Here I discuss the small number of movies
supportive of the war effort.
I have moved some
long reviews
to a separate page.
The movie
300 (2007).
Not about the modern war,
and yet still perhaps the best movie relevant to the war since 9/11.
The ambassador from the tyranny of the
Persian Empire
says there is no need for the Persian Empire to
exterminate
all of
the people of Sparta,
if only they will submit to Persian rule.
All they ask is:
"A token of Sparta's submission to the will of
Xerxes."
King of Sparta:
"Submission
... That's a bit of a problem."
He refuses:
"You threaten my people with slavery and death."
Persian ambassador:
"This is blasphemy! This is madness!"
King of Sparta hurls ambassador to his death:
"Madness? This .. is .. SPARTA!!"
This was directed
by the leftist
Oliver Stone,
the man who perhaps more than any other has provided us with a distorted,
negative, anti-military, anti-American
image of the Vietnam War:
And yet, incredibly, he does not bring his stupid politics into this movie.
It is a fine piece of filmmaking,
capturing the heroism both of the Port Authority police officers
and of their rescuers.
I never thought I'd say it, but well done, Oliver Stone.
The James Bond film,
Die Another Day (2002).
The enemy is the communist genocide state of North Korea.
Braver than most Hollywood movies.
Tears of the Sun
(2003).
Haven't seen it yet.
Sounds good.
The bad guys are rebels in Nigeria.
They are identified as Muslim,
but whether they are really Islamists I don't know.
Osama (2003)
apparently shows the oppression of the Taliban.
I haven't seen it yet.
Was it only 20 years ago?
Hard to believe it was the 1980s.
I was young and free, and I was on the Internet,
and half of Germany was communist.
It is hard to believe.
300 (2007)
- Cracking, subversive stuff.
The best movie since 9/11.
The Kite Runner (2007).
About Afghanistan.
Not about the Americans (it's set before 2001), but rather about the Soviets and the Taliban.
Portrays the Soviet Red Army soldiers as rapists
(which they were).
Portrays America as the place free people escape to.
Portrays the Taliban as sleazy child abusers.
Proper order!
Apart from its great politics,
it's just a really good film about friendship, racism, betrayal, guilt and redemption.
Libertas
says it is
"the first serious look from a major studio release at the brutality of our Islamofascist enemies, and more importantly, the very people we are so deperately hoping to liberate."
The quality monster movie
Cloverfield (2008).
Very pro-military.
The U.S. military are portrayed as brave and heroic,
rushing forward to fight this monster
as all the civilians run away.
Right from the start, the U.S. military are the only hope to save the day.
The civilians can't help at all.
They can only hope the military win.
At the end, a
B-2 stealth bomber
appears like an avenging angel,
and when it
drops its bombs
you cheer with relief.
The comic-book movie
Iron Man
(2008)
features "terrorist" bad guys in Afghanistan.
They look like jihadis, and have a staged pre-beheading scene on video,
but it is never spelt out that they are jihadis.
There is no mention of a war against the infidels or America.
Rather, their motivation seems to be looting Afghan villages
and acquiring better weapons.
So I don't think it counts as a movie where the bad guys
are Islamists.
It's far too ambiguous.
C'est dur d'être aimé par des cons
(2008)
("It's Hard Being Loved By Jerks"),
apparently a sensible French-language
documentary about the Muhammad cartoons.
The title is from another cartoon at the time,
showing Mohammad holding his head in exasperation and uttering the above phrase.
Indiana Jones 4
(2008).
The bad guys are Soviet communists.
Good stuff.
Rambo (2008)
- not about the war, but about the brutal Burmese
regime,
so still braver than almost all films since 9/11.
Making the bad guys a foreign tyrannical government
has become very rare in cinema.
Warning: This is one of the most violent, blood-spattered films I have ever seen.
Libertas review.
"Stallone's made an allegory about the fight against al-Queda, the fight against evil - the fight against those who do nothing to stop evil."
Allegedly,
Stallone wanted to make it about Bin Laden,
but Hollywood wasn't interested.
Rambo inspires Burmese dissidents
(and here).
Comment:
"I think this news item is a testament to the power of film, and it just serves to underscore the depth of betrayal we've suffered from our own people in the last five years. If one man with a clear moral sense can inspire the Burmese with a mid-budget movie, what could twenty of them have done? Thirty? Instead we get hateful, wretched, stupid anti-American crap."
Burma bans the film.
The unelected regime is furious.
"Stallone's fictional exploits have made him a folk hero among the government's real-life foes here, who circulate bootleg DVDs of the film".
" 'Everyone likes to live in the world of fantasy at least for a short period. Even in a movie, we are happy to see the American mercenary enter Myanmar to smash up the brutal army,' a 22-year-old university student said."
Since when have Hollywood's safe, predictable films
ever managed to really upset any of the world's tyrannies?
Seems a long time since Hollywood made a film this dangerous.
300 is not about the modern war,
and yet is perhaps the best film for the times since 9/11.
How they were allowed make this kind of film in the current stifling anti-war climate
is hard to imagine.
This is about the
Battle of Thermopylae
in 480 BC
- the last stand of Ancient Greek civilization
(and infant western democracy, science, mathematics and
philosophy) against invading Persian armies.
A rare movie
whose subject matter at least is attuned to the times.
Victor Davis Hanson:
"almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash.
...
If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny,
they should reread carefully ancient accounts
... who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy,
free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty,
their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others."
Victor Davis Hanson
on the argument that this was not freedom v. tyranny:
"True, 2,500 years ago, almost every society in the ancient Mediterranean world had slaves.
...
