Word: palmas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bleakest and toughest of the Iraq films is Brian De Palma's low-budget, no-star Redacted. Based (like Elah) on an actual atrocity, it takes the form of a multimedia documentary: a mix of simulated TV-news reports, YouTube blogs, video posts and a daily video record of the war, kept by a soldier whose buddies see their sergeant blown up by an IED and go a little crazy. In a long scene that shocks and sickens, they break into an Iraqi home, rape a girl and slaughter her family. An antiwar splatter movie, Redacted ain't subtle. What...
...Dad” doesn’t have a plot so much as a set of relationships that provide a pretext for mounting hysteria. There’s Madame Rosepettle (Alexandra C. Palma ’08) and her emotionally stunted son Jonathan (Jonah C. Priour ’09), whose excessively tight-knit relationship makes Norman Bates look well-adjusted. Intruding into their claustrophobic domesticity in a hotel in Havana are Rosalie (Sophie C. Kargman ’08), in love with Jonathan, and Commodore Roseabove (S. Adam Goldenberg ’08), in love with Rosepettle. The main...
...life figure of Madame Rosepettle. Resembling a fashion-forward Wicked Witch of the West in a series of all-black mourning outfits (designed by Heidi Hermiller) in honor of the dead husband whose coffin sits by her bed, she manages to combine the regal and the psychotic eerily well. Palma lends an appropriate volume and edge to her character, often seeming to be on the verge of physically attacking someone, but lacks some of the hauteur that should accompany Rosepettle’s sense of entitlement, even at her most hysterical. Fortunately, Palma is called upon to be aggressive...
...this edition of TIFF, one day was not enough to contain all the 9/11-related movies - not with Hollywood finally getting the Iraq bug. Two American fiction films, Brian De Palma's Redacted and Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, both based on true incidents of violence involving U.S. soldiers, have been among the festival's most strident talking points. Gavin Hood's Rendition tossed Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep into a story of U.S.-condoned torture of a terror suspect. But documentary films are the main entertainment conduit for leftist antiwar sentiment (the right wing has talk...
...movie has torrents of words and goes heavy on macho posturing; at times it suggests a ragged off-off-Broadway play. And De Palma is not going for subtlety here: Flake, the craziest of the squad members, has a Confederate flag for his bedspread - he's a lunatic Reb. But Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11, and his strongest cinematic and political statement at least since Casualties of War, his Vietnam...