Watching an interview of the anguished Brian de Palma (Redacted) sighing in an almost too true-to-believe nasal drone. Now the wounded fawn, he proclaims that he alone has courageously done something –trash his country’s troops in the field at a time of war–that you just can’t do in America (“I have done something that just cannot be done. You can never say anything critical of the troops.”).

Say what?

Does he remember U.S. Senators like Dick Durbin who compared them to Nazis and Stalinists, or Ted Kennedy (Baathists), or the other epithets such as “terrorists” used by elected officials, that predated his caboose film by years?

In de Palma’s case, he’s found a way all at once to continue his genre of the disgusting ‘Dressed to Kill’ shocker, make even more money in the process, and along the way alleviate his southern California artistic culture’s apparent guilt-all at a time when tens of thousands of his own countrymen are risking death every day to stabilize a constitutional government and provide a fraction of the security and prosperity that he enjoys to millions who have never tasted it.

Sadly his pretentious BBC interview sort of summarized all the pathologies of today’s Hollywood-continual self-absorption and odd need for dramatic adulation, the quirky notion of the multimillionaire film hack on the barricades suffering for his voice-in-the-wilderness beliefs, and of course, the calculated preemptory media blitz passing his film off as a victim of the right-wing attack machine.

It all might work. But the publicity crew for the studio really should keep this director under wraps; the more he whines on, the more he confirms all the caricatures of a contemporary unhinged Hollywood.