Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...documentaries is one reason the form?s audience is so severely limited. You generally approach factual films dutifully, without the joyous (if oft disappointed) anticipation you bring to fictional features. Errol Morris is acutely aware of this defect, and he likes to liven things up by bringing what Hollywood has always called ?production values? to his docs. His new movie, Standard Operating Procedure, about the shocking photographs that revealed the horrific conditions at Iraq?s Abu Ghraib prison circa 2003, offers a compendium of these techniques...
...There is, to begin with, the film?s score by Hollywood composer Danny Elfman, which would pass virtually without notice in a fictional melodrama, but which here rings and thunders with portent. These are accompanied by sound effects of dubious provenance. Then there are the inserts, like the famous deck of playing cards, carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein and his leading henchmen, which was distributed to American troops in Iraq, Images of some of these cards, very handsomely photographed against black, fly artfully, abstractly across the screen in a manner that is distinctly at odds with the essential grubbiness...
...their heads or leashed like dogs--is harrowing and haunting. It's also spooky how poised and telegenic the perps are; two, Javal Davis and Sabrina Harman, could easily fit into the cast of The O.C. But the ultimate anomaly of Morris' movie is how closely the story mirrors Hollywood melodrama...
...Kaplan agrees, noting that the media backlash is actually a positive indication of being in the spotlight. “I think he made the right decision,” Kaplan says. “He wrote a New York Times bestseller that ended up being made into a Hollywood blockbuster. Can’t say he did anything wrong.” In spite of this controversy, or perhaps because of it, there is a growing interest in blackjack. Irvine has an HBO drama series and a reality show currently in development. Kaplan, who has been retired from blackjack...
...tenderly tell the story of the pained collapse of the demimonde she inhabited. One by one, the subjects of her photographs overdosed or died of a disease that people then knew little about. They demonstrated a calculus that today is commonly understood—that makes for E! True Hollywood Stories, not gallery exhibitions—one which draws a correlation between reckless youth and a forlorn future. That said, shocking art on the whole is not as shocking as it was thirty years ago, for the simple reason that the means of communicating one’s story...