at the Uptown. It's only there for a week, I believe. Very good movie.There was a story about the American soldier featured in the film at Salon:
There's a moment a half-hour into "Control Room," Jehane Noujaim's widely acclaimed new documentary about the Arab news channel Al Jazeera and media coverage of the war with Iraq, when U.S. press officer Lt. Josh Rushing discusses his reaction to the brutal images of captured and killed American soldiers that Al Jazeera chose to broadcast in March 2003 -- to the condemnation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"The night they showed the POWs and dead soldiers ... it was powerful, because Americans won't show those kinds of images," Rushing says. "It made me sick to my stomach." The viewer then expects him to proceed in the same vein of patriotic rhetoric he's been using up to this point in the film -- he is, after all, a Marine -- but instead what follows is an unexpected, and profoundly moving, observation.
The previous night, Al Jazeera had shown similarly graphic images of Iraqis killed during a bombing in Basra, and Rushing calls them "equally if not more horrifying." At the time, though, he admits they hadn't bothered him as much. "I just saw people on the other side," Rushing says, "and those people in the Al Jazeera offices must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war."
Rushing comes across as a sympathetic character in the movie -- earnest and thoughtful, a patriot and a skeptic -- with shrewd observations about partisan media coverage (Al Jazeera and Fox) and the failure of U.S. media to fully explain what is happening in the Middle East. But now the Pentagon has silenced Rushing, 31, ordering him not to comment on the movie. And as a result, the 14-year career military man, recently promoted to captain, plans to leave the Marines, his wife told Salon in an interview Thursday.http://archive.salon.com/ent/feature/2004/06/04/control_room/