OSCAR WINNER: Taxi to the Dark Side
By Norm Schrager at February 25, 2008 | 6:15 pm | Print
Sunday’s Academy Award winners and losers will be discussed ad nauseum, so we’ll avoid all the obvious stuff here at The Lobby. Instead, we’re really interested in the Oscar win for Taxi to the Dark Side, the Best Documentary Feature from director Alex Gibney.
Acquired by HBO just three days before the big win, this festival favorite brings Gibney the Academy Award he already deserved for his superb 2005 film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (after losing to, good lord, March of the Penguins).
Taxi to the Dark Side investigates U.S. tactics of detention and interrogation in the Middle East, highlighting a specific incident in Afghanistan, where an innocent cabbie was murdered at the Bagram Air Force Base. While topics like Abu Ghraib and waterboarding still show up on the political talk shows, this feature couldn’t be more timely.
It’s worth noting that another highly acclaimed Iraq War film, No End In Sight, was the probably favorite in the Documentary category this year, and lost to Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney (right) takes a specific aspect of the war and brings it to the most brutal, individual level possible. War or no war, some government officials will continue to exercise rights they may have no business having in the first place.
HBO plans to air Taxi to the Dark Side in September 2008.
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[...] by Alex Gibney, the same guy who did Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Academy-Award winning Taxi to the Dark Side, this documentary includes recreations as well as rare footage and unpublished work. Johnny Depp [...]
[...] based on 37 reviews. (Average rating: 8.2). That’s the third 100 score of the year on RT, but Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side is even more impressive, garnering a 100 score with 71 reviews. (The third film is the documentary [...]