11/11/2023 0 Comments Movie redacted![]() ![]() Debating its numerous problems - the weakness of some of the acting (De Palma uses a group of relatively unknown actors here), or the effusiveness of the music over the final, devastating set of images - is like critiquing an open sore. But the nakedness of its anger, of De Palma's anger, is its very strength. "Redacted" is a fictional story based on real events - most significantly the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, in Mahmudiya, Iraq, in March 2006 by American troops - and it's a blunt, flawed picture, flagrant in the way it defies the degree of finesse and meticulous emotional orchestration we expect in a movie. But I've seen no other picture like it, certainly not this fall and perhaps ever. In places, it's nearly impossible to watch, or perhaps it just seems like too much for any filmmaker to ask us to watch. But of all the war-themed pictures that have been released so far this fall, it stands apart, and it stands alone: "Redacted" is confrontational, rough, immediate and confounding. At this point, can any movie about Iraq make us think or feel any differently?ĭespite - or perhaps because of - everything that's already been written about it, not many people will likely want to see Brian De Palma's "Redacted," either. When I talk to my friends about it, it's clear they're staying away not out of apathy but out of helplessness and fatigue. As my colleague Andrew O'Hehir has noted, no one wants to see these pictures. But the Iraq war movies of this recent autumn have churned through theaters so quickly they've barely left a footprint. These days all movies are disposable - even a heavily hyped blockbuster like "American Gangster" has a short shelf life. Week by week those movies - "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition," "The Kingdom," "Lions for Lambs" - some of them lousy and some of them at least honorable and thoughtful, have come and gone. Late in the summer, editors at all sorts of publications ( this one included) were looking ahead to the fall's releases and taking note of the numerous fictional movies that were either about the Iraq war specifically, or about the United States' tangled, contentious involvement in the Middle East in general.
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