Gunner Palace
An essential and unvarnished documentary following the daily grind of American soldiers in Iraq who unburden themselves with sardonic humor worthy of "Catch-22's" Joseph Heller
Jan Stuart, New York Newsday
March 4, 2005
In this uncompromising glimpse into several weeks in the lives of an American artillery unit in Iraq, a 19-year-old soldier is asked how he likes the military life. "There's nothing like it," he says with an affirmative smile.
What we see in "Gunner Palace" backs that up. Truly, there is nothing like crack-of-dawn raids after suspected insurgents that traumatize women and children or the power to bully men three times your age to the point of tears and to pile them on top of one another, barefoot and blindfolded, in the back of trucks. There is nothing like having rocks flung at you regularly by the locals, living in dread of every roadside bag that may contain a bomb, or finding out that one of your fellow troops was just blown up. Where can I sign up?
Exploding boyhood fantasies of the glory of combat is one of the strategies of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's you-are-there film, which moves in and out of the bombed pleasure palace of Uday Hussein that has become the gunners' temporary home. The testimony of the gunners, whether relayed in searing hip-hop lyrics, or satirical jabs at scrap-metal jeeps, speaks for itself.
At times, the film's evocation of war's absurdities invokes memories of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H." As one commentator says, however, "Unlike a movie, war has no end." And like a war movie, you can be pretty sure that some of the "characters" in "Gunner Palace" are going to be dead before the picture's final fade.
Jan Stuart, New York Newsday
