In the first episode, Person reads aloud from a letter that some schoolchildren back home have written to the 1st Recon, wishing for peace. What distinguishes Generation Kill from the Iraq films that came before it is its fearless portrayal of the Marines and the conflict itself. “No, just lucky, I guess,” croaks Ferrando. “Godfather.” When Wright, portrayed as an awkward reporter, asks Ferrando how his voice got so scratchy, he explains that he had throat cancer. (In a very Simon casting move, Reyes plays himself.) Towering above them all is the square-jawed Lt. The hulking Sergeant Rudy Reyes’ obsession with his appearance earns him the nickname “Fruity Rudy” his buddies suggest that he become a gay porn star. Corporal Ray Person (James Ransone, who played the squirrelly dockworker Ziggy Sobotka in season two of The Wire) is a stimulant-chomping, Ice Cube-quoting Humvee driver. The Marines are mostly twentysomethings raised on mtv, South Park, and Grand Theft Auto. There’s lots of realistic dialogue, peppered with references to sitreps (situation reports) and other military jargon, and a vast cast of fully drawn characters. Still, Generation Kill ?has a shaky, nervous intensity it feels as if you are in the Humvees with the Marines. Nearly the entire first episode depicts the bored Marines biding their time in Kuwait before war is declared. In classic Simon style, the narrative unfolds with a deliberate pace that will be familiar to Wire fans yet frustrate casual viewers. As might be expected, Generation Kill is violent, profane, and thoroughly engrossing. In seven one-hour episodes, Simon and Burns meticulously re-create journalist Evan Wright’s 2004 firsthand account of the Marine Corps’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion’s six-week march to Baghdad in 2003. That’s not surprising, considering that its executive producers and writers are David Simon and Ed Burns, the creative team behind the acclaimed and sorely missed series The Wire. Thankfully, the new hbo miniseries Generation Kill, which begins July 13, is neither squeamish nor ham-fisted. Director Brian De Palma’s Redacted tackled a real-life atrocity-the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by American soldiers-but its combat scenes were ruined by its didactic approach. Both were oddly hesitant about depicting the actual war, skirting battlefield images in favor of making statements. In the Valley of Elah was a meandering whodunit about a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to find his son, an Army specialist who goes awol after coming back from Iraq. In Stop-Loss, an Army sergeant (Ryan Phillippe) returns from Iraq only to face an “involuntary extension” of his service. Another reason is the way they have awkwardly shoehorned political talking points into soldiers’ stories. Is it even possible to make a good movie about a war that’s still being fought? Americans’ battle fatigue only partly explains why Iraq films have flopped. But more than anything, I want them to write that it’s a good movie.” “If most critics use the word ‘Iraq’ in the opening sentence of their reviews, we’ll deal with it,” an executive at Lionsgate, the movie’s distributor, told the New York Times. The Lucky Ones, an upcoming film starring Tim Robbins as a recently returned vet, reportedly doesn’t include a single mention of the I-word. The few major Iraq-themed movies- Stop-Loss, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted-have tanked at the box office, and the indifferent reaction to these heavy-handed attempts at relevance seems to have soured the industry on the idea of trying to bring Iraq to the screen. Five years into the war, there has yet to be a truly memorable or defining movie about the conflict. “We band of brothers.”Īmerica’s profound disconnect from the Iraq War has been nowhere more evident than in Hollywood. Surveying the nearly empty chat room, Ricks offered a self-mocking take on the quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V that had inspired the title of Stephen Ambrose’s book about World War II paratroopers and the popular hbo miniseries based on it. “Our little group of people who still care about the Iraq war appears to be dwindling,” Ricks wrote. On february 26, Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks logged on to an online chat to discuss the war in Iraq, only to find that the number of readers awaiting him had reached its lowest point since the war started. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |