Word: standardize
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...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...
...Implicitly - and correctly - Standard Operating Procedure - wants us to remember that Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, an isolated incident that can be apologized for, swept aside, blamed on the ignorance and stupidity of the ?other ranks? as the British have always rather contemptuously called their dogfaces. It was, and it should remain, a central symbol of what is surely the most immoral and misguided military adventure in American history. All I am arguing here is that Morris?s manner of relating this story is very often quite inappropriate to its substance. It is a sordid and appalling tale...
...poems: the Hyakunin Isshu (one hundred people, one poem each), also known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. For more than seven centuries, these poems have resonated with countless readers. They have also acted as a dynamo of cultural creation - driving later poets to reach for the poetic gold standard they established and propelling generations of visual artists to set down in myriad mediums the arresting images they contain. The poems have penetrated the culture so deeply that some Japanese still play a centuries-old card game (karuta) based on them...
...strengths as art, politics and soap opera, Standard Operating Procedure will reach only the art-house audience--a small fraction of the Harold & Kumar crowd. Yet Morris' argument is pure populist Hollywood. He says the grunts were the little guys who took the fall while the brass got off free. Harold & Kumar, oddly, believes our boys can be saved by a higher power: the President of the United States...
...Standard Operating Procedure, from Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War), is a creepily edifying study of the U.S. soldiers who took those horrifying photos at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Then there's the stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay, in which the two Asian-American dopesters, last seen searching for a White Castle burger, get into lots of zany scrapes, including being arrested as terrorists and sent away for sexually demeaning punishment from guards at Gitmo...