Weapons of Mass Distraction;or, All the Nukes That's Fit to Print

Green Zone

Crit

I seriously considered staying home to nurse my crappy cold, but then I thought that maybe Paul Greengrass's shakycam would work a sort of homeopathic magic on my inner ear and cure me. But no.

Look, there's a lot I don't know about what has happened in Iraq over the past seven years, and like all good peacenik liberals, I'm really attracted to the narrative that Very Bad Guys lied shamelessly to foment a completely unnecessary but profitable war while Very Good Guys tried valiantly by ineffectually to make the truth carry the day.

However.

Unfortunately, I have spent a significant portion of my 56 years interacting with actual human beings, very few of whom seem to sport evident halos or horns, and the black and white hats they sometime wear fail frustratingly to correspond consistently to accepted good-and-evil iconography.

As a result, it's hard for me to enjoy black-and-white narrative-qua-narrative. In fact, I sometimes feel a tad insulted. In fact, I sometimes get a tad pissy about it. I've been known to use terms like "intellectually dishonest" or "mindlessly simplistic." Particularly when, within the narrative, one of the points the Very Good Guys are trying to make is that it's not useful to consider all Iraqis to be either Very Good Guys or (more likely) Very Bad Guys. Did no one notice the contradiction?

Oh, and did I mention the script? Have Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear ever had to read such clichéd dialogue?

Random point #1: what is more disorienting, Greengrass's camera work or Brendan Gleeson's affecting a regionally indeterminate "American" accent?

Random point #2: did anyone else on this side of the Pond notice Greengrass and Matt Damon in the stands at Stamford Bridge during a recent televised Chelsea match? The (Brit) TV announcers didn't, though obviously the engineer did.

Trailers

Sequels, an old standby, and a beloved title appropriated . . .

• Robin Hood--Yeah, I've already blurbed this, but the new radically revised trailer shows a much ballsier Cate-as-Maid Marian, and that in part ramps up my enthusiasm for the project.
• Iron Man 2--I was lukewarm on the original, but red-haired Gwyneth Paltrow is back as Pepper Potts, and Mickey Rourke is the Russian supervillain, so I'm a guarded yes.
• Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps--Gecko sticks. The fabulous Carey Mulligan plays his estranged daughter, the inexplicable Shia LaBeouf plays her fiancé who yearns not to be estranged, and Michael Douglas is back, of course, as The Man.
• Repo Men--It is fair to say, I think, that this is a descendant of the Alex Cox cult classic. Here, though, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker repo defaulted body parts. It goes without saying that such a life must always be intense.