Friday, November 30, 2007
News / Randomly Noted Waiting for those Redacted protests
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Fri, Nov 30, 2007 at 4:44 PM
If you’re driving near Midtown Promenade this weekend, be on the lookout for protesters holding signs saying, “Support Our Troops.†You may have to look really hard. Why? Because Landmark Midtown Art Cinema will be showing Brian De Palma’s Iraq war drama Redacted, a fictionalized account of the rape and murder of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi in Iraq in 2006. Orwellian Big Brother Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has singled out Redacted for picketing for "inciting hatred against the United States."
Frankly, I suspect that any fervor for or against Redacted cooled off over Thanksgiving, with more pop-culture interest focusing on the return of "Project Runway" and whether you can see anyone’s CGI naughty bits in Beowulf. Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, however, we can recall the Redacted feud of early November. Primarily it involved volleying insults between Redacted producer/Dallas Mavericks owner/Internet zillionaire Mark Cuban and O’Reilly, who went after Cuban on “The O’Reilly Factor" Nov. 12. Incidentally, note the way an O’Reilly producer uses yellow-journalism tactics along the lines of “Are you still beating your wife?†in the segment. Imagine what they don’t actually put on the air.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/f6Om3oksAPA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
In response, Cuban articulated an answer to O’Reilly and a defense of Redacted on his blog ("Bill O'Reilly just a wonderful, confused guy"), while MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann derided O’Reilly’s fulminations on "Countdown" Nov. 13:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6Dq6NgNVdYc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
I have my own criticisms of Redacted and, at any rate, suspect that the conservative protesting bloc is getting more wound up about the anti-religious content in the upcoming fantasy epic The Golden Compass. The fact that O'Reilly is so much more concerned with a low-budget indie film about the Iraq war inciting hatred against America than he is about, you know, the actual Iraq war inciting hatred against America is an irony that will be lost on no one capable of experiencing irony.
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