"If I answer your questions, will you stop writing nasty shit about me?" he asked. Of course we could promise nothing (especially not with a Roland Emmerich collaboration on the horizon), but for now, anyway, it's hard to deny he's on to something with War, Inc. He tells us why after the jump.

Most observers were pretty shocked to see War, Inc. score the way it did last weekend, especially after the reviews it got. What was your reaction?

I wasn't totally shocked, but I'm shocked that it went as well as it did. I've been the beneficiary of a lot of cultural snobbery, so I can't really bitch about it, you know? I don't really mind too much when it goes against me, especially when you do a movie that's different and radical. Some of the most powerful people intellectually that I know had not only seen it but endorsed it: authorities on Iraq, writers, thinkers, artists, comedians — I thought, "Hey, we've got a shot here; we don't need to sell out 6,000 screens, but I thought we could just go grass roots with it."

What's the irony in a critically-snubbed film about the Iraq War doing so well, especially after those same critics complained about commercial failures of films they backed?

Not only didn't it have critical backing, it didn't have corporate backing. But again, the critical backing we had was a different kind of critic. They write about foreign affairs and politics and culture; they don't sit around a bunch of junkets every weekend and then be snarky tastemakers about movies. Many of the press never wrote about movies before; they spent time in Iraq and had written about the issues in the movies for a long time. They said, "I don't know what the hell these critics are seeing, but this is what we see." Some people just get it.

Is that a model that more distributors and studios should take to heart for future Iraq films?

I hope so. I definitely remember thinking that if we pulled this off, it wouldn't have been done before. I was pretty excited about that. But I've also been around long enough to know the response something gets when it's either the flavor of the month or it has nothing to do with the overall life of the film — especially these kinds of edgy political satires and experimental films. We'll see how it does this weekend, but we're already going out to six new markets in two weeks.

Your previous film about the Iraq War, Grace is Gone, was a very well-received last year at Sundance. Harvey Weinstein bought it for $4 million; it made less than $100,000. What happened?

I think, to be honest, releasing it at Christmas was probably not the right time, in retrospect. I think Harvey was thinking it would get into that award season "luge," where it gets nominated for script or actor and that sort of propels the life of the movie. When that didn't happen, there wasn't a back-up plan. When Christmas came around and the debacle in Iraq was so depressing, people didn't want to be reminded of it. What's fun about War Inc. is that it's got these serious ideas but it puts it through an absurdist lens. You remember subversion can be fun; the first thing you want to reclaim is your spirit of defiance.

You're reportedly attached to star in this Roland Emmerich film 2012. You're seriously playing a limo driver in the apocalypse?

I can't divulge that information. It's very secretive stuff.

WHAT'S NEW: There's a holiday-ready, cruise-control part of us that feels like skipping this part of Defamer Attractions, but again, Indiana Jones 4 is not the only new release demanding attention. That said, with $26 million already in the bank on Thursday, and with the Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Projection Ticker speeding toward $9.5 trillion, we should probably just get it out of the way. It's easily going to win the weekend, but can it displace four-day weekend champ Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ($139.7 million) and five-day king Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ($172 million) as the all-time biggest box-office bow? We doubt it; there's too much cultural competition to overcome the 19-year generation gap. Nevertheless, we're still calling Indy to break $110 million by Sunday and $140 million by Monday, thus promising a fifth installment set in 1967 and pitting our hero and his greaser sidekick/offspring against their toughest adversaries yet: Filthy, filthy hippies.

Also opening: John Cusack's Iraq satire/career nadir War, Inc.; the here-and-gone Jonathan Rhys Meyers drama The Children of Huang Shi; and the acclaimed Vice Magazine-produced doc Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

THE BIG LOSER: Despite early reads positioning Postal in the same critical class as What Happens in Vegas, Speed Racer and Sex and the City, it won't likely be enough to boost Uwe Boll's latest clusterfuck to anything approaching respectable at the box office. Granted, he's on four screens as opposed to, say, Indy 4's 4,200, but if Postal's per-screen average breaks $8,000, we'll volunteer to be the guy eating his own puke in Boll's next film. What? Stoic has already been shot? Whatever. The point is: It will not happen.

THE UNDERDOG: Fatih Akin's 2005 culture-clash stunner Head On captured audiences about as abruptly and unforgettably as its title suggested, and his follow-up, The Edge of Heaven, revisits his volatile Turkish/German roots with no less intensity. Which, considering its scope, is a bit of a marvel: A elderly Turkish man invites a compatriot prostitute into the home he shares with his son in Bremen. It ends... poorly, with the son traveling to Istanbul to find the woman's 20-something daughter. She's embroiled in political actions there, expatriates herself to Germany seeking asylum, falls in love with another young woman, and then — horror of horrors! — is expelled back to prison in Turkey. The interwoven searches and tragedies that follow in Heaven make Babel look like an afterschool special — not for their violence or viciousness (though they have that, too), but for their stoicism and, ultimately, their unalloyed compassion. And in any case, we'd never reject anything featuring both lesbians and Turkish prison.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, the latest terrible George Romero zombie entry Diary of the Dead, the Richard Gere/Claire Danes folly The Flock, and the long, long-awaited complete first season of The Bill Engvall Show.

So are we low-balling Indy's weekend plunder? Are we too generous? And is anybody actually planning to see Postal? Share your own plans, place your own bets and go ahead — tell your boss we said you could take Monday off!

Cusack, in the latest of a seemingly endless (and psychologically curious) string of hitman roles, plays Hauser, a typically troubled assassin whose inner psyche is so dead that he resorts to downing shot glasses of hot sauce in order to feel anything. His latest mission, at the behest of Tamerlane — a Halliburton-type corporation run by a Dick Cheney-like former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) — is to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister named Omar Sharif (an example of the film's humor) who is threatening to undercut their plans to build an oil pipeline in the wartorn country of Turaqistan. — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

He also encounters a reporter for The Nation (Marisa Tomei!), a Central European pop tart named Yonica Babyyeah (Hillary Duff) who drops a scorpion down her pants and a hysterical double-agent (played by Cusack's real-life sister Joan running the trade show that serves as Cusack's cover — featuring a chorus line of amputees with high-tech prosthetic limbs. And I haven't mentioned Sir Ben Kingsley, sporting another one of his eccentric American accents, as a Big Brother-like character. — Lou Lumenick, NY Post

Films like this and Redacted and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? exist to make their makers feel good about their own political correctness, and content that their razor-thin world views are accurate and viable, when in fact they represent a tiny fraction of the bigger picture. This is not activism—this is self-congratulation. — Karina Longworth, Spout Blog

It gets worse from there, but again, we'd prefer to think of Cusack as we remember him: a tasteful man whose recent lapses into treacle and trash (Martian Child, John? Really?) warrant a Sure Thing sequel or, better yet, the prompt franchising of Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything Else. It's not like Cameron Crowe couldn't use the boost himself.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]