Archives » Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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David Botti
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Nov 28, 2007 11:46 AM
Last month NPR had a short segment looking at why Iraq/War on Terrorism movies seem to be faltering at the box office of late. Movies such as Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted, are examples of these most recent pictures. Still, even back in 2005 an FX channel series Over There, also failed to gain an audience. NPR interviewed Washington Times movie critic Christian Toto. Here's some of his thoughts as to possible reasons for all this:
I think there's a couple of things going on. One is the public doesn't seem to want to see this kind of entertainment right now...It could be just the fact we're inundated with material from op-ed pages to the news. Everywhere we look we have information about the war so, if you want to go to the movies at it's best is escapism. It's not really escaping anything if you're seeing these things over and over again.
But also, the films have not been very good. I think some have gotten mixed reviews, some have gotten awful reviews, and I think that's definitely playing a part too...
...A lot of the critics of the more recent films have said that the films are full of speeches, and it's very obvious what the political angle is. And I think an artist, maybe if he or she had some time to reflect on the material, may give a more nuanced balanced performance. Maybe because their emotions are so hot at that moment, they can't really check themselves, they can't edit themselves and they just go with what they're feeling as opposed to being more careful, more considerable about what they're doing.
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