Déjà Vu Review

From A melange of music and message by Jon Bream:

I cry at movies. Sappy songs make me cringe, but sentimental movies cause me to tear up. I'd be ideal for a test audience for the Hallmark Channel.

To my surprise, I pulled out my hankie twice during "CSNY/Déjà Vu," the new documentary about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 2006 concert tour. I wasn't getting misty-eyed for "Wooden Ships," "Teach Your Children" or other nostalgic songs.

My eyes got wet when a California single mom talked about losing her son in the Iraq war to friendly fire. Tears of joy ran down my cheek after seeing a young Marine from Ohio play his punkish songs on acoustic guitar for his fellow soliders in Iraq and later perform them in a U.S. hotel room for an audience of one -- Neil Young, who raved about the serviceman's songwriting.

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Mr. Bream concludes his review with this:

Too bad all this conflict comes too late in the film. It might have seemed manipulative to inject this controversy earlier, but, frankly, it's the only real surprise in "Déjà Vu." Otherwise, when you watch the rest of the movie, you probably realize that we have all been here before.

And that is what is truly sad. We have been down the anti-war road way too many times before.

The Antiwar Surge

From Surge of antiwar films by Ed Rampell:

After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood went to war, making training shorts such as Jap Zero with Ronald Reagan and morale boosters such as Casablanca.

During the Korean War, only one film - Retreat, Hell! in 1952 - was released during the conflict. There aren't too many movies, sympathetic or critical, about Korea.

During the unpopular Vietnam War, however, Tinseltown went AWOL, releasing only one Indochina-set feature, John Wayne's hawkish The Green Berets in 1968. The dovish Oscar-winning documentary Hearts and Minds came toward war's end. Films less sympathetic to the war - Coming Home with Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, Apocalypse Now with Marlon Brando, and Oliver Stone's Platoon - came well afterward.

In contrast, today's wars on terror and in Afghanistan and Iraq have unleashed an unprecedented antiwar cinematic surge while those conflicts are still going on. To be sure, there have been patriotic, pro-administration, and right-leaning films and TV series. But overwhelmingly, the film world has been antiwar and ready to sink production money into saying so - even if the films hardly break even. It's a concerted media protest unlike any that have gone before - and it suggests that filmmakers are frustrated with the way the too-careful mainstream media got hornswoggled in their Iraq coverage.

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