Despite what you might have read in the over-hyped reviews for “In the Loop”, this is not a satire on the build-up to any war in the Middle East, including the one that began in 2003. It is instead a commentary on the back-stabbing behavior of high-powered governmental functionaries in the U.S. and Great Britain that throughout its 106 minutes contains not a single political conversation.

We are led to believe that Pentagon generals, British foreign office functionaries, and inside-the-beltway policy wonks could be capable of not mentioning a single word about the ostensible enemy despite the reality of White House obsession with Saddam Hussein in 2003. Instead, the power-brokers, both men and women, spend all their time cursing each other out with particular emphasis on the size of the men’s penises. One supposes that A.O. Scott, the N.Y. Times movie reviewer, flipped out over this sorry movie (“The audience…is likely to die laughing”) because it reminds him of what goes on at his job.

Some reviewers compare “In the Loop” to “Dr. Strangelove”. For this comparison to work, you have to imagine a “Dr. Strangelove” without any reference to a looming nuclear war with Russia. Instead we would be treated to George C. Scott’s colorful portrayal as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson but captured entirely in the bedroom rather than the “war room”. Who would want to be inconvenienced with boring discussions about the impact of a thermonuclear device on New York City or Moscow when you can get laughs watching Turgidson prancing about in his underwear?

“In the Loop” reminded me of last year’s “Nothing but the Truth”, a movie inspired by the Judith Miller/Valerie Plame contretemps but utterly devoid of politics. The movie begins with some vague reference to CIA military intervention in Venezuela in order to get the plot moving, but switches gears to become a sterile melodrama about professional ethics and the ambitions of strong-willed women. A big yawn in other words.

The movie begins with a low-level British foreign affairs minister being interviewed about sexually transmitted diseases, his specialty. When asked whether he thought that a war would be fought in the Middle East, he replies that such an event is “unforeseeable”. The doves interpret this as opposition to war, while the hawks spin it in the other direction. The foreign minister is a character similar to Zelig or Peter Sellers in “Being There”. Meanwhile, James Gandolfini of “Sopranos” fame plays a Pentagon general who also likes to be seen as dovish or hawkish to fit the occasion, a supposed reference to General Colin Powell. The only problem with this, of course, was Powell’s full-throated warmongering in 2003. He only became ambivalent about the war after it became costly, just as was the case with most politicians including Barack Obama.

The movie was directed by Armando Iannucci, a Scotsman of Italian descent who also directed “The Thick of It”, a BBC comedy with the same narrow focus as “In the Loop”—nothing so boring as politics ever makes its presence in this television show apparently. It instead prefers to reveal what miscreants run the British government, as if we needed to watch television to learn that. Iannucci’s inspiration was “Yes, Minister”, another comedy of bad manners that used to air on PBS. I once watched 10 minutes of it before switching the dial out of fear of being turned into a pillar of stone.

I doubt that I could improve on the proper trashing of “Hurt Locker” by Jay Rothermel that appeared today on Marxmail. It includes the following observations that I could not agree more strongly with:

The Hollywood combat movie is a genre notorious for hoary clichés. We all know them: at least one solider is on the verge of going home. Another loves war a little too much. A third, from the rear echelon, wants to see some real action. Around camp a G.I. might befriend a local boy, a Samuel Fuller war orphan with a name like Short Round. If Fuller or Robert Aldrich made the movie, most of the officers would be useless tyros or dangerous martinets. The Black soldier would come off hard-as-nails, but reveal himself late in the movie as the heart of the unit. The youngest baby-faced grunt would have a meltdown. There would be some lighter escapades, too, to break-up the bigger combat scenes: men carousing and “getting down” to the soundtrack’s rock and roll music.

“The Hurt Locker” is sold as a vigorously up-to-date hand-held no-stars kitchen-sink realist combat movie with none of these trite and ancient plot points. On this the TV commercials, stellar reviews, and print ads all agree. But the movie has them. Indeed, it seems like an encyclopedia of such clichés. So many are used that the viewer starts to feel like the victim of a practical joke, lured to the theater with the old bait-and-switch.

I would only add a couple of my own complaints. In one scene the American bomb defusing expert, one Sergeant James, scours an abandoned bomb factory, where he discovers a dead Iraqi boy who has been booby-trapped. In keeping with the sensationalist approach of director Kathryn Bigelow, James uses his knife to surgically remove the bomb. To add to the melodrama, the boy is assumed to be a street kid that Sergeant James has befriended, a DVD peddler who calls himself Beckham after the soccer superstar.

