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Hollywood goes to war.....that War!

Hollywood has, traditionally, played it very carefully when making movies in relation to war and global conflicts. That is not to say that movies depicting the Russians or Arabs - never said so explicitly - as "baddies" haven't been made, almost, seemingly, as part of some sort of propaganda.

The Iraq War appears to have changed things, for as The Independent reports, a slew of movies dealing with the War are about to hit our screens:

"Not so long ago, Hollywood was famously shy of telling stories ripped straight from the headlines. The movies, after all, are a form of escapism, first and foremost. Who wants to go to the multiplex to get more of the same depressing images being broadcast on the evening news?

Film-makers and studio chiefs preferred to take a more oblique route to commenting on the pressing events of the moment, especially when it came to questions of war and peace. They transferred the conflict to an earlier time, or to another culture, or simply kept quiet until the conflict itself was long over. Robert Altman's counter-cultural masterpiece M*A*S*H famously managed to send up the absurdities of the Vietnam war while purporting to be set 20 years earlier in Korea. More recently, Ridley Scott gave us an earful on the follies of imperialism in the Middle East by recreating the Crusades in Kingdom of Heaven.

Now, though, Hollywood seems to have lost its coyness. Perhaps it began with Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which turned anger at the Bush administration on the eve of the 2004 presidential election into an unlikely box-office hit. Perhaps the moment of truth came with last year's United 93, Paul Greengrass's harrowing recreation of the doomed fourth jetliner on 11 September 2001, whose passengers sacrificed themselves to avoid a greater atrocity in a major East Coast city.

The plain fact, though, is that we are about to be inundated with dramas set either in or around the Iraq war, and the tone of most, if not all, of them is hardly complimentary to George Bush's military adventure in the Middle East.

The first of them is also the one with the highest profile, since it has been written and directed by Paul Haggis, the Canadian film-maker who wrote Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby, then walked away with the Best Picture Oscar for his directorial debut, Crash."

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