I did not know that Mark Cuban was planning a pre-release screening of Brian De Palma’s REDACTED on cable tv’s “On Demand” channel until I stumbled upon it last night and hit the buy botton ($20) without thinking twice.
I had read all of the reviews, including the award coverage, that came out this summer when Redacted swept through the Venice Film Festival. I was also highly familiar with the real life story this ‘fictional’ accounting is based upon – : the brutal rape, murder and body burning of a 14 year old Iraqi girl and murder of her family – and I was ready to see this film.
Or so I thought.
NOTHING prepared me for this film’s ability to reach into my soul and tug me so hard that as I write this nearly 14 hours later, I am still swimming in a combination of revulsion, guilt by association and unfathomamble anger of what has been, and is still, being commited in my name.
Today I am living at the end of the second world war being shown pictures of the ovens which I was shamelessly hoping were not real even though I knew they were. Today my stomach is in knots, my head is spinning and I know I am not going to get through this day without – well – throwing up – no easier way to say it.
This film will be explosively controversial. The right wing smear machine has been at it relenlessly for the past couple of weeks – going as far as trying to descredit all of the anti- war Iraqi films now surfacing, saying viewers aren’t interested. yawn. pass.
DON’T YOU FOR A FRICKEN SECOND BELIEVE THIS BS. When the definitive history of the best anti-war films is written REDACTED will be on the list and it will have been seen and discussed and disected and studied by millions. Why?
Because in the tradition of “Night and Fog”, “The Battle of Algiers, ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ and “Missing’ – REDACTED is our first true look into the abyss of horrific atrocities commited against the Iraqi people by the current administration and all of its enablers – the citizens of the United States of America.
REDACTED puts in your face what we have done, what we are still doing and what we are consideriing doing in the future – in so subtle and powerful a form that the effect will be a shredding for once and for all of the white-washed version of this outrageous criminal war and the consequences that will be shared and paid for by the men and women in uniform and the people of this countrty for a minimum of one generation, in my opinion at least 2.
Today impeachment is not enough for me.
I want ACCOUNTABILITY
I want these greedy bastards behind bars
I want the people (and we all KNOW who they are) to pay for their mistakes
I want them to stop profitting from their madness
I want, no I DFEMAND that every elected official make this war stop immediately
Not within a year
Now
Period
And I want a plan for reparations put ‘ON THE FRICKIN TABLE’ Madam Speaker or I will spend every minute of every hour I am awake getting you and your self-annoited apostles of the Democratic Party thrown the hell out of office for being my last hope my last refuge my last belief that all that we are doing we are not doing and that you will make it go away.
I guess when it comes right down to it I am no better than YOU because I am still letting these atrocities happen.
No I don’t feel better. In fact I feel worse
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the horrific details. Much less looking at pictures or watching a movie about it. I really wonder how Bush/co would feel watching something like that? The really sick thing is, I don’t think it would affect them adversely.
The best way to understand the Bush administration is the concept of time travel. Bush has taken our society back to pre-chivalric medieval times. In this dark era, it was customary to plunder and pillage conquered peoples. The symbols and monuments of a conquered country were smashed; the people raped, tortured, and killed, and the booty looted.
In the words of a Quentin Tarantino character, Bush used 9/11 to “get medieval” on the people of Iraq. Because much of our public was willing to regress to this primitive era, the spectacle of a humiliated and shattered Iraq, the picture of raw conquest, was somewhat appealing.
Now that a majority of Americans are wandering dazed back into our own century, there is a sickening feeling of guilt and the sinking realization that we have done something so horrible that it can never be put right. This is what comes of bad leadership. We will never expunge the stain of the Iraq War from American history.
want to stay. The framing is only and in what capacity we will remain, with euphemisms about what role our military will have Spinning what this horror show is and how they can continue it. No one ‘electable’ will say out now all the way and begin the reparation, prosecute the war criminals, give them back their country and help them.