While the film lover in me might be happy to see Matt Damon branching out with roles that don't trade on his looks, the red-blooded girl in me is happy to see Damon back in fighting form. Empire has the first still from the Iraq drama, The Green Zone, and he's back to the Matt Damon that we all know and love.

Zone is based on the 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Damon stars as Chief Officer Roy Miller, a soldier stationed in Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein charged with the task of locating weapons of mass destruction. During the investigation, Miller begins to suspect that the WMDs may not exist, and then things really get dangerous. Amy Ryan also stars as a NYT correspondent, along with Jason Isaacs and Brendan Gleeson as fellow military men.

Studios might have a 'complicated relationship' with Iraq war films, but there is no chance that Zone is going to fall into the same trap of preaching to audiences. Damon made it pretty clear to Empire that Zone is strictly a Hollywood affair: "[We're] not trying to make a statement, particularly with a movie that costs $80 or $90 million. Hopefully this will feel like an accurate portrayal of what things were like for these guys. You can't do a polemic – you should be blogging if that's what you want to do." Maybe it's for the best, but I happen to think there is nothing wrong with mixing a little politics into your entertainment -- how about you?

Green Zone is expected to arrive in theaters in 2010.

A couple of people have been griping about Wall-E director Andrew Stanton's refusal to admit that his cute little movie about a robot in love actually contains some pretty upfront green politics, but there's a far more polarizing reference in the film than its harmless pro-environment agenda. It's no major plot spoiler to reveal that, about an hour or so into the story, Fred Willard appears in a recorded message as the mysterious president of Earth's corporate government and orders the ship's captain (Jeff Garlin) to "stay the course." Wait, we've heard this one before: It was the go-to statement used by the Bush administration for about three years or so when describing its modus operandi in Iraq (the term was abandoned when staying the course started to sound like a bad idea). In Wall-E, the context is quite different -- it's an order to not do something, rather than take action -- but hard to ignore nonetheless.

Certain critics with (surprise!) conservative slants have taken issue with this. At Dirty Harry's Place, John Nolte expresses his disappointment in the first paragraph of his review: "Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome?" he asks. New York Post critic Kyle Smith picked up the rant and decided to write his own, even though he hadn't seen the film yet: "This kind of crack, lame as it is, also breaks the spell of the movie by hurling you out of the theater and back into reality."

There's no way around it: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson owes at least some of his fame to the way his dominating figure fits the blockbuster action stereotype with near-mechanical sleekness. However, he also offers an alternative to that reductive perspective. Looking sharp in a business suit and speaking with the relaxed professional discipline of a CEO, Johnson showed up at a screening of Get Smart on Sunday at the CineVegas Film Festival displaying sheer confidence. The screening took place at the Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino, where Johnson had recently acted in Race to Witch Mountain ("We just added to the chaos," he said), but on this visit, Johnson got a chance to remind people that he's not just a one-note performer, but someone who plays an active role in the international film community (not to mention the health community, since The Rock Foundation pushes obesity prevention).

Outside of his supremely meta performance in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, Johnson has made his interests in adventurous cinema increasingly clear, and boldly champions independent artists. You can get a small glimpse of this aspect of his personality in Operation Filmmaker, documentarian Nina Davenport's account of an Iraqi filmmaker named Muthana Mohmed whose aspirations tragically fall short of the expectations surrounding him. Landing the opportunity to work for Liev Schreiber on the set of Everything is Illuminated, the 25-year-old Mohmed grows increasingly frustrated with the boring tasks given to him, and continually blows opportunities as a result of his unbalanced work ethic.

The recent U.S. involvement in Iraq has become one of the biggest subjects for documentaries in the past few years, and it's hard not to feel weary of watching the variety of movies on this topic, no matter how varied and original they might be. Phil Donahue has contributed to the genre with Body of War, a documentary he co-directed with Austin filmmaker Ellen Spiro (Troop 1500). The movie focuses on the effect that the U.S. conflict in Iraq has had on a single soldier.

Body of War combines two threads of narrative. The first thread follows Tomas Young, who enlisted in the U.S. Army on Sept. 13, 2001 as a reaction to the events of Sept. 11. He ends up being deployed to Iraq, and after only a few days in combat is injured -- a spinal injury. He's paralyzed below the chest and is confined to a wheelchair. Tomas, his bride-to-be and his mom all have to get used to dealing with his range of physical problems as a result of this injury: not only can't he walk, but he's on an ever-changing variety of medications, he can't control his body temperature, he vomits frequently, and experiences sexual difficulties. Meanwhile, his experiences have made him passionately anti-war, and he visits Cindy Sheehan's compound in Crawford, Texas, travels to the offices of several politicians, and speaks out frequently in public.

