Here I discuss the vast number of movies
sneering at the war effort,
and promoting enemy victory.
I have moved some
long reviews
to a separate page.
In the four Jason Bourne
films, the hero only fights against the CIA.
He only fights against Americans.
And we're meant to find this heroic!
How strange the left-wing mind is.
Scorning heroes.
Admiring traitors.
Maybe the above guys are the target audience for the strange Jason Bourne films.
Photo of anti-war protest, San Francisco, 15 Mar 2003.
Fahrenheit 9/11
refuses to even show the 9/11 attacks.
The Cowardice of Michael Moore
- "why would someone who clearly understands the power of images
choose not to show the most powerful images of our time?".
Because he is afraid to, is the answer.
Mark Steyn,
The Spectator, July 10th 2004
- "because he knows that if he showed us, say, the couple holding hands
as they plummeted to their deaths he'd risk audiences reacting as viscerally
as they do to the dead Iraqi kids. What Miss Hornaday calls
"one of the most moving sequences in recent cinemas"
is, in fact, an act of evasion."
Sept. 11 witness says Moore's film insults victims of the attacks
by Michael Niewodowski,
on Michael Moore's junk film "Fahrenheit 9/11."
- "There have been more than 20 films made about Pearl Harbor,
and over 200 films made about World War II.
...
Moore's film is the first major motion picture about Sept. 11, 2001. This bears repeating.
...
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is indicative of a nation that has become too apathetic, ignorant or deceived to face the enemy at the gate.
America, where is your fury?"
Soldiers who died in Iraq come back from the dead
and supposedly are angry with their commanders and their leader
- rather than, say, with the director of this sneering disrespectful shit,
who says that they died
"for nothing."
So presumably the Allied dead in WW2
would have been angry with Winston Churchill -
rather than, say, with
Lord Haw-Haw.
The Day After Tomorrow
criticises a Cheney-like character for ignoring the danger of
global climate change.
In reality, of course,
Cheney is a visionary
who sees as few others do the real danger to the world
- nuclear-armed Islamist terror
- a danger that the movie makers no doubt don't believe in,
and won't
take seriously until a western city is destroyed.
Like in the film, in fact.
James Lileks
points out that The Four Feathers is about a similar fight
(or even the same fight)
as the West is engaged in today.
And yet this point seems lost on the filmmakers.
"but you wouldn't know it from the movie. It's like Warner Brothers making a movie in 1942 set in the Prussian wars that studiously ignored parallels to modern events."
An unpleasant moment in
the romantic comedy
I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007).
Saoirse Ronan's character just assumes that everyone hates Bush
and thinks the Iraq War is about oil.
And the film assumes this too.
What a bubble they all live in.
Lyrics:
"So hot. Must be 98. For December, that's not so great.
While the North Pole is turning to slush, on my TV, there's President Bush.
Isn't he moronic? Don't you think? Incredibly moronic. And yes I really do think.
He's a pa-a-in, in the whole world's ass.
He'd stab his mom for a gallon of gas.
How can it be, we voted him in? I just don't see how it figures."
Love Actually (2003)
was
a pleasant romantic comedy
spoiled by the simply unnecessary insertion
of obnoxious
anti-American politics.
It's bad enough that the world's
movie makers are afraid to address the great War on Islamism -
that this massive drama is played out on the news
and we never get the chance to see it in a movie.
But now we have crap politics being shoved down
our throats in the unlikeliest of settings.
Are the movie makers in such a hermetic
Guardian-reading world
that they think everybody will like
Hugh Grant's sad little anti-American speech?
Sadly, probably yes.
Hugh Grant's sad little speech
in Love Actually (2003).
In the film, the US President is a Texan Bush-like character
who is a sleazeball
with women.
In reality, of course,
Bush is a rather dull family man
who
(in contrast with Clinton)
has no interest in partying,
goes to bed early,
and is
"Dry, sober, and at home with his wife"
every night.
Brilliant ad for the actual PM
Boris Johnson and the Tories
in the
UK election 2019.
Parodying another famous scene in Love Actually.
I far prefer the real Boris PM
to the fictional Hugh Grant PM!
Why must the media attack our soldiers' mission?, Michael Gove, April 3, 2007
- It's not so much that this enemy propaganda was made.
It's a free country after all.
It's that this is the only thing that gets made:
"I do take issue with Channel 4's decision to screen a drama,
its only dramatic depiction of our troops at war in Iraq,
which portrays them all as bullies, sadists, moral vacuums or cowards.
...
How can it be right that the only drama yet screened about our troops in Iraq,
who are risking everything to help to build a democracy,
is one in which they are depicted as sadists and cowards?
Why do the people who commission this sort of stuff seem to hate our country,
and our values, so much that their first impulse is to see what they can
do to blacken the reputation of those who fight in our name?
And what does it say about the moral courage of our broadcasters
that the broader context of the war our soldiers are fighting,
the struggle against militant Islamism, just doesn't get a look-in?"
