No Play For Hollywood

From the September 24th National Review's The Week (sub req):

Hollywood is about to release a batch of Terror War movies. What are they like? You'll know when you see them, but here are thumbnail advance sketches from mainstream media.

Lions for Lambs: Robert Redford is an anti-war professor whose students end up fighting in Afghanistan. Grace Is Gone: John Cusack must tell his children that their mother died in Iraq. Charlie Wilson's War: Tom Hanks aids anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan (who become the Taliban). Stop-Loss: A soldier refuses to return to Iraq. The Fall of the Warrior King: Soldiers drown an Iraqi civilian. Redacted: Soldiers rape an Iraqi girl and murder her family.

The director of the last is Brian De Palma, who says, "The pictures are what will stop the war." No. The pictures would stop only one side from fighting. The other will just keep going. De Palma et al. certainly behave as if they want that side to win. But saying that would be McCarthyite, and then they'd just make movies about that for 40 years...

With the possible exception of "Charlie Wilson's War" (which is a great story and could be a great movie if the partisan axe grinding is kept to a minimum), these films all sound like absolute crap. What the hell is wrong with Hollywood anyway? It's not as if there aren't fascinating stories to tell from the war.

Marcus Luttrell's for instance:



Or Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec's? We need movies that tell stories like The Lion of Fallujah not more lies and distortion.

UPDATE-- More on the motivations of Hollywood from Friday'sWSJ (sub req):

Director Paul Haggis, whose new film "In the Valley of Elah," stars Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon in a classic murder mystery set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, makes no bones about his political stance. "I'm very political and was very much against this war and the Afghanistan war before we invaded," he says. He describes the film as a political "Trojan horse" disguised as a murder mystery.

Mr. Haggis, the Oscar-winning writer-director of 2004's "Crash," launched the project during the early phase of the war, when public sentiment was largely behind the conflict. He says the current public mood will make it much easier to market the film, which opens today. "It would have been impossible if the war had gone as well as the president predicted or had there been another major terrorist attack," Mr. Haggis says.

Yeah, it would have been a shame if US military success in Iraq had dampened Mr. Haggis' hopes for a boffo box office.