IraqWar Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you still haven't watched any of the million documentaries about the Iraq War because you're still not quite ready for that kind of subject matter, you might want to check out Full Battle Rattle. It is a documentary, and it is related to the Iraq War, but you may consider it more like a simulation of a documentary about the Iraq War than an actual example. Think of it as like a practice piece until you can handle the real deal.

How is Full Battle Rattle different from the rest, you ask? Well, it's not set in Iraq or even in the Middle East. It takes place in America, in California's Mojave Desert, to be exact. It's there that the U.S. military has built a bunch of fake Iraqi towns, complete with fake Iraqi people, some of whom are played by actual Iraqi immigrants, others of whom are played by soldiers preparing for combat before being deployed overseas.

And then there are the other thousands of soldiers who basically play themselves on the unscripted side of partially scripted training exercises designed to simulate possible scenarios that they'll be faced with once they're shipped out to Iraq. In a way, watching the simulations documented in the film is like watching Civil War reenactments, except that in this case it's more like pre-enactments.

There's no way around it: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson owes at least some of his fame to the way his dominating figure fits the blockbuster action stereotype with near-mechanical sleekness. However, he also offers an alternative to that reductive perspective. Looking sharp in a business suit and speaking with the relaxed professional discipline of a CEO, Johnson showed up at a screening of Get Smart on Sunday at the CineVegas Film Festival displaying sheer confidence. The screening took place at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, where Johnson had recently acted in Race to Witch Mountain ("We just added to the chaos," he said), but on this visit, Johnson got a chance to remind people that he's not just a one-note performer, but someone who plays an active role in the international film community (not to mention the health community, since The Rock Foundation pushes obesity prevention).

Outside of his supremely meta performance in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, Johnson has made his interests in adventurous cinema increasingly clear, and boldly champions independent artists. You can get a small glimpse of this aspect of his personality in Operation Filmmaker, documentarian Nina Davenport's account of an Iraqi filmmaker named Muthana Mohmed whose aspirations tragically fall short of the expectations surrounding him. Landing the opportunity to work for Liev Schreiber on the set of Everything is Illuminated, the 25-year-old Mohmed grows increasingly frustrated with the boring tasks given to him, and continually blows opportunities as a result of his unbalanced work ethic.

You're probably thinking you don't need another documentary about the Iraq War. But you're wrong, because Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is finally being released, and the film is one of three necessary docs dealing with Iraq. The triad, which would make a great box set if only the same company distributed all three films, also includes Charles Ferguson's very highly acclaimed Sundance jury-award-winner No End in Sight (on which Gibney was a producer) and Patricia Foulkrod's under-appreciated 2006 work The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends.

What do they have in common? Well, if you put them together and watch them all, you'll feel like an expert on three important aspects of the war and its most significant repercussions. They may not tell you everything there is to know about the Iraq War, but they're more thorough and informative than most. No End in Sight is the most directly involved with the actual conflict, from its causes to its effects (read Kim's review here). The Ground Truth more specifically deals with the American soldiers, but in an all-encompassing, training-to-homecoming portrait of modern combat and its consequences (see my review here). Taxi to the Dark Side is sort of like a flip side to that film, though it doesn't necessarily focus on the enemy combatants. Instead it deals with suspected enemies, soldiers or otherwise, who are held and oftentimes tortured in prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

Taxi to the Dark Side somewhat falls outside the box (set), though, in that it really isn't about Iraq. In fact, Gibney insists that his documentary is not an 'Iraq film.' Yes, it does feature a lot of details about, and footage of, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, which is probably the best-known prison of its kind, but it also prominently features Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the two other facilities used in the detention and interrogation of individuals presumed to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency or any other enemy of the U.S. in its "War on Terror."

(Since Grace is Gone is now screening in limited release, we're re-publishing James' review from the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.)

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
(It is sweet and decorous to die for one's country.)

-- Horace

Sure, but try explaining that to someone who's lost a loved one in war; it may be sweet and decorous to die for one's country, but how is that consolation to the people left behind? How do you explain that kind of loss to yourself? How do you explain that kind of loss to children? And moving from the abstract to the concrete, as Stanley Phillips (John Cusack) has to ask himself, how can he explain to his daughters Heidi (Shélan O'Keefe) and Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) that their mom -- wife, mother, friend, U.S. Army staff sergeant -- isn't coming back to them because she's died in Iraq?

