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Friday, January 3, 2025
BOOK - 'CASUALTIES OF WAR - AN INVESTIGATION' - OUT NOW
NATHAN RERA'S FRENCH BOOK HAS BEEN TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, PUBLISHED BY STICKING PLACE BOOKS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/bookcasualtiesnathan.jpg

Back in 2021, we posted regarding a nearly 600-page French book about Casualties Of War, written by Nathan Réra. Last week, Sticking Place Books published an English translation of Réra's book, titled, Casualties of War: An Investigation. Here's a description from the press release, with quotes from Julie Salamon and Adrian Martin:
Casualties of War, Brian De Palma's devastating and brilliant 1989 feature film starring Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox, tells the true story of the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman by a patrol of American soldiers. "When you leave the theatre," wrote Pauline Kael in her review, "you'll probably find that you're not ready to talk about it. You may also find it hard to talk lightly about anything." De Palma himself said: "It's a film I still have a hard time watching because it's so disturbing. It's one of the most horrific stories you can imagine."

Drawing on a wealth of rare material, including military archives, correspondence and unpublished screenplays, Nathan Réra revisits the 1969 book by Daniel Lang that documented the actual events, examines two films from the early 1970s inspired by Lang's work, and analyses a series of unproduced scripts written over a period of many years, before exploring in detail the making and reception of De Palma's film. More than just a production history, Réra's text delves into the aesthetic, ethical and political issues surrounding screen representations of the Vietnam War, and violence against women in the context of armed conflict.

This fascinating and unusual book uses Brian De Palma's unappreciated Vietnam masterpiece as a portal into the collision of history, journalism, politics and the moviemaking process. Nathan Réra brings academic rigor and a storytelling gift to this intriguing investigation into the long and painful transformation of a horrific incident into art.

- Julie Salamon, author of The Devil's Candy.

What began in admiration of Brian De Palma's remarkable film Casualties of War became an intrepid, rigorous investigation for Nathan Réra: a probe into the original, horrendous Vietnam War incident, the extraordinary, journalistic book it gave rise to, and the many attempts (realised or not) to bring this difficult, confronting material to the screen in all its complexity. Ending on a note of autobiographical revelation, this book delves deeply, emerging with an abundance of rich insights.

- Adrian Martin, author of Filmmakers Thinking.


Posted by Geoff at 10:01 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 7, 2025 6:27 PM CST
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Saturday, November 23, 2024
'AND A FEW NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES COME TO MIND RIGHT AWAY'
JOHN C. REILLY IS ASKED THE FIRST THIING THAT COMES TO MIND FOR CASUALTIES OF WAR


While promoting a new animated short streaming on Disney+, John C. Reilly was asked by ABC 7's Joelle Garguilo to say the first thing that comes to mind for several projects, starting with Brian De Palma's Casualties Of War:
Joelle Garguilo: I’m going to bring up a project, and just the first thing that comes to mind for you.

John C. Reilly: Okay.

Joelle Garguilo: Casualties Of War.

John C. Reilly: Casualties Of War was my first movie. That was my first time on an airplane, first time in front of a camera. Yeah, a lot of firsts. I met my wife on that movie. And a few near-death experiences come to mind right away, too. As Michael J. Fox said, never drive in a country that believes in reincarnation.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
Updated: Sunday, November 24, 2024 11:03 AM CST
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Thursday, August 29, 2024
IN 2006, DE PALMA RESTORED HIS CUT OF 'CASUALTIES OF WAR'
DE PALMA TO BRUCE WEBER IN 1989: "IN A MOVIE LIKE THIS, I'M NOT SURE TESTING HAS ANY RELEVANCE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/casextended1.jpg

In 2006, when Columbia released Brian De Palma's restored cut of Casualties Of War, it was billed as the "Extended Cut."

In May of 1989, three months prior to the theatrical release of Casualties Of War, the New York Times Magazine published an article about the film by Bruce Weber, which begins with a test screening of the film. Here's an excerpt, courtesy of the book Brian De Palma Interviews, edited by Laurence F. Knapp:

IN THE MINUTES BEFORE the first public test screening of Brian De Palma's new movie at a theater in Boston, a young man approaches Steven Spielberg, De Palma's friend and fellow director who is sitting in the audience with a baseball cap pulled down over his brow, and asks him if he is Steven Spielberg.

"No," Steven Spielberg says, though as the man begins to walk away, he changes his mind.

