When you head out to another fun-filled night of dinner, drinks and movie-watching with your friends, will it put even a slight damper on your evening that more than 66 people died in Iraq today, including 12 children? That kind of somber news doesn't seem to put a dent in anyone's mind these days. So maybe a new round of post-9/11 and Iraq-centered movies that look at the horrors of the war on terror from new, askew and comical perspectives may finally get people thinking again about the American-perpetrated crime of this 21st century.

After surveying a number of upcoming movies, I noticed that filmmakers were throwing out the conventional rules of political cinema -- straightforward serious message movies or agit-prop fact-based expose docs -- in favor of far more ambiguous, satirical and metaphorical material. This article in the Voice, "Absurdistan: The New Iraq War Cinema" is meant to try to make sense of this sudden turn to the strange, nightmarish or absurd. Feel free to comment here.