A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Too bad they don't illustrate the atrocities of the captured scum.I'm surprised Michael Moore's name isn't attached to this one.S1E1 was enough for me. Bail!

'Standard Operating Procedure' is a hard-hitting doc made by famed non-fiction American filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris has been making documentaries since the late 70s and has since become synonymous with the form of filmmaking. His latest film covers events that occurred in 2003 in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, which saw American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners in a number of humiliating and torturous ways.Morris' authorial stamp is made very clear on the film from early on through the use of talking head interviews and reconstructed footage. One of his more famous films, 'The Thin Blue Line', was actually rejected from consideration for the Oscar category of non-fiction film because it has too much reconstructed footage in it. The most important facet of the documentary, though, is the inclusion of a great number of photographs that depict all the heinous acts that took place in the prison – all taken by three of the soldiers in the prison of their own free will. In short, the photographs depict naked Iraqi men in sexually humiliating circumstances with the American soldiers smiling with their thumbs up right next to them. Other photographs include a dead Iraqi man in a body bag, a picture of a bloodied prisoner after being attacked by a dog and more.The photos not only exposed the whole scandal but they were hard evidence that it actually happened. This is something that's often spoken about in the documentary with people saying that the photographs are an objective representation of what happened and everything you need to know is in the frame. But this logic is then complicated when we discover that some photos have been cropped and manipulated. One interviewee even states that the photographs are taken out of context and you need more information to understand what the photo's representing. The whole idea of objectivity and representation seems to interestingly reflect the function of a documentary (to re/present 'reality') which is undoubtedly a sub-text Morris was going for. The big question, though, is why did these people take these incredibly condemning photographs of themselves?To be clear, this was a ridiculously stupid thing for the American soldiers to do – it's like a bank robber taking a picture of themselves robbing a bank. When you're actually watching the talking head interviews with the people that committed the acts you can't help but feel they're confused. They try to justify themselves saying that they were taking the pictures with the intent on exposing the mistreatment of these people, but it certainly didn't pan out that way. And the limp excuses for the thumbs up and smiles were 'I never know what to do with my hands in pictures' and 'When someone takes a photo, you smile, it's normal'. It's as if they don't understand the grand severity of the ethical injustices they've just committed, it's really incredible. Morris presents their shallow and ignorant defences on a plate, letting the viewer independently judge these people.There's quite a spread of interviewees throughout the documentary and it doesn't take long before you're able to distinguish who's smart, who's reliable, who's experienced and so on. One that stands out is Brent Pack who was in charge of going through the hundreds of photos and creating a timeline out of them. He is a seasoned, ex-Desert Storm field agent who, from experience, tells us that the ethics and rules during war time become 'fuzzy'. He explains that these soldiers were being shelled day in and day out whilst they witnessed fellow soldiers come back scarred from the horrors of war. The anxiety and frenzy of war clearly resulted in contempt towards anything Iraqi and Pack puts this forward as a sort of quasi-justification.But the real shock of this documentary has yet to be revealed. It comes in a short sequence nearing the end when pictures are showed on screen and Pack labels all of them either 'Criminal Activity' or 'Standard Operating Procedure' (or S.O.P.). Many of the pictures are identified as 'Criminal Activity' because they depict a soldier sexually humiliating a prisoner or something similar. However, there was one scenario in particular covered in the film about a prisoner that was told to stand up straight or else the wires that were tied to him would electrocute him. Except the wires had no electric current running through them, so this was deemed 'S.O.P.' – in other words 'legal' and 'just', because it was a means to extract information from a prisoner. This was just one instance of prisoner treatment that was deemed S.O.P. and it's a truly stunning revelation made by the film. It's further exacerbated by the fact that some of the prisoners weren't even terrorists, they were bakers or welders taken from their homes.The unethical acts committed by these people is the focal point of this film but I feel that Morris wants the headline to be that some of these things are actually permitted by the U.S. military. I can't help but feel that's the take-home truth from this documentary. Overall, this film really hits you in the jaw with some excruciatingly heavy subject matter but it's worth it by how well-crafted, expositional, and informative it is.My Rating: 7.9/10I have a bunch of other film/music reviews up here: https://somespiltmilk.wordpress.com/

