Entries associated with the tag "New York Times":

This weekend the New York Times reported on the controversy surrounding Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris's new documentary about the Abu Ghraib case. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise," Morris said in a statement. He considers the possibility that he should have revealed the payments in the credits, though he says he "didn't feel the necessity."

The story highlights an interesting and little-remarked-upon dichotomy between  journalism and movie documentaries: newspaper, magazine, and Tv interviewers rarely pay subjects, while film producers commonly do. In fact, the dicier issue seems to be whether the New Yorker violated its standards by publishing in its March 24 issue an excellent piece by Morris and Philip Gourevitch that drew from the interviews Morris collected for the film. Especially fascinating is its treatment of Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company, who began snapping digital photos inside Abu Ghraib as a way of indemnifying herself against what she knew were abuses but wound up incriminating herself instead.

The Times is also hosting a blog by Morris, where he considers in two posts his technique of staging reenactments for the specific purpose of isolating and focusing on key moments in a complex chain of evidence. There's a fair amount of this in Standard Operating Procedure, though the stagings are mostly for emotional effect. The evidentiary burden falls mainly on the prosecution's reconstruction, by synchronizing digital photos from three soldiers' cameras, of the chain of events as prisoners were abused and ritually humiliated. And Morris's interviews with Harman and Lynndie England are chilling--paid or not, they starkly capture the dehumanizing environment inside Abu Ghraib.

In the media frenzy that followed last week's massacre at Virginia Tech, the sideshow of greatest note to film fans would have to have been Mike Nizza's April 19 New York Times blog item speculating that Seung-Hui Cho was inspired by the South Korean hit Oldboy (2003). Even by blogosphere standards, the story was fairly thin, based on (1) the similarity between photos in Cho's manifesto and images from the movie, and (2) the fact that number 1 had been pointed out to Nizza by an honest-to-God Virginia Tech faculty member, Paul Harrill.

Nizza backed off less than two hours later: "We don’t know yet if Mr. Cho ever saw the film Oldboy. . . . With Mr. Cho expressing so many other reasons for his shooting spree, it is hardly time to start blaming movies." But by the end of the day Rupert Murdoch's British cable news program Sky News was reporting, "Officers believe [Cho] repeatedly watched Oldboy as part of his preparation for the killing spree." And by the next day Stephen Hunter, film critic for the Washington Post, had widened the scope of accusation to include John Woo as well.

Debates over the lethality of pop culture have a way of getting really dumb really fast, and with the exception of Grady Hendrix's essay in Slate, most of what I've read so far has been as specious as the original blog item. Having already taken my share of potshots at Park's "revenge trilogy" (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance), I'll simply say this: If a hammer were the deadliest weapon Cho had been able to get his hands on, no one in Blacksburg would have died last Monday.