It's A Winning Streak

If Friday's box office numbers are any measure, the latest anti-war movie will flop just as badly as the others. Stop-loss came in 7th yesterday, and Hollywood execs keep kidding themselves about the reason:

"It's not looking good," a studio source told me before the weekend. "No one wants to see Iraq war movies. No matter what we put out there in terms of great cast or trailers, people were completely turned off. It's a function of the marketplace not being ready to address this conflict in a dramatic way because the war itself is something that's unresolved yet. It's a shame because it's a good movie that's just ahead of its time."

That's not it at all. We're more than ready to "address this conflict" if the absolutely voracious appetite for war-related news is any gauge. It's just that hardly anyone--not even liberals who aren't quite sure how they feel about our country--wants to sit through an hour-and-a-half exercise in public shaming.

More: DrewM. writes to point me to Libertas, a conservative film blog that I really should be reading. Their review (more of a takedown) is here. It begins:

What is possibly left to say about a poorly produced, poorly acted, poorly directed, and very poorly written anti-war film that defames our troops…?

Actually, they manage to say quite a bit.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 01:16 PM

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