Conflict on Screen: Hollywood Goes to War

[babylonsister]

Conflict on Screen: Hollywood Goes to War
by Andrew Gumbel

snip//

Now, though, Hollywood seems to have lost its coyness. Perhaps it began with Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which turned anger at the Bush administration on the eve of the 2004 presidential election into an unlikely box-office hit. Perhaps the moment of truth came with last year’s United 93, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing recreation of the doomed fourth jetliner on 11 September 2001, whose passengers sacrificed themselves to avoid a greater atrocity in a major East Coast city.

The plain fact, though, is that we are about to be inundated with dramas set either in or around the Iraq war, and the tone of most, if not all, of them is hardly complimentary to George Bush’s military adventure in the Middle East.

The first of them is also the one with the highest profile, since it has been written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian film-maker who wrote Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby, then walked away with the Best Picture Oscar for his directorial debut, Crash.

Haggis’s film is called In the Valley of Elah (the Valley of Elah being the place where David slew Goliath), and it follows the story of Army Specialist Richard Davis whose mysterious death near his home base at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 2003 was covered up until Davis’s father took on the investigation and discovered he had been stabbed to death by members of his own platoon because he had witnessed atrocities they had committed in Iraq. The film, set for release in the United States in September, stars Tommy Lee Jones as the father and Susan Sarandon as the mother, and Charlize Theron as a (fictionalised) detective who helps the father’s investigation.

snip//

Several things about these projects come as a surprise. First, that they are being made at all while US service men and women are still fighting the war they concern themselves with. Second, that they all overwhelmingly focus on aspects of American failure - military, political, diplomatic and also spiritual failure. (A seminal image in In The Valley of Elah, we are told, is a Stars and Stripes flag hung upside down somewhere in heartland America.) And third, that they are so close to the sorts of issues that continue to exercise the news and opinion pages of the world’s newspapers.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/27/2817/

[babylonsister]

1. I'm going to kick this once, k? nt

[malaise]

2. These rats are being encircled in every

fugging sphere. The sheeple are about to wake up. Bring on the movies.

[annabanana]

3. More will be enlightened by the movies than 6 years of desultory

"news" coverage was able to effect.

[malaise]

4. Indeed n/t