Ambivalence and nervousness are prevalent this evening. De Palma himself, who believes this movie, Casualties of War, unequivocally to be his best, is nonetheless aware that it is not a romping entertainment. "It's so intense people may get up and leave," he said earlier in the day. At the moment, he's in the front row, and will spend the evening with his back to the screen, watching the audience.

Farther back, seated with Spielberg, are the film's producer, Art Linson, and several Columbia Pictures executives, including Dawn Steel, who approved the project in November 1987, shortly after she became president of the beleaguered studio.

Casualties of War had been abandoned by Paramount, Steel's previous employer; she rescued it for Columbia, upped the budget to a reported $22.5 million and made it her first "green light." Columbia finished 1988 last among the nine major movie studios in domestic market share, and Steel, charged with effecting a resurgence, is now awaiting summer, when the first movies produced at the studio on her watch will be released. Though Casualties of War features Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn, and is thus compatible with Steel's predilection for star packages, it isn't Ghostbusters II (which is due next month). As the lights go down, Steel is visibly on edge.

Based on the true story of an atrocity committed by a squad of American soldiers in Vietnam, Casualties of War is immediately recognizable as a Brian De Palma film. In its opening sequence, a nighttime battle in the jungle that is photographed in the glossy, hyperbolized mode De Palma has frequently favored in his depictions of threat and chaos, Daniel Eriksson, a "cherry" who is seeing his first action, falls through a hole in the jungle floor and finds himself wedged in the earth up to his armpits, his legs dangling into a tunnel dug by the Vietcong. Played by Fox, Eriksson is plainly terrified, but he is spared a bit of suspense that the audience, which sees that the tunnel occupied, is not. As Eriksson is yanked to safety by a comrade, an enemy guerrilla swipes at his legs with a knife-and misses.

It is a typical De Palma manipulation, a macabre joke played both for the audience and at its expense. It is the only one in the picture: Though the film is bursting with De Palma's inventions, the grim truth of the material is no laughing matter. When the squad members, sent on a scouting patrol, kidnap a young Vietnamese woman, rape her and kill her, Eriksson is unable to stop them and bears excruciating witness to the crime. For the remainder of the movie, he is at the mercy of his conscience.

In the middle of the screening, half a dozen people do pick up and leave. And when the lights finally come up the theater is silent. Not a rustle. Eventually, as opinion cards are distributed, Steven Spielberg leans across Dawn Steel, whose fists are not yet unclenched, and murmurs a judgment to a man sitting on her opposite side.

"You'll be thinking about this for a week," he says.

"Maybe the ending could be made simpler," De Palma says. It is the following morning, and he doesn't look well. A large man - his girth, like many of his movies, is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock - he is devilishly bearded, and can be imposingly stone-faced. But today he is pale with apparent sleeplessness. After the screening, he attended a focus group discussion, examined the audience opinion cards and went to bed. Dawn Steel and Art Linson have expressed a wary satisfaction at the results of the test, but sipping cappuccino in the lounge of his hotel and speaking in his oddly reedy voice, De Palma is more forthright. The focus group had been impatient during a key expository sequence, he says, and he now wears the aspect of a man who, at the end of a long and grueling effort, has just discovered there is more work to be done.

"We were disappointed," he says, acknowledging that the majority of the audience graded the picture in the good to very good range. "What you really want," he says, and then stops to distance himself from the studio executives. "What they want is to have it tipped way high in the excellent area." He points out that, unlike a comedy, in which you can actually gauge what the audience thinks is funny, Casualties of War is supposed to leave the audience stunned, disturbed, introspective - and silent.

"In a movie like this, I'm not sure testing has any relevance," he says. "Still, you have to consider the problems when you read the cards and listen to the focus groups. You have to consider what's bothering them. Why aren't they reacting more strongly? It unnerves you. Everyone is unnerved. No question about it."


And then the Weber article ends on a note about that test screening:
"We were in hell for five months," said Michael J. Fox. Speaking during the filming of the movie's final sequence in a San Francisco park last summer, Fox had, along with the rest of the crew, just returned from the jungles of Thailand, where the bulk of the movie was shot, and where temperatures had been routinely over 100 degrees.

"You're physically exhausted, and because of the material, you're emotionally in a bit of a state," Fox said. "It was really important to watch Brian getting out of his Volvo every day, and to know that he knew exactly what was going to happen. He inspires confidence."