In fact,
I have never seen any drama on British TV
celebrating the bravery and performance of British troops in Iraq.
If you know of one, tell me
here.
The British play
Black Watch
sneers at the British troops' mission in Iraq,
and regards the whole Iraq war as futile.
That's fine, so long as alternative points of view
are allowed to exist.
Are there any plays that don't sneer at the troops and their mission?
Tell me
here.
Pro-enemy propaganda by Molly Bingham and Steve Connors.
They defend and justify
the Iraqi jihad that is killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
They seem to want it to win,
so that all of Iraq can be enslaved.
Shame on them for this disgusting enemy propaganda.
They ask:
"What would you do if America was invaded?"
Are they so stupid that they have never thought of
the answer to this:
"If I lived in a country ruled by a sadistic murdering tyrant that has isolated himself from the rest of the world and brought nothing to the people but poverty and pain, while living a lifestyle beyond my wildest dreams, and I saw an Iraqi soldier riding on top waving his gun promising freedom and opportunity, I would not only accept that, but I would shake his hand and thank him from the bottom of my heart
... Suck on that New York Times! This game is easy."
Jason Bourne is a unique action hero.
In three films, he
never fights anyone real.
Only his own employers.
Maybe, as
Cosmo Landesman
says,
that makes him the perfect
left-wing action hero.
"Bourne allows liberals to enjoy all the forbidden pleasures of the espionage block-buster: they can see him kick ass, break necks, smash faces and shoot fellow human beings, and not complain about civil liberties because the victims work for the CIA."
The Bourne Legacy
(2012) changes the formula.
It introduces another guy - Aaron Cross - fighting his own employers.
Casino Royale
(2006)
and
Quantum of Solace
(2008).
The bad guys are some kind of international "terrorists".
Motivated by money and power.
Certainly not by religion or ideology,
or anything too close to reality.
And in Quantum of Solace, the Americans are in league with the bad guys!
What a load of crap.
During the Cold War,
Bond fought the enemy.
During this war, he doesn't.
(Though he's still one up on
Bourne since Bourne only fights the CIA.)
Matt Damon,
the actor who plays Bourne,
has a long history of talking left-wing nonsense:
Good Will Hunting
(1997). Matt Damon thinks
Howard Zinn
is an intellectual:
"'A History of the United States,
Volume I.' If you want to read a
real history book, read Howard Zinn's
'A People's History of the United
States.' That book will knock you on
your ass."
Damon attacks the troops in Iraq, Dec 2006,
as "people who have to go for either financial reasons, or, I don't think that that is fair" [sic].
This arrogant multi-millionaire cannot imagine that
the brave, selfless troops are doing it for any reason other than money.
Damon attacks Sarah Palin
as a supposed lightweight, Sept 2008:
"It's like a really bad Disney movie, 'The Hockey Mom.' Oh, I'm just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she's president. She's facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It's absurd."
Um, duh.
She's the Governor of Alaska.
You're an actor.
Damon
(who never got a college degree)
calls
Bill Kristol
(who has a PhD)
an "idiot"
for thinking the troops have won in Iraq,
Jan 2009:
"He's an idiot - he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!"
Anti-Semitism now
- Irit Linor
on the anti-Israel propaganda film
Paradise Now:
"The message of "Paradise Now" is simple: We're all people, even mass murderers.
You see, anyone has the potential to
blow up children and babies in a restaurant.
It can happen to anyone, like dandruff."
There are no children shown on the civilian bus that the
handsome "hero" is bombing. Why not?
There are no shots of the lives and loved ones of his victims. Why not?
The aftermath of the bus bombing is not shown. Why not?
The Palestinians are not shown
celebrating
the bus bombing. Why not?
A similar film is
Day Night Day Night
(2006), which features a
beautiful (of course)
young Islamic suicide bomber of innocents in New York.
The film (of course) attempts to
humanise her
and "understand" her.
How about a film that demonises the killers of innocents?
Wouldn't that be something novel?
The director
Hilla Medalia
says:
"I believe that theirs is a story that needs to be told, in part because we can all identify with the individuals in this tragedy. Most of us have all been 17, after all."
Sorry, no.
I can't "identify" with a hate-filled Islamist religious maniac.
Not even if they are 17.
And this evil woman
was stopped from killing more innocents
by a true martyr, security guard
Haim Smadar.
From here:
"He was a father of five. Two of his children are deaf. He had been married for more than 30 years. He made a security guard's salary. ... Witnesses attest that his last words, as he struggled to stop Akhras from entering the supermarket were, "You are not coming in here. You and I will blow up here." He may have saved 12 or 20 or 30 lives, or more."
Comment:
"He knew he was going to die but that didn't stop him. Unfortunately, he couldn't save Rachel Levy. But think about it. Here was a story of heroism made for a movie and it was largely ignored. It wasn't as important as the phony symmetry between killer and victim."
Rabia (2007),
a sympathetic portrayal of a Palestinian suicide bomber.
This is
made by Muhammad Ali Hasan,
co-founder of Muslims For Bush, now
Muslims for America.
