Film Week

A review of the films I've seen this past week.

GREEN ZONE (2010)
One of the better films I've seen about the so-called War on Terror. Matt Damon stars as an Army Warrant Officer in command of a unit tasked with finding hidden WMD locations. Of course, they're not finding anything, and he makes the mistake of calling out the intelligence for being faulty. As a result of his irritation and a chance encounter with a sympathetic Iraqi national, he finds himself being used by all sides--the CIA, the Pentagon, even the Baathists--because they all have differing agenda for the future of Iraq. It's well-paced and engrossing. Like many movies about this war, it has a deep sense of frustration about the moral ambiguity of this war. As Damon says in the film, the reasons we go to war always matter. But as history shows, when the reasons are corrupted and the goals aren't clearly stated, things become a morass. **** stars.

ZOMBIELAND (2009)
Fantastic movie that works as both a horror flick and a comedy (and even a romantic comedy). Jesse Eisenberg (still the poor man's Michael Cera) stars as a college student trying to make his way east after the population is turned into zombies. He meets up with Woody Harrelson, a slightly unhinged tough guy who loves killing zombies, and the two run into Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, a pair of sisters who will do anything they have to in order to survive. That's pretty much the entire cast, except for one of the best cameos in the history of film. I think we're full up on zombie movies, to be honest, but this one more than makes its case in a clever, witty, emotionally genuine way. Loved it. **** stars.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRISIS ON TWO EARTHS (2010)
It is absolutely insane to me that DC wants to pull the plug on its animated movies, when they actually keep getting better and better. This one even succeeds despite some truly head-scratching vocal casting (Billy Baldwin as Batman? Mark Harmon as Superman?) because of the great screenplay. It takes things seriously, making the crisis a dire one--Owlman attempting to destroy all of reality--but never forgets that at their core superheroes are human beings, and that's why they're so compelling. Extremely well-animated, especially the battle sequences, in which I was thrilled to see DC heroes using their powers in ways they almost never do in the cartoons. It's a tiny bit edgier than most of the cartoons, too, in language, violence, and sexuality--not to an insane degree, but it's like a PG-13 kind of thing. These things have been edging more and more towards being somewhat adult in mindset, and fuck DC for wanting to end these. That's an amazing legacy of animation over the past 20 years that they're throwing away. **** stars.