Indeed, as technicians, setting up one last shot, built a track on the park grass for a camera to dolly on, De Palma, supervising, was an enormous, composed presence amid the commotion. De Palma would explain later that the scene had been storyboarded long ago; it was already in his head, and because there were no grave problems afforded by the location, the only problem left, really, was the technical one - matching his vision.

In the sequence being filmed, Eriksson, years after his discharge, confronts a young woman who reminds him of the woman he saw killed. And in the final shot, the young woman emerges from a bus, followed by Eriksson, who pursues her into the park and calls after her. As the cameras rolled, De Palma, seated in a director's chair and watching the scene through a viewfinder, hunched his shoulders, becoming aggressively more attentive, like a cat who'd heard a distant, unidentifiable sound. Fox approached the camera; the camera dollied toward Fox, so that, in the end, they were inches apart, his face in close-up, the actress Thuy Thu Le offscreen. The whole thing lasted less than a minute.

De Palma ran the actors through eight takes, consulting with Fox after each, and finally, the last couple of times, hustling just to the edge of the confrontation himself, so that he, Fox, Thuy Thu Le and the cameraman were all huddled together under the sound boom as if it were an umbrella.

It was the acting that hadn't satisfied him - Michael Fox's final expression.

It's a difficult scene to bring off," he said afterward. "You know, you run into a stranger and she looks at you and understands something about you that no one's ever understood. In a sense, she's the forgiving angel. And he's got to show that he's been forgiven. In the initial takes, it just wasn't there."

Eight months later, sitting in his Boston hotel, De Palma is asked if this is the scene that befuddled the screening audience. "No," he says, "they seemed to like that. They thought the movie was paced very well. And they were not disturbed by the violence, which in a movie of mine is remarkable."

The problem, he explains, was in the court martial scene, which the audience seemed to feel reiterated dilemmas that had already been resolved. "I think it's important to see the squad members on the stand," he says, see what they have to say, see them confronted with what they've done. But you are taking the risk of dragging the audience back through material they are familiar with, in order to get the true emotional thrust of the movie - which is that these are all casualties of war." He admits that he's thinking of dropping the trial scene, or at least editing it down.

It's an interesting moment, the film maker listening in his head to several different voices at once. He looks as if he wished they would all shut up.

How, he is asked, will the decision be made? "Everyone will give me an opinion," he says. "and then I'll do what I want."



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Sunday, August 18, 2024
35 FRAMES FROM 'CASUALTIES OF WAR'
RELEASED IN THEATERS 35 YEARS AGO TODAY, IN 1989
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/cas35th39.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 9:35 PM CDT
Updated: Sunday, August 18, 2024 9:45 PM CDT
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Thursday, August 8, 2024
THE HEADLINE - 'NIXON RESIGNING'
SOME FRAMES FROM THE OPENING SCENE OF BRIAN DE PALMA'S CASUALTIES OF WAR
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/casualtiesopening1.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 7:52 PM CDT
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Wednesday, May 29, 2024
STEPHEN BALDWIN TELLS STORY OF GETTING FIRED BY DE PALMA
"YOU DON'T ASK WHAT SEAN IS GONNA DO!!!" - SET OF CASUALTIES OF WAR



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, May 31, 2024 1:34 AM CDT
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Saturday, December 16, 2023
'CASUALTIES' DIRECTOR'S CUT, SUNDAY MORNING IN PARIS
BLUMENFELD & VACHAUD WILL PRESENT THE SCREENING & SIGN COPIES OF THEIR DE PALMA BOOK
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/cowposter65.jpg

Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud will be at Le Max Linder Panorama cinema in Paris Sunday morning to present a "Caro Ennio" film club screening of Brian De Palma's Casualties Of War, with its score by Ennio Morricone. This will be the director's cut of the film. Blumenfeld and Vachaud will be on hand after the screening to sign copies of their De Palma interviews book, which will be available, as well.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
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Sunday, May 14, 2023
'THE MOST AMBITIOUS WORK OF HIS CAREER'
NEAL JUSTIN ON FOX IN 'CASUALTIES', GUGGENHEIM ON USE OF CLIPS IN 'STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/still1255.jpg

A. Frame's Alex Welch talks to Davis Guggenheim about his Apple TV + documentary, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie:
"I found an incredible joy and levity in his books, and that surprised me," Guggenheim tells A.frame. "At first, I thought, 'Someone should direct a movie about Michael,' and then I realized, 'No, I should direct a movie about Michael.'"

