Typically I don’t post serious things on this blog and they usually contain a video but I stumbled across a blog article on Blog Maverick and want to give attention to the documentary “Fighting For Life“. Regardless of where you stand on the “war on terror” in Iraq or in Afghanistan, this documentary is about the men and women serving this country and the sacrifices that they have to make on a day-to-day basis.

Recently the mainstream film “Stop-Loss” has come out under MTV film studio. When first seeing the trailers on the tv, I had no interest in seeing the movie mainly because of my interest more in documentaries over Hollywood corporate dramatization. About a week later I was sitting down at lunch and picked up a City Pages and the featured story was called “Soldier Suicides“. This story was very well written and depicts the struggles and inner demons that these “kids” are dealing with when they come home. I couldn’t believe some of the statistics that Beth Walton pulled out in this story. I honestly read the story and said to myself under my breath, “these kids need help”. So after reading these stories in the article, I decided to go to Stop-Loss. Despite many story-line flaws and typical main stream Hollywood influence, the movie does depict our current struggles facing our over-worked men and women in this long drawn out war. Looking at this trailer for this new documentary, Fighting For Life, I hope that it succeeds enough so I can see it come to Minneapolis.

The only other Iraq documentary that I had seen is “No End in Site” which focuses on after we had declared “Mission accomplished” in major combat operations in Iraq. This actually was one of the better more disturbing documentaries that I’ve seen and makes you furious how ridiculously poor planning and execution of securing a post Saddam Iraq. As always here’s the whole movie if you have time (1 hr 42 min) to watch at your computer. I highly recommend this documentary and if you get a chance check out Fighting for Life.

Filed under: Movies