“Green Zone”: Uninspired Passion

It’s tough to look this good while spouting exposition.

The scariest piece of intel I got out of the new pseudo political actioneer Green Zone, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matt Damon, the team that brought you the last two Bourne films, is how the Government and the CIA really don’t get along. If what they dramatize in the movie is even remotely true, we’re screwed. This isn’t a simple jurisdictional problem. These organizations and the decisions they make force change on cultures.

About a half hour of the movie deals with these issues, but you see, this is secondary. What the Green Zone wants to do is give a fictional time out to the people who sent us over to Iraq in the first place and to give us an outlet for our rage over the falsifications of the WMDs that led to war. Our everyman is a disgruntled soldier named Miller (Damon) who decides to help out the CIA to find out what’s really going on as every WMD site they show up at…has no WMDs…bum bum buuuuum!

In Bruges: And the Biggest Oscar Debacle of the Year — Thank you Focus Features

Good times on the set of "In Bruges"...before Focus Features dropped the ball.

In Bruges, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, is by and far the best movie of 2008, certainly better than several of the Best Picture Oscar contenders, and while worthy of a Best Orignal Screenplay nomination, it’s certaily worth more than that. It’s funny, contemplative, sad, hopeful, tragic, meaningful, poetic, bristling with intensity, violence, romance…any positive adjective you can throw at it will probably stick, and it lingers on all of these without diminishing the tone and overall spirit of the film itself. It’s a work of breathtaking genius that has stuck with me since the very beginning of the year. This is a film that’s just as perfect as last years No Country for Old Men, but somehow it’s been almost completely overlooked at the Oscars. Who’s fault is it that a gem like this isn’t as appreciated as it needs to be?