Now there have been few reports of booby-trapped corpses in Iraq, but those have exclusively involved occupation forces, either military or civilian like truck drivers. The idea that Sunni insurgents would defile the corpse of a Muslim, even if it belonged to a Shi’ite is unbelievable. As deeply religious rebels, they were and are obviously constrained by their beliefs. The Muslim religion dictates a rapid burial and not the use of a dead believer’s body for a weapon. Suicide bombing, of course, is an entirely different matter that while not exactly sanctioned by the religion is not in open defiance of its strictures, at least as interpreted by its Imams, which is all that matters in the final analysis.

In some ways, this lack of verisimilitude reminded me of “The Deer Hunter”, another war movie that also aspired to transcend the genre’s conventions. In one of the most heralded scenes in the movie, the Vietnamese force an American captive to play Russian roulette. As it turns out, the only record of such a gruesome form of mental and physical torture taking place during the war was imposed by Americans on their Vietnamese captives. That’s par for the course in Hollywood, where demonization of the Empire’s enemies is a requirement for career advancement.

In another scene that is directly related to the scene described above, Sergeant James forces another Arab DVD peddler to drive him to the house where Beckham was booby-trapped, or where he lived. Like much of this movie, it is rather murky what his goal is. When he gets there, pistol in hand, he discovers that it is a middle-class home with an older man preparing dinner in the kitchen. The man, a college professor who speaks English, is not intimidated by the gun and invites him to share tea with him. We are finally on the verge, it would appear, of having some serious dramatic interaction and revelations about how the Arab perceives the occupying powers. But just as soon as the professor makes his invitation, his wife bursts into the kitchen and beats Sergeant James over the head with a metal pot. Our intrepid GI, unafraid of the deadliest bombs, goes running off into the night and no further words are exchanged with the Iraqi man and woman. I imagine that the screenwriter was incapable of writing dialog appropriate to the scene. He was much better suited obviously for having his principals say things like “Haji at 2:00″.

It’s too bad that Jean Baudrillard died since he would have had a field day with “Full Battle Rattle”, a documentary about a billion-dollar simulation of Iraqi villages constructed by the U.S. military to train its occupying forces at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert. The movie premieres at Film Forum in New York tomorrow and can best be described as unintentional satire.

In 1991 Baudrillard described the first Gulf War as existing more as media images (simulacra) than as actual combat. Simulacra would just about sum up the subject of Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s movie whose poster advertises it as “Fake Town, Real War”.

Gerber and Moss made the wise decision not to editorialize but to allow the events to unfold in classic cinéma vérité fashion. After convincing the military that they were serious film-makers and not bomb-throwing anarchists, the two directors were allowed to film inside Medina Wasl, one of the fake villages constructed by the army. Along with the other villages, it has a staff of Iraqi émigrés who seem motivated by a mixture of pro-American zeal and a desire for a quick buck. In other words, they are like their opportunist countrymen who have no problems working for the occupying forces. Other than the fact that they speak Arabic and once lived in Iraq, they are much more like average Americans. For example, the “Deputy Mayor” of Medina Wasl has a regular job as a liquor store clerk and two young women dressed in caftans and head covering would appear more comfortable in designer jeans.

The performances do not stop there. Jihadist raids on Medina Wasl are carried out by American soldiers in costume. When instructed by an officer in charge of the simulation to shout out something in Arabic during an attack, the grunt demurs—he doesn’t know a single word in Arabic. The officer tells him to fake it, to just say something (that sounded to my ears) like “Blubba, hushamusha, bubul, mgugul.” A New York Times article written by the hawkish Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns on Fort Irwin on May 1, 2006 notes: “The insurgents even get acting lessons, coached by Carl Weathers, best known for his portrayal of the boxer Apollo Creed in the ‘Rocky’ films.” It shows.

Since this action and many others are intended to be reviewed by the troops in training, there is always a camera crew taping them. Standing above them all and orchestrating the mayhem is a commanding officer who fancies himself a latter-day Stephen Spielberg. When one grunt, who is playing an Iraqi shot by a jihadi, puts out his hands to soften a fall to the ground after the fake bullet is fired into his skull, the director bawls him out. Since his fall was not “realistic”, he orders a second take.

