The HBO miniseries Generation Kill probably is the best movie yet made about the Iraq war, if "movie" is defined as something caught on camera and made available for viewing. But if you insist on calling it a TV show, then the best feature film about the Iraq war that's been released to movie theaters is probably Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight. The great virtue of Ferguson's film, which won the Special Jury Prize for documentary at last year's Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, and is now available on DVD--is the lucidity it brings to a confusing subject. Ferguson assembles his material, which is mostly talking-heads interviews with people who were involved, and who became disgruntled, with the management of the war, so that you can see the string of bad decisions, made by people with a deeper committment to their ideological predispositions than to reality, and how they eventually added up to a fisaco of epic proportions. (The movie has a shortage of die-hard supporters of the war, but not because they weren't invited to share their views. One of the brave few who did agree to be interviewed was Walt Solcombe, a senior advisor to "reconstruction" admistrator L. Paul Bremer. Slocombe provides the movie with one of its rare shots of comedy when he's asked if it has ever been suggested to him that Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi military, thus automatically rendering several thousand guys with guns who were well trained in blowing stuff up out of work, essentially created the insurgency. Slocombe makes a face as if he'd been asked if he's still fucking his sister and answers, "Not in those terms!")
Now, No End in Sight is being made available for free viewing on YouTube. So far as we can determine, this is the first time that a movie is been posted, without charge and with its filmmaker's blessing, on the site after a successful theatrical run, and those with iron butts would be advised to take advantage of it. The movie was posted on Monday of this week and will be pulled after November 4. In other words, it's there from the start of th Republican National Convention through the day of the presidential election. That's probably a hint.
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