Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defy the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Rife with satire and absurdity, with more ambiguity and less agit-prop, they don't toe the MoveOn party line and go beyond the familiar war-is-hell mantra. As documentary filmmaker Michael Tucker says: "Yes, it's tragic and horrible. Duh. What else is there?"

For one, there's the bizarre madness of it at all, as shown in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. While ostensibly a raunchy teen comedy, the film's archvillain is a racist, ignorant deputy chief of Homeland Security who sends Harold and Kumar to face the horrors of Gitmo. "While it's obviously absurd," co-writer-director Hayden Schlossberg acknowledges of the film's premise, "there's an element of truth. There have been people thrown in Guantánamo who have done nothing. We like the idea of doing something about these subjects in a way that's not serious."

"Sincerity handicaps you," explains Tucker, who co-directed a number of Iraq docs, including Gunner Palace. "Trying to be earnest about something—it does nothing to explain it," he says. "That's why the fiction films have largely failed—because people are already in that emotional place." 

Are audiences suffering from war fatigue, as many have suggested? Do they have little interest in following a war on the big screen when they are surrounded by images and stories of it on the small screens in their home?

Moviegoers will not leave their homes unless they're being offered something in the theater they cannot find elsewhere, and what is notable about many of this year's political films is that very few of them actually stand up as triumphs of cinematic art and storytelling. In many respects, the greatest risk of making political art during wartime is that heightened political passion will trump artistic judgment, which in the case of moviemaking means that expressing a political stance will take precedence over character development and plot structure. 

Among the tiny percentage of Americans who do contribute large amounts of money to political campaigns (the number who give a thousand dollars or more to any candidate hovers around one tenth of one percent of the population), Hollywood contributors are almost alone in not trying to buy themselves anything so concrete as a tax break or a watered-down regulation. Although the entertainment industry itself does have corporate PACs, which do the industry's bidding and spread its wealth accordingly, most of the contributions handed out by individual members of the entertainment industry are ideological money that buys them nothing.

Here's the dirty little secret: No one knows how big or small a market the distribution of films and television programs over the internet will be in coming years -- not the writers, not the directors, and not the studios. And that's the nub of the problem. Hollywood runs on fear and both the guilds and the studios fear they will make a mistake in projecting the value of the internet market and that mistake will be locked in for many years to come.