October 28-November 3, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Stolen Honor/Soldiers Pay

($19.99 DVD/Mon., Nov. 1, 9:35 p.m., IFC) After public outrage, threats of lawsuits and regulatory action, not to mention a precipitous slide in their stock price, media giant Sinclair Broadcast Group backed off plans to air the anti-Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal last Friday. (Excerpts, balanced with clips from Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, aired as part of the hastily assembled A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media.) But the 42-minute screed, directed and hosted by disgraced journalist and Vietnam veteran Carlton Sherwood, has banked publicity money can't buy and has even roped a few credulous liberals into thinking that it represents a silenced, if twisted, point of view. Though calling the film "histrionic, often specious and deeply sad," The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley said Stolen Honor "should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television," because it helps "understand the rage" against Kerry that some Vietnam veterans have nursed for three decades.

In a purely clinical sense, that's true, but Stolen Honor isn't a sociology experiment, and it's deeply patronizing to lump all the veterans who took issue with Kerry's actions in with the monomaniacal Sherwood and his band of nutters. Pathologically ahistorical, Sherwood dismisses My Lai as an "isolated incident" and accuses Kerry, without evidence, of organizing a vast conspiracy to concoct evidence of nonexistent American atrocities. "A new and willing accomplice" for "enemy propagandists," Kerry and his fellow protesters (including that bitch Jane Fonda) ensured that captive Americans would be tortured longer and more viciously and somehow prolonged the war by campaigning to end it. Contradictory on its face, the last assertion is never explained, nor is it reconciled with the film's assertion that Kerry opportunistically jumped on the anti-war bandwagon just as the war was about to end. (There's no mention, of course, of Kerry and John McCain's landmark investigation into the fate of American POWs, a highlight of Kerry's senatorial career.) As if that weren't enough, Sherwood claims Kerry wrote "the first draft of history," which ensured that Vietnam veterans would forever be portrayed as vicious, amoral killers. You can blame Kerry for a lot of things, but Apocalypse Now isn't one of them.

Perhaps Sherwood and his subjects, who feel that they fought an honest fight in good conscience and ought to be respected for it, haven't been adequately heard. But their vicious, underhanded attempts to silence veterans who don't share their views don't even the scales. In their view, criticizing a war, any war, is tantamount to treason. "Wasn't he saying that Americans, by their nature, were a murderous horde, unrestrained by civilized rules of combat, or even the most basic norms of human decency?" Sherwood asks, rhetorically, of Kerry's Winter Soldier testimony. But even the brief excerpt from the hearings proves him wrong. "We saw America lose her sense of morality," says a sorrowful Kerry, implying that the soldiers' acts were contrary to, not in line with, American morals.

Perhaps one of the most lasting lessons of Vietnam is that soldiers shouldn't be held responsible en masse for an unpopular or unsuccessful war. But in its effort to portray American soldiers nobly, the media has consistently neglected voices of dissent within the military. No wonder the last 20 minutes of Fahrenheit 9/11 was its most successful: The portrait of American troops' life in Iraq was, and has remained, virtually uncontested.

Composed mainly of interviews with American soldiers who have served in Iraq, Soldiers Pay, a 35-minute documentary directed by David O. Russell, Tricia Regan and Juan Carlos Zald'var, is far, very far, from a perfect movie. But with so little competition, it doesn't have to be perfect. Like Stolen Honor, Soldiers Pay was suppressed by its corporate benefactor, although it didn't take public pressure for Warner Bros. to shelve plans to include the film on a pre-election DVD of Russell's Iraq-set Three Kings. The media giant caved all on its own, canceling the rerelease after "production issues" mysteriously surfaced.

Resurrected by Cinema Libre, Soldiers Pay has surfaced on Robert Greenwald's DVD Uncovered: The War on Iraq, as well as an election-eve broadcast on IFC. (Friday at 10, IFC will air a half-hour "tribute" to Fahrenheit 9/11, while Sundance Channel will air Uncovered and other political documentaries the night before the election.) The film, crudely shot and edited on a minimal budget, makes an attempt at balance, juxtaposing criticisms of the war with statements from Ghanem and Jabir AlGarawi, Iraqis who acted in Three Kings. "They would never oppose that liberation if they were under Saddam rule for one month," Ghanem says. But Major Gen. J. Michael Myatt, a retired Marine who served in Iraq, says that the U.S. actions have made Iraq a "honey pot" for terrorists and calls the Abu Ghraib scandal "the darkest cloud to descend on the military in my lifetime."

The filmmakers waste time on the story of a group of soldiers who may have been unfairly blamed for stealing boxes of American money during a "finds" mission (depicted as a sort of government-sanctioned looting), a situation of interest mainly for its similarity to the Three Kings' plot. The film's strongest figure is shell-shocked Blaine Willis, whose doubts about his service will take more than rhetoric to quell. "I just don't want to feel I'm used," he says. "I want to feel what I did over there really helped somebody."

Spook Stuff

With fear of a Bush planet hanging heavy, the goblins-and-ghouls stuff feels like a breath of fresh air. As usual, Halloween weekend offers an embarrassment of films to make you squeal, start and shiver. Let's start with Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's vampire classic, for which you've got two options. Truck on down to the Broadway Theatre, in Pitman, N.J., and catch it after Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera (Fri., Oct 29, 7 p.m., both with organ accompaniment), or stick close to home and see it at the First Unitarian Church (Sat., 8 p.m.), with Don Kinnier tickling the ivories. Speaking of Lon Chaney, Lon Jr. stars in the voodoo thriller Weird Woman, which caps a Secret Cinema evening of characteristically unsettling shorts (Oct. 29, 8 p.m., Moore College of Art and Design). Phoenixville's Colonial Theatre has two programs on tap: The Devil Music Ensemble returns with their live score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Oct. 30, 8 p.m.), this time with a 35 mm print in tow, and the classic Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are stitched together for a double feature (Sun, 2 p.m.). If it strikes you as horribly unfair that scary movies only get respect once a year, ease your post-Halloween blues with the County and Ambler theaters' screenings of The Shining (Nov. 1 and 3 respectively, both at 7 p.m.). And if your greatest fear is getting egged by kids on Halloween night, curl up with Turner Classic Movies' Day of the Dead, which starts at 6 a.m. and includes I Walked with a Zombie and The Bad Seed, or IFC's tribute to Italian gore-maestri Dario Argento and Mario Bava, featuring a new Bava doc.