matt damon paul greengrass greg kinnear green zone

http://greenhomeauthority.com/greenzo-30-rock.jpg

get ur fuckin gameface on

i meanhttp://greenhomeauthority.com/greenzo-30-rock.jpg

y'know, the trailer doesn't excite me that much, but damon + kinnear = LET'S DO IT

yeah this is gonna own so hard. bourne 4 baby

er, i meant damon + greengrass -- could give a fuck about greg kinnear, more or less

matt damon paul greengrass greg kinnear green zone harry truman doris day red china johnnie ray south pacific walter winchell joe dimaggio

haha and i was about to make a post about how much i like kinnear and think he's kinda weirdly underrated (or as underrated as a dude who's nominated for a bunch of oscars can be) - brendan gleeson owns too - whole thing is gonna own

I'm kinda weirded out that they made this really great and interesting political book into what looks like a fast paced bourne sequel??

that's what should happen to all lame books

MATT DAMON
JULIA STILES
in
THE KAPITAL

No plans to see it. Boycotting Greengrass for life after that United 93 horror.

matt damon paul greengrass greg kinnear green zone harry truman doris day red china johnnie ray south pacific walter winchell joe dimaggio

what else do i have to say

Caught this at lunch and enjoyed it. Not perfect, but mostly well-done and well-acted. As far as recent, talked about Iraq war movies go I liked it much more than Hurt Locker.

AMY RYAN

i haven't seen this movie but would like to on account of one AMY RYAN

Liked this a lot. Amazing set design, in a Children of Men way.

this fucking sucked

No plans to see it. Boycotting Greengrass for life after that United 93 horror.

― Fusty Moralizer (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, March 10, 2010 2:35 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark

united 93 owned

yea united 93 was good

this was like a truther version of that

U93 was fucking terrorporn

porn owns, terror owns

LET'S ROLL, AND PRETEND WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED

sounds good 2 me

Never mind the morality: United 93 was just boring, people.

well there's a fair enough criticism

i didn't think it was boring, U93 -- a lot of it was interesting! and i don't see the problem with imagining what happened.

with green zone, though...

im a fan of the bourne films. on the whole i disagree w. david bordwell et al and thought that greengrass had kept shit just comprehensible enough. and a lot of what was enjoyable was brian cox/joan allen/david strathairn and the funny mamet-isms.

maybe it's coz i read bordwell since seeing "ultimatum", but the action in "green zone" is inept. greengrass fails to establish what is going on and where, spatial orientation is all fucked up, and so it's just disconnected shots of people running and shooting.

and the obvious comparison is "the hurt locker" (which iirc bordwell has also slated, but then he likes uninteresting HK actioners above all), which -- though it's also shot by barry ackroyd and is lil shakey and fast cut -- is rigorously conceived. bigelow "gets" staging in a way greengrass doesn't.

another thing: bourne doesn't have a character and that's OK. maybe the hectic style makes it hard to create character as well as space. idk. but in this one, damon has no character, really, but for some reason he's the *only guy* askin' questions. does that scan? i mean at all?

in the end you just see matt damon, liberal actor, pretending to be naive about WMD. it's a really unconvincing performance. (jason isaacs kills it tho.)

and the bigger picture is stupid. the idea is that in *february 2003* pengaton guy greg kineear met baathist general al rawi in jordan. al rawi said "we stopped making WMD after desert storm". but sneaky kinnear tells judith miller (amy ryan) that he said iraq *was* making WMD. boom! the war was started under false pretences.

and now the cia's brendon gleason says the last thing we should do is disband the iraqi army. we should get baathists like al rawi on-side to prevent civil war. i guess the problem is that "we all know" this stuff already, except this is a stupid and simplified version of the story. i don't think iraq did stop making/trying to obtain WMD after desert storm. they constantly obstructed UN weapons inspections teams, and the UN passed various resolutions saying so.

keeping the baathist army might have been a better play than what happened, but it's not like it would have been a perfect outcome. a sectarian split in the army hardly seems unlikely. the film comes way close to saying it would have been dandy -- except it has an OK twist.

matt damon's main aim is to stop the pentagon's goons from killing al rawi, because for some reason he's the last hope to keep the country together. a strong man who will unite the nation, etc. but just as damon is about to nab him, damon's trusty english-speaking iraqi friend guns him down, coz he hates the baathists big time. then he says to damon, this is none of your beeswax, being my country and all. i guess we're meant to nod sagely, but don't we all believe in the UN now? i forget.

so the right-wing blogosphere has it all wrong. this is basically a paleo-con movie. that's not my main problem -- my main problem is tells us a stupid version of what we "already know", badly -- but it's best to say what's on the end of the fork.

just happy this is a bomb:

http://www.thewrap.com/ind-column/green-zone-bad-blood-universal-15356

kind of enjoyed this movie after the first 30 minutes.

