The paranoia is ultra-Nam, and so is the alienation. Redacted revives Casualties's sense of men sent on a senseless mission to a country they'll never understand and acknowledges the conditions under which American soldiers live. This "professional" movie enables De Palma to establish that of the 2,000 Iraqi civilians killed at coalition checkpoints, only sixty were ever identified as insurgents. Much of the action is filtered through Sally's camera and tempered by his fatuous Godardian promise of "truth 24 times a second." Everything else is played out on an assortment of blogs, security cams, YouTube rants, Iraqi news reports and jihadist websites.ĭe Palma is consistent in this fractured multimedia methodology, as well as in his cinematic jouissance - at one point fabricating an arty French documentary, replete with symphonic music and Wild Bunch homage, to show Sally and his unit administering a checkpoint. ![]() De Palma, however, operates at once-removed: "Welcome to the oven," Baghdad-based Private Angel "Sally" Salazar (Izzy Diaz) tells the presumed audience for the video journal he's keeping in the hopes that it will get him into film school. Powerful, polarizing and disturbing even in the context of the war's ongoing horror stories, Redacted was made in Jordan over eighteen days for $5 million and has a credibly sun-blasted look. Bush declared our mission accomplished - or that, reading about American soldiers who raped a fourteen-year-old girl and murdered her family, Brian De Palma would feel compelled to remake his 1989 Viet-nightmare Casualties of War under the title Redacted. It's not surprising that Viet-vet PTSD disability-compensation cases have doubled since George W. technological supremacy is confounded, with atrocious unintended consequences. Yet, pinned down in the Mesopotamian desert rather than an Indochinese jungle, U.S. administration bogged down in an ill-conceived, undeclared, bungled, costly and apparently endless counterinsurgency? (Although who familiar with American history could doubt its recurrence?) ![]() Acid flashback or déjà vu? Who, having lived through the late '60s, would have anticipated re-experiencing the spectacle of an arrogantly mendacious U.S.
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