MTV Movies Blog has the brand new poster for Stop-Loss, the upcoming film from director Kimberly Peirce. Outside of an episode of The L Word, Peirce hasn't directed anything since her highly acclaimed 1999 feature debut Boys Don't Cry -- the film that won Hilary Swank her first Oscar. The script for Stop-Loss was written by Peirce and Mark Richard (Huff), and the film stars Ryan Phillippe (whom I had never liked until last year's excellent Breach), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (one of the best young actors working -- see Brick, Mysterious Skin, and The Lookout!), and Channing Tatum (I intentionally missed Step Up, but he was great in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints).

Stop-Loss deals with soldiers who are "stop-lossed," meaning they are ordered to return to combat, even though they have completed their enlistment contracts. Phillippe plays a soldier who stands up to the government and refuses to return to battle. It is an MTV Films production, and the poster plays up the cast's beefcake angle, making the film look like Dawson's Creek Goes to Iraq. But I have a feeling it's going to be much better than that. I've been waiting to see another film from Peirce for a long while, and the trailer gives me goose bumps every time I see it. Stop-Loss is set for release on March 28th.

Well, I guess Christopher was right. Eventually everyone is going to make a film about Iraq, but at least this one sounds a little different from the rest. Variety announced that New Line has acquired the Iraq war drama Time of Your Life (which has the unfortunate luck of sharing a name with a Party of Five spin-off). Jim Burnstein and Garrett Schiff have already been hired to write the script and will co-produce, but there is no word on a director so far. Burnstein and Schiff have already finished scripts for The Richest Man in The World with Universal and The Quarterback's Tale for MGM.

Time of Your Life is based on the real-life events surrounding an Army Special Forces captain that arranges the mother of all parties for his friends and family in the event that he did not return from Iraq. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. Captain Jeffrey "Toz" Toczylowski was killed in 2005 after a fall from a helicopter. Toczylowski arranged to have emails sent in case of his death which began: "If you are getting this email, it means that I have passed away. No, it's not a sick Toz joke, but a letter I wanted to write in case this happened." The email was forwarded through friends of friends after Toczylowski's death with an invitation to a party to celebrate his life, and for which he had already set aside $100,000.

So I guess Time will be the 'feel-good film' about Iraq. We already have a couple combat tales scheduled for next year, but Time is going straight for the heartstrings instead. Unfortunately, if you have ever spent a day reading headlines, it doesn't take long to realize combining 'feel-good' and Iraq is going to be a tall order.

One of the year's best documentaries is No End in Sight, a calm and methodical recounting of the mistakes the U.S. made in Iraq during those crucial first few months after the fall of Saddam in April 2003. One of the main points director Charles Ferguson makes is that when the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army, it left hundreds of thousands of soldiers unemployed, disgruntled, and armed. Frustrated, many of them joined the insurgency that now plagues the country.

The man who made the decision to disband the Iraqi army was L. Paul Bremer III. On Sept. 6, Bremer wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called "How I Didn't Dismantle Iraq's Army" in which he defended himself and rebutted some of Ferguson's assertions. His points were basically these: that by the time he got there the Iraqi army had pretty much dissolved on its own; that post-invasion looting had destroyed nearly all the military bases anyway; and that he did consult with advisers before making his decision. (No End in Sight claims Bremer made the call more or less on his own.)

Now Ferguson has responded -- not with an editorial, but with a video. It's a 10-minute short film, posted on the Times' website as a "letter to the editor," that dissects Bremer's article point by point and refutes nearly everything he said. For support, he uses clips from No End in Sight, interview footage that wasn't used in the film, and a telephone interview with one of his primary sources recorded after Bremer's article appeared.

One of the 78th Oscars clip montages was devoted to films about big social and cultural issues, and when the clips were done and the cheering muted, host Jon Stewart gave a resigned smile to the camera and delivered a cruel, cutting, it's-funny-because-it's-true joke about Hollywood high-mindedness: " ... And none of those issues were ever a problem again." And that moment came to mind watching In the Valley of Elah. You get a sense of what everyone involved, especially writer-director Paul Haggis, was trying to do -- to make a gripping, engaging drama about Iraq and America -- but as the movie stretches and grasps and strains with sweaty-palmed desperation and clumsiness, you can feel those aspirations slip out of reach. You can tell everyone involved wanted to make an important statement. What they would end up making was a fairly indifferent movie. But hey, if an expatriate Canadian Scientologist who used to write for The Facts of Life can't bring the boys home, who can?

