Chinese interrogation (click to enlarge)
The New York Times describes HBO’s latest movie, Strip Search, as — are you ready? — “an intensely earnest, painfully wrongheaded film” that “tries to sound an alarm about the erosion of civil liberties under the Patriot Act by likening the detention of a Muslim immigrant in the United States to that of an American student in China.”
I really can’t think of a dumber plot for a movie. Based on what I know, I’ll take being detained in America any day, Patriot Act or not.
The problem is not just that this kind of melodramatic moral equivalency is silly and specious. (Dissent, terrorism — what’s the difference, really?) The most tendentious point in “Strip Search” is Glenn Close. As a federal investigator intent on wringing a confession from the Muslim suspect, the slithering star of “Fatal Attraction” is a hundred times more menacing and scary than any bullying Chinese military interrogator. One glimpse of Ms. Close in action (“But who am I, just a lowly cog in a rusting wheel,” she whispers silkily, “ignored, unappreciated”), and viewers can only conclude that even without air-conditioning or habeas corpus, a suspect is much better off in Communist China.
I wish I had HBO, because the movie sounds like an unintentional hoot.
1
By boy
there is something attractive about that girl. and there is something unattractive about that girl.
April 29, 2004 @ 10:06 am | Comment
2
By Grimm
Indeed.
Man that movie sucked.
June 6, 2004 @ 10:02 pm | Comment
3
By Dave
I saw the movie. As a movie, it was bad. As a political commentary, it was excellent. It asks several times how much “freedom” you would surrender if it would stop “terrorists”; most people are quite happy to take those same freedoms from someone (anyone) else.
September 5, 2005 @ 9:25 pm | Comment
4
By Mond
Just to say hellow!
September 16, 2005 @ 6:58 am | Comment