Mark Cuban writes in his blog that he did not read the script to “Redacted” or “know all that much about it” before giving director Brian De Palma the go-ahead to do his hit job on the troops in Iraq.
That is a curious position of the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, given his well-known thoroughness and attention to detail in the NBA.
In this case, he put his money behind a project while having only the vaguest knowledge about its essence.
The film is based on the actual events involving a 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered by U.S. soldiers. The soldiers also murdered the girl’s family.
De Palma has mined this material in the past, with “Casualties of War,” the 1989 flick that detailed the abuses of American troops in Vietnam.
De Palma makes no secret of his intentions.
“The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what is happening in Iraq to the American people,” he says. “The pictures are what will stop the war. One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against the war.”
De Palma is entitled to his heavy-handed message. But his flick no more validates his view than if he were pro-victory and had made a heartwarming movie that showed American troops building schools in Iraq and befriending the Iraqi people.
War is a nasty business, as Americans know only too well. Even the good guys sometimes can be found in black hats. But that is only one snap shot out of the picture album.
Cherry-picking an event to bolster a political view is fairly easy stuff, as De Palma has shown anew.
It is his view, as it is the view of most of Hollywood, that America is a morally repugnant place, symbolized by those practitioners of evil, George Bush and Dick Cheney.
This delusional thought process is difficult to grasp but all too familiar today. Too many Hollywood types champion the dictatorial charms of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and romanticize the brutality of Che Guevara.
This intellectual dishonesty plays well in Hollywood, where having it both ways is standard. Hollywood is the kind of place that denies the power of its images if it is pushing gratuitous sex and carnage on the young but accepts the power of its images if it is pushing a political statement on the public.
The far left has become adept at these brain-twisting formulations, none more obtuse than the “we-support-the-troops-but-not-the-war” mantra.
The boots on the ground are the first to say they can do without the far left’s definition of support because of its capacity to embolden the enemy.
De Palma’s unflinching look at the atrocity certainly will be picked up by those who feel a surge of elation while pushing a steak knife through the neck of an unlucky American.
Not surprisingly, Cuban sees a higher purpose.
“Diversity of information makes for more informed perspectives and decisions,” he writes in his blog.
That is true enough, except diversity of thought is mostly a one-way street in Hollywood.
Cuban, to his credit, concedes he is no armchair general, the favored position of many Americans today.
“I don’t agree or disagree with the war because I don’t know enough,” he writes. “There isn’t enough information available to me to take a position beyond hoping it runs its course very, very quickly and our troops return home safely as soon as it is viable.”
Of course, American troops gone wild is a staple of the far left, going back to John Kerry’s Senate testimony in 1971, when he told of the U.S. military razing villages in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan,” among other atrocities.
De Palma, with Cuban’s backing, is merely trafficking in the same old boilerplate.
It never gets old to the choir of the like-minded.
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