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Cinema and the war

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  • Libertas blog (and here) is the best ongoing blog covering news and politics about cinema and the war.
  • However, I have learnt not to trust his artistic judgement. He didn't like Atonement. I thought it one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. He didn't like Cloverfield. I thought it was a cracking, pro-military film. He liked Enchanted. I thought it was boring and unromantic, even anti-romantic. He liked National Treasure 2. I thought it was a brain-dead execrable pile of crap.
  • So for following news and politics, I love Libertas. But it's a coin-toss as to whether I'll agree with his reviews or not.
  • Like many conservatives, he also talks rubbish about science and religion (and more), even defending the absurd pseudoscience of creationism. I have no interest in his views on those topics, on which he is very ill-informed. I read him for other topics.
  • It's an imperfect world. I link to Richard Dawkins on science and religion, despite his idiotic views on politics. Likewise I link to Libertas on politics, movies and the war, despite his idiotic views on science and religion.

The law of media diversity: The more expensive media have less intellectual and political diversity

1. The Internet - The most diversity of all media. All views can be read in great detail. You can read directly, for example, from the U.S. military, the Project for the New American Century, or the Israeli military. You don't need to read a journalist's spin, or selective quotes. And of course you can read directly from their opponents as well, including directly from Islamist websites and directly from foreign tyrannical government websites.

2. Print (books, newspapers, periodicals) - Less diversity than the Internet - at least in terms of what you can access unless you are sitting in a national library. Only something like a national library contains similar diversity to the Internet - a bookshop doesn't. Neither does any one periodical. But still there is a reasonable amount of diversity in print in a country like Ireland, say. Many of the views on this website can be found periodically in print in Ireland somewhere, though in much smaller numbers than online. It costs little for a basically liberal-left newspaper to add the occasional neo-con column, for example. It can be easily ignored by their readers - whereas the cost on radio or TV is much higher since it takes up time.

3. Radio - Some diversity in America. Almost no diversity in Ireland or in Britain.

4. TV - Some diversity in America and Britain. Almost no diversity in Ireland.

5. Cinema - The least diversity of all media. There is almost no political diversity in cinema in the world.

What movie has ever been made about ..

• List of war films

• What movie, for example, celebrates America's victory in the Cold War? The western victory in 1989 is possibly the most important event in world history since the western victory in 1945, and yet no movie celebrates it or the people like Reagan and Thatcher who made it happen.

• Movies about the communist democide
  • Apart from the Holocaust, movies tend to avoid the topic of democide altogether. 100 million people died in communist democide in the 20th century, but movies are not interested.
  • What movies are there about the Soviet democide? I can't actually think of any. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was good but didn't depict the democide of men, women and children all across Russia.
  • What movies are there about the Chinese democide? Almost nothing.
  • What movies are there about the Cambodian democide? I can only think of The Killing Fields with its junk anti-American politics.
  • What movies are there about the North Vietnam communist democide? I can't think of any.
  • What movies are there about the North Korean communist democide? I can't think of any.
  • Movies are about a much more restricted list of topics.

• Pro-war movies
  • Movies get made about wars, but - apart from WW2 - almost all are unheroic and anti-war.
  • What film has been made about Gulf War One? Only the cynical, anti-war Three Kings and Jarhead.
  • What film has been made about the Palestinian intifada? Only the cowardly Paradise Now and propaganda like Jenin Jenin. Nothing that I know of shows the reality of the suicide bombing of women and children on buses. Film-makers are afraid to show us this reality.

• What films have been made about Vietnam? Almost all are cynical, anti-war, Oliver Stone-type movies.
  • This is not bad, but doesn't really show why the war had to be fought:
    • We Were Soldiers
  • I haven't seen these yet:
    • The Green Berets
    • The Hanoi Hilton
    • Rescue Dawn
    • Forgotten Heroes
  • We need a movie to show: (1) the North Vietnam communist democide, (2) the American left's betrayal of the military and the people of Vietnam, (3) the disaster that happened after America abandoned the Vietnamese, and (4) the fact that Vietnam is still a dictatorship today.
  • 30 to 40 years later, and we're still waiting for the first proper political movie about Vietnam and Cambodia. At this rate of going, don't expect a proper movie about the War on Islamism before 2030.

• Red Dusk: It's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism by Bridget Johnson - "What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? ... I'll bet the big studio execs have never thought - or cared - to do a big-screen adaptation of "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression," by Stephane Courtois, et al."
• Hollywood Heroism: A to-do list for George Clooney and his brave crowd - A brilliant article by Mark Goldblatt on the movies that Hollywood will never make. Such as a movie about the Hatuel family. He mocks the supposed "bravery" of Hollywood. "True, none of these films would likely be a runway box-office hit. But that shouldn't matter to a courageous artist like George Clooney."