And I may, perhaps, be a little over-the top in the above dismissal, but that might just be because In the Valley of Elah is one of a ever-growing class of movies -- released in the last quarter of the year, festooned with talent, and ostensibly about something -- that desperately want to be seen as 'political' and 'important' modern moviemaking. My initial revulsion at the clumsy coincidences and cardboard characters and cheap tricks in Haggis's previous directorial effort, Crash, gave way to a sort of grudging admiration for the fact that, all things considered, Haggis was trying to talk about race and class. The willingness to look at those topics -- so present in life, so absent on the mainstream big screen -- made Crash seem better than it actually was. And while heaping honors on Crash may not rank on the all-time list of Oscar's worst Best Picture Picks (Forrest Gump, Million Dollar Baby, Around the World in 80 Days, et al.), it's not exactly in the honor roll of Oscar's finest moments.

But we've already given Haggis rewards for his lazy storytelling, his cheap sentimentality, his glib and clumsy narrative tricks -- so who could fault him for coming back to them again and again? In the Valley of Elah is very much in the mold of Million Dollar Baby -- where an older man uses his lifetime of experience to try and do the right thing even though doing the wrong thing would be a hell of a lot easier. It's also got Crash's delusions of moral grandeur. Yes, In the Valley of Elah is about great and mighty topics, but it's somehow both self-satisfied and self-righteous, both preachy and predictable.

Kathryn Bigelow should really make more movies. She's directed some terrific action flicks (Near Dark, Point Break, Strange Days), but she seems to disappear from filmmaking for long periods of time -- her last movie was 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. Bigelow's upcoming project is a drama about the Iraq war called The Hurt Locker, and it was announced today that the film will star Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie . "Who, who, and who?" you might be asking yourself. Renner recently starred in the pretty sweet 28 Weeks Later. Geraghty has done the war movie thing before, he played Fergus in the underrated Jarhead. And Mackie starred in Half Nelson and what I consider Spike Lee's only bad movie -- She Hate Me. "He Who Must Not Be Named" Ralph Fiennes and "He Who Can't Remember His Name" Guy Pearce will have cameos in the film.

The script was written by Mark Boal, a former Playboy journalist -- see! there's good articles in there! -- and was inspired "by true events and recently declassified information." The film will follow "an elite Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal team in present-day Baghdad that fights an onslaught of bombs and snipers." Renner will play the team leader. Mackie, Geraghty, and Pearce will play team members, although if Pearce just has a cameo I'd imagine he doesn't last long. Fiennes will play a mercenary. Says Boal: "The idea is that it's the first movie about the Iraq War that purports to show the experience of the soldiers. We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can't see on CNN, and I don't mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn't actually put photographers in with units that are this elite." He adds, "It's really exciting for me, coming out of the world of journalism, to have a movie come out about a conflict while the conflict is still going on." Hell, at the rate things are going, they could delay the release of Hurt Locker ten years and it'd still be going on.

Oliver Stone is one of the most politically-minded filmmakers working today. Naturally, this also makes him one of the most divisive. His most recent project promises to be just as controversial as his earlier work. He has made an ad calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It's a 30-second spot, sponsored by the political action groups MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org. The spot features former infantry sergeant John Bruhns, who fought in Iraq during and following the 2003 invasion. Bruhns speaks about his time there in the ad, closing with: "To keep American soldiers in Iraq for an indefinite period of time, being attacked my an unidentifiable enemy, is wrong, immoral, and irresponsible." The ad ends with a brief message from Vietnam vet Ron Kovic -- the subject of Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and the author of the book on which it was based. You can view two versions of the ad here, as well as interviews with Stone and Kovic.

You can see the ad on CNN nationwide starting this Friday, and it couldn't come at a more timely point in the history of the war. Last week, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill from Congress that moved to set dates for withdrawing US troops in Iraq, and to end our involvement in the now four year-old war. When asked if he might ever make a movie on the subject, Stone answered, "It's not my generation's war...I'd like to do a picture about the politics behind it though. I find that fascinating." Stone's experience fighting in Vietnam is what made his three films on the subject -- Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven and Earth -- so powerful. He feels the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq are difficult to ignore, saying: "I made three movies about Vietnam and I thought it was behind us. This is a bad summer repeat of a war that happened 40 years ago. We must listen to the soldiers who are coming back."

Whatever you might think about the war in Iraq, it has created an entire subgenre of films in the past few years, mostly documentaries. We've seen films focusing on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, films shot from the point of view of ordinary Iraqi citizens, films about Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, and last year I even saw a documentary about USO comedians entertaining troops in Iraq. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair is one of the latest in this series, and it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from the comedians' point of view. The documentary examines the experiences of a prisoner of war sent to Abu Ghraib.

