NYT Magazine. "Hollywood Goes to War!"

For those of us who experienced the euphoria of 1989, the year historians will likely see as the true end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, it'll be very hard to explain to our kids that the now seemingly ridiculous hope we had - that large-scale wars, or at least America's involvement in them, had been consigned to the past - was genuine. After all, it was only two years later that Bush I demonstrated that, no, massive military engagement was not over; it had simply evolved. Now, with Bush II once again questioning the patriotism of anyone questioning the wisdom of the ongoing quagmire in Iraq, if you're going to do a special movie issue of a magazine, war's a smart choice for a topic.

AO Scott's audio introduction to the "Hollywood Goes to War!" issue of the New York Times Magazine is the obvious place to start. An overview of nearly 100 years of American war movies, it is, by necessity, short and ends with a boomer's take on WWII, Saving Private Ryan. No mention of Vietnam, but again, he's only got a couple of minutes.

Scott's article for the issue argues that George Clooney is a contemporary version of the liberal Hollywood mover and shaker exemplified in the 70s by Warren Beatty and Robert Redford. In a somewhat related piece, Matt Bai notes that "these last few months have given Hollywood's much-maligned activists some reason to gloat.... On Iraq, at least, Hollywood's self-righteous skepticism appears now not only to have been justified but also to have been precisely what Bush said it wasn't: a leading indicator of mainstream American opinion."

This second war in Iraq has dragged on so long now, in fact, that not only have several important documentaries about it already been made, they're actually aging just enough now for us to get some perspective on them. "The analytic content of these Iraq documentaries sometimes feels like journalism in a hurry," writes Tom Bissell as he weighs the strengths and weaknesses of BattleGround, Occupation: Dreamland, Gunner Palace, Control Room and Dreams of Sparrows.

Manohla Dargis considers a few classic war films that were not made in the USA; it's not that there "aren't worthy American war movies; our cinema is, after all, brilliantly violent. It is the lulls between the bangs that we have difficulty with, the quiet before, during and after the storm."

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a war movie, too, begins Charles McGrath, but the piece isn't really about that at all; instead, it's a fun backgrounder on CS Lewis, his friendship with JRR Tolkien and the state of children's literature in general.

Susan Dominus: "[Henry] Rollins is an unusual relic of the punk era, one of the few celebrated stars who stayed clean enough to remember it.... Of course, as faces of the USO go, he's even more unusual, an antiestablishment rocker whose hero is Iggy Pop, not Bob Hope."

Peter De Jonge profiles Dale Dye, "Hollywood's top military adviser and hardest-working monger of virtual war." Colorful character.

Lynn Hirschberg has a long piece on Peter Sarsgaard. The tie-in, of course, is Jarhead.

Simon Norfolk annotates two photos of a set for Over There: "To transform the California landscape into an Iraqi desert, 600 gallons of fuel were used to burn off the grass at the Hidden Creek Ranch north of Los Angeles, creating a bowl a couple of hundred yards wide in each direction."

Hirschberg asks Terry Press, head of marketing at DreamWorks, about selling war movies to women before segueing to all sorts of other marketing questions. Also only tangentially related to war is Rob Walker's report on the other indie scene being driven - and quite successfully, too - by fundamentalist Christians.

Also: Soofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello snap shots of 40s-era fashion, Christine Muhlke scopes out Hollywood's hottest eateries and Jaimie Epstein listens to location scout Deren Getz.

Posted by dwhudson at November 13, 2005 7:52 AM