Sparta turned the entire region of Messenia into a dependent serf state.
But in the Greek polis alone, there were elected governments, ranging from the constitutional oligarchy at Sparta
to much broader-based voting in states like Athens and Thespiae.
Most importantly,
only in Greece was there a constant tradition of unfettered expression and self-criticism.
Aristophanes, Sophocles and Plato questioned the subordinate position of women.
Alcidamas lamented the notion of slavery.
Such openness was found nowhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world.
That freedom of expression explains why we rightly consider the ancient Greeks as the founders
of our present Western civilization - and, as millions of moviegoers seem to sense,
far more like us than the enemy who ultimately failed to conquer them."
300 Shocker: Hollywood takes a detour to reality, David Kahane, March 12, 2007
- "When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King Leonidas's
hot wife,
threatens the kingdom, and rages about "blasphemy," the king kicks him down a bottomless well.
And yet nobody in Sparta asks, "Why do they hate us?"
and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on their doorstep. Why not?
...
that noise you hear this morning is the wind created by hundreds of writers from Playa del Rey
to Santa Barbara, sticking their fingers in the air to see if the wind's suddenly shifted,
wondering if they can shelve their metrosexual Syriana and Babel knockoffs
and conjure up some good old-fashioned "men of the West" material.
Because the dirty little secret is, we used to write these movies all the time.
Impossible odds. Quixotic causes. Death before surrender. Real all-American stuff, in which our heroes stood up for God and country and defending Princess Leia and getting back home to see their wives and children, with their shields or on them.
And the dirtier little secret is: We loved writing them."
Libertas:
"I sat in the theatre waiting. Waiting for the switch. ... There's always a bait and switch.
... But there was no switch. Here's a movie about free men dying to protect freedom against tyranny - where the anti-war voices are corrupt, cowardly, dead-wrong, and politically driven - where people talk about the honor of dying for one's country - where a strong women urges a skittish council to declare war because the enemy already has - and there's no switch.
... I've no doubt critics ... are calling 300 old-fashioned, and worse. But they're wrong. After forty years of liberal rule in Hollywood it is nihilism that's old-fashioned. It is moral relativism that is tired. It is political correctness, the always-noble people of color, the always-evil white guy, and the metrosexual that is cliched. A film with a clear divide between good and evil is something new. A film that celebrates patriotism, heroism, sacrifice, freedom, and honor is something revolutionary."
Comment:
"it's what movies are supposed to be about. It is what Hollywood has lost."
Libertas:
"300 is what war movies used to be: uncompromising when it came to liberal ideals such as freedom and liberty. These are men choosing death over the "peace" of enslavement, refusing to even talk with those who demand surrender."
Dilios,
fighting with a massive Greek army one year later
at the
Battle of Plataea:
"Long I pondered my king's cryptic talk of victory.
But time has proven him wise, for from free greek to free greek the word was spread
that bold Leonidas and his 300, so far from home, laid down their lives,
not just for Sparta, but for all Greece and the promise this country holds.
Now, here on this ragged patch of earth called
Plataea,
Persian hordes face obliteration! Just there the barbarians gather,
sheer terror gripping tight their hearts with icy fingers,
knowing full well what merciless horrors they suffered at the swords and spears of 300.
Yet they stare now across the plain at 10,000 Spartans commanding 30,000 free Greeks!
Ho! The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one! Good odds for any Greek.
This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny,
and usher in a future brighter than anything we could imagine. Give thanks, men,
to Leonidas and the brave 300! To victory!"
It was made for $65 m, and has so far
made over $450 m.
You can come up with theories why this is,
but I think it illustrates
my point that
people are desperate to see
a movie showing the defence of the West against its enemies.
The group-think of Hollywood was never going to listen
to the 6 long years of
complaints
about the lack of such films.
But now they can see with their own eyes the amount of money
they are losing, this may change.
Some real films about the War may be made soon.
Iran and Hollywood both hated this movie:
The tyranny of Iran
complained
about 300's
insults to the Persian Empire
(also here).
Iran's complaints
are ridiculous.
Like Egypt, Iraq and other Islamic countries,
Iran had little or no respect for their pre-Islamic history,
which was regarded as a time of paganism and idolatry.
Almost all of the history of
ancient, pre-Islamic Persia
was written up and excavated by
enthusiastic infidel Europeans,
not by largely uninterested and ungrateful Iranians.
The
Academy of Motion Pictures President Sid Ganis
actually travelled to the tyranny of Iran
and apologised for the film and rubbished it,
saying it was based on a comic strip.
How pathetic.
It's as if Sid Ganis is Theron, apologising to Xerxes for Leonidas
pushing the ambassador down the well!
Comment
on the mystery of Hollywood not wanting to make any money:
"We've heard Hollywood's lame ass excuse every time a new "We Hate America" movie comes out and bombs, people are sick of the war and don't want to hear anymore about it. O.K. if they are then why do they keep cranking these films out if it's clear that the public doesn't want them? Why would you keep making a product that you say no one wants? What's also odd is that Hollywood has not even tried to make a film that shows the war or the troops in a positive light. You'd think that it would make business sense to test the waters with both types of films and see which makes money. The real reason is Hollywood is scared to death at even the chance of such a film even being moderately successful. Because that would blow their lame argument right out into space and they would rather drink their own urine then make any pro-war/US films even if they make them money. People always say how inefficient the government is and how it should be run like any other business. Well here is a business that seems to be even worse run then government. They keep making products they claim people don't want. Yet when the public tells them want they want they ignore it and keep making the product they don't want. Washington is a model of efficiency compared to this."
300
made $450 m.
But is Hollywood listening?
From here.
Since 1995.
