Who's in It: John Cusack, Alessandro Nivola
The Basics: A former military man raises his two young daughters alone while his sergeant wife is off serving in Iraq. When the guys come to the door with the "we regret to inform you" message, he packs up the kids and hits the road to a theme park. So, it's kind of like National Lampoon's Vacation but about death, with lots of crying standing in for Wally World.
What's the Deal? I hate hating movies like this. It's like when I hated Crash and all the people who loved it were like, "You support racism!" That's how you're made to feel when you hate a dumb film about suffering and dying troops, as though you personally went over to Iraq and killed them yourself. But in reality, it's the movie that's to blame for everything, especially when the whole point of the plot is to get to a place where the little girls onscreen are bawling. Gross, right?
How You Know You're Watching a Film Suffering From Writer's Block: When Cusack finally breaks down and tells the kids that Mommy's never coming home, the dialogue fades away to music. Seriously. The most crucial and potentially affecting scene in the entire film is drowned out by the score.
Who Composed That Dialogue-Drowning Music: Clint Eastwood, who apparently really believed (?) in the movie's message. And it's not like he was alone on that one. It also won the (notoriously unreliable) audience award at Sundance, just like that nice arm-twisting weepie Spitfire Grill did a few years back.
Alternate Reading of the Entire Movie: That we, as a people, are still too insulated from the horror of war, so Cusack is the stand-in for America, and he has to wake up and deal with reality. Of course, if that is what this is about, then you're more or less calling your audience dumb. Because it's not like you need to convince the overwhelming majority of America that the war is a big disaster. Just look at the polls. So why, then, does this even exist?