In Mark Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column in the latest edition of National Review On Dead Tree (subscription required to read online, but likely soon reprinted on Mark's Website, he compares Hollywood's recent string of anti-war duds with the plot of Mel Brooks' classic romp, The Producers:

Why have these films tanked? Roger L. Simon, a screenwriter himself, made the point that these films are “essentially inauthentic.” “The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts,” he writes. “This feels to me like a cinema of ‘received wisdom,’ not based on personal experience or ‘emotional knowledge’ of any kind.”

That sounds right. One reason the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared with the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side. I don’t believe Brian De Palma can tell you why he opposes the Iraq War. In fact, I doubt he thinks about it all that much. And when he does, he thinks about it through the prism of Vietnam. And you can’t make that template fit.

In a way, there’s something heartening about the inability of so many Hollywood A-listers to make a decent anti-war film. For a start, they’re all about the wickedness of the troops or Dick Cheney or some shadowy agency deep inside the administration. The actual “enemy” are largely absent. They fulfill the same role the natives do in old-school British Empire yarns: an exotic distant backdrop for conflicts played out between two different groups of white man. These days, there are “bad” Americans (the Pentagon, CIA, Halliburton) and a “good” American (usually a lawyer, journalist, or stonewalled spouse) who blows the whistle. But the glamorous guerrilla of yore is hard to transplant to the new conflict: To convey one of the chaps wreaking havoc in the Sunni Triangle or the Hindu Kush with any honesty, he’d have to be shown as theocratic, misogynist, and homophobic. You might as well make him a Republican congressman.