Letters to the Editor
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Not quite
The term "stop-loss" refers to a government policy that allows soldiers to be called back to service even after they've completed their military contracts.
Close, but not quite. A standard enlistment contract stipulates clearly that the person is obligated for a period of eight years, in whatever combination of active duty, reserve, or inactive ready reserve the recruiter and recruit agree upon. If the soldier has not fulfilled that eight years, he has not "completed" his contract. More to the point, there's a section in every contract spelling out the possibility of stop-loss, and the recruit can't plead ignorance, because he has to initial that clause.
More important, no one is sent on back-to-back combat tours as this movie posits. He'd be useless in such circumstances.
But, in the end, despite it's legality, whether stop-loss is good policy or fair is a whole 'nother question.
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Told me what I needed to know (with one caveat)
I appreciate this review, because I was already trying to talk myself into going to see Stop Loss. That's always a bad sign: when the trailer makes me feel guilty for not caring. Once I saw the first trailers, I was confused because with a title like "Stop Loss" it is obviously a movie that takes a political stand. Yet I had to do a double take, because something about the trailer was a giant whiff, and it sort of made me feel like the move would be apolitical...Which clearly it isn't, but it just missed in a big way. And we don't need any more apolitical war movies like Mel Gibson's Vietnam waste of time. All the same, I think movies that are too aggressively conscientious can be dull and plodding. That seems to be the case here.
What I hate about socially conscious studio movies (and hell, even indies) is that so often they are too earnest, they're too balanced to be provocative, they lack edge. The studio system must be partly to blame, but that's not completely it though. Independent movies aren't taking huge chances either these days. I have yet to see a fictionalized account of the Iraq/Afghanistan messes that are as good as David O. Russell's early 90s movie about Iraq I. If anything, today's war movies are just too deferential to the 20th Century Vietnam war movies. A different war calls for a different style. We aren't getting that.
Only caveat I would add here is that the evidence suggests Kimberly Pierce didn't make a movie for 9 years because she couldn't get work, especially major studio work. The plight of women actresses hitting the age wall and being thrown out has been chronicled in some detail, but I haven't seen many references to the even worse situation for women filmmakers. Things aren't easy for filmmakers of any race or sex, but I think it's been established that talented women directors aren't breaking through - even ones who made a splash as big as Boys Don't Cry. That said, I'm glad you didn't use this review to explore these issues. Maybe that's a subject for a later date.
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Why can't we have an Iraq film that's warts and all?
I'm really tired of the naive, pained patriots approach of reflective self examination, seen in so many movies that choose the Iraq war as a subject or setting in examining what war is. I'm amazed that I have to look as far back as the Eisenhower era to find a better film about what unvarnished insanity war really is in a movie like Robert Aldrich's "Attack," which is about a hardfaced fragging incident in WWII, or else I have to look to Sam Fuller to show me it all like it really is, ugly, incomprehensible, and above all stupid, with pathetically ugly overtones of empty patriotism, that no longer have a place anywhere in the daily dialouge between life and death on the battlefield. The best war film about American soldiers in recent memory that I can remember is actually a film set on a U.S. army base in Germany during peace time at the end of the cold war, the ingenius "Buffalo Soldiers." I haven't seen DePalma's "Redacted" yet, but I'm sure it's better than "Jarhead," or any other generic Sapfest sure to come to a theater near you anytime soon.
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It's hardly fair to blame Pierce for the nine-year-between-flicks gap...
In addition to the "female problem," it was a combination of projects she was working on (and really liked) falling through--and her getting offered blockbusters, but not wanting to churn out a movie just to be churning out a movie. Sheesh, when a director promiscuously turns out bad flick after bad flick, critics groan and wonder why that person doesn't take more quality-time (or quit altogether. :)) But when a director _does_ take time, folks complain that person is either slacking or was a one-hit wonder who can't deliver again. This sort of complaining is like dissing Alice Sebold because she's not as "fast" as Michael Chabon...or James Patterson. :)
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Why is everything a soap opera?
I bet the real rate of desertions is higher than the army admits. And the US is a big country filled with idiots. So it's still easy to disappear w/o guilt. I'd like to see a movie about someone who didn't have a meltdown, just decided to walk away and start over. Heck, it's probably happened in real life a thousand times over.
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Why it's impossible to do earnest social realism about Iraq
It's a grotesque war. There's nothing earnest about it.
To encompass the grotesque, one must employ the fantastic.
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Nailed it
Zacharek nails why the screening I saw of this was -- in the quiet moments -- filled with the unmistakable sounds of "restless audience".
You _want_ to care, you want to feel like you're watching something _important_ but somehow it's just not there.
And sitting in the dark with 300+ others feeling the same way is really, really awful.
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Only problem about the premise
Is that when soldiers sign up they understand the terms of the IRR, or they should - it's in black-and-white and they signed the documents.
A man's minimum term is essentially eight years due to the Individual Ready Reserve 'caveat.' My recruiter explained it in 1991 and I still remember though I've been out since 1997.
So the entire premise I saw in the trailers of 'they can't make me go back' is false - he agreed to it, and personal, willful ignorance does not a valiant hero make.
Peace,
XY