Apparently we will end up sympathising with the sadistic killer of innocents:
"By the time she steps onto a popular Israeli beach, awaiting to kill hundreds of innocent civilians in a massive explosion, we find ourselves asking whether Rabia's act is one of evil or one of heroism?"
Speak for yourself, you moral black hole.
I would normally rush to see a film about the awesome
Israeli raid on Entebbe
in 1976.
IDF heroism.
Palestinian terrorists getting killed.
Left-wing terrorists getting killed.
Idi Amin getting humiliated.
What's not to like?
Who could make a bad film about this?
Well, these people could.
I got 2 minutes into this film and I was already repelled.
Its opening summary is as follows:
"In 1947 the state of Israel was recognized by the United Nations.
Immediately the Palestinians began fighting for the return of their land."
God almighty. Way to alienate 90% of your potential audience.
There was more crap politics throughout, and far too much humanising of the monstrous terrorists.
But mostly it was just a bad film.
The rescue action scene, which should have been the climax, was completely ruined
by endless cutaways to some irrelevant and incredibly tedious dance act.
This was meant to be "metaphor" or "art" I guess.
But it killed the action scene stone dead.
What a mess of a film.
The film ends with offensively ignorant subtitles about the peace process.
The film claims that "peace negotiations" were, and are, all that is needed,
and the people needed to move on that are the Israelis.
Not about the modern war, but Clint Eastwood's movies about Iwo Jima in WW2
betray a similar lack of understanding of reality
as the rest of Hollywood.
Instead of telling us the incredible story of
Iwo Jima,
this movie spent half its time
on this really boring story about the flag photo.
I guess Clint Eastwood was trying to make some preachy point about mythology,
but frankly it was fairly uninteresting compared with the epic, world-changing events taking place
on the island.
Propaganda Then and Now
by Kyle Smith, October 27, 2006
- "For 61 years, Americans have believed that the flag-raising on Iwo Jima was our country captured in its finest moment of teamwork, courage, triumph. For the next 61 years, thanks to Clint Eastwood's new film "Flags of Our Fathers," many Americans will think of it as a symbol of crass salesmanship, sleazy opportunism and even racism."
The film is based on a book. But the book is different:
"Mr. Bradley devotes one of his book's 20 chapters to the bond tour, but it takes up a major chunk of the 131-minute film."
As Smith points out, the problem with the film is it is in fact really predictable:
"At the outset of "Flags," one of the vets looking back decades later hints darkly: "Everyone likes things nice and simple - good and evil, heroes and villains."
But the film's creed is equally simple: that money corrupts everything, that the official story must be a lie, that patriotism is just a bumper sticker."
This movie
was (again predictably) a bland whitewash of an
Axis Japan
that killed maybe
6 million men, women and children:
"From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war."
Again, like Flags of Our Fathers,
the big picture of Axis Japan's imperialist aggression and genocide
is not mentioned.
There is no context for the war.
There is no explanation of what the Battle of Iwo Jima means
for the hopes of millions of Asians suffering under Japanese tyranny.
There is no condemnation of people like
Baron Nishi
for knowingly fighting for this tyranny.
James Lileks
on Flags of Our Fathers:
"There's no sense in this movie that World War Two was fought for any particular reason. It just was a thing that happened and some guys paid the price and the survivors were dragged out for an ad campaign."
The Japanese tortured prisoners on Iwo Jima:
According to Letters from Iwo Jima,
we are meant to believe that the commander
Kuribayashi
was an honourable man who
did not order the
torture of prisoners:
"Japanese soldiers increased the impact of these tactics by capturing sleeping Marines and taking them back down into their bunkers where they could be mercilessly tortured, with the screams carrying to the sleeping Marines up on the ground via small diameter vent holes."
Chris Tookey:
"As
William Manchester's memoir
Goodbye, Darkness
and Chester Hearn's book
Sorties Into Hell
reveal, the defenders serving under this supposedly heroic leader committed many terrible atrocities, including eating American captives alive at night so the U.S. Marines could hear their screams of agony.
There were many acts of Japanese torture, including the sodomising and beheading of prisoners."
Sorties Into Hell
details the eating of prisoners on
Chichi-jima.
Possibly prisoners on Iwo Jima were merely tortured, not eaten.
Ralph Ignatowski,
featured in the film,
was dragged underground and tortured by Kuribayashi's troops:
"Other eyewitness reports further indicated that Ignatowski had been tortured in the cave by the Japanese for three days, during which time they also cut out his eyes, cut off his ears, smashed in his teeth, and cut off his genitalia and stuffed them into his mouth."
As Tookey says:
"I know that to acknowledge these facts might diminish Eastwood's case, which is that the Japanese were innocent victims of a thing called 'war', but without some recognition of these factors, his account is light years away from honest."
Comment:
"The worst part is that the modern day Japanese are pig ignorant of the fact of the war; their government has lied to them for sixty years, saying that the Japanese soldiers - who in reality tortured, raped, murdered and killed his way across 1/8 of the globe - were actually honorable and that it was the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the true victims of the war. This movie COULD have opened their eyes about the facts."
