The crockumentary, Gunner Palace, is the latest Lefty movie attack on the war, the people who planned it, the officers in the field, and the helpless terrorists.

You can bet the Hollywood Left made this F-Bomb movie PG because it makes our guys in Iraq look bad, at least in their opinion. Why a thirteen year old should be exposed to this without a parent present only the Left can explain. The picture, Gunner Palace ---so called because the doc was filmed in Oday's Palace----was rated R by the actual ratings board which is composed of parents, but the producers appealed to the Hollywood Left laden appeals board who approved a PG-13. The cameraperson-director-editor is German--- you just know how she loves the USA---and produced by Michael Tucker, a Seattle runaway now living in Berlin. According to some of the reviews from a few non-Lefty papers the movie is pretty dam good. We'll see. According to the Stars and Stripes:

It’s a film that may do for the 1st Armored Division’s 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment — nicknamed “Gunners” — what HBO’s “Band of Brothers” did for Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division: Make them into American icons.

The producer gave an interview in Canada in which he stated

(that) he hopes the film will challenge the "Fox News view" of the war.

The movie is praised by a lot of the grunts, the guys get out their frustrations by doing spontaneous rap lyrics, and the oh so Left new York Times just loves it....

"Unforgettable. A raw and improbably funny portrait of the situation in Iraq. This is not a movie anyone should miss." ~ A.O. Scott, The New York Times

View the trailer HERE.

There are plenty of people who just hate this movie on both artistic grounds and content. This from Movies into Film:

One of the worst edited documentaries in recent memory, and painful proof that powerful subject matter doesn’t guarantee a powerful film, Michael Tucker’s Gunner Palace consists of a series of starts and stops as Tucker lopes through Baghdad in 2003. He photographs and interviews the American soldiers who occupy Iraq from within Uday Hussein’s bomb-scarred mansion. Luckily for the GIs, the late Mr. Hussein’s Olympic-sized swimming pool remains unscathed by U.S. bombardment: there are several scenes of enlistees sunning themselves on floats, or hosting lavish pool parties in the city they’ve helped to decimate and destabilize.

Tucker evidently hopes that viewers will feel empathy for the soldiers; the filmmaker apparently does, or he would like us to believe that. I have my doubts. There’s a hefty amount of cynicism in Tucker’s directorial choices, from his self-conscious evocations of Apocalypse Now (in voice-overs, Tucker tries to mimic Martin Sheen’s disembodied torpor) to structuring his footage so that the battalion members who are contemplative and well-spoken (there are two of them) receive scant on-screen time, while the film endlessly plays up the crude, foul whackos.

Tucker seems exceptionally smitten by SPC Stuart Wilf, a grossly unattractive, self-reflexive ironist who hails from somewhere in Colorado, somewhere, we’re told in one of Tucker’s Didionesque asides, “near Columbine.” Tucker introduces Wilf as “the new army…an army of one,” and never expounds upon those terms. What exactly makes the bug-eyed Wilf “the new army of one”? His youth? His goofiness? His vulgarity? Does the obscene slogan on his sleeveless T-shirt have something to do with it? Tucker stages an entrance for Wilf that’s meant to shock the educated bourgeoisie in the audience, then spends the rest of Gunner Palace sentimentalizing him.

The "movie" features raids gone bad where the "innocents" are sent to Abu Grahib, houses of innocents are knocked down, and the soldiers shown to be moral zeros. Review concludes:

If Gunner Palace had been made back in the early 1940s in Germany, and if it had been directed by Leni Riefenstahl, and traced the German soldiers’ mission with unquestioning integrity—it would be denounced and vilified as a scabrous piece of propaganda. But because it’s made by an American too enamored of his subjects to imply even the shadow of a doubt, everything’s (morally) relative.

Anything the NY Times likes is Left approved, so we'll all have to see. BTW, the Right Wing NY Sun thinks it is a pile of agit-prop too:

nevertheless speaks with what has become the standard documentary vocabulary when it comes to movies about the war, especially in seeking to drive a wedge between the soldiers and their commanders.

The film is punctuated, for example, by the voice of Donald Rumsfeld talking about the war on Armed Forces Radio in terms meant to take on ironic freightage from the pictures being juxtaposed with his words. The job is not very well done. In one instance Rumsfeld speaks of about things getting better in Iraq and how "Baghdad is bustling with commerce," whereupon we cut to — Baghdad bustling with commerce! Oops! Still, we get the idea, an acceptable one in the documentary vernacular, that the men are being sent into battle by people who are, at best, out of touch with the realities they face.

The movie seems to agitate against the officer class, the political class, and Bush. Saddam good--war bad. A fairly balanced review is HERE----three stars (out of five) because of boredom, but the guy pretty much liked it. And Blackfive, no wussy Lefty, loved it.