Yunis Abbas is a longtime journalist and photographer in Iraq. In 2003, U.S. military invaded his home on the grounds that it was a suspected terror cell. Abbas and his brothers were thought to be making bombs to assassinate Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair. Abbas spent nine months in Abu Ghraib even though no evidence could be found to support the allegations, and the U.S. was aware that he had no useful information to impart about terrorism plots.

I'm convinced there will soon come a time when every other film playing in theaters will have something to do with this whole Iraq mess. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you -- I'm sure there are plenty of courageous stories to tell. It's just, well, depressing. All of it. The whole thing. And I hate it when they make me cry. They always make me cry. Damn wounded soldier and his last-ditch effort to get a message out to his newborn son. Hollywood might as well tear out my heart and drop it in the middle of a rugby game. Anyway, Escape Artists has picked up the rights to an essay -- published in he New York Times this past January -- and written by the fiance of a recently deceased soldier, as a producing and possible starring vehicle for Denzel Washington. (Or, as the obnoxiously loud woman next door calls him, "Denzeeeel!!!")

Journal for Jordan was written by Dana Canedy, and it describes a 200-page journal her fiance penned for their newborn son -- a sort of "this is the way the world works"-type thing -- which the boy could grow up with in the event his father never returned home from Iraq. And guess what? He never returned home from Iraq. 1st Sgt. Charles Monroe King was killed this past October in Baghdad, one month before he was due to come back home. (Hang on, let me just save Hollywood some time and find the next rugby game in my area.) Washington will produce along with Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch; the project will most likely find a home at Columbia Pictures, since that's where Escape Arists has a first-look deal. Currently, no director or writer is attached.

Tuesday morning I attended the panel for No End in Sight, the documentary about the mess in Iraq, how we got there, and what it will take to get out. The panel was moderated by film journalist David D'Arcy, and included filmmaker Charles Ferguson, exec producer Alex Gibney (Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room), former ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was coordinator for central Iraq in charge of Baghdad, US Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton, Omar Fekeiki, former manager of the Washington Post office in Baghdad, and, via satellite, General Jay Garner and Lawrence Wilkerson (US Army, retired), former chief-of-staff to then US Secretary of State Colin Powell. You can see Part One of the panel above.

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There's an infamous essay about David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, which was financed in part by Canadian tax dollars: "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is; After All, You Helped Pay For It." A paraphrase of that title rang in my mind as I watched the Sundance documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: We should know how bad this situation is; after all, we've all helped pay for it. Director Rory Kennedy combines interviews, photos and on-site footage from Iraq's infamous prison -- which went from being Saddam Hussein's execution factory to being the site of an American scandal -- to make a potent piece of documentary filmmaking that demonstrates a clear chain of lawless, inhuman cruelty and corruption that went from the gleaming conference tables of the Oval Office and Pentagon to the blood-spattered, shit-smeared halls of a prison in Iraq.

Kennedy's methodology is meticulous and human -- many of the ex-service people who served time for the documented prisoner abuses captured in the infamous photographs speak on-camera about what they did, and why; several Iraqis are interviewed as well. Soldiers talk about how superior officers gave them minimal or conflicting guidance on how much pressure was too much pressure to induce captives to talk; ex-captives of Abu Ghraib talk about how, for example, they watched as their father was beaten so severely it lead to respiratory illness, which led to death -- with medical attention denied every time it was begged for by a weeping son.

Now that Paul Greengrass has won the hearts of American audiences and critics with United 93, he could easily keep hidden his political criticisms of the U.S. and hope for a prolific career in Hollywood. But he doesn't seem to want the easy life. Once the director finishes post-production on The Bourne Ultimatum, he is set to begin work on a film about the aftermath of the Iraq War. He will write a script based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran's non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, and then direct the film for Universal.

Greengrass is no stranger to Iraq. Ten years ago he made a movie for British television called The One That Got Away, about an operation during Desert Storm. His hand-held documentary style is perfectly suited for the discord of the region and its post-invasion events, though he will probably bring something original to the project that hasn't yet been seen in the actual documentaries coming out of the Iraq War.

Despite his putting out mostly apolitical work since arriving in Hollywood, he is typically a political filmmaker and we can probably expect a very critical position from him here. Chandrasekaran's book apparently reveals the failures of the U.S. occupation and presents the whole thing as a major historical disaster. The Washington Post journalist does depict some involved individuals in a good light, though. If Greengrass can keep it as honest and balanced, he might be able to keep some of his patriotic audience.