Throughout the film, the military brass keeps explaining why the simulation is necessary. It was 2006 when attacks on the American military were at an all-time high. In order to decrease the number of attacks, the GI’s were supposed to go through training to make them less hateful to the local population. In an odd way the officers sound a bit like what you hear from “diversity training” managers at big corporations–as if the problems of Iraq can be reduced to communication techniques.

As such, the military simulations can be grouped with other “soft cop” follies churned up by an intractable imperialist war, including the placement of anthropologists in the field whose training will allow them supposedly to open up lines of communication between the army and the restless natives. Ultimately, the solution that seems to be working–at least for the time being–is to simply pay off the Sunni insurgents to the tune of $800,000 a day not to attack US forces.

Filkins and Gordon also note:

At a recent classroom seminar on counterinsurgency at Fort Leavenworth, about 25 Army majors discussed the conduct of the French in the Algerian War of 1954 to 1962. The French, who were trying to hold their colony, lost to the Algerian resistance, even after some French officers endorsed the use of torture to extract intelligence from the insurgents.

In a vigorous classroom debate, the Army majors discussed how and why the French lost. Iraq came up often; four of the majors had already served there and a half-dozen others were scheduled to be deployed there at the end of the academic year. One of the lessons, for instance, is that torture does not work, because of the resentment it generates among the civilian population. The widespread abuse of Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, some of it apparently with official approval, did not come up in class. ”Is it applicable to Iraq?” Maj. Sean Smith, a member of the class, said afterward. ”That’s why we do that in every class.”

As long as the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military continues to back torture and as long as a supine Democratic “opposition” continues to allow him to get his way, I doubt that the training at Fort Irwin will have any impact. And as I watch Barack Obama’s latest gyrations, I am afraid that a new president will make no difference either.

Official Website

Iraq’s only heavy metal band in performance

If there is anything good to come out of the war in Iraq, it is film documentary. Over the past four years or so, there has been a steady stream of excellent movies. The latest of these is “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” that showed briefly in theaters to universal acclaim. With a modest budget, the documentary allows the principals to speak for themselves. Acrassicauda, the Latin nomenclature for the black scorpion that is found in the Iraqi desert, is the name of Iraq’s only heavy metal band. Their struggle for survival, both physically and culturally, is a reminder of the sustaining power of rock-and-roll.

“Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is related thematically to the excellent “Operation Filmmaker” that opened in New York theaters yesterday. Muthana Mohmed, the young aspiring Iraqi film-maker in this movie, simply wants to make art but events conspire against him. After a bomb blast has destroyed the only film school in Baghdad, he is forced to rely on the dubious charity of Hollywood actor Liev Schreiber for a job as a gopher. And not long after the war begins, the rehearsal studio of Acrassicauda is destroyed by an American missile. Unlike Mohmed, the band has no deep-pocketed benefactors and they are forced into desperate measures to continue with their art.

The members of the band were discovered by Vice Magazine, a more interesting version of Rolling Stone, in 2004 just as Muthana Mohmed was first noticed by MTV. Since Vice has a film company, it was a natural project for Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi—two of its executive producer/directors. They made a series of trips to Baghdad, conducted at extraordinary risk, in order to interview members of the band, particularly the leader Firas who expresses his dream at the film’s end after he has become an exile in Syria: “I hope I can live somewhere else, not in Iraq, so I can get long hair, long beard, Zakk Wylde-style, You know what I’m saying.” (Zakk Wylde was a guitarist with Ozzy Osbourne.)

Firas, a bass player, is a compelling figure. Although he describes himself and the band as non-political, nearly every word he has to say about Iraq would seem to accurately describe its descent into hell. After things took a turn for the worse in 2005, it became impossible for him to meet another band member even though they only lived 15 minutes from each other.

The final 30 minutes or so of “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” takes place in Damascus, where all of the band members have sought refuge. As such, it is one of the few documentaries that have described the terrible costs of the war on over 2 million Iraqis who have been forced from their country. Firas says that life in Syria is less than zero compared to the zero that was Iraq. At least in Iraq they knew the terrain, even if it might cost their lives. In Syria, they were safe but deprived from their livelihood as musicians. Apparently, despite the difficulties facing a heavy metal band there both under Saddam and afterwards, there was a fan base. One of the high points of the documentary is a performance by Acrassicauda at a hotel within the Green Zone before an audience of adoring fans, including some sprawled on the floor in an Iraqi version of a mosh pit.

