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…)

So once there was a man who had been arrested for violently beating another man – simply because he took his picture. Previously, he`d been busted for beating his own wife. Another man was busted for drugs – the least of his problems, since he`d previously shot his fiancé. And then there was this other creep named Tom – nailed for assault and battery, dealing in crystal meth, and most recently – down on his luck – busted for stealing cell phones.

A sad bunch, really.

Now if you`re Janet Napolitano, then you’re probably assuming I’m referring to a common sampling of our nation`s vets returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. After all, it was her report that said we`ve got a pile of damaged souls on our hands, on the brink, and ready to snap.

But actually I’m not: like Janet, I was only making a cursory assessment about a group of people – actors, actually – from recent anti-war films. (more…)