There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.
In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day.Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”
But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeuneputs it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?
In this longish but fascinating video companion piece to his Atlantic story on how Hollywood has reverted to 70s-style dialectics in order to talk about current global conflicts, Ross Douthat explains why the recent wave of Iraq movies haven’t connected with critics or audiences. The problem, in part, is that “Hollywood hasn’t found anything new to say about the Iraq War that you wouldn’t expect them to say based on what they had to say about Vietnam.” Via The House Next Door. Also on the topic of the contemporary war film’s unwillingness to telegraph unexpected or unsafe points of view: The NY Times did a profile of Stop-Loss director Kimberley Pierce over the weekend, and though an inordinate amount of space is given over to explanations for why it took Pierce nine years to make a second film, there’s some interesting stuff about the attempts made to “move towards a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.”
Stop Loss - or UKPP as most locals call it around here in Austin (short for The Untitled Kimberly Pierce Project) – was easily one of the most anticipated films of SXSW 2008. Written by a native, shot in and out of town and pertaining to residents of the area, the film generated so much interest that when festival producer Matt Dentler introduced the film as being, “the movie I got the single most calls about saying, ‘You have to play this.’”
The title comes from an unfair clause in a soldier’s contract that acts as a loophole in wartime that states the army can keep you even after you’ve served your tour of duty. This clause has been commonly exercised under the George W. Bush regime and has, in some ways, been the lifeblood that allows America to stay at war in Iraq.
The story is simple. A group of friends comes back home from war and reunites with their loved ones, for better or for worse. When memories of their final, particularly painful combat mission send them all mentally into different dark tortured places, their home lives fall apart and they desperately try to help each other out. But when the leader of the pack Brandon King (played by Ryan Phillippe) is stop-lossed and faces the decision whether to flee his country and his army, their lives might never be the same.
2008 SXSW Special Jury Prize winning documentary Full Battle Rattle manages to find a unique way to examine the War in Iraq. Rather than bring their cameras into an actual war zone, they decided to look at a simulated war zone, the U.S. Army’s training facility in the Mojave Desert. I talked to directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss about finding a way to elicit both outrage and admiration.
Sometime last year, the term “Iraq fatigue” was coined to describe the unwillingness of festival audiences and box office patrons to engage with the glut of Iraq documentaries being made. I would call Full Battle Rattle a post-fatigue film.
Rather than focus on the battle field, the administration’s failed policies, or the diplomatic fallout of illegal rendition and torture, the film examines a model Iraqi town in the Mojave desert used to train troops before deployment. By looking at a simulation of the violence and political strife, directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss are able to engage subjects that would otherwise be too politically divisive to find an audience on both sides of the political divide. The film is a surprising mix of what could be read as surreal and biting commentary on the American war machine on the one hand, and a loving portrait of honorable soldiers on the other.
True/False co-director David Wilson presented recent Oscar winner Alex Gibney with the festival’s True Vision Award on Saturday, before a screening of Gibney’s latest opus, Gonzo. The film takes a comprehensive look at the zeitgeist-defining glory years and post-middle-age decline of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose commitment to truth through fictionalization inspired Wilson to brand him “a man who could well be the patron saint of True/False.” In introducing Gibney, Wilson noted that the festival was proud to host the director on his first stop after last week’s Oscar ceremony. When he reached the mic, Gibney corrected the record. “This is not my first stop after that event in Hollywood,” the filmmaker said. “I looked at that as a warm-up to True/False.”
The True Vision Award is designed to honor mid-career filmmakers who, in the words of Wilson, “are pushing the non-fiction form forward.” It’s a bit of a disappointment, then, that formally, Gonzo swings wildly between stylistic experimentation and rote talking-head traditionalism. Shooting on high def video to appease producers Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who will release the film theatrically under the auspices of Magnolia before broadcasting Gonzo on their HD Net TV, Gibney seems to struggle to transcend the standard visual tropes of the medium. The bulk of the film consists of sit-down interviews with expert witnesses, including Thompson’s son and two ex-wives, Jann Wenner and Pat Buchanan; much of the rest of the footage is culled from fiction films about Thompson and previous documentaries. When Gibney does take chances––such as when he casts actors in a home-video style reenactment set to an actual audio recording of Thompson’s visit to a Nevada taco stand, the transcription of which formed a chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas––the end result is not dissimilar to something one might see on basic cable. There are inspired ideas here, but with its sometimes awkward video effects and general made-for-TV patina, the whole thing looks a little downmarket for a filmmaker of Gibney’s caliber.
