Redacted

Have you seen Nick Broomfield's 'Battle for Haditha'?

I haven't seen Redacted, so can't compare, but the impression I get is that Broomfield's film made a rather better - and certainly much more balanced - fist of exploring the subject of US-perpetrated atrocities in Iraq.

Badly directed trash? A Brian DePalma film?

Next you'll be telling us that Starry Night is badly painted trash or Beethoven's Ninth is badly composed trash.

We're talking about a - no sod that - the American cinematic genius of the last 40 years.

The beauty of DePalma is you don't even have to see the films to know they are the work of a master. Aside from being the best crime movie of the last million years, The Black Dahlia seperated those who know about film (they loved it) and those who reached their intellectual ceiling on Emmerdale (they hated it). All the naysayers merely do is highlight themselves as Philistines who know not the grammar of cinema.

I'm not even going to watch Redacted, my mind is made up.

You're bang on the money here - this is De Palma firing on half a coughy cylinder and repeating himself not very well. Although I thought the montage of real-life photographs at the end of the film was very effective. Shame the rest of the film wasn't like that.

Am I the only one who assumed Eddie Zimmerhoff was being sarcastic?

Granted, I see a lot of straight-faced arguments along similar lines, but there are one or two clues buried in there that might suggest a pretty harmonious marriage of tongue and cheek.

The mention that he won't even see Redacted because he already knows it will be a masterpiece seals the deal.

Unfortunately, De Palma gets some rave reviews for his recent movies uncomfortably close to Eddie's. I guess we passed a law in France preventing anybody to dismiss the value of Mission To Mars, Femme Fatale or The Black Dahlia when they were released. Mission To Mars got a two page review in Les Cahiers du cinéma, establishing it was a personal work.

De Palma's films in general tend to polarise viewers and critics but REDACTED seems to have had a tougher time, critically speaking, than practically any of his films thus far (even more than DRESSED TO KILL), so I'll stick my head above the parapet to say how much I like and admire this work - I saw it when screened at the London Film Festival in 2007 where it was met, at its conclusion, with a stunned silence - those I spoke to were highly impressed by its technique and by the ferocity of its argument and the power of the closing montage, which is certainly worth emphasising in any review as its effect is breathtaking just for its sheer sadness.

I for one am a great admirer of De Palma's work in general (especially those he writes himself) especially for their playful and ironic tone and would heartily reccomend his 2002 opus FEMME FATALE to anyone who doubts his abilities as a master of cinematic technique - but a lot of critics hated that film too. De Palma is a very knowing filmmaker and it is clear that much of the 'bad' or more properly speaking 'self-conscious' acting in REDACTED is quite deliberate. The film is full of smart point of view reversals (such as the bombing sequence) and the sequence-shot in which the would-be-filmmaker is kidnapped is after-all meant to be both humorous and chilling. The presentation of different media, at least as I saw it at the LFF screening, was very effective and technically convincing in its portrayal of cc footage or internet blogs or home video or a pseudo-intellectual French documentary.

I think calling a director of De Palma's pedigree as 'dumb' is more than a little reductive - while his fellow movie brats like Scorsese and Spielberg are treading water with such risk-free sequels/remakes as the ridiculously over-praised THE DEPARTED and the fun if insubstantial KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULLS, De Palma continues to challenge movie conventions and looks for new ways to express himself. He really isn't dumb and neither is REDACTED, but one has to make allowances perhaps for a low budget film brave enough not to try and hide behind the concept of journalistic 'objectivity' and which instead takes a real event to bring into relief a sense of anger and hopelessness in the face of the ongoing destruction of Iraq and its people and the degree to which it has been mismanaged and exploited for financial and political gain by the US military-industrial complex. As one of the very first fiction films to be released about the war in Iraq and the only one so far to expressly deal with the way that the media, especially in the US, has been complicit and acquiescant in limitations in freedoms of the press imposed by the Bush administration to report the outrages and deaths occurring 'out there'. Personally I believe it deserves a lot of respect.

Man, if you hadn't spoiled it by speaking to people I bet that stunned silence would be lingering still! That's DePalma!

