The Editor's Desk

I used to pay a lot more attention to upcoming movies than I do these days, and somehow the film “Redacted,” which opened this weekend (but is not playing in Barstow), slipped by me.

“Redacted,” directed by Brian De Palma, is a fictionalized retelling of the rape and murder of an Iraqi teen and the killing of her family by a group of U.S. soldiers.

The inspiration should be known to those in Barstow who follow the news. Former Barstow resident Sgt. Paul E. Cortez was one of the men who was responsible for the real-world incident on which De Palma is basing his film. Cortez pleaded guilty to rape and several counts of murder and was sentenced to 100 years in prison.

From what I’ve read through various stories and reviews of the movie, De Palma put his account together based on a number of different sources. I’m curious as to whether he included some of the information about Cortez’s difficult life here in Barstow we uncovered while reporting the story.

Reviews are extremely mixed and critics seem to be pretty polarized, not unexpected when dealing with a fictional telling of a real-world story. I want to see the movie and judge it for myself (based on reading some of the reviews, I think I can tell which character is meant to be Cortez), but I don’t think it’s likely to come here. I’ll be visiting Los Angeles at the end of the month, and if it’s still playing, I’ll see if I can’t find a way to see it.