Posted on 11/29/2005 2:55:50 PM PST by kristinn
TURIN, ITALY "This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horse(manure) and elbow grease."
The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney), reports to a Karl Rove–like guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power (sex) with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a "No Sex for All" tank top and "BSH BABE" license plates. Murch's glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, "If I had one wish . . . I would wish for your son to come back," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.
How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury (it was greeted with a five-minute ovation in Turin, the most vocal appreciation seeming to come from the American filmmakers and writers in attendance).
At once galvanic and cathartic, Dante's film uncorks the rage that despondent progressives promptly suppressed after last year's election and that has only recently been allowed to color mainstream coverage of presidential untruths and debacles. For all its broad, bludgeoning satire, Homecoming is deadly accurate in skewering the callousness and hypocrisy of the Bush White House and the spin industry in its orbit.
SNIP
Though Bush is never named, Homecoming tailors its provocative scenario to accommodate a devastatingly specific checklist of accusations, from the underreporting of war casualties to last November's dubious Ohio count. As if in defiance of the Pentagon's policy to ban photographs of dead soldiers' coffins, Dante's film shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but their irate occupants bursting out of them.
SNIP
Test.
Friends don't let friends sign up for premium cable.
Fortunately, we do not waste our money on the movie channels and in fact we are planning on getting rid of our satellite dish after my mother and step father no longer need it, they are the only ones that watch TV here. We'll just buy DVD's or rent movies.
Not an original premise, either. Abel Gance had the same idea (and did it much better) in his 1919 film "J'Accuse."
"In the film’s famous climax, the hero, a poet, develops the mystic power to call back the ghosts of the war dead (played by real soldiers from the front, many of whom died in battle shortly after appearing in the sequence) to accuse the living and demand to know the reason for their sacrifice. Gance’s use of rapid cutting, superimposition, masking, and a wildly-tracking camera accentuates the intensely emotional blending of camera actuality and poetic drama. The film was a spectacular hit throughout Europe, and Gance, hoping for an American success, took it across the Atlantic, where he presented it at a special screening in New York in 1921 for an appreciative audience that included D. W. Griffith..."
http://www.gildasattic.com/gance.html
Horrible
This is horrific.
SO HORRIBLY POLITICAL and CRASS and UNCARING and EVIL.
LOL ... and, now, they're claiming that Bush cheated by falsely counting the votes!!!!!! HOW awful.
And, of course, the Anne Coulter look-alike is just as slutty and evil as one would expect.
The pathetic use of DNC talking points as if fact is just par for the course in this film. The Acting stank and the characterizations were all lame.
BUMP ....
this is horrible
I cancelled Showtime yesterday.
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