By Debbie Schlussel

I can’t really recommend any of the new releases at the box office, this weekend.  And, oddly, they are so bad that the Matt Damon lefty anti-war movie is the best of the bunch.  But that’s relative . . . a big fat relative.

*  “Green Zone“:  This is yet another example of what I always decry in the movies–fiction presented as fact, as history.  Revisionism is what it is.  Some things in it–about  U.S. bungling in Iraq when we first went to war there–are accurate.  Others are just flat-out fraud.  The movie is based on the book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. But those who’ve read the book told me it’s not like the book at all. Nor is it entirely like the War in Iraq at all.

The movie presents our entry into Iraq as based solely on lying by the Bush administration about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a U.S. Army soldier and Warrant chief, whose men are responsible to take down and transport WMDs. But every location turns up empty. He begins to question this and the source of the info and soon discovers that the source is an Iraqi general in the “deck of cards”–one of the highly valuable Saddam loyalist targets our troops are looking for.

Damon meets a cab driver, who risks his life to tell him that the general is meeting with other Saddam loyalists at a safe house, and eventually the general tells him that he met with U.S. diplomats before the war, telling them that there were no WMDs. The general and Damon insist that the U.S. made all of the WMD sites up to get us into the war. Reality check: we went into Iraq not based on the WMD reports, which weren’t fiction made up because a meeting with a Saddam general went south. We went in because President Bush had a misguided view that he could spread democracy to an extremist world of savages.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal reporter (who is obviously supposed to be then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller) buys into the phony evidence and reports stories of the WMDs as fact when she never checked the evidence. Judith Miller, in real life, was never proven to be this gullible, nor have her stories been proven phony, despite what the left wants you to believe. Nice try, Hollywood.

As readers know, I’m not so sure the War in Iraq was a good thing. Overall, I think this whole democracy experiment is a disaster and we handed over a whole country to Shi’ite Muslims who’ve been running it a satellite state for their precious bosses in Iran. And to that extent, the movie gets some things right. For instance, the movie shows a diplomat who works for the Pentagon, under the direction of first Iraqi U.S. honcho Paul Bremer. The snide guy (Greg Kinnear) reminds me of the smug Dan Senor, who ghost-wrote Mitt Romney’s new book and who advised Bremer to de-Ba’athify Iraq, a giant mistake. De-Ba’athification of Iraq involved removing not only Saddam Hussein loyalists in the Iraqi Army, but pretty much all Sunnis and led to the riotous violence and anarchy that took place thereafter. It also made for the Shi’ite, Iran-loyal Iraq that we have now.

The action and adventure in this movie–since it’s being billed this way–is okay, not fantastic, but okay. If you want a good war movie, see “The Hurt Locker,” instead. Not overtly political like this one, but an accurate picture of how our soldiers put their lives on the line.

TWO MARXES

Watch the trailer . . .

*  “She’s Out of My League“: This rip off of a thousand nerd-wants-hot-girl, nerd-gets-hot-girl flicks was out of its league.  While it began as a funny, charming flick, it degraded into a vile, disgusting hodgepodge of scenes like a guy shaving another guys’ testicles and a guy’s pubic hair, to other gross humor which wasn’t funny, more like squirmy.  It stars no-names like Jay Baruchel and Alice Eve.  Who?

And you have to wonder where the TSA was in all this.  The main character, a complete geek, is a TSA screener.  A hot girl who looks like a mix between a young Kelly Preston and a young Christie Brinkley begins a flirtatious and then a dating relationship with the geek.  His friends can’t believe she’s interested in him, and soon he finds he can’t believe it either, but all is worked out, with a lot of vulgar humor and a ton of F- and S-words thrown in.  The end.

Sorry, but while I laughed several times and it had its funny moments, it was mostly just stupid and gutter stuff.  And since I believe that water generally rises to its own level, I really didn’t buy anything that was going on here.

FOUR MARXES

Can’t put up a trailer, because none are less than R-rated.

*  “Remember Me“:  Ignore the title, and do the opposite: forget this.

This long, boring, complete waste of time movie had one of the most atrocious and ridiculous endings ever.  Ever.  My friend, Detroit-based liberal movie critic Corey Hall, has a term for it, “9/11 porn.”  While we all know that 9/11 was an important and momentous event that should have been a wake up call for America to the Islamic threat (but was instead just a snooze button), the use of it as a clumsy ending to finish a horrible movie fits Corey’s description to a “T” here.  The horrific event, in which terrorists attacked our country and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans is gratuitously inserted and belittled here as a sudden ending to an unfinished celluloid presentation of crap.  What a waste.

Robert Pattinson, eager to show his acting chops span beyond playing a pale, sparkling vampire in the “Twilight” series, plays a bitter, sulking aimless slacker, who is the 20-something son of wealthy New Yorkers, including father Pierce Brosnan.  He is always angry at his uninvolved father and dotes on his younger sister who is bullied in school.  Soon he falls in love with the daughter of a cop who arrested him after a brawl.  But people get mad, there is the required trumped up, annoying melodrama, screaming, and crying, then all is forgiven and everything is good, and Pattinson is at his dad’s office in the World Trade Center when the planes hit.  The end.

What was the point of this movie?  Don’t know.  Don’t care.  Not worth ten bucks or even one.  Skipworthy to the max.

FOUR MARXES

Watch the trailer . . .

*  “Our Family Wedding“:  I have a rule.  If the title has the word “wedding” in it, it usually stinks.  This satisfied that rule in spades.  America Ferrera plays a Hispanic woman who is engaged to a Black medical student.  Their families don’t like this, given the different races and ethnicities.  And it degrades from there.  The Mexican family, with Carlos Mencia as pops, is stereotypical, and the Black family isn’t much different.  Stupid jokes and predictable pranks ensue, and I really wished I could walk out of the movie (but, then, the studio would prohibit me from reviewing it).  Plus you know a movie is bad when it relies on repeated cameos of former NFLer Warren Sapp as a relative of one of the main characters.  Absolutely horrible.

FOUR MARXES

Watch the trailer . . .