Best Years of Our Lives

In the new issue of n+1 there's a 24-page essay by A.S. Hamrah about war-on-terror movies that had me gasping and laughing out loud all the way through. "I watched three dozen of these movies and maybe 15 percent of them were any good," he says up front. "The rest, like the war itself, represented an enormous waste of manpower and resources that would have been better spent on something good for people, like entertainment."

The essay is titled "Jessica Biel's Hand: The Cinematic Quagmire" (in an awful-sounding movie called Home of the Brave, Biel plays a vet who lost a hand), and it's brilliant. In one sense it's an act of stunt journalism, with Hamrah torturing himself for two months by watching nothing but these films; in another it's deft, trenchant criticism in an exhausted, exasperated voice. It's full of deadpan zingers: in Lions for Lambs, "Tom Cruise is exceptional as a US senator who wants to escalate the war. For some reason, he's very good at playing very serious self-convinced loonies." In Iron Man, "Tony Stark fascinates. He needs a fake heart to keep him alive, the fake heart powers a superhero carapace that makes him all-powerful—he's a metaphor for how Hollywood movies work at the box office." The assessments are brief and often blistering: "United 93 is an exploitation film in the form of a safety-instruction manual." Here's the entirety of his take on No End in Sight:

If, by July 2007, you had not heard there was a war going on in Iraq, then No End in Sight was the documentary for you. The film had a real audience of maybe two people—two people, by the way, I would be happy to meet. The film is meticulous in establishing that the war was a botched job from the beginning, and it gets a lot of well-known people to appear on camera to support that extremely noncontroversial viewpoint. Then it concludes that, since American soldiers have died in this war or were horribly maimed or crippled for life, we have got to find something good about it. It is easy to get confused and emotional when you are dealing with veterans whose lives have been permanently altered for the worse, but you've got to figure things out a little more than that before you make a movie.

The ones he likes best—Iraq in Fragments, Taxi to the Dark Side, Battle for Haditha, Operation Filmmaker, Full Battle Rattle—are low on sanctimony and high on detail. They're also, significantly, not Hollywood films. As he concludes, "You always hear conservatives say Hollywood hates America. To me, what proves Hollywood hates America is the way they keep making Batman movies. Meanwhile, no Hollywood filmmakers have gone to Iraq."

The essay isn't online. But a recent interview with Hamrah, in which he goes on a tear about the current state of film criticism, can be found here, and includes this fun fact:

I know of one glossy magazine whose film reviewer doesn’t even see the films he writes about because the magazine’s lead-time is so long it closes before that month’s films are press-screened. Instead, he relies on pre-release material, refers to the Internet, and watches trailers. Then he guesses how audiences will respond when the movie is finally released, and writes his two paragraphs based on this pseudo-informed precognition. How is that better than the Internet?