• Other topics I have never seen a film about:
  • What movie has ever been made from the unionist point of view in Northern Ireland?
  • What movie has ever been made from the British point of view in pre-1922 Ireland?
  • What movie has ever been made showing why a communist killed JFK? I can't think of any.

• If there is a movie I should know about on these topics, please tell me.

Other topics that are taboo

• What movie has ever been made showing a realistic account of the life of the prophet Mohammed?
  • Only the pious whitewashes of The Message and the animated Muhammad, The Last Prophet.
  • List of films about Muhammad

• What movie has ever been made showing a realistic account of the life of Jesus?
  • Showing what actually happened. That he was just a preacher who was brutally executed. That, like all humans, his mother was not a virgin, and he had a human father. That no kings appeared at his birth, and there was no massacre of new-born children. That he preached, but worked no miracles, healed no sick and cast out no demons, for demons do not exist. That he believed he talked to God, but was mistaken, for there is no such being. That he died and that was that. Like all humans, he did not rise from the dead. That despite all this, his religion grew because it filled a need. Because it was a good meme. That hearsay and rumour got written as fact. That the gospels are not true.
  • The movies The Last Temptation of Christ and the Life of Brian touched on these topics, but ultimately chickened out.
  • Will anyone ever make a straightforward film that shows what actually happened? If you know of one, tell me here.

• What movie has ever been made showing a realistic account of the life of Moses?
  • Showing what actually happened. That he was an intolerant religious fanatic, tyrant, rapist, and murderer of innocent women and children. And he never talked to God, but was deluded that he did. For God is not there. That he did not receive commandments from God on Mount Sinai. And there were no selective plagues, no striking down of the first-born, no parting of the Red Sea. These things do not happen in real life, only in stories.
  • The children's animation The Prince of Egypt (1998) is perhaps the worst whitewash ever of this intolerant, hate-filled killer.
  • Will anyone ever make a film that shows what actually happened? If you know of one, tell me here.

The failure of cinema

• War? What War? Why Hollywood is ignoring the biggest story of the day (also here) by Jonathan V. Last, October 10, 2003 - on Hollywood's inability to make a movie about the War on Islamism. We will have to wait decades before Hollywood catches up with the present. - "In 50 years, when this war is over, there will be movies about the war on terror and they will show that the bad guys were the bad guys and that the Islamofascists did want to take over the world." - Until then, we will have to watch movies about other topics.

• Mark Steyn:
  • Time for some serious art about war , June 6, 2004 - "We've been in the new war now for almost three years, and .. Hollywood has absolutely nothing to say on the subject, except for a couple of Michael Moore crockumentaries. ... Something has gone badly wrong when (with the exception of a few country songs) our popular culture visibly recoils from the biggest event of our time."
    • On The Day After Tomorrow's destruction of New York's Chrysler Building: "it's the reductio ad absurdum of the lengths Hollywood's willing to go to avoid saying a word about the fellows who actually did bring down a New York landmark".
    • "Even when some hapless studio exec accidentally options a property that happens to have Islamist terrorists in it - like .. "The Sum Of All Fears" the first thing they do is change the enemy to German neo-Nazis. Imagine it's 1943, you're in a script meeting about "Casablanca", and Jack Warner says, "I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans?""

  • America's "Mission Impossible", July 28, 2004 - on the movies and reality. "on a day when every big-name Federal agency flopped spectacularly, a random sample of US citizens aboard that fourth plane, Flight 93, responded more swiftly and effectively to the threat than the entire US government. They did behave like action stars and, if Hollywood weren't a bunch of counter-tribalist Michael Moorons, they'd have made a blockbuster movie about them by now."
  • Where's the Vera Lynn for our war?, 3 May 2005.

• Look Who Isn't Talking - Bridget Johnson, November 24, 2004, on the silence of Hollywood. "The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic."
• Terrorist denial (or via here) by Greg Crosby, April 22, 2005 - "The fact is, Hollywood does not want to make movies about Arab terrorists, or the Iraq war, or radical Islam's jihad against the western world. ... If you're waiting for Hollywood to make some old fashioned patriotic movies like they did in the 40's concerning today's enemies, you've got a long wait. Ain't gonna happen. No, they'll continue to make patriotic period pictures of good ol' World War II, because it's safe to hate Nazis, but not today's wars with today's enemies."
• With Gutlessness Typical of the Grating Generation, Hollywood Takes Up 9/11, James Lileks, April 27, 2005. "In World War II, the movies had a clear message: The fascists needed to be defeated, and we were right to fight. Today's message: Jihadists are people too, you know."