That movie is Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, which features intensely personal interviews between Fox and Guggenheim about the former's life and legacy, as well as exploring the ways in which the actor has dealt with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease. According to Guggenheim, it was Fox's resilient spirit in the face of adversity that struck such a chord with him. "It made me think, 'If this guy can be so upbeat when he's got this chronic diagnosis and I'm more dark and pessimistic than him, what's really going on here?' I wanted to solve that riddle," he recalls.

"The best movies, for me, are the ones that you come at personally," says the filmmaker. "I just felt drawn to Michael as a person."

A.frame: Michael J. Fox is somebody who has been a constant fixture in a lot of peoples' lives for 40 years. Was the thought of exploring his career and pop cultural impact onscreen at all daunting, or just exciting?

It's always a little daunting, but mostly exciting. I wanted to break out of the sort of rut I was in. I mean, it was a good rut. I had made a lot of films that are about substantial things and topics that stimulated my intellect. But I wanted to break out of that, and there's something about Michael that was appealing to me. "Appealing" doesn’t even seem like the right word. There's something about him that I needed.

The film really captures his resiliency. There's a moment near the start of the film where he falls and this woman comes back to check on him and he just looks at her and quips, "You knocked me off my feet."

He's a saint. That could easily be a line from Alex P. Keaton or Marty McFly, and that moment says a lot. It was a total surprise, first of all. We almost cut just before that. We thought the take was over and he trips very deep in the frame. I've watched it so many times, though, and the thing is that he's being very deliberate with his steps while he's walking so that he doesn't fall, and then the thing that trips him up is the woman. They pass each other and she says, "Hello, Mr. Fox," and he can't help but turn to face her because he's that kind of guy. He doesn't want to be aloof. He wants to be kind, and it's that kindness that sends him tumbling. And then, of course, instead of doing what I would probably do — which is stay on the ground and call my family — he gets up and says, "You knocked me off my feet," and the woman laughs. It says everything about him. He insists that no one looks at him like he's a pathetic creature.

You use a blend of multiple different kinds of footage and media in the film. What was your thought process behind shooting some of the recreation footage used in the doc?

I knew we had to do recreations right away. Then we got Michael Harte to come on board as our editor, who's a genius. I think at Sundance I called him a "wizard genius," and I genuinely do believe that, because he's just the most gifted editor. My solution to depicting certain moments that we didn't have any archival footage for was to do recreations. His solution was always to try and find moments from Michael J. Fox's movies and re-craft them in new and inventive ways. I've seen that done before here and there. Ethan Hawke does it in his Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward documentary series, The Last Movie Stars, which is wonderful. But Michael does it very differently in Still.

You mean because he blends the recreations and movie scenes together?

Yes. For instance, it goes by too fast because it's at the very beginning of this movie, but there's a shot of this hotel in Florida. It's the first shot of the film. Then we cut to a hallway and then to a bed and then you see this figure in the bed and the figure turns and that's all recreation. But then when we cut to a close-up of him waking up, that's from The Secret of My Success. Then we cut back to the hotel room and we show him having a fistfight with Woody Harrelson in basically 10 different movies. In those scenes, the editor and I always battle a little about how to depict each moment, and we fought and fought and fought until the movie decided what was best, ultimately.

Michael is really the only person directly interviewed in the film. Did you ever consider including interviews with any of his peers or family members?

I almost didn't interview him, actually. The original plan was no interviews at all. I pitched the film to Apple that watching it would feel like watching an '80s movie. I wanted a big score. I wanted big music cues from Guns N' Roses and the Beastie Boys. I even got John Powell to score the film, and he'd never scored a documentary before. He's just done big Hollywood movies previously. I so wanted to switch directions from my previous films. I wanted to take people on a wild ride, and interviews tend to slow films down. Interviews are like the basic language of documentaries. But I'd been working on the film for a while already, and I was doing this commercial and this cinematographer showed me a shot where you can put the camera in a certain way that it looks like the interviewee is looking into the lens. It worked really well, but you have to sit really close to the camera in order to achieve that effect.

So, Michael and I were always only about four feet apart from each other. We were always looking right into each other's eyes, and I just thought, "This is amazing." It was so right, because he's right there. I didn't know for sure if it was going to work or if the audience would always be able to understand him — because sometimes his Parkinson's makes it difficult to understand what he’s saying — but he was so funny. He's funny exactly the way you see he is in the film, and he's so winning that it just worked. So, we did more interviews. We just kept going back. We did that kind of interview together about six different times.


