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Comment by carols_kitchen on April 1, 2010 at 9:57am

Hi, Happy Spring.

Comment by carol on March 22, 2010 at 10:33pm

Karen, I am so sorry about your Uncle.

Comment by KatK on March 22, 2010 at 9:20pm

I think that most men from the WW II era served their time, came home, and tried to go back to their normal lives. Some were able to do it and others were not. In WW II, PTSD was known as shell shock and it was thought that those who had it were cowards or wanted out of the military. It was so sad and glad that we know more about it today.

Comment by carols_kitchen on March 21, 2010 at 4:41pm

Wow--now we need someone to actually see The Green Zone to get a personal outlook on it. I'll probably wait until it comes out on the free movie channel at this point in time.
I would like to know more about the miniseries of The Pacific. My uncle served over in the Philipines in WWII and it was never mentioned again once he came home a changed man. I never knew anything was different until I was much older--but he was always a loving and wonderful man to me!

Comment by KatK on March 18, 2010 at 9:04pm

Michaels Mom, I don't know anything about the reviewer but just wanted to put out another perspective. Haven't seen the movie and have not seen any of the other hollywood anti-military movies. I get enough flak about my son being in the military as it is so movies that show soldiers as monsters, brainwashed killers, etc I don't want to see.

Comment by KatK on March 18, 2010 at 8:55pm

Did anyone see any reviews for the mini series The Pacific? I know it is not a movie per say but was wondering how it fared. I am in Singapore right now so won't be able to watch it until we get back next month.

Comment by KatK on March 16, 2010 at 4:43pm

Here's another review of Green Zone from Black Five:Rebecca Cusey reviews Matt Damon's Green Zone:


This film will appeal to people who hold Bush responsible for everything from masterminding 9/11 to their grandmother's halitosis. It offers up a neat, easy explanation for why we did not find WMDs in Iraq. If only reality were so simple.

For the rest of us, this is another in a long line of movies that lectures the American public about the Iraq war. The checklist is all there. Gentle Iraqis being harassed and arrested for no reason. Check. Torture of an innocent person. Check. Menacing dogs and black hoods. Check. Chaos and deprivation in Baghdad after the invasion. Check. The feeling that Iraq was better off before the war. Check.

There is no mention in this film whatsoever of 9/11. Nor of Saddam's refusal to let international inspectors do their jobs and look for WMDs in the months leading up to the war. Nor of the atrocities and horrors that Saddam and his Baathist buddies visited on the country. One suspects the script was written back before the election, when the eventual stability of Iraq was stil in doubt. There are all sorts of lines about democracy-building or peace in Iraq that don't seem as ironic as they were probably intended, now that the country has stabilized.

Real history is just so messy.

It's no secret that there were mistakes leading up to the war and in the execution of the war. The shame in this movie, however, is the fantasmic rewriting of history that will lodge in some willing brains as evidence that a conspiracy occurred.

I'm off to buy stock in tin foil.

Comment by carols_kitchen on March 14, 2010 at 6:24pm

Green Zone
BY ROGER EBERT / March 10, 2010
Cast & CreditsRoy Miller Matt Damon
Clark Poundstone Greg Kinnear
Martin Brown Brendan Gleeson
Lawrie Dayne Amy Ryan
Freddy Khalid Abdalla
Briggs Jason Isaacs
Gen. Al Rawi Igal Naor

Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Brian Helgeland, inspired by the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Running time: 114 minutes. Rated R (for war violence and language).


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"Green Zone" looks at an American war in a way almost no Hollywood movie ever has: We're not the heroes, but the dupes. Its message is that Iraq's fabled "weapons of mass destruction" did not exist, and that neocons within the administration fabricated them, lied about them and were ready to kill to cover up their deception.

Is this true? I'm not here to say. It's certainly one more element in the new narrative that has gradually emerged about Iraq, the dawning realization that we went to war under false premises. "Green Zone," directed by Paul Greengrass, is a thriller that makes no claim to be based on fact, but provides characters and situations that have uncanny real-life parallels. Its director made two of the "Bourne" films, and imports his approach to Baghdad, starring Matt Damon as an unstoppable action hero.

But this isn't merely a thriller. It has a point to argue: Critical blunders at the outset made a quick and easy victory impossible, and turned Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo-op into a historic miscalculation. "Green Zone" argues, as many observers have, that the fatal error of the United States was to fire the officers and men of the Iraqi army and leave them at large with their weapons. The Iraqi army had no great love of Saddam and might have been a helpful, stabilizing force. Instead, it was left unemployed, armed and alienated.

Damon, playing Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller, is seen at the outset leading a raid on a suspected storage site for WMDs. Nothing there. Another raid, intended to find weapons of chemical warfare, turns up years-old pigeon droppings. Because some of the raids produce casualties, he begins to question the intelligence reports the raids are based on. He speaks out at a briefing, and rather improbably finds himself face to face with a U.S. intelligence agent named Poundstone (Greg Kinnear). He's fed the usual line and told to perform his duty, but is overheard by Martin Brown, a hulking, grizzled CIA man who's an old Middle East hand. Soon he's meeting with Brown to pass on his doubts.

"Green Zone" indicates that the CIA, which lacked (as in real life) any evidence to back up the WMD claims, was cut out of the loop, and that Poundstone is not only the architect of the neocon fictions, but their enforcer; he even has a military group answering directly to him.

Miller also meets a New York newspaperwoman named Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), whose reports about a secret Iraqi informer have given credence to the WMD claims. From her, he discovers that Gen. Al Rawi (Igal Naor) of the Iraqi army met with Poundstone in Jordan but, unlike the source Poundstone cited, flatly told him Saddam had no WMDs. So the bad intel was cooked up to justify the war the neocons desired.

Have I made the plot sound complex? Greengrass works with screenwriter Brian Helgeland to tell it with considerable clarity. By limiting the characters and using typecasting, he makes a web of deceit easy to understand. Also a great help to Miller is a local named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), who risks his life to help him, acts as a translator and is given the film's key line of dialogue.

The action in "Green Zone" is followed by Greengrass in the QueasyCam style I've found distracting in the past: lots of quick cuts between hand-held shots. It didn't bother me here. That may be because I became so involved in the story. Perhaps also because unlike the "Bourne" films, this one contains no action sequences that are logically impossible. When we see a car chase that couldn't take place in the real world, we naturally think about the visual effects. When they could take place and it's a good movie, we're thinking about the story.

"Green Zone" will no doubt be under fire from those who are still defending the fabricated intelligence we used as an excuse to invade Iraq. Yes, the film is fiction, employs farfetched coincidences and improbably places one man at the center of all the action. It is a thriller, not a documentary. It's my belief that the nature of the neocon evildoing has by now become pretty clear. Others will disagree. The bottom line is: This is one hell of a thriller.

Comment by KatK on March 14, 2010 at 5:47am

Anyone see Green Zone and was it anti-military and anti-US?

Comment by carol on March 13, 2010 at 7:48pm

Can you give a brief summary? Who is in it?

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