#28 - Restrepo (2010)

First week of the new semester = mostly successful

Australian Open = Over in two days, and mostly successful.  Kim Clijsters plays for the women's title at 330 AM EST tonight/tomorrow morning, but I don't care much about the men's final.  Boo.

Yes, this is another 2010, pre-Oscar flick, the second documentary on the list so far, not terrible for someone who doesn't watch a whole hell of a lot of them.  Today's movie is one of the five movies nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award (the same exact category that failed to nominate Waiting for Superman): a movie that follows a platoon in Afghanistan.

I'm not a big fan of war movies, in general: real, entirely fictional, fictional based on mostly real events.  And especially in this world climate right now, I'm even less interested in seeing people killed in the name of who the hell knows what? But, as always, I go into it with an open mind, in the hopes that what I view is something that slips under the radar and is well done and is (to the extent that it possible can be) enjoyable.

First off, this is some seriously either foolhardy or brave-as-shit filmmaking.  These cameramen, et al. are right in the middle of this all.  And this is one of the most dangerous valleys in Afghanistan during the whole of the conflict/war.  People are dying: soldiers are getting killed, locals (some bad, some good) are getting killed throughout.  It is very real.

What is also real are the platoon members who are unsurprisingly candid in the head-on interviews that are conducted with them.  In the camp, many of them act exactly like I would expect them to when I consider that these are not the type of people I would, for example, be friends with in real life, but it doesn't make it any less difficult to deal with the subject matter when you watch them and get to know them a bit and understand the shit circumstances they're under. Pemble and Cortez and Captain Keirney are among those who were the most intriguing and realest of them all.

There's not a whole lot I can say about the rest of the movie beyond the emotional impact it has, and the "right in the middle of it all" feeling that abounds while watching.  If you're a fan of docs, you could do a lot worse, and if you hate the fact that we're sending all our boys overseas, you won't feel any better about it after watching.  You've been warned.

Score: 7.5/10