Wed, August 24, 2005
Embedded—10:15 AM
I completely forgot to mention, I also watched Embedded, Sundance Channel's telecast of Tim Robbins's play about the war in Iraq. (This is why I should avoid writing at two in the morning; a lot slips through the cracks.) It was actually a great counterpart to Dead Wrong, juxtaposing the truth with its fictionalized/satirized version.
The general chatter I heard about "Embedded" was that it was masturbatory, arch-left, hippy pacifist tripe. And while there is a masturbation scene set in the Pentagon's Office of Special Projects (the sort of greek chorus of the play), I thought the rest of this criticism was unfounded. Certainly, Tim Robbins has a strong point of view about the marketing and execution of the Iraq war, but I felt like the bulk of the play was about the absurdities and horrors of war, with some additional time spent on the management of the news media (censorship rules for embedded journalists, the whole Jessica Lynch thing) and a little bit on the neo-con philosophy.
Scenes between family members and soldiers were very moving, and a handful of the scenes with journalists actually included dialogue pulled from transcripts of news stories from the time – and sometimes the lines that seemed the most over-the-top turned out to be the real ones. Most of the performances were excellent and the choreography inventively combined military maneuvers with dance steps (but this was a small part of the show).
It's kind of a fun escapist satire of the war situation, if you're interested in that sort of thing. As with Dead Wrong, probably not a lot of information that comes as a surprise, but still thought-provoking.
