution, and I'm too aware that at this point in the game, the angriest of movies is still just a goddamn movie. If Americans weren't so good at entertaining ourselves - and forgive me if I count myself as an American here, since the thin line between our countries and the fact that I can't vote in your elections doesn't really seem to make me any less subordinate to or affected by your country or its leadership - we probably wouldn't be in the mess we're in. I can't but imagine an Iraqi viewer watching this film and being very puzzled: "They know all this, but they're still over here. How can this be?"

Really, see my blog article, linked above, for more cogent stuff.

P.

[flyonthewall2983]

Trailer

[portnoy]

I dunno guys, The Black Dahlia is pretty decent. It's no Femme Fatale, but I'd watch it again.

[marty]

I wonder if any film will be made about the heroic acts of the soldiers there. Sure, there have been instances of a few bad apples but most of the soldiers are busting their gut, risking their lives to save the lives of Iraqis against the insurgents and then they have to come back to see films like Redacted.

[Jeff]

I wonder if any film will be made about the heroic acts of the soldiers there. Sure, there have been instances of a few bad apples but most of the soldiers are busting their gut, risking their lives to save the lives of Iraqis against the insurgents and then they have to come back to see films like Redacted.

There's always The Green Berets.

[bunuelian]

Yeah Marty I agree with you. The left (and I count myself among the left) has from the start of this war had no stomach for the possibillity of good among U.S. soliders, aside from a stupidly righteous call to bring the troops home out of "support" for them. I've opposed the war from the moment Bush was elected governor of Texas, but it's incredibly depressing to see my point of view represented by these gross overamplifications of criminal acts by the psychotic element of our armed forces (which is no doubt present).

My cousin served in Iraq for two years. He counts among his accomplishments establishing regular garbage pickups and neighborhood dumpsters in a huge section of Baghdad, where before everyone was throwing their garbage in the street for lack of an alternative. The locals flocked to serve him tea in thanks, which he drank graciously despite already being overheated in his absurd modern warfare gear. Will his story be told by a filmmaker? Probably not, because it's simply not sensational enough to get self-righteous ignoramuses to praise its pretense of revolution.

Certainly, the misdeeds of the few remains a worthy subject for discussion (for example, the whole leadership of this country since 9/11), but making a film about rape and murder just seems, in this landscape, to be exploitative of popular sentiment that what we've done is bad (and therefore we are desperate for icons of this wrongness) rather than a genuine attempt to explore something more nuanced.

By the way, the black bars over the eyes corresponds precisely to the film's title, which ought to be obvious . . . However, there's also a huge population of budding human rights lawyers who would love to take up the cause of the outraged family's violation at the hands of the filmmaker, so that said family could take their fair share (i.e. most) of the profits of the film that is so clearly based on the images of their loved ones' suffering and death. I don't mean to sound cynical, I'm merely pointing out the gyst of the argument that the company's lawyers no doubt raised, to the trepidation of their superiors. "No publicity is bad publicity" stops when you're being sued by the grieving families of the dead depicted in your anti-war film. Whether the case would succeed or not is irrelevant - it's the settlement they're after anyway.

[marty]

Briaan De Palma has taken the easy option witthout tackling the immense complexites. I have read about many heroic war efforts by the soldiers but they rarely make mainstream news because they run counter to what the media believe in. Anything that depicts the war as being productive is thrown away as all war is evil.

[exte]

Trailer

That single shot with all the music felt like a von Trier moment, like something out of Dogville... (I'm guessing there won't be white tape designating rooms in this film, though!)

[numediaman2]

I wonder if any film will be made about the heroic acts of the soldiers there. Sure, there have been instances of a few bad apples but most of the soldiers are busting their gut, risking their lives to save the lives of Iraqis against the insurgents and then they have to come back to see films like Redacted.

Wars are not judged by individual acts, but by issues that causes the war. The acts of a few soldiers does not make that war either good or bad -- that can only be judged by the acts of those that promoted the war. (Fighting NAZIs = good; self-defence = good; aggression = bad; etc.)

