The time I made Christopher Hitchens laugh...

I don't claim to have known Christopher Hitchens -- except through his work. (Probably the way he would best like to be known.)

However, I did meet the man once.

It was after his debate with British MP (and all around thuggish antisemite) George Galloway on the subject of Iraq. Nick Denton hosted drinks at his Soho loft afterwards and I crashed. (My friend, Mike Weiss -- who penned these two tributes to Hitchens today here and here -- had been a legitimate guest and he invited me to tag along.)

For some reason (at around 3 or 4 in the morning) I was invited to tell a joke. I told the following:

Shelley and Byron die and are taken to the pearly gates. As they approach, St. Peter looks them over and says, "Well, well.... you have both been pretty naughty. But we do have space for a poet. One poet. So here's what we'll do. We'll have a bake off. I'm going to give you the subject, you will each have an hour, and when I return, I'd like a poem. The author of the better poem will be admitted to heaven. The subject will be my favorite place down on earth, Timbuktu."

St. Peter leaves the two poets alone with paper and pen and returns an hour later. "OK, boys, what did you come up with? You, Shelley -- why don't you start."

Shelley began:

"With feet upon the burning sand,
"I gazed upon the promised land.
"And in the far off distant view
"The paradise of Timbuktu."

"Very nice," replies St. Peter. "Now you, Byron. Read me your poem."

With a wink, Byron says:

"Tim and I, a hunting went --
"and spied three maidens in a tent.
"As they were three, and we were two,
"I bucked one, and Tim bucked two."

Not only did Hitchens laugh, but he was extremely complementary of my ability to remember both poems. (I admit, that came with practice.)

Not to join the throngs of fans and tributes (which I find slightly puzzling given how many enemies he made over the course of his life) but I admired Hitchens greatly. (The only thing that I've seen about him that was negative was this, funnily enough, in Gawker.)

There were many issues on which he was quite simply nuts (like, say, the Clintons), but I admired how ardently he clung to his (sometimes nutty) vision of the truth.

Long after it was obvious that America had been sold a bill of goods on Iraq (at least in terms of its threat to our national security) Hitchens refused to agree.

Hearing him argue the case (as he sometimes did ad nauseum) I sometimes started agreeing with him -- even recognizing how crazy some of his points were.

If all you wanted was some acknowledgement of just how shitty a job the Bush administration conducted the invasion, you were probably wasting your time. Hitchens had no interest in making you happy.

The night of his debate with Galloway, when he faced a mostly hostile audience and proclaimed his solidarity with a free Iraq over a penal state under the thumb of a crime family, I stood up and cheered. (I feel a little silly about that in retrospect, but Hitchens had a gift for raising one's blood.)

More than a contrarian, I think he was a romantic.

And there was his wit -- that glistening, sumptuous wit. It was a pleasure to listen to a man as smart as he expound on just about anything.

Of course, like many prolific writers (and Hitchens put out thousands of words every week), not everything Hitchens wrote was great. Much of it felt like he was too much in his cups when he sat down to begin writing. But when he was on fire, the man could hold his own with H.L. Mencken or any other polemicist. (I strongly recommend his memoir, Hitch-22.)

His last piece in Vanity Fair was truly painful to read. The man had been through a great deal of torture at the hands of his illness. I'm glad he's out of his misery -- and I'm glad that the one time I met the man I left him laughing.

Three reasons to hate "Green Zone"... two reasons to like it.

After hearing a mix of good and bad reviews about the new Matt Damon picture Green Zone, I decided to see for myself.

Overall, it was pretty bad.

Why?

Well, for a number of reasons.

1) It was too overtly political.

Essentially, the movie is about a WMD inspector (Damon) who finds that America was lied into war. Its thesis is that the Bush administration went to war knowing that there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq.

I'm not quite sure I buy that.