At last, in 2007,
a rush of movies about the war came out.
Or, not really about the war.
Rather, a lot of left-wing, anti-war, demoralising sermons and so on.
As you know, I'm obsessed by the war on Islamism,
and I go to the movies a lot,
and I'd love to see good movies on this topic,
and I know I have this webpage and so I should really see these.
But frankly my enthusiasm for seeing these is pretty much nil:
Anti-war, anti-CIA movie
Rendition (2007)
- All jihadis are innocent family men targeted by the evil CIA.
Obviously, stories about enemy POWs who may or may not be innocent
are far
more interesting than stories about the allied heroes actually fighting the enemy.
Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)
- Documentary about
"Dilawar",
a taxi driver
allegedly tortured and killed by U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan in 2002.
The story does sound as if someone should be prosecuted,
but why is this kind of thing the only type of film that ever gets made?
Couldn't they make one
movie about the heroic and awe-inspiring destruction
of the entire Taliban regime in just a few weeks?
Just one?
It's
24
years now and still not one film supporting the allied troops in Afghanistan.
As Libertas
says:
"it still grates that nothing given equal weight is ever produced to expose the evil of our enemy or the many, many selfless and heroic acts this country and her military is responsible for each and every day."
Lions for Lambs
by Robert Redford
(2007)
- It's all evil neo-cons or something.
Libertas review:
"I think you get the point that Lions For Lambs is the most expensive manifestation of Bush Derangement Syndrome yet. There's no other explanation, because you would have to be whacko out of your head to fund, produce, star, and distribute a film this embarrassingly bad. What Lambs is is a 2,000-plus screen monument to liberal stupidity. Seven-years of BusHitler raging within, and this is it? This is the manifesto? This?"
I finally watched this terrible film
(I waited until it was on TV).
One thing that struck me was how the brave US troops are portrayed as idiots
- helpless, pathetic victims, dying for neo-con plans they do not understand.
The film portrays them as worthy of pitiful sorrow and compassion.
Oh shed a tear for these fools being led to slaughter by politicians!
The film thinks it is paying some kind of tribute to the troops,
and it has no idea that it is simply insulting and patronising them.
In reality (as opposed to Hollywood-land),
most soldiers in the all-volunteer, ultra-professional
US military
are intelligent, educated, skilled, brave,
selfless, loyal, moral and focused.
Most of them know exactly why they joined, what they are fighting for,
and what the broader geo-political implications are.
And they are right, too.
The average American soldier understands what this war is about
far better than Robert Redford does.
Lions for Lambs,
the most annoying of all the crap leftie anti-war films?
Redacted
(2007)
- Wartime propaganda for the jihad
that will encourage the killing of Americans.
In no other war in history were enemy propaganda films like this made
while the troops were still fighting in the field.
The documentary
No End in Sight (2007)
- American errors led to the Iraqi fascist "resistance"
(rather than, say, the widespread
tribal, sectarian, totalitarian and Islamofascist beliefs
in the Middle East).
I'm sure America didn't do everything right after the liberation of Iraq in 2003.
But probably nothing could have stopped the fascist resistance.
These ideologies simply need to burn themselves out.
The problem is the ideology itself, not the civilized people who have to deal with it.
No normal, well-meaning people would have responded to any American errors
with violence.
You don't suicide bomb children and mosques because of something the Americans did.
You do it because that's the type of person you are.
The director
is angry:
"That after five years, there are 4,000 Americans dead, half a million Iraqis dead, 5 million refugees. That the country is still in chaos, and there's no sign that it's going to be in decent shape any time soon. That it was monumentally bungled by an incompetent and dishonest administration."
Again, such displaced anger.
Why is he not angry at the Iraqi resistance?
Bush didn't cause all the above to happen.
The Iraqi resistance did.
Libertas:
"this is simply Hollywood's same old, same old, blowing a mistake of ours completely out of context to hurt the war effort and refusing to even for a moment reveal the brutality of the enemy we face."
Libertas review:
"One of the MPs .. served 8-months in prison after being found guilty of pouring bottled water on a prisoner
and then hurling a Nerf football at him. To underscore the heinousness of this crime, Morris .. stages an ominously lit slo-mo shot of a Nerf football bouncing off a prison floor set to [a] score .. usually saved for the last reel of a Halloween flick.
...
contrary to the filmmakers' intentions, I left the theatre feeling good about a country, where, if anything, our laws are too easy on prisoners during interrogations."
Errol Morris, July 17, 2008, defends his nasty, disloyal movie after its (inevitable)
total failure at the box office:
He says it's hard to make money from Iraq movies because
"People like redemptive stories, the light at the end of the tunnel.
There is great difficulty in finding redemptive elements in the story of Iraq."
In fact, there is no difficulty in finding
such stories
(and here
and here).
It's just they wouldn't suit your politics.
So you have deliberately crippled your art (and your profits!) to suit your cynical, disloyal politics.
