Scarecrow suggests | Like 'Green Zone'? Try DVDs written by Brian Helgeland

"Green Zone" director Paul Greengrass started his collaboration with Matt Damon on "The Bourne Supremacy," the first sequel to Doug Liman's "The Bourne Identity." Liman created the template of Damon as a brooding amnesiac killer with suppressed fighting and fleeing skills. In the sequel, Greengrass continues with a similar tone but exaggerates the documentary-inspired visual style. His shaky handheld cameras and quick edits have inspired a boatload of messy modern action scenes, but Greengrass constructs them with a deceptively steady hand that makes for some of the more nail-biting car and foot chases of recent years. He continued with "The Bourne Ultimatum," which cemented the style in the popular consciousness so much that the studio is now looking to him instead of Liman as the future of the Bourne franchise.

"Green Zone," set in the early days of the Iraq war, was written by Brian Helgeland, who started as a writer of B-horror movies ("976-Evil," "Highway to Hell," "Nightmare on Elm Street 4") before making a name for himself with the Academy Award-winning script for "L.A. Confidential." Since then he's teamed with Richard Donner ("Assassins," "Conspiracy Theory"), Tony Scott ("Man On Fire," "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3") and, most notably, Clint Eastwood ("Bloodwork," "Mystic River").

As a writer/director, Helgeland had two collaborations with Heath Ledger ("A Knight's Tale," "The Order"), but his most solid work is "Payback," the tough-as-nails Mel Gibson vehicle adapted from the book "The Hunter" by Richard Stark. Gibson plays a thief betrayed and left for dead who takes on organized crime and corrupt police just to reclaim his cut of the loot. The movie is available in two drastically different cuts — the lighter, more humorous theatrical cut that Gibson re-shot and re-edited, and Helgeland's much harsher "straight up" director's cut, which finally came out on DVD a few years ago.

For more films related to the Iraq war: Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker's documentary "Gunner Palace" (2004) is a profound look at the lives of servicemen and women with the 2/3 Field Artillery (aka "The Gunners") in the months after President Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. The film follows the soldiers through all their daily operations, from the brutal immediacy of a raid on suspected terrorists, the immobilizing tension of confronting a possible roadside bomb, to the jarring juxtaposition of their rollicking pool parties inside their headquarters — a bombed-out palace that once belonged to Uday Hussein. Tucker says on the film's official Web site (www.gunnerpalace.com), "I walked into 'Gunner Palace' in September 2003 with a simple desire to tell the soldiers' story — to capture what we didn't see on the news ... I looked at the subject not as news, but as living history; an experience, not an event." He does just that, letting the soldiers speak for themselves and providing us their objective and unfiltered reaction to a complex reality.

Local filmmaker James Longley's powerful documentary "Iraq in Fragments" (2005) offers three intimate and poetic portraits of the war-torn country through the eyes of otherwise ordinary people. There's an auto mechanic's 11-year-old apprentice struggling to keep up on his school work while earning a living; the fundamentalists who violently clash with U.S. troops while trying to form an Islamic government; and the Kurdish farming communities of Koretan dreaming of independence. The film received several accolades at the Sundance Film Festival, including best cinematography and best director, and earned an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature.

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