As a chastened supporter of the war in Iraq, there's very little about the Bush administration that I'm not utterly appalled and outraged at in retrospect. They were the most reckless bunch of morons to ever walk the face of the earth. They were guilty of many crimes: Stupidity. Arrogance. Criminal neglect.

But, at the end of the day, I think they were very surprised that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. On that (and maybe that alone) they were sincere.

This doesn't forgive the error.

The Bush administration had a horrible habit of cherry picking the intelligence that fit their thesis (that Iraq was hell bent on acquiring WMD) and ignoring anything that contradicted it. They saw what they wanted to see, and little else -- which is a grave sin for custodians of power. But if you read Barton Gellman's biography of Dick Cheney, Angler, you discover that months after the fall of Baghdad, Cheney was still examining the raw intelligence reports and calling David Kaye in the middle of the night to suggest possible WMD sites for him to check. Which is not really the behavior of a guy who thinks that there weren't any WMDs in Iraq.

2) Every character was a walking, breathing political spokesperson.

In a sense, I almost feel that Green Zone should be cut a little slack in this, because I remember that back in 2003, almost everybody I knew was itching to engage in some sort of moral, ethical, strategic, tactical philosophical conversation about what the war in Iraq meant; whether it was right or wrong; what would happen there; etc.

Greg Kinner plays an administration official, harping on about the messiness of Democracy. (I think he was supposed to be Douglas Feith, or a broad neocon composite.) Brendan Gleeson is the cynical CIA op. There's a one-legged Iraqi named Freddie, who levels accusations against Damon and makes prononcements about the invasion. An Ahmed Chalabi character and a Judith Miller character all turn up.

But, honestly, nobody speaks in such platitudes.

And these weren't real characters (with one or two exceptions). People are usually a little more complex than a one-idea spokesperson. These people were pretty much stripped of any complexity.

3) It was sort of tedious.

The director, Paul Greengrass, has done two of the Jason Bourne movies, and he employs a lot of the same chase sequences. The last 15 minutes or so, I was really sick of all the running and chasing and gizmo technology. Maybe I'm getting too old for that kind of thing, but I was gettnig very, very bored.

All that being said, I thought there were a couple of things worthy about the film.

1) It sets the scene pretty well.

The images of Baghdad in casual chaos (when there aren't necessarily buildings burning to the ground, but Iraqis who are coming in and out of government buildings with swag) were pretty good.

While the handheld camera shots were somewhat overdone, there were moments when it was used quite well.

2) Amy Ryan was excellent as Judith Miller.

She seemed like the only actor who had any depth; a reporter who had fucked up royally, but who seemed at least somewhat concerned that she had fucked up. But also self-justifying and self-loathing.

As an impression of Miller, it was pretty spot on.

But overall, skip it.

Boom!

Among the many fascinating stories about the filming of Apocalypse Now, was one about how shortly after Marlon Brando arrived on the set he improvised a long monologue about American culpability in Vietnam.

After he had finished this speech Francis Ford Coppola stopped the cameras and said to him, "Marlon, this movie is about many things. I might not know all of them... but one thing I know this movie isn't about is our guilt."

(I'm paraphrasing. To read the full account pick up Michael Schumacher's Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life.)

Now, there's no question that Coppola's political feelings about the Vietnam War were strong. (He was antiwar.) But you've got to admire a filmmaker who protects his art from his politics -- especially in a setting as rife with politics as a movie about a war.

This is one of the big problems with war movies -- most can't stop themselves from turning themselves into manifestos. Not every war movie, naturally. And sometimes a war movie with a political message can still be a great piece of art (I'm thinking, specifically, of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.)

But in my experience, movies with a "message" are mostly pieces of shlock or propaganda. (Often both.) Even if I "agree" with a movie's message, I usually find myself not wanting to. Wars are complex things. Movies (in this day and age) are not.

And this might be the reason why the batch of Iraq War movies that I've seen have been so disappointing.

