Posted on 08/08/2005 8:08:58 PM PDT by Interesting Times
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment.
Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)
Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so many years.
[snip]
When one of the veterans - John Kerry, who was seen on screen for less than a minute - ran for president last year, the old film turned up as propaganda on both sides of the partisan divide: Mr. Kerry's friend, the filmmaker George Butler, used footage from "Winter Soldier" to lionize him in a biographical film underwritten by Democrats called "Going Upriver." His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web site called Wintersoldier.com and made a film of their own, "Stolen Honor," to assail him as a traitor and a fraud.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The trashing of Vietnam vets continues...
Hey John Frikkin Kerry, when are you going to release your COMPLETE military record?
(I know some "oldies" too.)
This will certainly turn us Vietvets into NYT reading democrats.
How about Vietcong atrocities against innocent civilians and American soldiers?
New York Times is a socialist (communist) newspaper.
Why don't they just show "Triumph of the Will" and get it over with?
The leftists never cared about that, and they aren't going to start now.
They also ignore the communist genocide that followed the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, or twist themselves into knots trying to blame it on Nixon. So far as I'm aware, the only reasonably prominent antiwar figure who spoke out against the slaughter in Cambodia was Joan Baez. She was immediately denounced by a pack of her former movement pals, with Jane Fonda taking the lead...
Intelligent Americans already know that lies about Vietnam are not "powerful." The subtitle of this film should be, "We're peeing on you leg and telling you it's raining." The bozos chosen to protray Vietnam combat vets in this "film" are not combat vets and many weren't even in Vietnam. The whole thing is a Liberal pro-Communist farce. It's a joke but, like a puddle of vomit, the Liberal artsy-fartsies will lick it up.
Presumably it fared poorly in the test marketing phase.
Well, that should cover it.
Any minute I expect the left to dig out their old tie-died raggedy shirts, love beads and hash pipes.
Shades of the sixties. Only problem is that if they manage to generate the same anti war sentiments that they did then, it'll get nastier than our worst nightmare.
aiding and abetting
Oddly, this article doesn't mention him...
I'm sure the article included the fact that during the Winter Soldier investigation, the VVAW used fake vets to give accounts of atrocities. Of course they did, it's the NYT after all.
Precisely. No one ever mentions that, do they?
I think this film will backfire big time if they think it will attract a new "anti-war" feeling. I remember how scummy, unwashed, doped out and repulsive these "love children" appeared.
Remember, back then there were only a few Viet Nam Vets who had the time or the inclination to speak out against the anti-war anarchists. They had done their duty and now they were busy getting on with their lives. They won't let the lies go unchallenged now.
No, and neither should we.
Wow. I agree with them. John Kerry is a national embarrassment.
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