Tuesday 4 September 2007
Tuesday
Apparently there are not one, but two films about Iraq showing at the Venice Film Festival this week. The first I mentioned earlier: Brian De Palma's Redacted. The second is called In The Valley of Elah, and stars Charlize Theron and Tommy-Lee Jones as two people hunting for a missing soldier. It's directed by Paul Haggis (who directed Crash). These are the first, big, high profile Hollywood movies about the war - which seem to me to be a long time coming. De Palma's is generally so far agreed to be better, and more critical, than In The Valley of Elah. Their premieres come just days after Ridley Scott was quoted saying it's very hard to get good movies made in Hollywood anymore. He argued against the run of franchises that we've seen, and how the percentage of good films is becoming less and less. To hear this from a successful director is fairly astonishing, but at least Hollywood are putting themselves forward as possibly critical of the Iraq war. Even if these films aren't good, they're at least challenging the mainstream political thought in America, which is something.
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And especially from Ridley Scott. There are a lot of directors who sound off about Hollywood but Ridley's been pretty quiet over the years. When challenged on this he said, "don't bite the hand that feeds you". And he added something along the lines that people who don't think they are part of hollywood will never change hollywood. If they say something like "hollywood is making bad movies" then they are so detached as to be irrelevant.
I wonder if those words have come back to haunt him?
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