“Super Size Me” creator Morgan Spurlock begins his new documentary by comparing the supposed trauma of learning he was about to become a father with the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden,” a supposed comedy in which Spurlock tours various places in the Arab world and Israel (Morocco, Egypt, the West Bank, Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and finally Afghanistan and Pakistan) begins with soaring-through-the-clouds airplane footage meant to evoke the point of view of the 9/11 attackers as they began their descent over New York City. In Spurlock’s narration, he speaks of how wonderful it is to experience the joy of waking up to realize it’s a beautiful day, only to be shocked when the whole thing is wiped out in a sudden unexpected moment. Cut to Spurlock’s wife announcing (in a moment obviously staged for the cameras) that she is pregnant.

Such bad taste is characteristic of the film, which is intended to downplay fears of terrorism and consequently is sure to delight the liberal press that praised every distortion in “Super Size Me.”

Spurlock’s vision is the squishy liberal view, the standard Westchester County wine-sipper’s wisdom, about the post-9/11 world. It isn’t that America is to blame for the attacks, exactly. But if only we were a little more sensitive to the suffering of the Arab world–if only we built them more schools and hospitals and resolved the Israeli/Palestinian issue and maybe sent them a card on Mother’s Day–they probably wouldn’t hate us.

In each country, Spurlock finds a couple of scholars and journalists to deliver that view. When he gets tired of listening to them he simply tells us in voice-over that we should think this, as we regard a cringe-inducing series of animated sequences in which Bin Laden and other terrorists are portrayed as dancin’ rappers or pictured on mock baseball cards (wearing caps with the AQ logo). This film is literally a cartoon version of the Islamist threat.

“Lush Life,” the forthcoming new novel of New York City from Richard Price, the author of “Clockers” and many a script for “The Wire,” is superficially a crime mystery but really it’s an acidly funny and hugely successful attempt to get everything that’s happening in the city today between two covers. The collision between confused, stupid and morally blank housing-project dirtbags on the one hand and, on the other, cosseted suburban-grown product who staff and patronize hot restaurants on the Lower East Side while they await certain celebrity, leads to a homicide and then a runway show of the vanities. Price dryly takes it all down: the way a young screenwriter/bartender-for-the-time-being confronts an armed robber by exclaiming, “Not tonight my man” and pays for his foolish movie behavior with his life. The way the young killer almost inadvertently squeezes off the round because he can’t think of anything else to do (then retreats to his unpleasant apartment to write rap lyrics extolling his great secret). The way the well-meaning cops terrrorize the wrong guy with a sneak-attack interrogation intended to wring a confession that instead alienates an innocent man who is the only reliable witness. One felon shakes down a tourist for cash and is instead offered a check; the criminal thinks this a great joke and keeps the check to show off to his friends as an example of humorous folly, never grasping that in doing so he is carrying around evidence against himself. A memorial service for the slain writer/barkeep degenerates into a competitive audition in which his creatively-inclined surviving pals work it for the news cameras on hand. “Lush Life” covers familiar ground without romancing any of it; it’s so vivid and real, it’s like “Rent” as rewritten by Balzac. The book is coming in March from FSG.

The allegorical content of mass-market genre films is always amusing to consider, and no director of cheesy flicks is more fond of allegory than George A. Romero, whose four-decade run of zombie movies continues this week with the release of “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.” Romero, who like his buddy Stephen King makes no effort to disguise his leftward leanings, whipped up a parable about racism in 1968’s low- budget creepfest “Night of the Living Dead,” in which a black hero was lynched by white townsfolk. He moved on to a swat against consumerism in 1979’s “Dawn of the Dead,” which was shot in a shopping mall. Lately Romero’s viewpoint apparently has grown more extreme: in 2005’s “Land of the Dead” Romero showed that he saw contemporary America as experiencing another great Depression, dividing starkly into haves and have-nots in which the rich lived in penthouse fortresses and the poor in hovels where they prepared armed onslaughts on their business-suited betters.

“Diary of the Dead,” which, like dozens of recent films, from arthouse flicks all the way down to “Cloverfield,” is shot on jumpy hand-held cameras, says much about the fashionable left’s view of the terrorist enemy today. It takes place in a post- 9/11 world in which the zombies are unstoppable bloodthirsty savages–yet the message is that we should get used to them, sympathize with their plight and more or less admit that we’re doomed and accept it. The zombie outbreak this time starts at a murder scene where a family of dead immigrants being taken to the morgue suddenly rise up off their stretchers and start munching on the carotids of the police and other authority figures–payback time.

As a group of student filmmakers simultaneously flee the area and make a documentary about the carnage erupting around them–everyone who gets bitten by a zombie turns into one–they fight back half-heartedly, talking about their guilty feelings and describing themselves as no better than the supernatural killers. As they talk about society’s failures during, for instance, Hurricane Katrina, and look at news footage about looting and paranoia breaking out all over the country in the wake of the zombie attacks, the tone of the movie evolves from a resolve to fight back to despair and surrender. We, meaning America, have brought this on ourselves, they learn. Now we’ll just have to pay the price.

Yet another Iraq movie started shooting this week. This one is a fictionalized version of the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. Director Paul Greengrass is one of the most impressive talents working in film today, and he’s secured Amy Ryan, a likely Oscar winner for Gone Baby Gone, and Greg Kinnear to star with Matt Damon. Ryan plays a New York Times reporter, and the apparent point of the movie is that the Army is making a huge mistake by staying holed up away from the Iraqi public in the heavily fortified Baghdad Green Zone.One of the many problems you face when you make a movie about Iraq is this: it takes years to put a movie together, by which time you can bet that whatever you are saying will be outdated. Since the Surge, for example, the Army no longer sticks to its Green Zone-think. And anyway, the armchair generals who have been offering their wisdom to actual military officers since day one keep contradicting themselves. An excellent example is No End In Sight, which has won a shelf full of awards for Best Documentary of 2007. The movie argues at length that the American forces made a huge mistake by keeping inside the Green Zone, and offers up as an example of what they should have done the tale of the U.N. official Sergio Vieira de Mello. It’s true that Viera de Mello operated within a much more open and welcoming site. It’s also true that he was promptly killed by a bomb. To add insult to it all, the book on which the Greengrass film is based was written by a Washington Post man, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, yet it’s a Times reporter who is a lead character. If there’s anything the public likes less than an antiwar Iraq movie, it’s a movie about how wonderful journalists are.