Culturopolis

There hasn’t been such a gratuitous abuse of slow motion since Flashdance as there is in Standard Operating Procedure. Errol Morris’s film gives the same emotional significance in his tedious overuse of the technique to a drop of blood falling from the body of an Iraqi man who has been tortured to death, as it does to a cracked egg artfully dropped into a frying pan by super-bad man Saddam Hussein. Pretty, pretty pictures. Errol Morris’s “expose” of Abu Ghraib is like watching two hours of “The Jerry Springer Show.” Never has there been so much play-by-play description of senseless, base behavior with so little insight. Coupled with Morris’s artful reenactments and endless slow-motion imagery, and the film makes Abu Ghraib into a music video, circa 1985. It’s an intensely disturbing, obsessively documented film about the disturbing, obsessive need to document. The bulk of Standard Operating Procedure is a succession of Abu talking heads: poster girl Lynndie England, and some equal...

Some films bring out the smart-aleck in me. It was hard not to take the piss out of the tempest in a teapot faux-Merchant Ivory production Before the Rains , reviewed here for New York Press .

I was amused by a recent interview with writer/director David Mamet in The New Yorker . Somewhat sheepishly amused, because I am one of the journalists who has occasionally opened with a lame question like the one he cites in his litany of clichés, “What inspired you to do this film?” I often think on press junkets how tired people must get answering the same questions over and over, but also of how hard it is to ask a truly original question. I reviewed Mamet’s latest Redbelt , in The Charleston City Paper.

Few things, perverse though it may be, give me more pleasure than an unhappy, alienated film hero. I will always identify more with the Travis Bickles and the tortured chumps like Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity than with cinema's winners. If I have a movie culture Achille's Heel, a surefire way to slay me, it's the loser, the oddball. La Vie En Rose , Old Joy , Ghost World : show me a failure and I'll show you a five star rating. On that note, two recent films about alienated guys, The Visitor and The Counterfeiters spoke to that part of me that wants to see suffering, miserable-looking sadsacks struggling to connect.