Latest Antiwar Flick Bombs

Another Hollywood flop in the ongoing war on America by the movie moguls:

IT'S hard for Hollywood pacifists like Brian De Palma to capture the hearts and minds of America if Americans won't see their movies. While the public is staying away in droves from “Rendition," “Lions for Lambs" and “In the Valley of Elah," audiences are really avoiding “Redacted," De Palma's picture about US soldiers who rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then kill her and her family. The message movie was produced by NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who insisted on deleting grisly images of Iraqi war casualties from the montage at the film's end. Cuban offered to sell the film back to De Palma at cost, but the director was too smart to go for that deal. “Redacted" - which “could be the worst movie I've ever seen," said critic Michael Medved -took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country. “This, despite an A-list director, a huge wave of publicity, high praise in the Times, The New Yorker, left-leaning sites like Salon, etc. A Joe Strummer documentary [of punk-rock band The Clash] playing in fewer theaters made more in its third week," e-mailed one cineaste. “Not even people who presumably agree with the movie's antiwar thesis made the effort to see it."

That's a pretty good takedown, but not near as devastating as James Lileks:

To paraphrase Gore Vidal in a way that would horrify him: it is not enough for the surge to succeed. Brian DePalma must fail. And a heaping helping of FAIL he got, too; his movie took in $6.97, and was less popular than a Sundance-approved documentary about leg-hair tweezing rituals of Belgian nuns, or something. This imdb page had reviews from thoughtful progressives who were able, as I suspect most of their kin were able, to separate their politics from their critical faculties. One of the messages addressed the montage of dead bodies at the end, which is meant to tell us how deeply the director cares about the Iraqi people. Keep in mind that this is a fellow who, in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, made a movie about a guy who falls in love with a porn star who’s in danger of being killed by a giant scarred Indian who murders women with a giant phallic power drill. The commentor notes something interesting:

"As a final indignity, DePalma closes the film with a montage of pictures of dead Iraqis. Before the montage begins, the screen goes black and then the title "Collateral Damage" comes up with the claim "Actual photographs from the Iraq War" printed beneath it, and then the graphic slideshow begins. One problem though... among the real pictures of dead bodies, DePalma inserts some fake ones, including the pregnant woman killed earlier in the film. I have a screening DVD copy. I froze the frame and went back and compared it to the earlier scene in the film. Among DePalma's "Actual photographs from the Iraq War" is a picture of an actress pretending to be dead. And of course, the closing shot in this montage, the picture that is supposed to pull on the audience's heartstrings the most and make them forget the bad movie they just watched, is a fake picture of a bound and murdered rape victim.

Look beyond the message... this film is a mess."

This may actually be the first movie example of the fake-but-accurate doctrine.

At Entertainment Weekly I read a review that took special note of the dialogue. Apparently one soldier tells another “You’re so white you wouldn’t wear yourself after Labor Day.” He has the common touch, that DePalma. It's like Ernie Pyle walks among us again.

Hollywood will never learn.