The Departed and Flags Of Our Fathers were great, and I urge anyone to see both.

I found these meta-moments amusing:

1. In The Departed, one of the main characters gets to enact a film director fantasy and beat the shit out of his production team for not properly shooting an expensive, elaborate, and critically important sequence.

2. In Flags Of Our Fathers, the central point is how disgusting it feels to reenact important historical events for a large audience. They build a set and put on a show at a football stadium, for a mass market audience, and discuss how phoney and miserable it is to walk up a fake mountain at Iwo Jima. This scene is shot just as phoney as the plaster rock, though, with incredibly unconvincing rear projections for the football stadium audience.