Battle For Haditha
(2008)
by Nick Broomfield.
Not about allied bravery (of course),
or jihadi crimes (of course).
Rather about the
Haditha massacre.
Interview
with Broomfield, Mar 2008.
He patronises the brave and smart volunteer professional troops
in Iraq,
saying they are
"the poor and dispossessed
... Puerto Ricans and white trash".
He means to have sympathy for them, but we can all see the real contempt.
Infinite Justice
(2007)
by French-Pakistani writer and director Jamil Dehlavi.
About a Jewish reporter captured and murdered
by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan
(like Daniel Pearl).
Sounds full of moral equivalence.
Tagline is the leftist slogan:
"With every battle that you win, you make another enemy".
Well that wasn't exactly true in 1945.
Memorial Day
(2008)
by Josh Fox -
Abu Ghraib (*) again. And again. And again.
Forever and ever until the end of time.
Boring!
Change the record you weasely traitor.
(*) No, not Abu Ghraib under Saddam, silly.
You know, the other thing. Where all those people were killed. Loads of them killed. Or something.
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?
Holy God, another Valerie Plame film!
Who's going to watch this stuff?
Fair Game (2010)
stars anti-American moonbat
Sean Penn.
"I just couldn't take my eyes off this material, it was so compelling",
said writer Jez Butterworth.
Um, right.
To me, stories of heroism fighting the evil jihad are compelling.
This story is so boring I can't believe anyone would even remember it
several years later, let alone make an
entire film about it.
Scathing preview:
"a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.
...
If the American people can't be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood's leftist morality tales even by
a Bourne-style thriller
featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?"
I sympathise with this
comment on an article about this film:
"I care so little about Plame, let alone a movie about her, that I couldn't even read this article. Sorry."
Kyle Smith, 4 Nov 2010:
"Bored? Don't blame me.
You can't make a compelling drama about l'affaire Plame
...
As Liman "urgently" shakes his camera and brings up tribal drumbeats on the soundtrack, his cast ruminates on the thickness of aluminum rods used in centrifuges and whether Novak's column was syndicated overseas. It's like watching C-SPAN set to "Survivor" theme music.
...
After seven years, this phony frenzy for a 21st century Watergate has ended."
Fair Game. "another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn".
I made the error of picking this crap up somewhere, thinking it was an action movie.
Instead, jihadis and a hostage sit around talking.
And the jihadis talk how left-wingers think they talk.
And they have the motives that left-wingers imagine they "probably" have.
The jihadi hates the Jews and
beheads innocent people
(and will later rape little Yazidi girls)
because ... he has personally suffered when Americans bombed a wedding and killed his son.
Yeah, right.
That's not why jihadis fight.
At that point I turned it off.
Guys, if you're interested in jihadis, why not take the time to find out what motivates actual jihadis?
The above
is as good as it gets in actual depiction of the war.
There are also a whole bunch of anti-war, anti-victory films set at home:
In the Valley of Elah
(2007)
by
Paul Haggis.
A returning U.S. soldier is
murdered by members of his own platoon after a rowdy night on the town.
Because that's what U.S. soldiers do.
Another soldier drowns his dog and then his wife in the bathtub.
Oh yes, and in Iraq they drove over children in their way on the street.
Home of the Brave (2006)
- U.S. soldiers traumatised by the war.
Heaven forbid that we should see
confident U.S. soldiers displaying their skill and bravery.
Stop-Loss
(2007),
not about the fight in Iraq.
Rather about a soldier's fight to avoid going back to Iraq.
Libertas review:
"If our military was as stupid as portrayed in the movie, casualties in Iraq would be ten-times what they are.
...
The values of the film are so upside down that it's Steve - the girlfriend beating, front yard foxhole digger - and his fidelity to the Army that's portrayed as the problem, not the deserter."
Day Zero (2007)
- Three young men get drafted to fight in the Middle East,
and agonise about whether to go.
Why would anyone want to watch this boring, depressing, anti-war, anti-morale crap?
Why stick us with these whiny people
when there are hundreds of thousands of clear-minded volunteers in the US?
Why not give us just one film about what is going on in the Middle East?
Just one film showing us this war against
evil and depravity.
Grace Is Gone
(2007),
produced by and starring John Cusack.
Not about the war,
but rather about a father who does not want to tell his 2 daughters that their
army mother has been killed in Iraq.
Imagine a mother with 2 sons in 1944-45.
Their father dies liberating Europe from the Nazis.
Would the mother be ashamed? Would she hide it?
Or would she be unbearably sad and yet tell her sons that Daddy was a hero.
This film clearly doesn't believe that the wife was a hero.
It doesn't believe she died for something.
It just wants us to feel the family's pain, as a way, presumably,
of attacking her mission.
Certainly we know John Cusack doesn't believe in her mission.
He explains
why he made this film:
"If people see the human side of war, they'll be so revolted that they'll do more to stop it."
Review.
