You’d think after “Rendition,” “In the Valley of Elah,” “Redacted,” “Stop Loss” and “Lions for Lambs,” film studios would be leery of projects depicting U.S. troops in an unflattering light – or much worse.

Not so! The calendar might say 2012, but there’s another Iraq War-themed film heading our way.

“The Boys of Abu Ghraib,” starring Sara Paxton, Sean Astin and John Heard, sounds like a culmination of all the previous films out to undermine the war effort.

You won’t find a ton of information about the film online, nor does “Boys” seem to have a release date at the moment. Still, a news page for actor Garret Dillahunt, whose name doesn’t appear on the imdb.com page but is linked to the project via Variety, serves up a plot description that sounds like a greatest hits package of past anti-American flops:

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(As with all Sucker Punch Squad reviews, what follows is a review of the script, not the final film – which I’ve not yet seen.)

Despite their insistence that Americans “get over” 9/11 even though we’re still at war with Islamic fundamentalists, the Left refuses to get over the Bush administration and the war in Iraq that we’ve already won. The Hollywood Left, with their “Bush lied, people died,” bumper-sticker brain capacity, are especially determined to keep flogging that dead horse long after American audiences have proven that they reject such defeatist, morally inverted propaganda.

And so if you think a new movie about the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln might make a gripping historical thriller and be refreshingly free of Hollywood lectures about the ill-named War on Terror, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Robert Redford recently unveiled his period piece The Conspirator at the Toronto International Film Festival. It begins with the assassination of Lincoln and centers on one apparent conspirator, Mary Surratt, on trial for providing gunman John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices (including her son) with a location to plot their conspiracy (her boardinghouse) and with other assistance. Mary, who “kept the nest that hatched the egg,” as Andrew Johnson put it, ended up being the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government.

But strangely – or maybe predictably, if you’re as cynical about Hollywood as I am – one figure looms as a more insistent presence in Redford’s courtroom drama than Surratt, Booth or Lincoln: President George W. Bush. (more…)

Beginning in June 2007, filmmaker Tim Hetherington and war correspondent Sebastian Junger embedded themselves with a U.S. Army platoon in the truly God-forsaken Korengal Valley of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. A companion piece to Junger’s new book War, Restrepo is their feature-length documentary centered on a fifteen-man outpost in one of the most remote and dangerous war zones on earth. 

Trailer is NSFW

Its cinema verité style, interspersed with commentary from soldiers interviewed after the deployment, puts you in the center of the action – and inaction – alongside a half dozen or so principal characters. It captures the chaos and the boredom, the courage and the fear, the tension and the playful abandon of their stretch in Outpost Restrepo, named after their young medic, a Korengal casualty.

In between IED attacks, firefights, digging in on a cliff-side, negotiating compensation with the villagers for a dead cow, mourning dead comrades, rooting out arms caches in the village, and general horsing around, these soldiers, painfully young but becoming men before our eyes, offer honest and revealing emotions about these experiences. One soldier says he can barely get his head around it all; he just hopes that “one day I’ll be able to process it differently.” (more…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see). (more…)

Almost before the echo of gunfire from the massacre at Ft. Hood had faded, the news media launched a pre-emptive rationalization for the slaughter committed by Muslim traitor Nidal Malik Hasan. To divert attention from the shooter’s inconvenient name (“I cringe that he’s Muslim,” said Newsweek’s Evan Thomas), the talking heads began speculating sympathetically about the fragile mental state of poor frazzled Hasan, who had never seen combat but nonetheless must have “snapped.” After all, surely there could be no rational, ideological motive for the mass murder, which President Obama labeled “incomprehensible.”  And “it’s certainly not about his religion, Islam,” denied Senator Lindsey Graham. Indeed, from listening to such “experts” as irrelevant diet book author Dr. Phil (“this is not a well act”), you’d think that Hasan was the victim, not the fourteen dead* and the nearly thirty seriously wounded that he left in his heartless wake. Even as a mountain of accumulating evidence irrefutably exposed Hasan’s act as premeditated violent jihad against the U.S. military, stubborn left-leaning commentators clung to their theory of mental derangement.

George Clooney in 2005’s  Syriana

Meanwhile the national discussion has segued to our own collective insanity, political correctness, which we are now discovering paved the very way for the massacre. It is this cultural and mental straightjacket that forced a U.S. Army general to say diversity is more important than losing American lives; that compelled our Homeland Security Secretary to reassure the Arab world that we’re doing everything we can to protect against a mythical Muslim backlash; that prevented people from speaking out about red flags that could have saved the lives of everyone murdered at Ft. Hood; and that prevents our officials from even naming the enemy. No such ailment afflicts the jihadists, however, who are celebrating Hasan as a hero, who have no problem acknowledging his ideological intent, and who recognize our political correctness as a self-inflicted fatal wound. Unlike our leaders and media elites, they don’t sap their wartime focus with hand-wringing and navel-gazing. (more…)

Kicking back listening to Bonnie Tyler belt out “Holding Out For A Hero” made me think of a recent visit to Hollywood where I had the opportunity to speak with a few producers and screenwriters, truly good people all. 

Their big message: military films aren’t working. The country is weary and doesn’t want war films as entertainment. Rather, they say, the good citizens of our nation want to escape with the fictional heroes in movies such as “Transformers,” “X-Men,” and “Spider-Man.” 

Military movies may not be working because Hollywood presently refuses to capitalize on the real life heroes in combat everyday. Everyone loves a good hero and for Hollywood to embrace the notion that there might be a valorous man or woman worthy of a feature film may lend creditability to the cause for which they are fighting. And we can’t have that. 

Instead, their latest war films are partisan propaganda as opposed to realistic and balanced. Somewhere between the screenplay and the final edit group therapy takes place and movie houses release message films as opposed to realistic action movies.  (more…)