For years, pundits have been trying to connect violent movies and video games with actual crimes.

The arguments typically end up more theoretical than reality based. In one famous instance, the 1994 Oliver Stone film “Natural Born Killers” supposedly inspired a young couple to kill a person and leave another paralyzed.

More recently, celebrities like Elizabeth Banks, Roger Ebert, Patton Oswalt and Michael Moore twisted the blame game for partisan reasons, using their Twitter accounts to accuse Sarah Palin of inspiring the Tucson shooter without a shred of evidence.

Now, we have a direct tie between an anti-war film and the murder of two U.S. soldiers. So … will the media cover the story? Will it change how the film industry treats the subject matter? And will Miss Banks and co. rush to Tweet their condemnation of the movie in question?”

Yes, I’m being rhetorical on all three fronts, but let’s plow on all the same.

“Redacted” by Brian de Palma (“The Untouchables,” “Scarface”) cast U.S. soldiers as racist, violent thugs. The film flopped in spectacular fashion, earning $65,388 for its entire theatrical run. Apparently, audiences weren’t too keen on seeing the men and women of the Armed Forces smeared.

But “Redacted” impacted Arid Uka, a Balkan Muslim who saw the film and went on to kill two U.S. Air Force servicemen in March. Uka told a judge this week he was inspired by “the movie’s graphic depiction of U.S. soldiers raping a girl in Iraq,” says The Daily Caller citing a BBC report.

(more…)

Very early, very sketch, and mostly an assumption at this point, but since we now live in a world where liberals and the MSM believe a shooter in Tuscon can somehow be motivated by a cross-hairs map he’s never seen — I’d say the New Tone Rules demand this question be asked:

John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media:

As reported here on Pajamas Media, Arid Uka, who shot and killed two American servicemen at Frankfurt Airport on Wednesday, has told German police that he was motivated in part by a video that he saw showing American soldiers “plundering a house and raping a girl” in Afghanistan. According to Germany’s deputy Attorney General Rainer Griesbaum, Uka is supposed to have viewed the video on YouTube.

An Islamist propaganda video roughly matching Uka’s description is in fact to be found on YouTube. On November 20, 2010, a German-language YouTube user going by the name “24jasmina” uploaded the video under the title “American Soldiers Rape our Sisters! Awake Oh Ummah.”

The video begins with roughly 80 seconds of footage apparently showing American soldiers marauding in a family’s home and raping a teenage girl. The footage appears to be filmed with a night vision camera and comes complete with vulgar and incriminating dialogue. At one point during the rape scene, gunfire can be heard off-camera and then a soldier on camera says: “I f****** killed them all.”

(more…)

Film blogger and sometimes Turner Classic Movies’ programmer,The Self-Styled Siren, came up with a terrific idea for a movie list: That which we love in filmdom that puts our cool credentials into question (And yes, I do have Cool Credentials. My mother keeps them with my badminton trophies). Siren describes the criteria for the list this way: 

“As always, it’s best to define terms. By uncool, the Siren doesn’t mean “slightly offbeat” or “quirky” or “underrated.” She means “courting hoots of derision from critical colleagues.” Picking a lesser work of a widely admired auteur doesn’t cut it, because after all, even late Hawks is still Hawks. And picking a film that was once lambasted, but is no longer, is also not exactly what the Siren had in mind.”

I would also add that there are certain uncool films that are now cool to like. The work of Ed Wood, for instance. Those choices shouldn’t count, either. We have to go for what’s embarrassing to admit to, and lucky for you there’s plenty to clean out of my uncool closet.

1. Fox Musicals: Everyone loves those big lavish MGM musicals of the forties and fifties, and those triumphs do represent for me the highest level of  artistic achievement we will ever see on film. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the hell out of the musicals Darryl Zanuck’s 20th Century-Fox produced to help Americans through a Great Depression. The name of the game was “simple”; simple stories, simple tunes… And not one true classic film emerged from the bunch. These films weren’t about that. They were about innocent, joyful escapism and to help you along were such stars as Sonja Henie, Carmen Miranda, Betty Grable, John Payne, Edward Everett Horton, Billy Gilbert, Charlotte Greenwood, Alice Faye, Don Ameche, and Cesar Romero. (more…)