Well, for Stanley, the answer to that is simple: You don't. At least not right away. You stall for a few minutes. And then you stall for an hour. And then you stall a little more and ask the kids what they'd like to do while driving around Minnesota's chain restaurants and strip malls, trying desperately to think of how to tell them. And when Dawn says she wants to go to Enchanted Gardens -- a Florida fun park -- Stanley puts the family on the highway and heads South, because doing something stupid is invariably easier than doing something right.

You know how it felt when you were in college and your dad would take you aside for a, "Let's have a serious chat about your future/what a slacker you are/why you need to start growing up and getting your life together" talk? Wasn't that fun? Or not. That's pretty much how it feels watching the lastest Iraq war flick, Robert Redford-helmed Lions for Lambs, written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, who also penned The Kingdom, which came out in September (and barely made back its $70 million budget).

Lions for Lambs gets its title from a story related by Redford's character, college professor Stephen Malley, about a German general in WW2 who had a lot of respect for the British footsoldiers on the front lines, even though he thought those brave men were being led by a pack of idiots. The general, Malley tells us, said of the soldiers "Never have I seen such lions led by such lambs." The film plays on that idea with our current (seemingly endless) war and the soldiers putting their lives on the line for decisions being made by people who don't seem to know what the hell they're doing. The anecdote could also apply to the film itself, which has heaps of earnest, heartfelt performances and a relevant message unfortunately wrapped up in an oddly discordant, moderately self-righteous package which is probably going to go right over the heads of most of the people at whom it's targeted.

Last November, when I brought news about Phil Donahue's directorial debut as a documentary filmmaker, there wasn't much known. We learned that it was focused on a paralyzed Iraq War vet named Tomas Young, that Donahue was financing it himself and that any profits would go to charity and to Young, and that he still had a lot to do before the film would be finished. It seems to be done, though, now. The former talk show host has been screening the doc, which he co-directed with Ellen Spiro (Troop 1500), in his Manhattan apartment, for a number of acquisitions execs from various distributors.

The film now has a title: Body of War (which sounds to me a little too close to Lord of War). It also has newly confirmed controversial subject matter: it criticizes many Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton, for their support of the Iraq War. Reportedly only one Democrat, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, is okay in Donahue's book. Body of War will feature a soundtrack of new music from Eddie Vedder that he wrote specifically for the film. Contrary to what I had predicted, it does not feature Donahue on camera in Michael Moore fashion. Donahue is hoping for a wide theatrical release, though the execs seem to be more interested in a smaller scale. Already the film has been accepted to one of this fall's prestigious film festivals, though it isn't known which -- possibly either Toronto or Venice -- so we'll probably see how it is received publicly before we hear about any concrete distribution plans.

By the time the U.S. stops fighting in Iraq, there will be so many films about the war and its aftermath that you will be able to watch one a day for the rest of your life. At some point we will even stop posting the announcements of directors who will be making a film about Iraq and instead write about the directors who won't be. But for now, here's more details on one of those who is planning one. As Monika reported earlier this month, Brian De Palma is set to write and direct an Iraq-based film titled Redacted. Now it turns out that it will be an HD feature for Mark Cuban's and Todd Wagner's HDNet Films.

I'll admit that I've never cared for De Palma's films, and I'm just about done with the subject matter, but the format of the film intrigues me. Variety reports that Redacted will be a montage of stories, and in addition to being about different soldiers, it will also be about different forms of media coverage. I also expect it will have an immediate feel to it, as it will be shot and released fairly quickly in the HDNet day-and-date distribution model. This will be great for De Palma, whose films tend not to age well.

There is a plan to open Redacted wider and more commercially than previous HDNet releases, but considering many theater owners still aren't into the idea of day-and-date, the plan probably won't include a lot of areas of the country. And though I don't understand why, De Palma has a large following, and there is going to be a lot of people disappointed that they won't get to see the director's latest on a big screen.

I've become something of a Nick Broomfield junky lately. Thanks to Michael Moore, I had otherwise become averse to documentary filmmakers who appear in their work, but Broomfield has charmed me unlike anyone else (save for maybe Ross McElwee), and so I make an exception for his work. Years ago, when Jon Ronson discussed these filmmakers, whom he calls "Les Nouvelles Égotistes" in Sight and Sound, he called this charm "faux-naïfery," but regardless of how genuine Broomfield is, he is always entertaining and he is always a curious and primarily objective journalist. Comparatively, he is more focused than McElwee and less rabble rousing than Moore. The fact that Broomfield's new doc, Ghosts, has been picked to screen at Sundance in January, has me very sorry that I won't be making it to the festival this year.