The comments box on the Waxman blog is weird - no comments on the industry side, just lots of boilerplate "why u librulz hate America?" bullshit.

the film does try to go for complexity -- it says, keeping the baathist army intact is fucked up but hey better that than the sectarian violence that only brendan gleeson can predict.

would make a good double bill w. 'the informant!' which is a super parody of this kind of one-man-against-the-system bs.

the best bits were the ones they lifted from the book. basically everytime they had CPA staff in the background in the Green Zone (lols) and the emphasis on how important disbanding the army really was (even if it does lead to a really handy action scene/climax).

marc cooper liked the political simplemindedness fwiw

http://marccooper.com/green-zone-must-see/

makes sense coz he seems kind of simpleminded

he's a politics guy, not a film guy.

Director Paul Greengrass' Green Zone, is about the collective psychosis that allows the most powerful country in the world to delude and lie itself into wreaking havoc on millions for no good reason.

yeah

i mean i was against the war but

im trying to remember what the standard line was in the 1990s, when, instead of wreaking havoc, we caused misery via sanctions

this isn't mentioned in the film: in the film, saddam gave up on wmd after desert storm "just because"

How morally deep and complex, anyway, are zealous ideologues who are ready to send others to kill and die in defense of illusions that exist only in their pointed little heads?

i guess they aren't very complex!

only good people are complex

damn marc cooper h8s chinos

Hans Blix was doing inspections up until the UN voted its tongue up Bush's ass.

exactly

we also imposed a no fly zone over parts of iraq, iirc, throughout 1991-2003

within this film none of that happened or needed to happen

hey i haven't seen the movie, but if kinnear and gleeson are supposed to stand in for the whole pre-war argument between rumsfeld (or rumsfeldism) and CIA (or those ppl in the US national security state who thought rumsfeld was wrong) -- that's a dramatization of a shorthand of a historical argument of an event. the layers of translation from what is real are necessarily very strained.

again, haven't seen. could very well be badly carried off.

I think they were truncating the WMD arguments and what they could of the book enough without feeling the need to boil down the US-Iraqi relationship history of the last 30 years as well.

hey i haven't seen the movie, but if kinnear and gleeson are supposed to stand in for the whole pre-war argument between rumsfeld (or rumsfeldism) and CIA (or those ppl in the US national security state who thought rumsfeld was wrong) -- that's a dramatization of a shorthand of a historical argument of an event. the layers of translation from what is real are necessarily very strained.

again, haven't seen. could very well be badly carried off.

― goole, Thursday, March 18, 2010 7:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah, that's what it's trying to do. to resurrect old arguments, it's hard to do that well. i get that they can't cover everything – but it's interesting, that they included the specific line, when the baathist general "who can hold the country together" says that they foreswore WMD in 1991.

it tries to present conflicting viewpoints, but i think the one that stands out (other than the obvious, that governments shouldn't lie, etc.), is that the iraqis should be left to themselves. need some1 who has seen it to disagree w/ me on this, but i think that's a fair representation. and then, second in the list of approved options, is basically the CIA's "regional strongman" realist view that won the day in the 1980s. and then third, the neocon view that actually prevailed in 2003.

I don't think it's necessarily ordering those viewpoints as a best option to worst option, other than the governments lie/wanted the war thing. I think it works to make Damon's character a Noble Guy who Breaks All The Rules to find out The Truth, only when he finds it he discovers the reality is still more complicated (the way he treats Freddy throughout the film is really great in this respect).

Overall, I really think the political themes it represents are the basic ones from the book more than anything. The book doesn't go into outright conspiracy theory the way the film does, but the general outrage comes from 'Washington really wanted this war and did whatever it could to get it', 'the Press were too easily swayed', and 'the outright naivety when it came to post-war planning and the narrow-minded approach (preconceived ideas) of how it would all work out damned the country to internal strife'. I really don't think it's political representations are very controversial or abhorrent, and I also don't think they stem from Greengrass/Helgeland/Damon's agenda (though they most certainly gelled with it).

The problems the film have come in the clunky exposition and dialog early on, plus a lot of this is well-covered territory for anti-war lefties like me. There's also a question of making an action-thriller out of the material, which in some ways both devalues the Message while also making the Message seem annoyingly lunk-headed. If you want to make an overtly political film, don't reduce everything to story that has to squeeze in the action-packed finale. If you want to make an action film with political undertones, use a totally different subject and make it an allegory so people who want fun don't feel preached to.

Look fucking gorgeous though (the sets and the effects, not really the grainy stock and handheld).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/29/labour-good-for-film-industry

greengrass kisses and makes up with the warmonger blair?

His most innocuous film -- as dull as that spate of Iraq movies released in '07. The game of Connect the Dots (Amy Ryan as Judith Miller, Brendan Gleeson as a Richard Clarke-Shinseki amalgram, Kinnear as Wolfy) got old fast. So did Matt Damon as Kevin Costner.

dug the fact that they made the big climactic moment come from the dissolution of the Iraqi army

i liked this well enough

no bourne though

politics are pretty dumb but

I gave up after Damon gives Ryan a lesson in journalism.

Bourne's politics were at least muddled.

i'd go to lions for lambs chasing lulz before I'd watch this

this was suuuuuuch shit

I saw it on an airplane, and it was a good airplane movie.