• Box office blues stem from blue-state bigotry, Govindini Murty, July 10, 2005 - Hollywood is losing lots of money because it refuses to make pro-war films.
  • "Hollywood's box office has hit the skids, and the entertainment media are in overdrive trying to explain why. The most obvious explanation for box office malaise is consistently overlooked: Hollywood's ruling liberal elites keep going out of their way to offend half their audience."
  • "post-Sept. 11, no studio movie has been made supporting America's war on terrorism, or denouncing Islamic terrorism."
  • She also has a fascinating list of pro-war movie ideas that have been rejected by the studios.

• Speech We'd Like to Hear From an Academy Award Winner, Dennis Prager, March 7, 2006:
  • "I .. want to apologize to these troops for my profession not having made even one motion picture about any of the heroic American fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. This country is fighting a war, Hollywood. You may think this war is unwise, waged under mistaken, or even false, pretenses. ... But even the men and women of Hollywood must recognize that America is fighting the worst people of our time, people who hurt every group Hollywood claims to care about - minorities, women, gays - people who engage in the sins Hollywood most professes to oppose - intolerance and violence - far more than anyone else on the planet."
  • "In another era, when what many have labeled "the greatest generation" fought the German Nazis and the Japanese fascists, Hollywood made movie after movie depicting that great war and our great warriors. And Hollywood showed freedom's enemies as the cruel and vicious people they were. We have not produced one film yet depicting this war in positive terms or one depicting this generation's enemies of freedom as the cruel and vicious people they are."

• Is Hollywood too timid for the War on Jihad?, Andrew Klavan, Feb. 5, 2007 (and here)
  • "In the history of our time as told by the movies, the war on terror largely does not exist. Which is passing strange, you know. Because the war on terror is the history of our time."
  • "at the movies, all we're getting is home-front angst and the occasional "Syriana," in which "moderate" Islam is thwarted by evil American interests. But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple. It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone. The real world is both darker than that and lighted brighter in places by surprising fires of nobility. It's darker because our enemies were not created by the peccadilloes of free people and will not melt away before a moral perfection that we, in any case, can never achieve. It's brighter because there are heroes like the FBI, the military and the cop on the corner who will give up everything, even their lives, to stop these madmen. That kind of rousing story seems tailor-made for films. So why aren't they telling it?"
  • "Which is a shame. It's a shame for so powerful an art form to become irrelevant because we can't find a way to dramatize the central event of our time. It's a shame that we live under the tireless protection of lawmen and warriors and don't pay tribute to them. And purely in artistic terms, it's a shame that so many great stories are just waiting to be told and we're not telling them."

• Andrew Breitbart, September 24, 2007: "Hollywood acting as a collective voice stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year streak of working against the United States' strategic objectives at a time of war. Congratulations to every heroic studio exec and heroin-addled reality star for being ahead of -- and helping to move -- the polls. While you and your celluloid comrades bravely brandish "dissent is patriotic" bumper stickers on your Prius (after Pilates), the system that you uphold has endemically rooted out voices that dissent from your dissent. ... Free speech is a two way street, but in "patriotic" L.A. -- where pro-victory voices are reflexively ridiculed, cold-shouldered and made pariahs of on the party circuit -- the other side of the argument is rarely, if ever, made."

• Not until 2006, 5 years after the War on Islamism started, was a single proper, mainstream movie made about the war.

• Even today, there is still no film showing the WTC attacks. James Lileks: "Just tell the story as it happened that day, and people would cram the theaters by the millions. ... It's like it's 1943, and Hollywood turns down a Pearl Harbor movie in favor of the gripping account of a Washington bureaucrat who warned FDR that the oil embargo would needlessly anger Japan. The attack on Hawaii would take up five minutes - and even then it would be a shot of the hero listening to the radio with an expression of stoic anguish. If only they'd listened."

• The Return of the Paranoid Style, Ross Douthat, Apr 2008. "in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. ... More big-budget movies featuring Islamist villains were released in the 1990s than in the seven years since 9/11, and apart from docudramas like United 93, last fall's The Kingdom - released to hand-wringing over its supposed jingoism - was the first major studio release to feature Muslim terrorists since 1998's The Siege."
  • He is amusing about the daft Bourne series: "We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead. ... Matt Damon's Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky."

