John Cusack Goes To War

John Cusack is angry. And he thinks you should be too.

He's angry enough to take what might be a suicidal cinematic chance: making a stylized satire of a war in progress.

As a topic, the Iraq war has been a graveyard for big-budget films. But with "War, Inc.," which opens today in Los Angeles, Cusack is gambling that the movie, directed by Joshua Seftel and co-written by Cusack, will sway audiences by using pointed humor and an auteur's absurdist lens to make the case against privatizing the military.

"Everything is outsourced; everything is for profit," the 42-year-old actor-writer-director said recently in an interview at his Venice production office. "I don't think people really understand that. Corporations have privatized the war to the point where the war itself is the cost-plus business. They are hollowing out the very core function of what it means to be a government. They're using the State Department as an ATM."

He scoffs: "They should be sent to prison. They should be convicted. Their ideology should be shamed. We should revolt against them. We should mock them."

Keep reading

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Read the LA Times review: "John Cusack and Marisa Tomei make the satire work."

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USA Today's review: "The fast-paced and sharply written War, Inc. is audacious and entertaining"

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Watch or listen to a Democracy Now! interview with Cusack

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TIME's review: "Old-school fun"..."a great excuse to call up your old liberal pals and relive that dreamy time when war as business was an idea worth satirizing"...one of the "5 things you should know about" this week.

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Jeremy Scahill's review: "It is sort of like this generation's Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and The Wizard of Oz mixed together with the un-embedded reporting of Naomi Klein, spiced up with a dash of South Park."

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See John Cusack talk about the film