Except for The Hurt Locker -- which I heartily recommend every man, woman and child to run out and see immediately. (Well, maybe not the children.)

The Hurt Locker is refreshingly (blissfully!) not political.

Well, that might not be entirely true. The politics are certainly under the surface. But I've been thinking about The Hurt Locker ever since I saw it yesterday afternoon, and I still have no idea whether the director, Kathryn Bigelow, or the writer, Mark Boal, are pro- or antiwar.

But I really don't care. (I suspect they don't care, either.)

What they are, instead, are really stupendous reporters.

The movie is from the perspective of a three-man Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit (aka, bomb squad) who drive though Baghdad looking for I.E.D.s and various other bombs to defuse and dispose of.

The chief bomb defuser is played by Jeremy Renner (whom I've never heard of before, but is one of the most talented actors I've ever seen -- and looks a little like he's Daniel Craig's less handsome cousin.) He is described approvingly by one officer as "hot shit" -- which he most certainly is. But he's also crazy. He takes insane risks to dismantle these bombs -- sometimes much more risk than he needs to.

When he's rifling through a car to try to find the trigger to five enormous bombs in the trunk, his sergeant, Anthony Mackie, radios to tell him that the area has been cleared from civilians and -- being that there's no broader danger -- they can leave the car to the military engineers. Renner ignores him, and continues trying to find the trigger.

Mackie keeps calling him and calling him until Renner rips off his headphones and gets back to his work.

He needs to dismantle bombs, like Paul Cezanne needs to paint.

This is one of the major themes of the movie -- it's about the beauty of war. How these guys get addicted to it.

But it's also an amazing portrait of how isolated Americans are in that country (or, how isolated they were before the surge, in any event). These guys (there are no women in the movie) head to the trouble spots and are constantly trying to evade death. They don't say much about the grander mission in Iraq -- and they don't care.

On the streets they encounter Iraqis of various degrees of friendliness. (Some are very unfriendly.) But the Iraqis are mostly a bafflement. Another potential source of death. And the bombs that the Iraqis leave for these soldiers are devilish in their violence -- you can fully understand why these soldiers want nothing to do with their potential killers.

The Americans are suspicious of any Iraqi they see -- but how could they not be? Any Iraqi could have a remote detonator that they're waiting to set off at the right time to do the maximum amount of damage. You'd have to be a fool not to be suspicious. Politeness and kindness by the soldiers is usually not reciprocated.

The Hurt Locker is not a perfect movie. There is a subplot in which Renner goes hunting for the killers of an Iraqi child that was pretty mawkish and unnecessary. And I thought the second half went on a bit longer than it needed to. But, overall, it is far and away the single best movie made about Iraq.

But I'd rather not put it that way. How about this: Kathryn Bigelow has simply made a great movie.

Doubling down

Dexter Filkins, the New York Times' former (and intrepid) Baghdad correspondent (and the author of one of last year's truly magnificent books, The Forever War) has a fascinating review of Thomas Ricks' new book, The Gamble, in this week's New Republic.

Anyone who cares about what happens in Iraq (which, I think, should include everybody) must read it. (That is, they should read the Filkins article. I haven't had a chance to look at the Ricks book yet. But I can vouch for Ricks' previous book, Fiasco.)

Both Ricks and Filkins struck me as initially very critical of the war and the surge. But the point that both of them are making is that Iraq is a completely different place than it was two years ago -- and almost entirely for the better.

Only a fool wouldn't recognize just how fragile the situation is, and not treat Iraq with an appropriate sense of skepticism, but it would also take a stubborn fool not to take seriously the tremendous amount of progress that has taken place since 2006.

What does this mean for the future? I think that whatever President Obama has said in the past, it means American forces aren't going anywhere any time soon.

No matter how horrible a mistake this war has been, it makes no sense whatsoever to compound this folly by letting the place revert back to its hellish, 2005 state. I think Obama's way too smart to let that happen.

Going to be a long haul...