war - The Screengrab

The Return of Mark Leyner

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the forthcoming John Cusack movie War, Inc. comes in the opening credits, which reveal that the movie's screenplay is by Cusack, Jeremy (Bulworth) Pikser, and Mark Leyner. Leyner, now 52, was that rarest of things, a genuine literary star in the 1990s, when such books as Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroentesterologist were both critically acclaimed and commercially trendy. Leyner, whose writing danced on the line between experimental meta-fiction and stand-up comedy, was a popular get for magazine profiles and a welcome guest on the David Letterman and Conan O'Brien talk shows. But after his 1998 novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, he slipped from view. Where's he been all this time? Trying to break into writing for TV and movies, it appears. He developed "a pilot about a kilt-wearing, punk rock surgeon for MTV called Iggy Vile, M.D." and wrote scripts for the acclaimed mental-health-ward network drama Wonderland, which ABC cancelled almost instantly--before, in fact, any of the episodes Leyner worked on had a chance to air.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "War, Inc."

John Cusack gets his smug on in War, Inc., a satiricial action comedy with a touch every bit as light and precise as its sledgehammer title. Cusack, who co-produced the movie with Grace Loh for his New Crime Productions, and splits the screenplay credit between himself, novelist Mark Leyner, and Bulworth scripter and Huffington Post blogger Jeremy Pikser, plays a hit man who is hired by Tamerlane, a Halliburton-like corporaton that is staffing America's first war that has been fully outsourced to the private sector. The movie intends an attack on how big business profits from, and may even influence, American foreign policy, but its ideas about how that's reshaping the world seem to have only gotten as far as slapping company logos on the sides of tanks and in smoking urban war zones, a device that mainly results in some really questionable product placement deals.

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