The failure of Jarhead to stir any primal chords about anything …to make anyone feel anything about what happened 14 years ago in Kuwait, or sound any echoes about what’s going on in Iraq today…I think this absence of content is going to build respect for a film that dealt very precisely with young soldiers coping with an often boring war situation in a very real way. I’m speaking of Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace, a credible contender for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It isn’t easy to go out and film an unpopular war, and the conflict in Iraq is something that’s happening right now…even though it’s a war that few people want to pay attention to. The funny thing about Jarhead is that it appears to wrap itself in “clever” postmodernism. Everybody is writing about the grunts watching the Vietnamese-village-attack scene in Apocalypse Now and the similarites to Full Metal Jacket. Like…surprise!…soldiers watch war movies, look at porn and masturbate. All of this stuff is part of Gunner Palace — Kubrick, Apocalypse and porn…but because Gunner Palace‘s soldiers are real, it’s being absorbed in a diffferent context.