At the cinema, 2008 was the year when it was hip to depart from the moral outrage any conscientious individual might feel about our countries’ on going illegal and immoral war 6,000 miles away. Light satire, be it of the buddy (Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay) or “five minutes in the future, things will be even more remarkably FUBAR” variety (War Inc.) were fashionable. Stop-Loss, much like last year’s ill conceived Lions for Lambs, luke warm Rendition and sneakily powerful In the Valley of Elah, was too sincere for most audience members and a large swath of critics’ taste. On the other hand, did we really need Morgan Spurlock to go looking for Osama Bin Laden? What if he would have found him? That might have been a beheading worth watching.

Thankfully the much-maligned documentarian Nick Broomfield, best known for his perpetual work-in-progress (i.e. shoddily constructed), Tragic Musicians of the 90s Docs Kurt and Courtney (1998) and Biggie and Tupac (2002), finally surfaced with a genuinely terrific film. His 2007 TIFF entry Battle for Haditha, a picture that, in perhaps the year’s biggest cinematic surprise given its author’s dubious track record and relative inexperience in the realm of narrative, is so eerily verisimilar that it puts much of what one could accurately call combat cinema to shame.

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Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is calling it “a masterful takedown” of “the right-wing myth that Hollywood keeps making anti-war movies that flop, proving how out of touch the Liberal Elite are with the will of the peeepul.” This post from Leverage creator John Rogers may be that, but it also points to something I’ve brought up many times before: the whole “Liberal Hollywood will spend untold sums of money to make sure we lose the war in Iraq and turn your children into godless eco-communists!” hysteria only floats when buoyed by willful ignorance of the stratification of the film industry. Different kinds of films are made, distributed and marketed in different kinds of ways, thus lending their ultimate market performance different kinds of expectations. I know when infidel propaganda like Taxi to the Dark Side doesn’t quite do the same business as good ol’ entertainment like Hannah Montana Topless With the Jonas Brothers in 3D, it’s tempting to say that America hates Alex Gibney. Except that America doesn’t know who Alex Gibney is.

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I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.

Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

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Filmmaker and former Marine JD Johannes is selling a compilation DVD called Outside the Wire on his website. The DVD contains three short documentaries that Johannes shot himself whilst embedded with troops in Iraq (a trailer is embedded above). On a blog on the site, Johannes positions his “pro-victory, pro-troop” films in opposition to docs like Body of War and The Ground Truth. “Actually going to Iraq, living down in the dirt with the grunts and making documentaries about what is happening on the ground appears to be a rather novel concept, but I think the best way to understand Iraq is to see it from 5′10″ off the ground,” he writes.

Fair enough. But wait––there’s a gimmick! Johannes is trying to sell 2,900 copies of his DVD in six weeks, in order to match the domestic box office gross of Brian DePalma’s fall flop Redacted.

I haven’t seen Johannes’ movies, and I’m certainly not opposed to as many views of the war as possible getting out into the market place. In fact, I’ve argued previously that the reason why films like Lions For Lambs and Stop-Loss are so disappointing creatively and commercially is due to a homogeneity of perspective––the anti-war choir really doesn’t need to be pandered to anymore.

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image via Stop Smiling.

“I’ve been struggling to try to do a memoir,” said Andrew Sarris at the beginning of the Moving Image Institute session with he and fellow critic/wife Molly Haskell. “I haven’t made much progress, so don’t hold your breath.” Not to brag, but anyone who was in that room won’t have to. The Haskell/Sarris Hour (actually, several hours––the discussion continued over dinner, including wine for many of us and a vodka tonic for Sarris) was, for me, both the most purely pleasurable session of the Institute, and the portion of the program that gave me the strongest dose of film cultural-historical education. It all came down through Andrew and Molly’s candid storytelling. MOMI’s David Schwartz more than once credited Sarris for having mastered the lecture-as-stand up comedy, but in our small group, with Haskell at his side snarkily finishing sentences, it felt more like lecture-as-autobiography. With jokes.

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We knew Oliver Stone wasn’t making W to make George W. Bush look good, but we didn’t know it was going to be an absurdist comedy. That’s the impression given by this report from ABC News, which contains several pages of details about an early draft of the script (and also misidentifies the actor cast as Bush as James Brolin instead of Josh Brolin, in the screencapped photo caption to the right). There are so many easy, cartoonish “Bush is dumb” jokes in this thing that’s it’s hard to cite a single one as being the most over the top. In flashback, George drinks vodka and orange juice out of a trash can at a frat party! Later, he threatens to shove “freedom fries” down Jacques Chirac’s throat! But I do think my favorite excerpt comes from the script’s alleged final scene:
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There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.

In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day. Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”

But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeune puts it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?

In this longish but fascinating video companion piece to his Atlantic story on how Hollywood has reverted to 70s-style dialectics in order to talk about current global conflicts, Ross Douthat explains why the recent wave of Iraq movies haven’t connected with critics or audiences. The problem, in part, is that “Hollywood hasn’t found anything new to say about the Iraq War that you wouldn’t expect them to say based on what they had to say about Vietnam.” Via The House Next Door. Also on the topic of the contemporary war film’s unwillingness to telegraph unexpected or unsafe points of view: The NY Times did a profile of Stop-Loss director Kimberley Pierce over the weekend, and though an inordinate amount of space is given over to explanations for why it took Pierce nine years to make a second film, there’s some interesting stuff about the attempts made to “move towards a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.”

According to Channing Tatum’s official website (no, I’m actually not a regular visitor, but I guess it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that I spend my free time collecting information on a young, strapping “naturally talented dancer that taught himself how to dance by attending coming-of-age parties in the Hispanic community called Quiceneras when he was growing up in Tampa, Florida”), Kimberley Pierce’s troubled Iraq war drama Stop-Loss will be screening (premiering?) at the SXSW Film Festival in March.

Stop-Loss, Pierce’s first film since the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, was initially supposed to open last fall. According to various blog posts, it was then bumped to early March, then to April, and is now scheduled to open on March 28. When the first trailer for the film appeared online in October, Anne Thompson wrote that the Stop-Loss team were “heaving huge sighs of relief that they did not go out this fall, where they would have gotten lumped in with all the other ’serious’ ‘Iraq’ movies.” But regardless of timing, the film has already been damned, to some extent, by synopsis and marketing campaign alone.

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Remember Masters of Horror? The name-brand horror directors anthology series on Showtime that gave birth to Valerie on the Stairs, as well as Joe Dante’s inimitable Homecoming, in which zombie veterans rise from their graves to storm the voting booths? Although Showtime has declined to pick it up for a third season, Masters executive producer Mick Garris and his team have signed a new deal to produce a similar show for NBC. This definitely means the show will attract more eyeballs, and it probably means the producers will have higher budgets, both of which will make luring talent easier. So this is good news for horror fans, right?

Wrong. Film Junk’s Sean writes: “The problem is that a network environment will be extremely limiting for a horror series — blood and gore will have to be borderline non-existent. I suppose there would always be the option for unrated DVD releases afterwards, but I find it hard to believe that the content wouldn’t suffer because of it.”

He may have a point. Take a look at the Homecoming trailer above. It’s a total sanitization of the movie, and I still can’t imagine ever seeing that shot of the guy on the table with the missing legs network TV. For more on Dante’s Homecoming, you must read Grady Hendrix’s Slate piece from December 2005, here.