What do you do with Josh Fox’s Memorial Day, a sporadically engaging (but far too simple-minded to be as troubling as it wants to be) hypothetical slice-of-life which exists to use spring break to explain away Abu Ghraib? When I saw the film at CineVegas last summer, Memorial Day certainly seemed to have fewer defenders than detractors, and I found it to be alternately mesmerizing, infuriating, boring and eye-rollingly facile. I think it fails as a narrative film, even as it occasionally stuns as a work of pure cinema. And yet, I don’t think it’s dismissable outright.

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