War films, on the other hand, are rarely about the big issues but about individual experience. Therefore, Redacted joins a long list of films that portray the soldier as either heroic, villainous, or as victim.

I have always been against this war (and believe those that started it are criminals). But a film by DePalma holds as much interest to me as a sharp poke in the eye. If DePalma were a novelist he would have been sued a million times over for plagarism. I find his films at best mildly entertaining, and at worst, laughably film-schoolish.

As for bad apples, I think the apple industry needs some quality control. For the past seven years everything that has gone wrong in government or the military has been blamed on "bad apples". I guess people don't do bad things, apples do bad things.

[pemmican]

Apples don't kill people, people kill people. With apples.

You can have my apple when you pry it out of my cold dead fingers.

I think I need sleep.

P.

[colinr0380]

Episode of The Treatment interviewing Brian De Palma.

[Nothing]

yes marty, destabilising a continent and slaughtering families with cluster bombs and white phospherous is heroic... Sure, you also have the PRT units, but their impact is minimal and their primary purpose is good PR (why not try Fox News if you're craving a story about good-hearted Americans 'helping' the Iraqi people). But these are not the people really fighting the war.

Btw, I see you lost the election - teehee.

[Galen Young]

Finally got to see this last night -- what an invigorating blast of fucking fresh air this film is! A real return to his polemic roots a la Hi Mom! and Greetings. Thought the use of Handel's Sarabande was hilariously ironic. It's obvious the producers who censored the photos in the final montage did it as a political act and not a legal one. They should be ashamed of themselves and De Palma has every right to be fighting mad about it. One of photos by Chris Hondros is one that has been seen every at the time it came out; why they would deliberately try to mute the impact of those photos is just incomprehensible. I hope the film makes it to DVD uncensored.

[justeleblanc]

Does anyone know the situation with the DVD? Will this film have the redacted photos in the DVD?

[Arn777]

This is supposed to be out on DVD today. Anybody picked it up or seen any reviews?

[Galen Young]

I've got it. The "Collateral Damage" segment at the end is still...redacted. The 73 minutes of extras make no mention of why the film was censored. Lame.

[filmnoir1]

Finally saw this last night on dvd. The film is flawed without question, however what makes it so interesting is the way in which De Palma embraces the multiple levels of media generation that are possible in the 21st century. Moreover he displays with the computer screen graphics how national identity is nothing more than an ideological construct of those who have the resources and the power to generate the images. De Palma understands that that the present government is completely aware of the power of perception through media, thus the establishment of seperate youtube site for the US military to post on, the embedding of US journalists (which is their only option for covering the war), the limiting of the Iraqi people to create their own media and most importantly the censoring of active troops letters, phone calls, and e-mails. The surveillance state is thus not only a domestic product, it is also a component of the soldiers day-to-day lives as the security cam footage in the film illustrates.
Also like the Vietnam war films that have preceeded it, Redacted engages with the harsh reality that this war harms those of lower economic means while making corporations and rich individuals even wealthier. It is an important film that may not have found an audience today, but it is a film that we will be unable to ignore in the future.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I saw Redacted this afternoon. It's only showing in one London cinema. I suppose if you were a film programmer, you'd probably avoid this film. Not because of its quality, but because it's a total downer.

It's one of the most depressing and distressing films I have ever seen. Shocking, powerful, visceral stuff; sure it's incoherent and wayward with what could be termed a narrative, but watching this is like being punched in the stomach. Two seriously horrible scenes; the rape and murder of a fifteen year old Iraqi girl, and the subsequent kidnapping and beheading of an American soldier in retaliation.

The concept of using several types of media to compose the film is interesting; an indication of how publicly accessible media outets are nowadays, and even despite this, as one of the characters says "the first casualty of war is the truth".

I've not seen any of the other Iraq-based films, but I doubt any could have the impact Redacted has. Once you have seen it, it's hard to get it out of your system. Not a great film but certainly compelling.