Good heavens, another movie — Grace is Gone, a Sundance ’07 entry that echoes Iraq anguish but doesn’t quite deal with it in a specifically confrontational sense — wasn’t previously put on the Hollywood- Iraq-Afghanistan list. So make it eleven films now — six Iraqs (In The Valley of Elah, Redacted, Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Grace is Gone), four Afghanis (The Kite Runner, Lions for Lambs, Charlie Wilson’s War, Jawbreaker) and the Riyahd shoot-em-up thriller that is Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom.
I’m not at the present time including Gavin Hood‘s Rendition (New Line, 10.12.07), although I could in the same sense that The Kingdom is included. It’s about U.S. counter-terrorism efforts, more particularly about the wife (Reese Witherspoon) of an Egyptian-born terrorism suspect (Omar Metwalley) trying to discover the reason for his disappearance, and a CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has played a part in her husband’s fate. It deals with the post-9.11 climate and threats from the Middle East, so I guess it sort of belongs. All right — let’s make it twelve.