Jarhead
Directed by Sam Mendes
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Peter Sarsgaard
Universal Home Entertainment
Release Date: November 25, 2008

Fighting enemies that you can’t really see and for a cause that you don’t fully grasp. That is what the Marines were doing in the Middle East in the late 1980s and early 90s for months and then years (they were slated to be stationed here for only a couple of weeks). Does that sound familiar in our day?

Sam Mendes shows us why he won Best Director for American Beauty. He was born to work the camera and he throws his patented touches in the film to show us what he really believes is going on in the minds and dreams of these rattled soldiers. Rather than look for or fight the enemy they sit and play cards, talk about each other’s girlfriends, and play football the entire day while they should be at home with their families and attending college. Jake Gyllenhaal is Sawford (based on the true story of this man, who also wrote a book in 2003 about his experience) and Jamie Foxx as the battalion’s staff sergeant. Jarhead shows us what these soldiers did to make the time pass and how anxious one gets in the heat of battle.

Rendition
Directed by Gavin Hood
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally
Rated R

Rendition is about the post-9/11 American torture practices and shocks the audience into facing the truth of what their fear created, both home and abroad. Rendition made me ashamed to be associated, even by nationality, to those people who voted for, or support the Patriot Act.

A terrorist bombing rips through a crowded market street in the morning in an attempt to kill a middle-eastern official Igal Noar (Abasi Fawal). They miss the official, but it sets in motion a series of events which leads to Anwar El-Ibrahimi being kidnapped and taken to be tortured. Personally invested and morally conflicted, CIA analyist Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) is brought in to observe the “extreme interrogation techniques” approved by Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep) and inflicted upon the detainee, who may have information on the bombing. Anwar’s wife, Isabella (Reese Witherspoon), sets out on a mission to find her husband by contacting her old friend, Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard), now Senator Hawkins’s (Alan Arkin) personal aid. While Igal Noar attempts to deal with the terrorists in his country, his daughter Fatima (Zineb Qukach) starts to slip into the hands of her shady boyfriend, Khalid El-Emin (Mohammed Khquas).

The writing in Rendition takes what seems to the average American, an ethically gray area, and starts to separate the colors into a story far more black and white. Rendition asks and attempts to answer the question: What happens when the most powerful people in the world become people of convenient principle? Kelley Sane, the writer of this powerful script, asks the question so boldly and without reservation, the audience is required to face the truth of the answer.