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Military Intelligence and You!

Clever, clever conceit

By BETSY SHERMAN | March 19, 2008

3.0 Stars

Military Intelligence and You!

Will we miss having the Bush-Cheney administration to kick around? To remind us that things have yet to “change,” writer/director Dale Kutzera cuts and pastes World War II training films with a war-on-terror slant in his entertainingly subversive movie. Clips with the likes of William Holden, Elisha Cook Jr., and “Dutch” Reagan mingle with new scenes played in ’40s style, the whole topped with tongue-in-cheek narration. In the “post 12/7” landscape, intelligence is crucial because, as a blustery general says, “What sort of nation would we be if we went around sending in the troops just because we thought something might be there?” The conceit sustains its feature length because the jokes are clever, the actors don’t overplay the comedy, and the clips dramatizing Nazi captors (from Resisting Enemy Interrogation) are priceless. But no satirist can take credit for making “freedom” and “liberty” sound as campy and as bullying as they have lately. 78 minutes | Kendall Square

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