My appreciation for Broomfield may fall some in the future, though, if news of his next project has any validity to it. The North County Times has mentioned a casting call for a film being credited to Broomfield to be made about the Iraq War experience. This call is for members or veterans of any military branch who served in Iraq, and will be held in San Diego this Saturday and in Yuma, Arizona, this Sunday. Aside from my confusion over the story's reference to Broomfield as being "the maker of Jarhead and Fast and the Furious 3" and my slight problem with the use of the masculine term "servicemen", I have a major issue with the project as it is described. I don't mean my usual issue with the over-abundance of Iraq War vet docs being made, I mean some things stated in a telephone recording that I listened to after calling the film's casting hotline. An unprofessional-sounding woman stumbles through the recording and eventually gets to the point that the production is looking for real vets rather than actors because of a desire for improvisation based on real accounts. Oh, and she says that the film is scripted and that those picked for the film will be paid.

None of the information that I have found about this "documentary" seems to technically be descriptive of a non-fiction film. Does this mean that we should question all of Broomfield's previous films, which include Kurt & Coutney, Biggie and Tupac and two docs about Aileen Wuornos? Sure, you could say that no documentary should be taken as truth, but there is a good line between disbelief and distrust.

I am still waiting to hear from Broomfield's people to see if they confirm or deny this unfortunate report. Let's hope they can explain what this is all about.

There is no single superior format when it comes to documenting an issue. Non-fiction films have the advantage over fiction films in that they can give either a general overview, often with a sense of omniscience, or they can give a specific, personal study. Occasionally they can even provide a combined method. On a subject like Iraq War vets, both formats are necessary and effective. I will say, however, that I often prefer the broader documentaries, because with the narrower single-subject take I'm left wondering about the many other individuals. With technological accessibility what it is today, perhaps every Iraq War vet could get their own documentary -- but would this be at all sensible?

One vet is getting his own film thanks to garnering the attention of former talk-show host Phil Donahue. Tomas Young, a 24-year-old from Kansas City returned from the Iraq War paralyzed from the nipples down after being shot on his fourth day in country. Donahue, who believes his MSNBC show was canceled in 2003 because of his opposition to the war, met Young in 2004 while visiting Walter Reed Hospital with his friend Ralph Nader. Seeing as how he was then unemployed, he decided to shoot a documentary about the soldier. It is easy to imagine, too, that Donahue is making it for his own reasons, seeing it as his only outlet to speak out against the war and the media's mishandled coverage of it. However, he won't make any money off the film; he plans to donate any profits from the self-funded documentary to his wife's charity, St. Jude Hospital, and to Young.

If Vietnam was the first televised war and the Gulf War could be considered the first 24-hour coverage war (thanks to CNN), then the Iraq War might be called the most-first-hand-documented. Thanks to the more-immediate technologies of digital filmmaking, documentaries have been in abundance since the beginning of the conflict, giving us everything from ground-troop-shot films to quickly released looks at its aftermath. At this year's Tribeca Film Festival, films took us into battle alongside American soldiers (The War Tapes) and Iraqi insurgents (The Blood of My Brother) and brought us back home with the vets (When I Came Home; Home Front). Despite an overload of these documentaries, there still can't be enough of them, as they provide us with countless points of view and an immeasurable acquaintance with the reality of the ins and outs of the war.

Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends, which screened at this year's Sundance Film Festival, could be considered just another film about the homecoming of U.S. troops and their difficult return to civilian life, but despite its sharing two faces with When I Came Home (featured interviewees Paul Reickhoff and Herold Noel), the differences between the two films mark an apparent allowance for numerous looks into the subject matter. While covering Tribeca, I actually decided to skip the Iraqi vet pic Home Front, thinking it would be hard to handle too many similar films (it screened the same day as When I Came Home and The Blood of My Brother). Now I feel that there is no such thing as too many when it comes to understanding this or any war. It is the same reason that movies about WWII and Vietnam will continue to be made; the difference is that with documentaries, the immediacy of the truth seems to hit a little harder.