According to attending physicians, I died in 2004 during a surgical procedure. Not long ("two or three minutes," I was told), but I was, technically and by legal definition, dead. But I'm stubborn (according to the woman I married), and I came back. Not long thereafter, I found myself flat on my face in a service station parking lot, thanks to something called "occult blood" that had built up in my system. Back to the hospital, where I spent five days in the Intensive Care Unit (two or three of those days in critical condition). Shortly after dodging that bullet, I developed kidney stones that left me writhing in agony in the hospital parking lot. Procedure number three. Then came The Biggie: chest pains that required quintuple bypass heart surgery. The foregoing, as one might very well guess, left me feeling a tad... weary of it all. I said so, aloud, and suddenly found myself handcuffed to a chair bolted to the floor in a holding cell. The next day, I was driven out of town to a run-down facility known hereabouts as "Cherry." I knew that something was wrong when (still handcuffed) I walked into the bathroom and found the walls, the sink and the floor covered with blood. It was a clear indication of things to come. There were fistfights (one of which came dangerously close to me where I lay, stitches still fresh, in bed one night) and beatings by both fellow inmates (sorry: "patients") and guards ("staff"). It was a harrowing experience that made the antics in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST seem tame by comparison. I was only there for two weeks, but I saw (and was appalled by) the way mental illness (even simple depression) was dealt with hereabouts. Watching STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, I couldn't help but be reminded of my "time away." If and when our leaders straighten out the mess they've made elsewhere around the world, they might want to take a nice, long look at the homefront.

We're all familiar with the images that began flowing out of Abu Ghraib Prison in the spring of 2004 - photos showing detainees (some terrorists, others undoubtedly not) hooded and stripped, forced to assume painful and/or humiliating positions, often for hours on end, with American soldiers posing gleefully nearby, smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs for the camera. Once the pictures went viral, they came to symbolize not only the botched operation that was the Iraq war, but the fundamental failure of the U.S. military to win friends and influence people in a land the Bush administration claimed vehemently to be "liberating." In "Standard Operating Procedure," famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line") attempts to uncover the truth behind those photographs, mainly by allowing those who were most closely involved with the scandal to tell the story in their own words (including Private First Class Lynndie England, who, whether fairly or unfairly, emerged as the one clearly identifiable "face" and household name from the scandal). Morris provides no voice-over narration to accompany the interviews, just re-enactments of the incidents done in a quasi-surrealistic style, using slow motion photography and artsy graphics.Through his discussions with the principal players in the drama, Morris provides a probing study of the effects of war time stress on the human psyche. The film offers no easy answers as to exactly why the events at Abu Ghraib unfolded as they did; yet, while it doesn't turn the individuals involved into easy-to-blame villains, it doesn't completely exonerate them either. In fact, it is the seeming "normalcy" of these people, as they attempt to make their case for the camera, that renders their actions all the more unsettling. Morris also makes it clear that these low level individuals - many of whom have served time in prison for their crimes - were most certainly used as scapegoats for higher-ups in the military who managed to successfully deflect any personal culpability for the events that took place there.In a true journalistic coup, Morris was able to obtain grainy home movies shot at the same time that the pictures were being taken. As a result, we're able to witness the step-by-step process by which that infamous shot of the naked men stacked in a pyramid formation ultimately came about."Standard Operating Procedure" doesn't successfully address all the questions it sets out to answer, but that is hardly a weakness of the film, since it is dealing with a complex, messy situation involving complex, messy people caught up in a complex, messy war. One doesn't leave "Standard Operating Procedure" necessarily more enlightened that when one went in - just more well-informed. And that's perhaps the best one could reasonably hope for under the circumstances.