The filmmaker says:
""At first blush, Fort Irwin exists for logical, practical reasons: training soldiers going to Iraq. But as you begin to fall down, you end up in an absurd place."
It is, he added, an allegory for "our nation's journey into this war.""
He says (as if he needs to tell us):
"In my community, I don't know anybody who's serving, who's coming back. To me the military is very foreign, it's dominant but it's foreign."
Yes of course. That's why you're making this film.
The reviewer says:
"The filmmakers don't demonize the military personnel
.. but you'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to come out of it feeling that this war is anything but a disaster."
Oh it's so nice of them not to demonise the selfless heroes fighting for democracy against Islamist fascism!
How nice of these sneering metropolitan cynics to just patronise them
and attack their mission instead!
The Lucky Ones (2008),
another film patronising returning veterans.
Focusing on their problems. Uninterested in their mission.
And it's got Tim Robbins in it.
So we know what to expect.
Review:
"cheap, ignorant, tone-deaf and condescending
...
It's so slimy you owe it to yourself to see it
- but don't pay. Wait for it to be on TV.
...
the insurgents, and maybe the Taliban and Daily Kos readers, are the only conceivable audience for his creepy, unfunny, vile little piece of film."
The Tim Robbins character in
Team America: World Police
(jump to 0:25 here)
says: "Let me explain to you how this works.
You see, the corporations finance Team America.
And then Team America goes out, and the corporations sit there in their --
In their corporation buildings, and, see, they're all corporation-y,
and they make money."
A brave, upright US marine is captured and tortured by jihadis in Afghanistan.
They break him (very unconvincingly) so that he kills his comrade on their orders.
He is rescued and comes home traumatised
and has a breakdown.
It's well acted, but unconvincing.
It comes across as a cliched look at the military from people who know nothing about it.
As
John Nolte says:
"Am I the only one who eagerly awaits the $25 million film ... where the screwed-up brother returns from a tour of duty transformed into a responsible, resourceful and mature man ready to take his place in the world? That would not only be an inspiring and more accurate story worthy of the brave men and women who serve our country .. it would finally be a fresh idea from an industry drowning in their own leftist cliches."
Debbie Schlussel:
"The message is that if you serve our country, you'll brutally murder your fellow soldiers to survive and then go nuts.
Haven't we had enough of these movies already?"
Given that the neo-con right has understood for years
how bad this aid was,
and has made up for its sins by attacking and deposing the Taliban,
and introducing an
embryonic democracy in Afghanistan,
given all this,
why make this film now?
Who are they preaching to?
If the aim is to say that the US should not support
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian Authority
now,
because it will only lead to jihadi blowback in the future,
then this film could be good.
This would be totally correct.
We should be horrified by the sending of aid to the Palestinian Authority,
or the selling of fighter planes to Saudi Arabia.
If the aim of the film, though,
is to claim that Islamism is actually caused by the West,
this film will be worthless.
Update:
The answer seems to be more stupid.
It doesn't sound like an anti-west or anti-victory film.
But the film seems to be saying that the Democrats
were important to victory in the Cold War:
Libertas review:
"Twenty-five years ago, Democrats (and yes, Hollywood) worked as feverishly to derail, dismiss, and ridicule Ronald Reagan's
aggressive pursuit of a Cold War victory as they do today to see Bush defeated in the War On Terror. And yet, CWW solely credits a liberal Democrat for bringing down the Soviet empire through the arming of the Afghan Mujahideen
...
In Aaron Sorkin's hyper-wordy script there are two words glaringly absent: Ronald and Reagan.
...
CWW's blatant agenda to me-too the Cold War is laughable. The time for Hollywood to get on the anti-Communist bandwagon is long past. A film honestly depicting the brutality of Soviet oppression and painting America as the good guys we were may have actually made a difference twenty-years ago, but for the Hollywood liberal to look back today, realize they were again on the wrong side of history, and make a film about a drunken, womanizing liberal winning the Cold War is detestable in the extreme. Charlie Wilson's war was but a drop in the bucket next to accomplishments of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul - the true Lincolns of their time who will never receive their due on the big screen from the morally bankrupt victors of the Hollywood culture war. No doubt, in twenty-years, after Iraq and Afghanistan are stable, prosperous defenders of democracy, a 105 year-old Mike Nichols and 70 year-old Aaron Sorkin will reteam to make a film about how
Joe Lieberman made it all possible."
The real Charlie Wilson says the film omitted Reagan:
"Former Rep. Charles Wilson played no official role in the making of last year's film "Charlie Wilson's War,"
...
If the Texas Democrat had participated, it's clear he would have cast an actor to portray a figure all but ignored in Mike Nichols' production - President Reagan.
"He was absolutely essential to the victory," over the Soviets in Afghanistan, Mr. Wilson says"
Postal (2007)
starts off by laughing at 9/11.
Tasteless. Unfunny.
Don't take my word for it.
Watch the trailer and see if you laugh once.
New:
They sure do have the wrong politics to do it!
