Redacted
September 28th, 2007
More than with any film I’ve seen at the New York Film Festival so far, I’ve been struggling to find a way to talk about Brian De Palma’s Redacted, a movie that attempts to recreate the appalling images which have been systematically removed from the “news” about Iraq. The devastating reconstruction of the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers in Samarra in 2006, told entirely through “found” footage, the film felt like a well-aimed punch to the gut — or perhaps a stab in the heart. Whether blunt or sharp, the film’s impact is impossible to dismiss. Even though I thought I was handling the brutalities on screen well (usually by leaning over to scribble something in my notebook), I found myself unable to get up once the final credits started to roll; it had become physically impossible to move. Redacted sent me reeling.
Redacted. Brian De Palma, 2007. ****
Transformers
September 18th, 2007
A punchy B-picture, high on testosterone and a Hollywood megabudget, featuring pleasantly absurd giant robots that turn into cars. The boy-hero’s teenage crush is an improbable babe (Megan Fox) sprung from the pages of a glossy magazine, and because this is a Michael Bay movie, the fights are ridiculously overblown.
Now, I have nothing against popcorn flicks aimed at the thirteen-year-old in all of us, but I can’t stand propaganda. Transformers wallows in the questionable rhetoric of heroism and sacrifice, and the shots of fighter jets taking off at dawn and military helicopters swooping over downtown L.A. just need the superimposed tagline “Army of One” to be turned into recruiting ads. When Shia LaBeouf gets his orders and is told “You are a soldier now,” the fun is all but ruined for this pacifist. With John Turturro as anti-alien G-Man.
Transformers. Michael Bay, 2007. **
