review of the documentary "Act of Killing"

so this is a "documentary" or creative non-fiction film in which a director goes to indonesia to make a movie about the massive slaughter of indonesian communists in the mid-sixties but unsurprisingly discovers that people are little reluctant to discuss that subject matter and the government is none too thrilled with the topic either. what's a poor filmmaker to do? he discovers that the gangsters, who collaborated with the right wing government on this genocidal project, are actually quite glib & boastful about their exploits in the sixties, so he films them telling their stories about how they killed all these innocent people & films them making their own "documentary" about how they committed these war crimes, though as one of them qualifies, it's not war crimes if you win. needless to say, these reenactments bring up some difficult memories for the people who lived through those experiences and lost loved ones. the film is disturbing on all sorts of levels. apparently, telling it from the gangster's point of view was the only way they could get the film made at all & also avoid government censorship, and the gangsters are much more interested in showing off rather than giving an accurate, well-rounded view of the history. as i watched the various political rallies where the main gangster organization frequently spoke & shared the stage with government officials, i was struck by how much the style of their rhetoric (they liked to say that the word gangster originally meant "free men") resembled our own right wing politicians here in the united states. it's easy to make fun of these people but they are quite serious in their lust to acquire & maintain power and are unencumbered by any sense of empathy or ethics. i was also frequently struck by how frequently they mentioned watching hollywood movies and borrowing ideas for torture & murder from them, particularly the gangster genre, of course. i have to quibble with the cute gothy woman at movie madness who recommended the director's cut to me. i've had an ongoing issue about the length of movies. i am not at all opposed to long movies and do frequently watch them as the type of films i tend to gravitate toward, foreign films, documentaries, and the arty, creatively financed low budget indies, frequently indulge in extra long running time. however, i disagree with the storytelling impulse. i think movies have a better future in letting television do the episodic storytelling, which i think it's good at, and concentrating on the ability of the medium to create dream-like atmospheres. in a sense, they are trying, and in my opinion, failing too often to tell stories when they could be seducing us into strange dreams that hew to the compressive demands of the poem.