American filmmakers hope to bring impact of Iraq war home

[RamboLiberal]

Without a military draft, few middle-class Americans have been directly touched by the Iraq war, making the 4-year-old conflict seem distant compared with the war in Vietnam.

But over the next few weeks, the war will land at the multiplex, thanks to prominent feature films starring Robert Redford, John Cusack, Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones -- and co-starring the war either in the background or in your face.

It is unprecedented for so many Hollywood films to depict a war in anything but flattering terms while the country is still fighting it. Most major Vietnam War-related films either came out after the war ended (such as 1978's "Coming Home" and 1979's "Apocalypse Now") or expressed the frustrations about Vietnam through the prism of another war, like the 1970 film "MASH," which was set during the Korean War.

Why now? Filmmakers feel many Americans are seeing a sanitized, bloodless view of the war in the mainstream media. Couple that with a general anti-President Bush vibe in the liberal filmmaking capital, and producers and analysts say Iraq movies have become relatively easy to finance. While most major Hollywood productions can take three years or longer from inspiration to curtain-raising, many of this first wave of Iraq-related features were pounded out in a year or less.

Shortly after Bush's re-election in 2004, and with no end of the war in sight, filmmakers and screenwriters said they felt an urgency to produce films in time for the presidential campaign season - or at least as Congress continues to debate the U.S. involvement in Iraq.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/19/MNCJS8OV1.DTL