obviously haven't seen this film but after reading the review I'm having serious difficulties imagining that it is masquerading as anything other than what it is. how many will see it as a celebration of abject violence, rape, and murder? even in the heart of the beast, in the depths of moral depravity, i seriously doubt anyone will.
It does so by
disavowing it as war porn, as so many war movies routinely do, from
Saving Private Ryan to
BlackHawk Down, justifying all the imagery with cynical piety and indignation. As if the brutal mass-murder of Iraqi's is still some Big Secret that will only be finally revealed in
'make it real' big screen technicolour (when such images are long since all over the internet).
Shifting gear, everyone still imagines that
Nick Ut's 'iconic' (branded and mass-produced) 1972 photo of 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc somehow changed the course of the Vietnam War (it did no such thing), whereas such an image, if it were of a Western girl, would be instantly condemned as paedophiliac:
Hardly surprising, then, that precisely thirty-five years later, the very same Pulitzer prize-winning photographer should now be an active part of the emotional pornography of the Paparazzi, having snapped this:
So maybe Meisel, in his supposed descent into 'cheap soft porn,' might re-create the Vietnam photo, but substituting a pouting Paris Hilton for the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl. Forrest Gump will be delighted ...
