I haven't seen "Redacted," and I'm not sure that I plan to, especially considering the reaction it's been getting from critics. Hell, even Armond White, the world's most ardent Brian DePalma apologist, couldn't bring himself to defend it:
"Redacted’s bald, humorless title feels desperate, like De Palma’s defection to digital-video fashion—desperate to keep up. For a cinema aesthete, that’s practically a capitulation to terrorism... Redacted opens itself to the obnoxious rabble-rousing of right-wing fanatics like Bill O’Reilly because it carelessly blames the war on the young men who fight it...The O'Reilly vs. Mark Cuban brouhaha over this is silly on a number of levels, from O'Reilly's threat to "come after" Cuban unless he agrees to pull the film, to the insistence that the movie "slanders the troops" and "puts them in harm's way" when 1) it's based on an incident that actually happened, and 2) O'Reilly and most of the others making noise have not actually seen the film. As is BillO's slander of Cuban, a multi-billionaire capitalist who has said he voted for Bush twice, as a "far-leftist." Posted by Stephen Silver at November 15, 2007 05:22 PM