The director Uwe Boll says:
"POSTAL makes some very important points ..but you dont wanna see that .... : that Bush used the SEPTEMBER 11 to start a war against a country what had nothing to do with Bin Laden etc
...
POSTAL has the opinion that it is a scandal that BUSH is not in jail. What happened in America in the last 7 years is the biggest joke since Columbus stepped on that land.
but instead of seeing the courage i had in doing that movie against everybody who tried to stop me - you are sitting on your desks and you are working on stories about me .."
and so on as the illiterate rant continues.
Of course we know where Bin Laden is.
He is in Pakistan.
Apparently
Spurlock just interviews a load of America-hating Middle Easterners and then:
"At the end of the movie, he is about to go into the Tribal Area of Pakistan ... He thinks about his kid and decided to turn around."
Great comment:
"The difference between Spurlock and our troops is ... he thinks about his kid and turns back, our troops think about their kids and go forward."
Libertas review:
"Throughout his travels in the Middle East ... Spurlock stands quietly by and accepts without protest every evil spouted from the mouth of Arabs and Muslims about America. That's not creating an understanding. In fact, it's just the opposite. What Spurlock's doing in agreeing through his silence, and at times, verbally, is confirming everything that fuels the irrational hatred too many Arabs carry for our country."
Update:
It turned out Bin Laden was not in the
Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
He was in the
Suburban Areas of Pakistan.
Not the worst film.
And if it weren't for one terrible line I could almost put it in
movies supportive of the war.
An Iraqi jihadist/criminal buries an American contractor alive, and holds him for ransom.
We're not sure who he is.
He doesn't seem like a jihadist because he never talks about Allah.
Maybe he is just a criminal.
He says the Americans killed his children in the war,
which would seem to feed into the leftist myth that jihadis kill because they have actually suffered.
But the film is not really on his side, and it is not clear that he is telling the truth.
He is a nasty piece of work.
He executes an innocent female prisoner on camera.
Most of the film is about the suffering of the (basically innocent) American hostage at his hands.
So it's not a bad film, but it is
spoiled by one incredible line.
The hostage rescue guy, of all people, says that if you were poor, homeless and desperate,
you too would shoot 6 unarmed truck drivers, and
execute an innocent mother on camera.
Why leftists believe such obvious rubbish
- "If you were poor and desperate, you would torture and kill innocents"
- is beyond me.
Audiences feel the same lack of enthusiasm as me, October 25, 2007.
"It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera - audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films.
Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on terror."
"Every Friday night at the multiplex, Mr. and Mrs. America are saying, "Hmm, shall we see the movie where our boys are the torturers? Or the one where our boys are the rapists? How about the film where the heroic soldier refuses to fight? Or the one where he does fight and the army covers up the truth about his death?" And then they go see Fred Claus"
"In this season's crop of movies, the enemy is never al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Baathists ... Sure, they're out there somewhere at the fringe of events, but they're just Hitchcock's MacGuffin - the pretext for the real story. And that means the heroes can never be, say, a bunch of U.S. Marines who leap from their Humvee on the outskirts of Ramadi because something goofy's going on. No, the heroes have to be dogged journalists or crusading lawyers or obstinate wives who refuse to swallow the official explanation. And the real enemy are renegade government officials, covert agencies, right-wing senators, Halliburton.
...
What the preview crowd were telling Berg is, hey, we'd love to see one film where our guys kick serious terrorist butt - and there isn't one, and there hasn't been one for six long years.
...
But at some point reality will reassert itself. Hollywood, for complex psychological reasons, is waging war not on Bush and Cheney but on its core business, on the very art of storytelling. If you were of a conspiratorial bent, you might make a thriller about it."
Satire -
BoxBux Sux As Stix Hix Nix Xmas Flix
- "Despite critical acclaim and massive promotional budgets, a wave of anti-Santa holiday pictures floundered at the box office over the Thanksgiving opening weekend, leading some entertainment industry analysts to question whether Hollywood had overestimated the American public's loathing for the Claus administration and a seemingly endless shopping season.
...
The most controversial of the new releases, Brian De Palma's "Red on Green," also proved to be the weekend's biggest financial disappointment. The film's documentary-style depiction of brutal gang rapes, genital torture, and candy cane stabbings by North Pole workers earned critical raves and a Palm d'Or award for De Palma when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year, but the positive advanced notices were not enough to fill theater seats.
According to Nielsen/EDI the film generated only
$18.00
in box office receipts
...
Despite the disappointing weekend showing, MPAA spokesman Bell said that industry still has high hopes for 17 more anti-Santa films that will open nationwide this weekend"
A pro-American film might make money:
Comment:
"Can't Hollywood make just one pro-American film? How many anti-American films does this make? Do they hate the U.S. so much, that they can't seem to make a
"300"
type of movie about the American troops in Iraq? Come on Hollywood, give us something to get us back in the movie seats, if for no other reason, so you can make more anti-American films."
Michael L. Wentz, October 25, 2007:
"The same is true in the movies. ... We want to get behind the heroes and fight along with them, feel their emotional peaks and valleys, and share in the victory when they vanquish the villain at the end. That is a great movie. ...