I'm hearing ya. They know they're being filmed, that's the whole point. Would make bad actors of the best of us. I took some phone footage of Ross Kemp at a party once and he was terrible!

I don't know what reductive means but whatever the blazes it is, it sounds far too pleasant for this reviewer. He should have his cinema pass and spectacles taken from him and never returned.

Let others tread where Brian would walk. That's what I say.

Correct. I think too much emphasis is placed on 'best' within filmdom. You know, 'best' this or 'best' that. Screw best! What about 'first'? It might not technically be the first, but it's the first in English, so basically the same thing. And I couldn't agree more. What's the best - Dante's Peak or Volcano? Armageddon or Deep Impact? Who cares. What was the first? That's the one I wanna watch!

Agreed. Here we have a ageing and explanding genius making - let's face it - a hip movie. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad. It's like Val Doonican making a techno album. Ultimately who cares if the masses like it? Best not to even listen to it really. Let's just respect Val for attempting it and leave it at that. Same goes for Brian.

Originally Posted by Eddie Zimmerhoff:

I don't know what reductive means but whatever the blazes it is, it sounds far too pleasant for this reviewer. He should have his cinema pass and spectacles taken from him and never returned.

===


Well, I gues that'll teach me to stick my head above the parapet (or in other places too by the looks of things) - I retire whipped, abashed and not a little disconsolate.

Originally posted by Eddie Zimmerhoff

Alas, this is sadly true. Seal managed to get off with little more than a mild admonishment in the form of a 6 rating in my review of Seal: The Videos 1991 - 2004.

If such a law was indeed passed , I'll be sleeping in film jail tonight.

As for Mission to Mars, it certainly is a very personal work : De Palma's brother died shortly before the shoot and I believe this is where the sense of loss and mourning which permeates the entire movie comes from. But a highly personal film can also be a highly flawed one, a point Mission To Mars makes with admirable clarity.

I've finally seen it, and while Battle for Haditha is immeasurably the superior film, I do think Redacted is better than Noel's giving it credit for.


I would certainly defend the soldiers talking in cliches, because I'd be quite surprised if they came out with anything else in such circumstances - i.e. when a camera is thrust into their faces and they're ordered to express profundities about the war with no prior warning or rehearsal. What exactly were you expecting them to say?


I also think Noel's missed the point when he complains that "they in fact make a rather serious situation like the abduction and execution of a soldier seem laughable". First of all, there was nothing remotely laughable about the execution scene - and what made the abduction so effective was that it was carried out in the context of a rather dopey soldier clowning around for the camera and being jumped from behind: he probably thought it was one of his colleagues at first.

That said, De Palma's mise-en-scene does rather illustrate just why Broomfield's film is superior. He actually pulled off something similar in Hi Mom!, when he combined the film's narrative with amateur footage (in colour) ostensibly shot by the Robert De Niro character and grainy black-and-white 4:3 footage shot by someone else of material that the De Niro character is only tangentially involved with - but, again, he didn't do anything especially imaginative with these multiple viewpoints on a structural level, and Redacted was at base a far more conventional narrative feature than I'd been led to believe from advance hype.


Ironically, it's the more "straightforward" Battle for Haditha that ends up being by far the more complex film, as Nick Broomfield takes care to show the central incident (broadly similar to that which inspired Redacted, at least insofar as it's about atrocities committed on innocent Iraqis by US soldiers) from multiple viewpoints - and, something De Palma doesn't remotely do - give each a fair amount of weight.


So unlike in Redacted, by the time of the massacre we've not only spent a lot of time with the US Army personnel, but we've also got to know the people who live in the relevant street, the "jihadists" (who are actually former Iraqi army officers summarily fired in the wake of the 2003 invasion - Broomfield doesn't make a meal of this, but his film is full of similarly in-passing political points that De Palma barely seems aware of, let alone interested in), and the string-pullers behind the scenes (ranging from US Army officers relying on fuzzy night footage to Al-Qaeda terrorists who prefer to let locals do the dirty work to the local imam, possibly the most Machiavellian figure of all).


Broomfield also makes use of footage being shot onscreen by the film's protagonists, but only in that context - we're always aware of what this footage is, who shot it, under what circumstances it was shot, and the reasons it might be worth watching.