On a night four years ago, five soldiers back from three months in Iraq went drinking at a Hooters restaurant and a topless bar near Fort Benning, Ga.
Before the night was over, one of them, Specialist Richard R. Davis, was dead of at least 33 stab wounds, his body doused with lighter fluid and burned. Two of the group would eventually be convicted of the murder, another pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and the last confessed to concealing the crime.
Now some in Hollywood want moviegoers to decide if the killing is emblematic of a war gone bad, part of a new and perhaps risky willingness in the entertainment business to push even the touchiest debates about post-9/11 security, Iraq and the troops’ status from the confines of documentaries into the realm of mainstream political drama.
On Sept. 14, Warner Independent Pictures expects to release “In the Valley of Elah,” a drama inspired by the Davis murder, written and directed by Paul Haggis, whose “Crash” won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones as a retired veteran who defies Army bureaucrats and local officials in a search for his son’s killers. In one of the movie’s defining images, the American flag is flown upside down in the heartland, the signal of extreme distress.
Other coming films also use the damaged Iraq veteran to raise questions about a continuing war. In “Grace Is Gone,” directed by James C. Strouse and due in October from the Weinstein Company, John Cusack and two daughters struggle with the loss of a wife and mother who is killed on duty. Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss,” set for release in March by Paramount, meanwhile, casts Ryan Phillippe as a veteran who defies an order that would send him back to Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/movies/26movi.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=sloginRight now I'm watching on Spike a new serial TV show "The Kill Point" about a group of Iraqi vets whose bank robbery goes wrong and they end up holding hostages in the bank. Watching cause it films in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Key point in first episode is when the robbers leader Sarge goes outside to negotiate with cop's negotiation leader. Sarge strips off his shirt and drops his pants to show the horrible scars he bears from an IED. Then demands that they send vests to every soldier in Iraq and that every senator who voted for the war that their son join up and go to Iraq. The crowd cheers him wildly.
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