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By Julia Kukiewicz
Editor
12 July 2010
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Green Zone
Out to rent from Blockbuster and Cinema Paradiso from today
Universal are presumably wishing that this could have been released a few weeks ago when McChrystal and Rolling Stone were in the headlines.
'Team America' would be right at home in this Bourne-in-Baghdad thriller.
The plot is very Bourne. Matt Damon plays a Warrant Officer charged with finding WMDs who becomes mighty suspicious when it turns out there aren't any, a feeling we can all relate to.
Rajiv Chandrasekaren's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, on which the film is supposedly based, is essentially a catalogue of the errors made by a sassy but ultimately woefully under prepared invading force.
There are fewer car chases.
Even as the film shrinks its subject matter to fit the genre, though, the sentiment is the same.
One of Green Zone's military advisers even went so far as to denounce it as an "exploitive polemic" to Fox news.
In any case, Damon manages to pull off the many-fingers-in-potentially-explosive-pies thing with relative ease and Jason Issacs makes a great 'baddie', as always, in a film that, like Greengrass' Bloody Sunday (and unlike United 93) manages to make fact into compelling fiction.
Note that, as a result of the ongoing Universal pictures problems at both Lovefilm and OutNow the film is unavailable to rent from either.
Youth in Revolt
Out to rent from today
Also treading a line somewhere between fact and fiction - though with more hilarious consequences - is Youth in Revolt.
I've seen it billed as Michael Cera's attempt to shake off George Michael (his Arrested Development character not, well you know) but if that's the case he's taken it a bit literally.
Cera plays Nick, a nerdy virgin into Fellini movies and wincing at his vulgar parents (Steve Buscemi and Jean Smart), who invents a dangerous alter-ego to impress a pretty girl.
Life intervenes and, in any case, the alter-ego is hardly less embarrassing than Nick himself, Cera's not about to turn into a Brad Pitt (or a Michel from � bout de souffle) anytime soon.
C.D Payne, who wrote the book the film is based on, also wrote the book that because beauty pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous and this has the same sense of humour; dark but far from black.
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