VALLEY OF THE WOLVES: IRAQ REVIEW

Gary Busey and Billy Zane in an anti-American Turkish action movie about the War in Iraq? I always knew there was something wrong with that guy, ever since he snapped at Kate Winslet in TITANIC. This movie has kicked up a mini-dust storm on the dusty old blogosphere, and so now we cut through the hype with this review from Oge with full descriptions of the scenes most liable to cause offense. Oge originally posted this to a list serv and generously agreed to let us repost it here (profanity removed as per Variety rules):

I have to admit, this sh*t was pretty entertaining. I also have to say though that watching MUNICH (which came out recently here, coinciding with the Hamas rout) and this around the same time was definately bizarre, and not really because of any direct point involving Jewdom. Billy Zane takes his cue from those neo-Nazi guys in those B action movies, dressed in a safari hat and jacket with a thin purplish-blue scarf around his neck and all, provoking civil war while pretending to prevent it etc.

As far as the anti-Semitism, there's this hilarious scene where our hero is in a fancy smancy hotel for shady influential evil people in Northern Iraq and demands that the hotel be evacuated, and the camera catches an Orthodox Jew with locks, black robe and hat shuffling out the door. Besides that there's the "Tel Aviv" (Among New York and London) written on iced lunch boxes carrying the much talked about human organs that they're harvesting from unfortunate wedding goers. That Garey Busey (who is so right for this) is Jewish only comes up later and implicity when Billy Zane argues about how his people are more chosen than Busey's. All this might have something to do with the whole grudge story about Israel commandos training the Kurds in Iraq for an independent Kurdistan...last year a couple Turkish newspapers claimed that our foreign minister leaked their part of the story to Seymour Hersh because the government was pissed off that Israel was simply ignoring their concerns. But overall, the anti-Semitism in the movie is pretty much overshadowed by Crazy Motherf*cking Christian Guy. There's a long scene where the camera pans across Christ on a cross in front of which Billy Zane is praying and going on about how his blood will flow through Babylon or something.

Despite a couple of solidly campy scenes--like when they seemingly run out of American actors and
impersonate American soldiers with local talent, and when they show a woman with a broken Turkish-English accent ripping off the clothes off of an Iraqi and throwing him on a human pyramid, thumbs up, as the camera zooms out in order to capture the imitation of the infamous real-life photo, and like when Busey flips out at a guy for killing all the captives because he needs them alive for their organs, yelling, "They're not animals, they're human beings damn it!"--at the end of the day, it's really not a so-bad-its-good movie. It does in fact stay within some sort of logical boundaries in order to work as propaganda.

"They gave the mountains to the Kurds, the desert to the Arabs, and the oil to themselves" complains a Turkmen Iraqi. A group of soldiers wait outside of a wedding party and once the people start firing into the air, the commander smiles and says, "Now they're terrorists...let's go in." An American soldier is killed when he says he will report the guy who just mowed down a truck full of wedding guests, one of his last sentences being, "they may be terrorists, but they're people too damn it!" A lot of air time is given to a Sheikh who lectures a woman when she says she wants to be a suicide bomber and besides the whole Islam forbids it line, he wisely notes, "they may die, but others will die too, damn it." There's also a scene with Islamic terrorists videotaping the beheading procession of a  Western hostage where they're going on about cleansing Iraq from Americans and Jews and what have you when the same Sheikh comes in all what-the-f*ck-is-going-on-here like and verbally bitch slaps them into humiliation, releases the hostage, and gives the long samurai blade that was being pointed at the hostage's neck to the hostage and tells him to behead one of the terrorists. The journalist then drops the blade and weeps at the Sheikh's feet. They did manage to include an interesting action scene in which a gun battle ensues right at the epicenter of a suicide bombing. Although the bomber was a guy whose son was killed by an American soldier, the emphasis in the scene is on the blown up limbs and wriggling torsos of the bystanders amidst which a couple of rogue Turkish special ops people and American soldiers try to take each other out.

Of course, what is intentionally ironic about the movie is that for a film motivated by nationalism it has an awful lot of Kurdish dialogue. At one point, when two Turkish guys are under fire and ducking for cover, one of them yells, "goddamn Kurds" to which the other responds "dude, I'm a Kurd" to which the first guy says, "yeah, but you're different."