iraq - The Screengrab

Screengrab Review: "Heavy Metal in Baghdad"

In my other life as a music writer, I listen to a lot of heavy metal music, and one of the things that I always tell people about the contemporary metal scene that seems to surprise them is that it's one of the most diverse types of music, both in terms of the material and the people who make it, imaginable. So ingrained in the American psyche is the image of metal as strictly the provenance of jacked-up white dudes from the hinterlands that it shocks people when you tell them that there are more women in metal than ever before, or that there's hardly a corner of the globe, from Southeast Asia to South America, without a thriving extreme metal scene. Even in the volatile Middle East, metal has found a home, but to hear Heavy Metal in Baghdad directors Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi tell it, there's only one metal band in all of Iraq -- and they can't wait to get out.

The compelling documentary follows the exploits of Acrassicauda, a Baghdad thrash outfit, from their earliest gigs before the U.S. invasion of Iraq (where they were obligated to sing a ridiculous anthem to Saddam Hussein in order to get permission to play gigs) to their life after the war, when their practice space was hit by a missile that destroyed all their instruments and they are faced with the unwelcoming choice of either leaving behind their families and home in order to have a shot at living and working free of the specter of death, or staying in their native country and sacrificing their careers as musicians -- and possibly their lives. Some of the movie's most tragic -- and hilarious -- moments come when we see how difficult it is for Acrassicauda to accomplish things that metal bands elsewhere in the world take absolutely for granted. They're afraid to grow their hair long lest they become targets for anti-Western extremists; in the newly oppressive religious atmosphere of post-Saddam Iraq, women don't dare come to their shows; a brief sojourn in Syria finds them finally able to record a short EP, but the men who run the studio have never recorded any kind of rock music before and don't know how to mic them; and partying and drinking are special treats to be kept hidden behind closed doors, not everyday activities.

Box-Office Quagmire

Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent

Posted Nov 05 2007, 12:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, redacted, iraq, war, rendition, lions for lambs, ao scott, in the valley of elah, the situation, grace is gone, the kingdom

Redacted Redacted

Brian De Palma has always been fascinated by contrasting points of view, and by the way the media frames and filters complex events to serve its own purposes. His new film, Redacted, which got the sixty-seven-year-old director his first invitation to the New York Film Festival, is based on an actual atrocity committed by American soldiers in Iraq; it tells its story through mock-documentary footage, YouTube and video blog postings, and one soldier's video diary. It's clearly a staged and acted film; De Palma isn't out to fool anybody, though there have still been reports of walkouts during a couple of key, horrific moments. But the movie ends with a brief montage of actual photos of carnage from Iraq, photos that look like scenes that have come before them, yet are so much worse that they put the whole film into perspective.

De Palma has great faith in the power of images to change the world; after Redacted won him the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival, he confidently told reporters that "The pictures are what will stop the war," and he's chastised the media for not showing Americans the full awfulness of what has been unleashed against the Iraqi people. So it's an oddly apropriate sick joke — a De Palma-esque joke — that Redacted itself is being, as its director says, redacted: the movie's producers are insisting on "protecting" the anonymity of the dead and wounded in the photos by placing black bars across their faces, as if they were in a vintage stag film. De Palma has been using the bully pulpit of the NYFF stage to complain about this, and even to publicly argue with his backers. Blogger and critic Jurgen Fauth has posted video of a recent Q&A here. — Phil Nugent

Posted Oct 17 2007, 12:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: NYFF, phil nugent, redacted, iraq, war, brian de palma, censorship