Review of The Lucky Ones (2008) by Chads — 30 Sep 2008

In the novel "Trespass", author Valerie Martin demonstrates her assertion that young Americans are less concerned with war than their kindred spirits from the Vietnam era, in a bar scene where the protagonist's father observes the inelegance of war coverage being treated as a background visual while loud music throbs, and college-aged people hook up as they swill cheap beer.

Although nobody is paying attention to the lonely television, at least somebody made an effort to acknowledge that life during wartime isn't business as usual. Perhaps it's the bartender, or the owner, who put the war on.

That's better than the bar in "The Lucky Ones", where the college-aged patrons ignore, not the televised war, but the stars of that televised war, the veterans themselves, who are insignificant compared to the going-ons of some "American Idol"-type program.

Unlike the people's choir in the title song from Neil Young's last album, the three girls that Colee(Rachel McAdams) tries to chat up aren't "living with war in [their] heart[s] everyday.

" The "I" on a girl's sweatshirt may stand for Indiana, but on a metaphorical level, the "I" represents the difference between soldiers and civilians. There's no "I" in the army; in a platoon, especially a platoon on tour, where soldiers meld into a "we" to keep themselves alive.

The letter is so foreign to Colee, she asks. The acoustic guitar, the weapon of the folksinger(as Woodie Guthrie wrote, "This machine kills fascists.") is both a commodity and an object of sentiment in "The Lucky Ones".

There's nobody around to write a protest song for the troops, so maybe Colee will have to write one herself. David Lowery(of Cracker, and the newly reformed Camper Van Beethoveen) was wrong, the world does need another folksinger.

What it doesn't need is more "American Idol" winners. In "The Lucky Ones", we can see that the bravest thing a soldier can do, is reporting to duty, and getting on the plane.