>Well, my recollection is dim, and I take the 5th, but from what I
>recall the subtext of the film was that if the U.S. really cared
>about Wilsonian ethno-racial self-determination "we" should've stuck
>around and supported the mutineering officers and the Shia in
>Southern Iraq. Now don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that if
>Clinton was commander-in-chief he would've done this, but he might
>have done something else (like not cease at the "Highway of Death")
>using the "plight" of the Shia and the Kurds as a pretext. So the
>film wasn't agitprop for what Clinton, Albright, Cohen etc. might
>have actually done, but for "human rights interventionism" which is
>their ideological alibi.
In other words, _Three Kings_ is not really a movie about the Gulf War; it's a movie about the present & future cases of "human rights interventionism," just as Steven Spielberg's _Saving Private Ryan_ (1998), Roberto Benigni's _Life Is Beautiful_ (1997), etc. are at bottom not about World War II either. David O'Russell is smart-aleckier than Spielberg & Benigni, so his film is meant for the "anti-racist" white members of the Talented Tenth who would find _Saving Private Ryan_ & _Life Is Beautiful_ (not to mention Robert Zemeckis's _Forrest Gump_ [1994]!) insufferably corny (_Three Kings_ probably doesn't appeal very much to blacks despite its attempt to interpellate them through Ice Cube, since it's mainly a film about "white boy moments," that is, American "innocence" criticized _& then restored_).
Terence Malick, a little out of sync with trends, made _The Thin Red Line_ (1998): a film that is ostensibly set in Guadalcanal during World War II but seems to be vaguely & belatedly about the Vietnam War, its "critique" of it drawing upon the tradition of liberal primitivism (e.g., Robert J. Flaherty & F.W. Murnau's _Tabu_ [1931]; Frank Lloyd's _Mutiny on the Bounty_ [1935]). Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
***** ...In a discussion we had about the film in the on-line magazine Slate, critic David Edelstein described for me the film's "mythos": "We begin in Eden, we go to hell, we return to Eden." Malick's Eden recalls Murnau's Polynesian Eden in Tabu: the latter is polluted by "civilization" just as Malick's Eden is polluted by war, with the expressionist arrival of a fateful ship. But images like these depend on our ignorance of both places, a desire for innocence that's touching but debilitating. Not as debilitating as our willful innocence about war, which Saving Private Ryan ultimately caters to, but debilitating all the same: in The Thin Red Line the peaceful, frolicking Melanesians come to us through Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), whose affection and soulful compassion for them gets more screen time than the natives themselves. When Japanese soldiers belatedly enter the picture, we may be so grateful to Malick for refusing to stylize them as villains that we may overlook his mythologizing of their "simple" humanity. This is the negative side of Malick's embrace of silent cinema.... <http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/1999/0199/01159.html> *****
While Rosenbaum ultimately praises _The Thin Red Line_ for its visual beauty, its narrative is neither as ideologically revealing nor as amenable to the practice of "reading against the grain" as _Mutiny on the Bounty_. Besides, it too includes George Clooney (yikes!).
Yoshie
P.S. I forgot to add Boaz Yakin's _Remember the Titans_ (2000) to my original list.