10 comments

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  Dan Leo

  1 year ago

  Dearest Siren, haven't seen the movie, don't know if I will, but as usual your writing makes my remaining brain cells very happy; this is why I have you listed in my blogroll as:
  
  "The Very Talented Miss Self-Styled Siren".
  
  In some impossibly better world your by-line would be in the New York Times.
  
  Cheers.
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  Self Styled Siren

  1 year ago

  Thank you very much, Dan.
  
  So, are you saying Eli might go for it? ;)
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  Jim Tourtelott

  1 year ago

  Damn it, why didn't Ernst Lubitsch make Westerns? Can you imagine how much fun Gunsmoke would be if Miss Kitty were played by the wavishing Kay Fwancis?
  
  The Hitchcock musical idea, though--not so much.
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  Self Styled Siren

  1 year ago

  The closest Hitch came was having Doris Day sing Que Sera, Sera in The Man Who Knew Too Much. In one scene she sings it like a dirge. I
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  The Shamus

  1 year ago

  Siren, Siren — I can feel your pulse pounding way down South here. Why do you read those web sites?
  As for De Palma, your post is a nice birthday tribute to the man. He turns 67 tomorrow, and he's back in the cultural news, and winning awards at film fests. He deserves it.
  P.S. No love for "The Fury"?
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  Campaspe

  1 year ago

  Shamus, I don't know. One time at my workplace my colleagues staged an intervention: they took away my WSJ editorial page. 'You do not need to be reading that, hon.' Maybe I need a 12-step program.
  
  I do like The Fury but rarely list it because Amy Irving irritates me, for reasons I can't completely explain.
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  Kevin Wolf

  1 year ago

  How the right wing and/or religious crowd never tires of bashing movies they refuse to see is beyond my comprehension. You figure they'd at least go to the theater so they could walk out indignantly halfway through the film.
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  Tom Watson

  1 year ago

  I think DePalma should have made a semi-fictional movie about the invasion of Iran. Now that could've moved the damned needle....
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  Chuck Tryon

  1 year ago

  Not sure I have much to add here, although I wrote about this same topic a few days ago.
  
  I think it'll be an interesting film, and the "documentary" issues are especially interesting to me.
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  Bob Boldt

  1 year ago

  I am appalled to hear that Redacted has been redacted. As if it were possible to further destroy the identities of the poor, maimed, dead Iraqis whose faces formed the background of the end titles in Brian De Palma’s film, now add the redaction of their images entirely. Are the cost benefit analysts working for the pharmaceuticals, automobile manufactures and the tobacco companies the only ones with any sense of risk or courage anymore? I prefer to think this has less to do with protecting the producers from legal action or the Iraqis from humiliation and invasion of privacy, than a monumental cowardice when it comes to confronting of the American moviegoer with a little too much reality. De Palma’s initial acquiescence to the insurers forced him to abandon the use of any actual footage in the body of the film. This has already resulted in the Right Wing warmongers accusing him of “making it all up” because he restaged rather than using the real footage. This colossal inability on their part to understand the difference between art and life is too outrageous to even deserve comment.
  
  What this chronic failure of nerve on the part of underwriters will do to the future of actual documentary filmmaking I leave to cynical speculation. I am convinced however that eventually the entertainment industry, corporations and the insurance pencil pushers will so lobotomize the creative spirit in this country, that the only artists left in our culture will be members of the Brittany Spears Ilk’s Club.
  
  If you wish to see an unrepentant, unredacted piece of filmmaking that is not afraid of lawsuits and not afraid to show the real face of war, I recommend to you a moving three minute video on YouTube called “Kindertotenlied”.
  
  http://youtube.com/results?search_query=kindert...
  
  I hope that when the producers, whose footage was stolen for use in this video, finally get around to suing the filmmaker, they will learn exactly how much blood can be squeezed from a rock (as opposed to Iraq). Abject poverty, my friends, does have its privileges.
  
  Peace,
  
  Bob Boldt
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