The official DVD release date for “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is June 10. Look for it in your better video stores or Netflix. It can also be ordered from the film’s website.

Muthana Mohmed (r) was “rescued” by Liev Schreiber (l)
in the same way that Iraq was rescued by George W. Bush

“Operation Filmmaker” is at once a searing indictment of colonialism in Iraq and the phony do-goodism of Hollywood, all revolving around the interaction between Muthana Mohmed, a twenty-five-year-old Baghdad film student, and his various “rescuers” in the film industry. At the conclusion of Nina Davenport’s excellent documentary, you don’t know who is more disgusting–the military men who have ruined Iraq or the film executives who have turned Muhtana into a psychologically and economically dependent tragicomic figure.

Shortly after the war in Iraq began, MTV interviewed Muthana in Baghdad about how an errant American bomb had just leveled the only film school in the country, thus destroying his dream of being a director. After listening to the interview, American actor and director Liev Schreiber decided to “rescue” him from Iraq and make him an intern on the latest film he was directing in Prague: “Everything Is Illuminated”. Muthana came to Prague with dreams of learning the craft of filmmaking, but his job was to be a “gopher”, bringing coffee to the cast, cleaning Schreiber’s shoes and preparing vegan snacks for one of the producers. Preparing the snacks is a real production, involving the exact combination of nuts and dried fruits. Muthana is told that if the combination was not correct, there would be hell to pay.

As a typical Hollywood Jewish liberal, Schreiber is almost as insufferable as Stephen Spielberg. When he finally sits down with Muthana–a Shi’ite–he is disconcerted to discover that George W. Bush is his hero for having liberated his people. As Schreiber and producer Peter Saraf–another Jewish liberal–continue to hear Muthana praise Bush, the relationship cools visibly even though they pledge in good liberal fashion not to hold that against him.

Saraf, the producer of a film on Nelson Mandela and the execrable “Little Miss Sunshine”, is particularly annoying. As Muthana’s internship is coming to an end, he lectures him about the need to “set something up”. The fact that he hasn’t made contacts in the U.S. or Great Britain tells Saraf that he doesn’t have much of a future in the film industry where hustle is all-important. Although Muthana always wears a smile on his face during these encounters, you can almost read his thoughts: “I would like to kill this mother-fucker”.

Despite being a Shi’ite, Muthana is not the least bit religious. He likes to drink and screw around with the women on the set. The film also interviews his friends back in Baghdad who are just as secular-minded as him. The steady deterioration there has led one of them to conclude that all religions are “fucked”.

Just as Muthana’s visa is about to expire, he keeps getting extensions. Word from Iraq is that things are just too dangerous for him to come home. Even with the visa, he is still not sure he can make it in the West since film jobs are relatively hard to come by, even with his high visibility as an Iraqi struggling to make it. After his gig with Schreiber is up, he gets another low-level job on the movie “Doom”, a zombie b-movie starring the ex-wrestler Dwaye “The Rock” Johnson. Muthana confides to Nina Davenport that the script is horrible and is further distressed by the site of actors made up to look like their flesh has been eaten. It reminds him too much of the footage he watches each night on Al Jazeera.

Just one step ahead of the immigration cops and the bill collectors, he relies on friends and associates for legal help and for hand-outs. His relationship with Nina Davenport becomes particularly strained since he sees her as exploiting him for the purpose of her documentary. He demands cash payments from her and when she refuses, he keeps her latest tape hostage.

As the film concludes, Davenport is heard saying: “I always hoped that there would be a good ending with my collaboration with Muthana, but more and more I was looking for an exit strategy.”

“Operation Filmmaker” will have its American theatrical premiere on June 4th at the IFC Center in New York City. It will also open on June 10th at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, on June 13th at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and on June 20th at the Brattle Theatre in Boston, with other national dates to follow throughout the summer and into the fall.

Very highly recommended.

Official film website

Since so much water has passed under the bridge, I asked for a review copy of Nick Broomfield’s “The Battle for Haditha” (scheduled to open at the Film Forum in N.Y. on May 7; it can be downloaded from BitTorrent as well apparently) without realizing that the title was ironic. I entirely forgot that there was no “battle” there, as there had been in neighboring Fallujah, but only a massacre of civilians that was called Iraq’s My Lai.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, an IED attack on a Marine convoy in Haditha left 2 soldiers wounded and a third sliced in half. Immediately afterwards, the marines stopped a taxi cab in the vicinity and shot the driver and 4 young unarmed passengers to death. One of the marines urinated on the head of one of his victims. Soon afterwards, the marines, who had been joined by reinforcements, went into three neighboring houses and shot another 19 civilians to death. A long article in the 2006 issue of Vanity Fair by William Langewiesche, which seems to have had a strong influence on Broomfield’s film, states:

Many had been sleeping, and were woken by the land-mine blast. Some were shot down in their pajamas. The oldest man was 76. He was blind and decrepit, and sat in a wheelchair. His elderly wife was killed, too. The dead children ranged in age from 15 to 3.