Meanwhile, Neal Justin at Star Tribune writes, "Guggenheim's super-personal approach means there is little time to evaluate that ABC sitcom [Spin City] or much of Fox's other works. But you can do that on your own." Justin includes Casualties Of War as one of "five gems" to start with:
Fox does the most ambitious work of his career in Brian De Palma's take on the Vietnam War. He plays a private who dares to go against a gung-ho sergeant (Sean Penn) after the rape and murder of a civilian. The film never got the attention it deserved, in part because it premiered in the shadow of "Platoon." HBO Max


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Wednesday, May 3, 2023
FILMMAKER'S INSTINCT - 'STILL - A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE'
USES CLIPS FROM FOX'S FILMS TO TELL HIS STORY - "I FORGOT THE CAMERA WAS THERE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/still275.jpg

Anticipating the May 12 Apple TV+ premiere of the documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, The Globe And Mail's Barry Hertz interviewed Fox himself. "The new film is constructed in a uniquely engaging fashion," Hertz writes in the article's introduction, "with director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and editor Michael Harte mixing footage of Fox’s on-screen work with scripted re-enactments to tell the story of one Canadian kid’s rise to the top of the Hollywood ecosystem, and how being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease changed his life – for the better. Narrated by Fox – who is the only “talking head” featured here, another rejection of the typical celebrity biopic format – Still is as honest as it is adventurous."

Here's an excerpt from the interview portion:

In the new film, there’s one point where you’re talking about seeing your face on magazine covers and you say, ‘it was never a true reflection of myself.’ Is this doc, then, a true reflection of yourself?

True as it could be under the circumstances. As a young man, I was pretty naïve but I always knew when I was selling a movie or enjoying the attention. This was different. When I met Davis and he told me how much my books affected him, I agreed to go on a journey with him and see where it goes. I had no agenda. I didn’t hope it would respark my film career or anything like that. I just wanted to see how a guy who thought in a similar way, and had a great track record of filmmaking, would treat this material.

How closely involved were you in Davis’s decision to construct this film in such a unique fashion?

We talked about it early on, but it’s his genre. I remember my lawyers calling me up and saying, “Here’s how it works: you’ll get three strikes to take major plot points out,” and all these other measures to defend myself against the filmmaker. But I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to make a movie. So I waived all those provisions and I’m glad I did because god forbid I would have gone in and said don’t use my source material as part of the narrative. I thought that was so clever.

I love watching that scene where it’s talking about my relationship with [wife Tracy Pollan] and it’s footage from Bright Lights, Big City. It reminded me how lucky I’ve been in my career to work with everyone I have. Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader. It was so nice to look back and not only reflect on what was going on in my life at that point, but remember all the people I’ve met along the way.

I suppose that anybody who takes time to do this kind of exercise will find some regrets, faults in their decisions. But on the opposite end, I’m curious whether there is anything you initially felt was a mistake, a bad time in your life, that was actually much better than you initially felt, in retrospect?

I’m a goofy, optimistic guy, so all the things that have happened to me were great. I seriously wouldn’t change a thing. The difficulties I had with my early diagnosis, turning to alcohol, getting rid of that to save my marriage – as difficult and painful as all that was, I wouldn’t be the same person I am today without it, and my family wouldn’t be the same family without it. So I don’t question things, but I do celebrate them.

Some of the things in the film, people might wince at. But I was going, yeah, cool. Like that moment of me laying on the floor looking up at Tracy and finding her bored with my alcoholism and realizing that was the moment I needed to change. Yeah, I made the right decision coming out of that. The great thing about this film is the moments with my family. The way we were laughing. You can’t fake that laughter. I laugh so much it’s all you can do to get my face to not stretch beyond its skull and blow off.

Well there’s an image for a movie. Actually, it sounds pulled from The Frighteners.

Peter Jackson, I got him between masterpieces.

Hey, The Frighteners is a favourite film of mine.

I wouldn’t joke about it if I didn’t believe that, too. He’s a great filmmaker. I first met him in Toronto, when Heavenly Creatures premiered at the festival. I flew up to see it, and then agreed to make that film.

There is at one point in this doc where Davis says that you get close to the tough stuff and then dart away. How hard did he push you – and how hard did you push yourself – to get to the more difficult material?