TV movies and drama

• Series
  • The Grid
  • Spooks
  • Sleeper Cell
  • Over There
  • The Unit

• 24 (and here) has sporadically featured Islamist bad guys.
  • But only sporadically. Ridiculously, it feels that making the whole show about the current war would be bigoted, and it should make programs about imaginary wars as well. FOX says: "Over the past several seasons, the villains have included shadowy Anglo businessmen, Baltic Europeans, Germans, Russians, Islamic fundamentalists, and even the (Anglo-American) president of the United States." Well, if that makes you feel better.

• In Defense of '24' by Emilio Karim Dabul (a Syrian Muslim Arab-American), February 7, 2007.
  • He defends it showing an Islamist nuclear attack on California: "Most of the terrorists represented in "24" through the years have been Arab Muslims. Why? Well, probably because most terrorists today are, in fact, Arab Muslims. As a descendant of Syrian Muslims, I am very well aware that the majority of Muslims world-wide are peaceful, hard working, and law abiding. That still does not change the fact that the greatest terrorist threat to the U.S. today comes not from the ETA, the IRA, etc., but from one group: Islamic terrorists. And this is what makes "24" a compelling drama every week. Instead of pretending Islamic terrorists don't exist, the show presents frighteningly real worst-case scenarios perpetrated by Osama bin Laden's followers. So CAIR thinks it's over the top for the terrorists in "24" to blow up Los Angeles with a nuke? Please, if bin Laden and his crew had nukes, most of us would be way too dead to argue over such points."
  • He's great on journalists' credulity about "moderate" Muslim groups: "the next time a journalist decides to report on Arab-American concerns about shows like "24," maybe he could actually talk to someone other than CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and seek out Arab-Americans with a different point of view. We actually do exist. And maybe that same reporter could take a closer look at CAIR. Ask CAIR about the Holy Land Foundation and its support of Hamas. Ask it about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the CAIR board member who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case - yet still sits on CAIR's board. Look a little closer, and maybe you'll find that CAIR has good reason to get nervous about shows like "24.""

• Drama/movie
  • Dirty War
  • The Flight That Fought Back

• TV movie
  • TV movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003).

• South Park episodes (and online)
  • "Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants" (2001).
  • "Cartoon Wars Part I" (2006).
  • "Cartoon Wars Part II" (2006).

The best TV production so far:

• The Path to 9/11
  • An epic production. Actually shows where Al-Qaeda came from. They did not grow in response to Bush. They grew in the 1990s in response to Clinton. Also shows how Clinton failed to deal with them, and left them as a problem for his successor.

The worst of TV

• The Power of Nightmares (2004) - high-brow Fahrenheit 9/11.
  • Why can't we see a documentary explaining what neo-conservatism actually is, as opposed to this imaginary Chomskyite nonsense?

• Summing up the whole post-9/11 climate in movies and TV is this article: BBC changes terror attack in "Casualty" from Islamists to animal rights terrorists to avoid offending Muslims, Aug 2007. As a pithy comment says: "This proves that terrorism works."

• Britz by Peter Kosminsky - British Islamist killers of innocents are motivated by anti-terrorism laws, or British "oppression" (*), or the liberation of Iraq, or something - not by the powerful, global, racist ideology of Islamism.
  • Peter Kosminsky asked following the 7/7 bombs: "How was it that a group of second-generation British Muslims, born here, raised here, educated in British schools, steeped in British culture, could have become so angry, feel themselves so powerless and disenfranchised, that they would strap explosives to their bodies and set out to kill and maim their fellow British citizens?" Even in the way he asks the question he shows that he does not understand the answer. The 7/7 killers of innocents were driven by hope, and religion, and bigotry, and hatred, and utopianism, not by despair.
  • (*) Muslims are freer in Britain than in any Muslim country on earth. Only in the West, and in no Muslim country, can every single Muslim thinker and sect practice, write, debate, speak and publish in freedom.

• The Last Enemy, BBC TV, 2008 - The real threat is not Islamic terror, but rather British government surveillance (of course).

Upcoming movies

• Upcoming movies

• Upcoming anti-American movies - "Slow to awaken after the 9/11 attacks, Hollywood has finally come around to contributing what it can in the War on Terror: namely, glossy, star-studded movies that sympathize with the enemy."

  
  

• Movies about 9/11:
  1. 102 Minutes (2007), based on the book 102 Minutes.