Which is not to say that Gonzo doesn’t offer valuable insight into Thompson’s life, work, and, especially, the power of his celebrity. …Read more
As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.
You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?
The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.
Agnes Varnum points to the International Museum of Women’s Online Film Festival, through which you can watch a new film by a female director every day through the month of October. There’s some good stuff, including The Grace Lee Project, and a fascinating short documentary that I just watched by Turkish filmmaker Melis Birder called The Tenth Planet: A Single Woman’s Life in Baghdad. Filmmaker Melis Birder went to Baghdad in January 2004 looking for a story, and found one in the social life of her translator, an unmarried 20-something working woman named Kawkab. Kawkab and her friends and family speak incredibly candidly about sex, marriage, Sunni/Shia conflict, the difficulties of an infant democracy, and life in Baghdad after the U.S. occupation. Watch it here, and for more information on the film, see its official website.
While Tom Cruise continued to abstain from publicizing his own politics on theLions For Lambs press tour, the film’s director and co-star Robert Redford “lash[ed] out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” at a press conference in Rome yesterday. “We have lost lives, we’ve lost sacred freedoms, we’ve lost financial stability; we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage,” said the sometime Sundance Kid.
“The world’s first user-generated movie” begins shooting this week in London. MySpace users picked the director and some of the stars; Ewan Bremner’s in it, too. Be very afraid.
I’m not sure exactly what “two-way plug-and-play technology” entails, but the MPAA thinks it puts their copyrights at risk, and they want the FCC to ban consumer electronics manufacturers from making and selling it.
At Steady Diet of Film, Erin has a great post about two not-so-great film recommendations that came her way via form emails from John Kerry and the ACLU. Particularly alarming (to me, anyway) is Kerry’s endorsement of Paul Haggis’ In The Valley of Elah. In the portion of the email that Erin excerpts, Kerry essentially uses rhetoric to fight rhetoric. Elah is not “an ‘anti-war’ film,” he says (his fear quotes, BTW), because that term is too “too cheap and easy and clichéd.” “No,” says Kerry. Elah “is a film about soldiers and families.” Nothing easy or clichéd about that!
MTV has the exclusive trailer for Stop-Loss, Kimberley Pierce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry. The film–which has already been the subject of muchpartisanbickering, sight unseen–stars Ryan Philippe as a decorated Iraq War veteran who resists a loophole that would send him back into combat after his tour of duty is up.
Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:
there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.
Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.
UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.
And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?
Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:
As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.
I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.
Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Bloodpremiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.
The Weinstein Company has apparently bumped the release date of Grace is Gone from October to December, and our favorite hyper-reactionary conservative film blog, taking a cue from the New York Post, says it’s a victory in the War on Terror.
In this post on his NYP movie blog, Lou Lumenick speculates first that the move might have something to do with the fact that the film was rejected from the New York Film Festival, which would have ostensibly given TWC a medium-profile platform from which to roll out the film in October. Lumenick (who is enough of a fan of Grace that his endorsement appears at the top of the film’s poster) then tosses out the possibility that Harvey Weinstein may have bumped Grace in reaction to “the soft opening numbers” of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah. It’s that suggestion that engenders this quip from Libertas: “Wouldn’t it be nice to think that every studio holding some vanity pro-Al Queda movie is right-now-as-I-write-this trembling at the inevitability of the red ink coming?”
Maybe that would be “nice,” but the thing is, Grace is about as far from a “vanity pro-Al Queda movie” as you can get.
There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s 
As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s 
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For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, 
The Weinstein Company has apparently bumped the release date of 
