Below are photos of the world premiere of MEMORIAL DAY, which was held at the CineVegas film festival. I was one of the actors in this extremely controversial film. The film is basically Girls Gone Wild meets Abu Ghraib.
Here is what the press had to say about the film:
DISPATCH FROM LAS VEGAS | CineVegas Showcases Small Films Under Big Lights
Wednesday June 18 6:50 PM ET
by Eric Kohn (June 18, 2008)
"I think we found our audience by the end," said Josh Fox, director of the fiercely controversial feature "Memorial Day," which premiered last week at the CineVegas Film Festival. It was an apt summary of a prevailing sentiment for many filmmakers in town for the event, which showcased a variety of audacious films that would probably get buried at the country's larger festivals. For Fox, the statement merely reflected the small crowd left in the theater for the Q&A, which followed a screening plagued by a wave of walk-outs during its first hour.
It's not that their reactions came as a surprise: "Memorial Day" spends a long time in the company of a queasily explicit group of twentysomethings engaging in grossly hedonistic party behavior on a beach near an army base in Maryland -- their drunken, horny revelry captured in lo-fi home video with the sort of shaky-cam maneuvers that have grown into a code word telling viewers to read between the lines. After awhile, howev er, "Memorial Day" does that for you, as the scene gradually switches to Abu Ghraib, where the same reckless characters apply their brutish tendencies to Iraqi prisoners in ways that the American public now knows too well. Whether or not the transition works or reveals frustratingly obvious intentions is tough to determine, but there certainly were fewer walkouts during the topical second half. Fox leads a theater troupe in New York called the International Wow Company, and "Memorial Day" seems like a kind of brash performance art testing out how much one audience can take.
As it turned out, his initial assessment of the room was something of a misnomer, since many of the remaining viewers quickly took Fox to task for downgrading the Abu Ghraib scenario to a simplistic reading. (He claimed that the soldiers mistreated prisoners because they thought it was "fun," and left it at that.) Still, it's possible that Fox -- a native Manhattanite whose sheltered New York background was overly stressed in the Q&A -- doesn't comprehend the nature of his creation. "Memorial Day" has a mesmerizing hook that unavoidably provokes dialogue about the disingenuousness of the "bad apples" rubric set forth by the American government.
At the same time, it's difficult to recommend. While the film firmly situates Abu Ghraib within the larger context of humanity's destructive tendencies, you have to sift through a lot of unnecessary ugliness to find that conclusion. ("A cousin of 'Full Metal Jacket'," suggested Variety's Robert Koehler after the screening. "A digital verite indictment of the generational nihilism bred by "Girls Gone Wild," "The Real World" and popular culture's general evasion of moral consequence," concluded Spout's Karina Longworth. ) Either way, it's hard to deny the impact it has on viewers willing to stick around. Where Brian De Palma's "Redacted" was intellectually flaccid, "Memorial Day" has a raging boner for the motivations behind Abu Ghraib. "I think there's a searing energy running through the core of America that has no place to go," Fox said, but couldn't really explain it -- and neither could his cast ("We all think torture is bad," said one). If the "Memorial Day" gang doesn 't try to understand their characters, it suggests that they reflect them -- and that makes the movie a symptom of the national disease it seeks to diagnose.