A movie that takes a stand against the bad guys will be huge; they're always huge! A movie that takes a principled stand against the forces of evil will become a blockbuster.
... Audiences don't want to see this current slate of anti-war films. They want us to win. They want our country to be victorious and the Iraqi people free. They want to cheer for the good guys - America. They want the nightmare of terrorism over. ... What they don't want is the Hollywood view - the defeatists view. They're not going to go see the films."
Ezra Levant, October 25, 2007:
"These films are not the results of true business decisions by Hollywood. They're personal indulgences -- hopefully ones that will cost the studios dearly.
I don't know showbiz, but it seems to me that the first studio to decide to make an unabashedly pro-American movie about the war on terror -- where the enemy isn't the CIA, or a rogue U.S. Senator
-- would set a box-office record."
As a comment above says:
"Imagine a videogame in which soldiers die for nothing and victories are seen as ironic at best, disastrous at worst."
Who would buy it?
Likewise, why does Hollywood think anyone wants to see anti-victory films?
The video game
Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
is set in the 1960s
and
includes a level where you get to assassinate
Fidel Castro.
Nice!
The reality, as
the fantastic comments section
points out,
is that movie-goers don't want to see left-wing anti-war films
(which is all that is on offer).
Comment:
"This guy is a moron. Make a movie showing America and American troops as the best in the world and they'll make more money than they can imagine."
Comment:
"Hollywood doesn't get it and America is tired of the "America is the enemy" portrayals.
Want to make money? make a movie about the heroes that are fighting over there.
I'll spend dollars to feel good about winning the war."
Comment:
"THANKS EVERYBODY! I love the USA and am proud to be a US citizen. I am sick of hearing the Liberals badmouth my country. If Hollywood wants to keep making anti-American movies, fine. But they have no business complaining when we don't watch their films."
Comment:
"Interesting and quite hilarious to see a mainstream media reporter and a bunch of Hollywood elitists scratching their heads at all of this. Their utter cluelessness as to the make-up and character of the vast majority of the population of this country - so clearly defined by the 100% slamming they are taking in these COMMENTS - is just a beautiful irony here today."
Comment:
"Really, who would want to see these movies? I know I sure don't. I wouldn't go see "Redacted" or "Rendition," if they were across the street and free, with all the free pop and candy I wanted. In truth, I love going to the movies, and I really like a good war movie. I have been waiting, waiting, waiting for years for something good, portraying the War on Terror to come out, but all we get is this anti-war, anti-Bush self-righteous crap."
The End of the War Hero
- "The first block-buster Iraq War movie will be about the battle of Fallujah or another life and death struggle showing Marines or Soldiers as heroes. This movie will follow the traditional monomyth with the heroes confronting a villain with violence and prevailing.
But this movie will come out of nowhere. It will not be backed by a major studio or star name-brand actors.
And only then will the war hero return."
No one wants to know, Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, March 8, 2008
- Yet another moronic article by a leftie who cannot understand why people don't want to see anti-war films.
"Brian De Palma, Nick Broomfield and Paul Haggis have been called traitors and villains, their films branded 'Bin Laden cinema'. They are desperate to tell the truth about what is going on in Iraq. But there seems little appetite for
war films right now."
War films??
Oh, so there are some pro-war films out there are there?
"The true surprise is that America has not simply turned its back on De Palma's war film,
it has turned its back on all Iraq war films. Not even Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie or Robert Redford can entice Americans into the cinema to explore Iraq."
Wow. Not even other anti-war films can make Americans watch anti-war films!
How about that.
How can Hattenstone be so prejudiced that he cannot even imagine the existence of a pro-war film?
He even gropes at an answer later:
"Perhaps the most successful film about the "war on terror" is The Kingdom,
which had grossed $83m by the end of last year; perhaps not surprisingly,
although it is a story about Arabs, terrorists and bombs, it is not actually about Iraq,
bares [sic] little relationship to reality and works as an escapist thriller."
Fine, do your leftie sneering all you like.
No one expects someone like you to like such films.
But at least understand that it was successful because it was pro-war.
A pro-war Iraq movie might make money.
No one knows.
It's never been tried.
Maybe Hattenstone's article should really be titled:
I don't want to know.
MSNBC's
Donny Deutsch
interviews John Miller, July 2009.
Deutsch hilariously claims that Hollywood has made loads of movies showing American heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and Americans aren't buying them:
"Unfortunately, sir, they have made movies like that recently
and unfortunately Americans turn it off."
When pressed by Miller to name these alleged movies, Deutsch says:
"Real life fighters in Iraq today, and Afghanistan, they've done
documentaries, they've done ... marines in Fallujah,
a lot of movies in the last few years that hit on the very topical subjects.
Americans turn it off right now unfortunately, and it is sad."
When pressed again to name these alleged movies he says:
"I will email you the titles. There are several.
You are ignorant here sir, there have been several."
- high-brow Fahrenheit 9/11.