At the time the massacre was just one more in a series of outrages that helped to consolidate opposition to the war. Representative John Murtha, a Marine veteran himself, gave a news conference in which he said, “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Frank D. Wuterich, the Marine staff sergeant in charge of the killings, sued Murtha for defamation.

Wuterich and four other marines were charged with murder after a report in Time Magazine put enough heat on the military to force it to take action. Even the top killer at the White House was forced to say: ”I am troubled by the initial news stories. I am mindful that there is a thorough investigation going on. If, in fact, the laws were broken, there will be punishment.”

Broomfield is not the first director to make a docudrama based on the Haditha massacre. Last year, Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” generated a lot of controversy through its all-out assault on the Marines, who are depicted as total sociopaths. I confess to having been able to sit through only 15 minutes of the movie since it was so amateurish and stupid. Not surprisingly, De Palma was lionized at Cannes, where his “political statement” captured the feelings of many film industry celebrities.

Broomfield’s “Battle for Haditha” takes an entirely different tack on the events. Unlike De Palma, the movie-according to the press notes-makes the case that “The Marines too are victims, attacked, wounded, and forced to respond in the way they have been trained. But when events occur at great speed and under extreme stress, can Marines in the line of fire be accused of murder.”

In order to humanize the American soldiers, Broomfield takes several liberties in his fictional recreation of the events that are not borne out by the facts. To begin with, he introduces a couple of characters responsible for the placement of the bomb who are the mirror images of the Marines. If they hadn’t placed the bomb in the road nearby the houses where the innocent victims lived, none of the killings would have taken place.

The motif of innocent civilians being caught between the pincers of an occupying army and a bloodthirsty insurgency is very old. During the Vietnam War, liberal journalists and politicians always saw the peasant as a victim of two armed forces while only wanting to live in peace. Graham Greene encapsulated this way of thinking when he had the jaded British journalist hero of “The Quiet American” say: “In five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to the market on the long poles of wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on their buffaloes.”

An even more egregious error is Broomfield’s decision to have one of the marines leading a young girl, a sole survivor, out of the charnel house by her hand, an utterly bogus “redemptive” note that smacks of the kind of Hollywood liberalism that made Paul Haggis’s “Crash” so insufferable.

If I had the time and the money, I’d try to write a documentary on Iraq–one that is so desperately needed. Nearly every movie that has come out, either fictional or documentary, has been thin on historical context. Basically, there is no equivalent to Peter Davis’s masterpiece on the Vietnam War, the 1974 “Hearts and Minds” documentary that can now be seen on Youtube.

I would start with the country’s origins, which involved the heavy hand of British colonialism. What an amazing rogue’s gallery, from the well-known buccaneer T.E. Lawrence to the much less well-known Gertrude Bell who drew the map from the Ottoman carcass that would include modern-day Iraq. Bell was an “Orientalist” who spoke Arabic and was trained as an archaeologist at Oxford. You can read her journals (and letters) at Newcastle University, including this excerpt from 9/29/1919. You will note that British imperialism had a handle on “divide and conquer” that has been handed down to their American successors. My guess is that the Americans will eventually be forced to leave just as they were-and the sooner the better.

Egypt should be an object lesson to us of how not to do things. I said I thought India was a still more striking one (e.g. Mr Sifton’s remark that the real difficulty under the new scheme will be how to deal with a British officer who rightly comes up against a native minister; if he is to be broken, as would seem inevitable, he should at least be allowed to retire on his full pension – this is a fine example of the extreme difficulty of relinquishing hold once we have taken hold too tight.) Gen. Clayton agreed but said that the fact that Egypt is all of one piece increases the formidableness of the problem. If India were not so much divided, Hindus against Islam, native princes against Nationalists, it would be a much graver matter, indeed if India had the homogeneous population of Egypt, we could not hold on at all.

Youtube trailer for movie