3-18-10 Movie Review:  Green Zone

Noncommercially, we have three rather special showings from now til Wednesday, the first two unfortunately on the same night, tonight. Horse Boy, a new American movie that is apparently a combination of travelogue, a study of autism, a story of family relations, and a study of relating between people and animals as family travels across Mongolia in search of a cure for an autistic child, shows tonight, at 7, with a wine-and-cheese reception preceding it at 6, at the Flint Hills Therapeutic Riding Center in the Murffin Stables at 143rd Street East and 13th Street North --- that's 143rd Street East and 13th Street North, wine-and-cheese at 6 and movie at 7. Also tonight, the Orpheum feature is one of the all-time Oscar winners, with Oscars for Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, director Milos Forman, the screenwriters, and itself as best picture of 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, at 7 in the Orpheum. And Friday, the Murdock, 536 North Broadway, shows the sequel to last week's Jean de Florette, Manon of the Spring, the revenge half of the story, with Yves Montand and Emmanuelle Beart, at 7:30.

And commercially, we have Matt Damon in Green Zone.

Time calls Green Zone "gritty" and "thrilling" and says the audience will be "scared stiff enjoying themselves," but Entertainment Weekly gives it a C+, the Associated Press gives it two stars, and I give it zero as one of the worst movies I have reviewed in 36 years of reviewing.

The principal among many offenders is probably cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whose jiggly handheld camera can't seem to move into a closeup without one final twitch to hit the target, and that's when it isn't wandering desperately around trying to remember what it was supposed to show. It flashes from one spot to another with pans that show you nothing but streaks of color, usually ending just off the target and twitching back to where it should have stopped in the first place. I don't recall the last time I was so maddened by a nervous amateur camera.

The second perpetrator is probably editor Christopher Rouse, who loves to cut shots short and whose idea of editing an action scene is to splat together tiny bits of film into a kaleidoscope of teeny pieces that produce a mere melange of color accompanied by screeches and screams and ear-battering blasts of gunfire and explosions, supposedly inciting visceral reactions in the audience nervous systems. I can't help suspecting that screenwriter Brian Helgeland's screenplay has been decimated for the sake of mere bang-bang excitement.

Because Green Zone wants to tackle the story of soldiers who put their lives in hazard under orders to find weapons of mass destruction that were being used to justify the war in Iraq, and who gradually come to realize that there are no weapons of mass destruction and they are fighting and dying for a fraud.

That's the theme that deserves a lot better treatment than Green Zone allows to come through.

I suspect that I resent Green Zone too much to see what might be good in it.