Lights! Camera! Torture! | Errol Morris attempts to recreate the horrors of Abu Ghraib on a soundstage in his documentary Standard Operating Procedure.
IMPRISONED IN A CELL!
Standard Operating Procedure
DIRECTOR | Errol Morris
As the followup to Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure was probably the most highly anticipated of all the documentaries about the war in Iraq — but if you want to know The Dictator’s opinion, it was by far the most disappointing. True, Morris gets those thumbs-up gals, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman, to open up about their experiences as guards in Abu Ghraib, but this ground was covered more clearly in Taxi to the Dark Side (which came out on DVD a couple of weeks ago) and with fewer obtrusive stylistic tics.
STUCK IN A MOVIE WITH SHIA LaBEOUF!
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
CAST | Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, John Hurt
This summer delivered great cartoons (Wall•E), solid comedies (Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express), and terrific comic book movies (Iron Man, The Dark Knight) — who’d have thought that Steven Spielberg would let us down the hardest? No one shoots and edits action sequences better than the S-man, but even Armond White would have to admit that this material — Seriously? Shia LaBeouf swinging through the jungle vines? — is nowhere near his usual standards.
TRAPPED IN A WINDSHIELD!
Stuck
CAST | Mena Suvari, Stephen Rea
With this year’s Edmonton International Film Festival all wrapped up, now’s a good time to pop in a DVD and revisit one of the hits from last year’s EIFF: a nasty little black comedy that’s also a welcome return to form for Re-Animator director Stuart Gordon. You may have heard the news story that inspired the plot: Mena Suvari is a drug-abusing white-trash nurse who hits homeless man Stephen Rea with her car on the way home from a party — and leaves him, stuck in her windshield, in her garage, waiting for him to die. It’s B-movie gold.
