Pat Dollard | Young Americans

In “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” the potheads head for Amsterdam before running afoul of airport security and getting shipped off to Gitmo.

Politico:

The conflict in Iraq may go on for years, but it appears the end is nigh for Hollywood’s ponderous, heavy-handed treatment of the war on terror. That’s because most new movies about the subject this season are lowbrow and cringe-inducing comedies.

Over the next few weeks, theaters will be screening far-out fare such as an Osama bin Laden documentary by the maker of “Super Size Me”; an absurdist slam against merchants of war featuring John Cusack; a zombie soldier flick with XXX star Jenna Jameson; a stoner movie about Guantanamo Bay; and a Sept. 11 parody — yes, parody — made by Uwe Boll, a little-known filmmaker often ridiculed as the worst director in Hollywood since Ed Wood.

Just how off-the-wall is the genre getting? Over the past six months, filmgoers have been turned off by overearnest snoozers (“Lions for Lambs,” “A Mighty Heart”), low-budget losers (“Redacted”) and far worse.

With the arrival of a half-dozen comedies, however, the post-Sept. 11 movie has quite possibly reached a new low.

Consider Boll’s “Postal,” opening nationwide May 23. Touted as a “shock comedy,” the film begins by depicting the Sept. 11 hijackers making moronic comments about the paradise that awaits them. The film is likely to offend just about everyone with its premise that includes “a gang of bosomy commandos [who] face off against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in an epic battle that will determine the fate of the world.” Since its opening cockpit sequence was first promoted on YouTube last May, it has been viewed more than two million times.

Boll, a European director-screenwriter whose specialty is adapting videogames for the big screen using no-risk German tax shelter funding, has made more than a dozen miserable movies, from “BloodRayne” to “Alone in the Dark.” While directors John Waters and Todd Solondz have both proven that offensive films can be outrageously campy and artistic, Boll is, at best, an unfunny hack.

While Boll’s film is being independently distributed, others are being handled by major studios, including the stoner sequel “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,” a New Line/Warner Bros. release. A dopey update of ’70s-era Cheech & Chong-style drug humor, the new story line finds the potheads headed for Amsterdam before running afoul of airport security and getting shipped off to Gitmo. Following their escape, the Homeland Security fugitives wend their way through the South, eventually landing in Texas where they meet President Bush.

“We really don’t think Guantanamo Bay is a joke,” says Njambi Good of Amnesty International USA. The human rights group has no plans to protest the film, though members will gather outside movie houses distributing handbills about real-life torture and rendition practices.

Two weeks after the film’s April 25 debut, Amnesty will tour a full-scale reproduction of a Guantanamo cell in Miami, Philadelphia, Portland, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. So far, there’s been no talk of cross-promoting the tour with the movie. “Because of its [pro-drug] content, this is not a film Amnesty can partner with,” says Good. “But we’re encouraging activists to do some tabling outside of theaters.”

If “Harold & Kumar” seems patently ridiculous, it’s High Art compared with “Zombie Strippers,” an R-rated gore comedy starring veteran porno queen Jameson. Opening this week for a limited engagement before being released on DVD, the nudie horror film revolves around a top-secret military lab in which scientists have developed a new virus to revive slain soldiers as zombie warriors, allowing them to continue fighting in Iraq. After a mission to stop the zombies goes awry, one infected soldier breaks into a subterranean strip club, where he bites the headliner and sparks an orgy of flesh-eating among both patrons and dancers.

“When I first read the script, I appreciated that it had so many political undertones,” said Jameson, 34, who adds she intends to send a copy of the film to one of her personal heroes, Bill O’Reilly. (It is probably safe to assume that Mr. O’Reilly won’t be giving the movie his thumbs-up, at least not on the air.)

Also opening this Friday is the comical documentary from “Super Size Me” director Morgan Spurlock, “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?” which Politico covered in January, when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

But on a slightly more absurdist tack is “War, Inc.” a zany, off-the-wall indictment of Iraq profiteering starring and co-scripted by Cusack, who also appeared in a somber drama about an Iraq war widower, “Grace Is Gone.”

Using Naomi Klein’s Atlantic Monthly article “Baghdad Year Zero” as a springboard, the film finds the likable Cusack portraying a hit man hired by the head of a Halliburton-type firm that has taken over an entire war-torn desert country called Turagistan. Debuting in theaters May 23 before its DVD release in early summer, the film also features Marisa Tomei as a nosy journalist, bubblegum pop star Hilary Duff as a Turagistan singer, and even Sir Ben Kingsley in a decidedly non-Gandhi role.

Cusack has read extensively about the subject, and also consulted with congressional leaders. “I’ve watched hearings, and spoken with different people like Rep. Jan Schakowsky [D-Ill.], who has been real good with that as well as Jeremy Skahill who testified,” says the actor, who has been chummy with Huma Abedin, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief assistant, and who counts George Washington University law professor/Beltway pundit Jonathan Turley as a family friend.

In addition, Cusack had a private dinner with his friend Arianna Huffington and once-presumptive Iraq leader Ahmed Chalabi. “We went out with his whole reptilian crew,” recalls Cusack. “Some of the things that a character named Omar says in ‘War, Inc.’ came directly from that dinner, the lines about ‘Americans do what they always do, come in with guns blazing like John Wayne. … Maybe they’ll kill me, maybe they’ll make me president, who knows?’”

Partly inspired by the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and George Miller’s “Road Warrior,” as well as Kafka (and perhaps even Duke Cunningham’s notorious poker parties), Cusack’s dark political film may be the best of the new bunch, though it is still likely to wind up on the same scrap heap of Iraq-themed films that have gone before it.

“I don’t even know what the genre is for this movie,” says Cusack, laughing. “It’s certainly not a somber, serious, dour take on the war, like the others. Hopefully it’s biting and satirical and raw. I don’t think there’s been a satire or a strange, fever-dream movie made like this, and I think that’s what might separate it from the rest of the pack. It’s not a depressing movie, I don’t think, but it is a provocative one. And the absurdity makes it go down a little easier.”