Davis did a brilliant thing, in that he put the camera 15 feet away from where I’m sitting, back up against the wall, and he left it on. I forgot it was there. The painful stuff, when I’m looking vacant and drooling in that blank, concrete Parkinson’s stare, I couldn’t have manufactured that for him. He had the filmmaker’s instinct to know how and where to get that. I didn’t see footage until the end, so I didn’t even know what he was up to. He wasn’t going to do talking heads – the one talking head was just mine, even though my head can barely talk some time. If I had any prenegotiated control over the material, it would have been a disaster.

I would, though, like to see a sequel where it’s just talking heads of collaborators you’ve worked with.

They gave me an Academy Award this year for my humanitarian work, which was great because Woody Harrelson presented it. He gets up and starts telling these stories and I thought, oh Jesus. Someone once said to me that we were “eighties famous,” and that’s true. We had a different perspective. There were none of these things [points to his smartphone]. It was just hardcore.

Woody starts to tell this story about when we were in Thailand, and I took them through the jungle. It was me, Woody and [hockey player] Cam Neely, and we found this little hut. It was Deliverance in Southeast Asia. This kid comes out who I had met before, and I gave him this big bag of baht, and he took me to this concrete wall and we jumped over. That’s when Woody and Cam realized there were like 35 cobras in there. I just sat there until they picked up a cobra. Its blood was drained and mixed with Thai whiskey and we drank it. “Brotherhood of the snake,” or something goofy like that. Madness. If we got a whole group of my friends and told these stories, we’d never get out of there.

I think you just found the title of your next doc, though. Michael J. Fox: Brotherhood of the Snake.

Or Fox Eats Snake.


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Wednesday, February 1, 2023
AN INNATE SENSE OF RIGHT & WRONG
UNSUNG CINEMA FEATURE AT MOVIE FINATICS LOOKS AT DE PALMA'S 'CASUALTIES OF WAR'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/casualties14a.jpg

At Movie Finatics, the latest "Unsung Cinema" feature looks at Casualties Of War. Here's the start of it:
To put it simply, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War is a devastatingly sad anti-war drama. Based on actual events of the 1966 incident on Hill 192 during the Vietnam War, a Vietnamese woman was kidnapped from her village by a squad of American soldiers who raped and murdered her. It’s essentially about morality and how there is an innate sense of right and wrong in a dire situation like war, or is it all about survival? It’s about following orders or going along with the crowd vs. standing up for some injustice you’ve seen, no matter the cost. It’s also about the brutality of violence, the trauma of war, the brutality of masculinity, and the brutality of misogyny. These are not pleasant subject matters to deal with on screen. Not a film where you gather the family for a night of escapism at the movies. You’ll likely never forget Casualties of War after seeing it, and it’s all the greater because of it.

By 1989, Vietnam pictures had become a staple in American cinema. Films like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket came out with tremendous success and fanfare. Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July was released later that year with immense success. They told the horrors of the Vietnam War at a time when Americans were beginning to reexamine that terrible criminal nightmare. By the time Casualties of War came out, it had received some excellent reviews but did not do well at the box office. Critics like Siskel and Ebert liked the film but did not give it as high of marks as they did Platoon. The timing of the release clouded the critical reaction at the time. It also was out during the infamous Summer of 1989 with films like Uncle Buck, Batman, Parenthood, The Abyss, When Harry Met Sally, Lethal Weapon 2, and Turner & Hooch were going strong. For a film with a genuinely tricky subject matter like the one it portrays to compete with these more mass entertainment films was asking a lot. For De Palma, this came after the tremendous success of The Untouchables. Casualties of War, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, would lead to a career setback for him.

Like most De Palma films, though, Casualties of War has undergone critical reexamination and praise. However, it’s still not considered as significant as more infamous Vietnam films like the ones mentioned above. I’m here to argue that it is just as monumental and maybe one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made. I almost hesitate to call it a war film because while there are few battles and action scenes, it’s more about the moral problem faced by our main character and the horror unleashed on an innocent Vietnamese woman. De Palma films in his usual theatrical style which I love a lot. Big set pieces, dramatic music, and appalling beauty. He usually boiled down his films to three or four big visual set pieces. You’ll never come out of a De Palma film not interested in visual storytelling. That’s who De Palma is at heart, is a visual cinematic storyteller. He’s one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, and my love of visual storytelling comes from films like his and Hitchcock.



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
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