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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I’ve always been conflicted by my hatred for war and my love for war films. But I can’t help being excited by cinematic combat. As Miguel Ferrer says in Hot Shots! Part Deux, “War … it’s fantastic!” Certainly his character is referring to the real-life action, but in a reflexive way he’s talking about war on film (he does break the diegetic space when he utters the statement, after all). And I have to say, in that context, no war film in recent years has been as fantastic as Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, which opened in New York yesterday.

The difficult thing about war films is that, despite often being exciting action movies, they’re about real, tragic situations, even if they’re fictional stories set in an actual war (the opening of Saving Private Ryan is of course the epitome of war films’ ability to be at the same time both affecting and awesome). Broomfield’s film has the additional difficulty of being about a real battle from a war that is still going on. And of course there’s that whole problem of Iraq War films being box office poison lately. But if the viewer is able to forget all that stuff, there’s a chance he or she will find Battle for Haditha totally exhilarating.

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It didn’t work out so well for Michael Moore, but who is to say other documentarians can’t succeed in fiction filmmaking? Recent notables to make the switch have included Nick Broomfield (whose unscripted yet dramatized Battle for Haditha opens at New York’s Film Forum next month), Barbara Kopple, Andrew Jarecki and Seth Gordon, who originally seemed to be crossing the line to remake his own The King of Kong as a narrative feature but has instead become attached to other fiction projects.

The latest, though, is a bit of a shocker, even if he is famous for making a dramatization-heavy doc. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Errol Morris’ next project is a comedy, which he’s currently writing. Titled The End of Everything, the script is at least based on a true story and Morris says the film will be, “a new idea of how to blend drama with reality.”

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I’m so over filmmakers who put or involve themselves in their documentaries. Thanks to Michael Moore, who wasn’t the first to use first-person narrative in non-fiction filmmaking but who was certainly the one who brought it into the spotlight, so many documentarians want to be in their movies, be the subject of their movies or at least narrate their movies in a very personality-injected way. It’s like the whole Woody Allen, casting oneself as the star kind of directing, which influenced so many indie filmmakers, only it’s much worse. This isn’t to say that all documentary must be objective, and I continue to be a huge fan of McElwee and Broomfield (who apparently has changed his style of late) despite the fact that newbies like Jonathan Caouette and Zana Briski have been ruining subjective documentary filmmaking in recent years. Instead it’s to say that one shouldn’t pretend to be making a movie about a cause, when really one is making a movie about oneself, or one’s cause.

Case in point, this trailer for Abby Epstein’s The Business of Being Born, which attempts to make the documentary out to be like a footnote to Moore’s Sicko. It doesn’t really show how the film involves executive producer Ricki Lake on screen, nor does it let us know that Epstein, too, is a character. I’ll admit that I haven’t yet seen The Business of Being Born and so can not comment on just how much footage there is of Lake, who apparently gives birth in the film, or Epstein, who fortuitously became pregnant in the middle of making the film, but any amount is too much, in my opinion. I made exceptions for Don Cheadle, who executive produced Darfur Now, in which he also appears, because the film is partially about how celebrity is unfortunately the best route in which to carry a cause (and a film), but in Lake’s case it merely seems like a case of blatant self-interest. Anyway, the film opens today in New York City. And no, I’m not running out the door to see it, so it may be awhile before I find out if that self-interest works or doesn’t.

• “There are all these people who are like a non-people living here in caravans, 15 to a house in parts of England. Completely under the radar, completely unprotected. Like Dickensian England, it’s all here. These people are working for Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and ASDA, [they] all pretend they don’t know it’s going on. And the government pretends it doesn’t know it’s going on. They’ve designed everything so that those people can be used to keep the cost of living low. There like this sub-human race and I realized that this is really widespread.” From RCRD LBL’s “exclusive interview” with Nick Broomfield, whose narrative feature Ghosts just came out on DVD in the UK.
• Coen Brothers blogathon alert: “Seeing as the Coen Brothers and their new movie haven’t gotten enough blogosphere attention, we here decided we would talk about the Coen Brothers and what their new movie has done to and in their body of work.” The show goes down Friday the 21st at Vinyl is Heavy.
• “At the moment, it looks like a good chunk of my annual top-ten will be dominated by Westerns and Musicals,” writes Filmbrain. “Go figure.” I totally agree with him on Michael Clayton, which I finally saw on Monday and which is such a disappointment–if there was an award for the Best Final Reel Totally Undeserved By The 90 Minutes That Precede It, this one would win in a landslide.
• Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is, according to Nathan Rabin, “unmistakably a coke movie. It has coke’s jittery, paranoid rhythms: the maddeningly repetitive circular conversations, the pummeling emotional intensity, the screaming matches, and ragged, overreaching ambition. It’s the kind of movie that shows up at your doorstep at four in the morning looking bleary-eyed and desperate and angrily demands $400 for something it doesn’t feel comfortable talking about.”

• The Hollywood Reporter predicts Saw IV will open huge this weekend, and Variety concurs. The Variety story is a bit more skeptical as to whether or not this latest installment in “the flagship hardcore horror franchise” can reverse the course on the torture porn down-turn, but THR is looking at the bigger question of “whether the gore-filled sequel can pump some blood into a recently lifeless fall theatrical season.”
• Variety’s headline says there’s “new life” in pre-strike talks between the WGA and the AMPTP, but the story reads like you literally couldn’t pay the Writer’s Guild not to strike. The Reporter’s headline seems more accurate: “WGA seems unimpressed with new AMPTP proposals.”
• Kurt & Courtney director Nick Broomfield has hopped from the William Morris Agency to ICM. Broomfield is looking for North American distribution for his second narrative feature in two years, Battle for Haditha, and his new agency has been tasked with aiding that cause.
• Reason #907 why this Taking of Pelham 123 remake seems like a bad idea: John Travolta.