Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on films inspired by the war in Iraq.

I continue to be concerned about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I suspect that is an understatement. According to the polls, most of the people in the United States are concerned about the wars and threatened wars throughout the Middle East. General Petraeus' recent report was not very comforting.

According to an article in Vanity Fair, it wasn't until three years after the fall of Saigon that the first films about Vietnam came out. I am discounting "Green Berets," John Wayne's 1968 recruitment commercial for the military.

And those first films were "The Deer Hunter" and "Coming Home," both nominated for Academy Awards in 1979. Even the Gulf War of 1991 had to settle into our unconsciousness for a while before "Three Kings" and then "Jarhead" came out.

It seems as though we are rushing things a little with the current war. Maybe that is because we are coming to believe that it will be with us for the 100 years that Sen. John McCain has projected as a possibility and we want to get to work imbedding it into the iconography now. And maybe it is just so puzzling as to what we are doing there and why, that we need to work it out in our literature now as we go along.

I had not seen any of the four or five latest films that seemed to come out in a bunch last year and early this year, so I thought I would see what Hollywood was thinking about it all. The first one I watched was "Home of the Brave."

Irwin Winkler, who is better known as the producer of all the "Rocky" movies, and some of the best, the middle period, of Martin Scorsese, including "Goodfellas," is the writer / director.

When he directs, he takes himself and his subject a lot more seriously, in that I'm-a-serious-intellectual kind of way, than when he produces.

Most of the films he has directed are very serious and what we used to call heavy, either driven by political concerns as in "Guilty by Suspicion," which is about Hollywood blacklisting, or the difficulty of mixing human relationships and small time crime in "Night and the City," with DeNiro and Jessica Lange. In "Home of the Brave" he returns to a political motivation.

In a very obvious, but unaccredited way, "Home of the Brave" is a remake of "The Best Years of Our Lives," which was made in 1946. The IMDB plot outline for "The Best Years..." is "Three WWII veterans return home to small-town America to find that they and their families have been irreparably changed."

If you changed the name of the war, "Home of the Brave" would have exactly the same plot outline. The small town is Spokane, Washington; the Fredrick March part is played by Samuel Jackson; Harold Russell, who really did lose both his hands in WWII, is played by Jessica Biel, who, either because she's pretty or a woman, only loses one hand; and Dana Andrews, is played by Brian Presley.

The film fails in so many ways; not just because it doesn't live up to the depth of character and the detail of life after a wartime experience for both the soldier and those who stayed home that William Wyler gives us in "The Best Years of Our Lives." The film fails because it doesn't really address this war, why we are there, what effect being there for six years, already longer than WWII lasted, has had on this country and on the Middle East, nor is it concerned with the kind of warfare that US troops are facing in Iraq.

The film exists in a vacuum. Rather, it tries to exist in the vacuum of memory, with a sad, weak lust for great films of the past. There is real concern for the men and women who are fighting the war, but it is so poorly articulated - and with no insight, except that which is clumsily borrowed from past films - that it becomes unreal. As an audience, we cease to care about the characters and, in the worst effect of bad cinema, we stop caring about the very real people that they represent.

Another movie I watched was "Lions for Lambs." I understand why no one went to see this movie -- even with Robert Redford, Meryl Steep and Tom Cruise above the title. It too follows three separate stories that intersect in only a cursory way.

In one of the stories, a college professor talks to a student in an office. In another, a reporter talks to a US Senator in an office. And in the third, two soldiers lie in the snow on a mountaintop in Afghanistan getting shot at and shooting back, barely talking at all, while being watched via satellite by superiors back at base. The superiors do a fair amount of talking.

So, there is a lot of sitting around and talking. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to make a movie about people sitting around talking. The talking is smart, and everyone is concerned about doing the right thing. The Senator and the reporter are talking about the history of the war in Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq, and how to resolve that conflict, as well as how to be honest with the people of the United States about it and still retain some dignity and sell papers or whatever television news is selling (they are selling something).

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Posted by dr.fran on May 5, 2008 at 3:38 p.m. (report)

Hi Mark, I've really been enjoying your reviews. They are both analytical and down to earth. I admire that you could make yourself go and watch all these films about the "War on Terror." I haven't been able to make myself do it, though I know I should. I suspect they are not getting full audiences because we are all so sick at heart about these seemingly endless and pointless invasions. I hear many people talk about feeling ashamed of our country, of wanting the ability to believe in American democracy and freedom once again. Nonetheless I believe it's a good thing that we have such quick documentation of these wars. Even though the audiences are small now, and even though we may gain more perspective as time goes on, I believe these movies will be good for our future, good to look back upon later to analyze and allow ourselves to feel the full impact of the evils our putative advanced democracy has been capable of. Fran Kaplan