• Movies about Iraq:
  1. The Hurt Locker (2008)

  2. The Lucky Ones (2008), another film sneering at returning veterans.

  3. Coming tedious anti-war movie Nothing but the Truth (2008), about the really dull Valerie Plame affair. Because that's far more interesting than stories of battle heroism and killing jihadis.

  4. Is there another Valerie Plame film, directed by Doug Liman? Who's going to watch this stuff?

  5. Traitor (2008) portrays a black CIA operative working undercover with a terrorist group. "This is in no way jingoistic." "The movie deals with the subject of terrorism evenhandedly. It's not black and white but gray and religious-based." Sounds crap. More of the same old, same old. Couldn't they make a black and white film for a change? Just one?

  6. Coming anti-Iraq War movie: The Fall of the Warrior King (2009).

  7. Green Zone, by Paul Greengrass, based on the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, "a critical look at the civilian leadership of the American reconstruction project in Iraq". Sounds bad (also here), but we'll see.

  8. Body of War - anti-war documentary, about a U.S. soldier paralyzed in Iraq, who joins Iraq Veterans Against the War.

  9. Pro-troop documentary Brothers at War (2008). Looks great. Profound. Moving. No doubt won't be in my cinema.

  10. No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah (2009) with Harrison Ford.

  11. Pat Dollard documentary, Young Americans.

  12. Time of Your Life

  13. The "Blackline International" Trilogy to be made by Christian Johnston. The bad guys are ... Blackwater!

  14. HBO to make movie of "Taking Chance".

  15. Upcoming movie of the Hannah Allam story. The Iraqi resistance kill a 4 year old child because her mother is an interpreter for US media. Could be the first movie to actually depict the Iraqi resistance that has killed thousands of brave American troops.

• Movies about Afghanistan:
  1. The Last Photograph (2008)

  2. Lone Survivor - sounds good.

• Movies about the War on Islamism in general:
  1. Against All Enemies (movie of the book). Presenting Richard A. Clarke's own view of the war. Defensive of Clinton's (and his own) failures leading up to 9/11. Critical of Bush and the Iraq war.

  2. Edward Zwick to make film about Daniel Pearl

  3. Coming films about Beslan, one by Matthew Hobbs, other by Brian Grazer.

  4. The comedy You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008) apparently slags off Islamist terrorists.

  5. Sylvester Stallone is planning to direct a movie based on the book The Forty Days Of Musa Dagh (1934) about the Armenian Genocide by Turkish Muslims. If he does this, Stallone has more bravery than almost anyone working in Hollywood.

  6. W (2008), absurd anti-Bush film by Castro-lover Oliver Stone.
     • Stone on Bush, 2005: "He was the wrong leader at the wrong time. I always felt that. I wish I was wrong."
     • Stone on the movie, 2008: "Bush may turn out to be the worst president in history. I think history is going to be very tough on him. But that doesn't mean he isn't a great story. It's almost Capra-esque, the story of a guy who had very limited talents in life, except for the ability to sell himself." Great reply in the comments: "Sounds more like the Obama story to me."

  7. An American Carol (2008), David Zucker film slagging off Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter, etc. Sounds fun.

  8. CBS Films to make movies of Vince Flynn's cracking, anti-jihad books.
     • Vince Flynn interview: "Look at Hollywood. They all detest President Bush because their friends will think they are smarter by hating him. ... But instead, they make these movies the American people don't want to see, because deep down inside, the American public does not want to see a movie that bashes America. ... People want a guy like Mitch Rapp looking out for them. People want to believe there are guys like this out there protecting us. ... Hollywood is now saying people don't want to watch movies about war. No, Americans don't want to watch [bad] anti-American movies about war. Americans would love to watch a great movie where Mitch Rapp is meting out punishment to these crazy zealots, but I don't know if Hollywood has the guts to do it."

• Other upcoming movies of note:
  1. Defiance (2008). Jewish partisan heroes kill Nazis in WW2. Sounds great. More of this kind of thing please!

  2. Ridley Scott to make movie about Reagan and the Cold War.

  3. We Were This Close, upcoming Michael Moore film whining about the 2004 election.

The new Hollywood McCarthyism - Prowar movies that cannot be made

• Bruce Willis wanted to make a pro-war movie about the Deuce Four (the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry). See article. But no studio would back him.
  • "I am baffled to understand why the things I saw happening in Iraq are not being reported", said Willis. He is a fan of Michael Yon: "What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn't doing, and that's telling the truth about what's happening in the war in Iraq."
  • A new attempt is being made to make this movie.

List of movie "bad guys"

Cinema - Movies against the war

Cinema - Movies supportive of the war

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