What We Are About To Do Here Is What The Good Lord Would Call A Cleansing of the Wicked. I Call It A Good Old Fashioned Texas Ass Kicking.
Posted on 04/05/2006 8:58:10 PM PDT by jmc1969
With support for George W Bush's war in Iraq at an all time low, some of the biggest names in Hollywood are working on movies that are likely to increase criticism even further.
In the last month, three of Hollywood's most respected directors have announced projects that are directly based on experiences of US personnel in Iraq.
Paul Haggis, whose movie Crash recently won the best movie Oscar, is planning a movie based on the best-selling memoir, Against All Enemies. The book by former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke chronicles how the obsession of Bush and other government leaders with invading Iraq led them to ignore warnings of Al Qaeda terror attacks prior to September 11 2001, and then to bungle attempts to capture Osama bin Laden and eradicate his movement.
Meanwhile Kimberley Pierce, who directed Oscar-winner Hillary Swank in the movie Boys Don't Cry, is set to start shooting Stop Loss, about a Texas soldier who refuses to return to Iraq and fight.
Irwin Winkler, the veteran producer of movies like Raging Bull and Rocky, is developing a project called Home of the Brave which will feature Samuel L Jackson as a soldier who struggles to readjust to life in America after an extended tour of duty in Iraq.
Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, says this willingness of Hollywood to make movies about an ongoing war is unprecedented.
Thompson says that it is no coincidence that this wave of movies is coming out as public opinion has turned decidedly against the war. Until recently the mass media was scared to address the war for fear of being labelled unpatriotic.
'That has certainly changed. With the president at a 36 per cent approval rating all of a sudden a movie that challenges the war is a demographically sound idea,' he said.
Thompson dismisses the oft-used conservative argument that Hollywood is out of touch with mainstream America, and he maintains that the media establishment is actually much better than the politicians at getting its message across.
'In the culture war for the American heart, Hollywood is a lot better than Washington at communicating with us,' he says. 'Whether these movie are influential or not depends on the movie. If the movie tells a compelling story, it could have an enormous influence on public opinion.'
Three more movies I have zero interest in seeing. No loss.
I'm gonna save money on popcorn. I have a feeling these movies won't do as well as they hope.
Somebody's been hitting the weed planter a little too early, I perceive.
Criticism of what? That we shouldn't leave the Iraqis to the terrorists? Leftists are very sick, immoral people, and they cause the deaths of untold innocents.
I had to stop here. What pray tell is "George W Bush's war in Iraq"? First of all (most importantly), such a war is America's war, not "George W Bush's". But besides that, what "war in Iraq" is there taking place at the moment which needs peoples's "support"? Are they talking about the one that commenced in 2003 and concluded within 3 weeks as Baghdad was taken? But that war is over. Why do people speak about it in the present tense?
Oh I see, he's talking about the occupation/counterinsurgency in defense of Iraq's new democratic government - that's what he means by "George W Bush's war in Iraq". So weird.
If "support" for the occupation/counterinsurgency is really falling, I'd bet that one reason for that is that media people still insist on (inaccurately) calling it "the war in Iraq" so as to generate maximal fatigue with it....
Hollywood hates America and clearly wants us to lose. But, the good news is these movies are all a year away. Iraq will look and feel very different a year from now after we have a unified government and 100,000 more Iraqi troops and police on the streets.
Oh, puh-leeeeeeze. Look at all the films that came out during World War II. Perhaps the writer of this article meant there's a big difference in the anti-American attitudes of wartime Hollywood this time around.
I just Googled up Hollywood's WWII Guide: World War II Combat Movies:
"Ninety million Americans went to the movies every week during World War II. The shows began with a newsreel. The audience saw Hitler dancing a jig or Pearl Harbor engulfed in flames or Roosevelt meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. A cartoon followed, perhaps Bugs Bunny "Nipping the Nips." Then came the main attraction, with Errol Flynn spitting grenade pins out of his mouth or John Wayne using a bulldozer to push an enemy tank off a cliff."
<snip>
"Much more than mere entertainment, the combat films of World War II were veritable civic lessons that taught Americans winning the war required the country to live up to its democratic values."
So big, bad, brave Progressive Hollywood has to wait for the poll numbers to be right before making such "important" movies?
Excuse me, when has Hollywood EVER backed up the war in Iraq? These are the same people who made "Paradise Now" and "Munich".
Saying these people are turning against the war is like saying Karl Marx is turning against Capitalism.
Wait until they start making movies like Valley of the Wolves Iraq.
If all goes according to plan. Those movies may be dropped, for fear no one will go to see them.
Yup...but a film-maker who produced a movie hoping for Germany or Japan to win would have been arrested for treason.
The useful idiots today are untouchable ......
Sadly, the ratings one the war won't be able to turn around that fast I suspect.
What will happen is that over the next year the US death rate will slow and Iraqi deaths will slow. But, not enough likely to get the presidents approval on the war back into the high 40s or low 50s a year from now.
If things go right by late 2007 I think Americans will finally figure out that we are winning in Iraq.
How long do you think it will take?
"Respected directors"?? Ain't no such thing anymore.
I mean to say the president ratings on the war.
The problem with the current situation is all al-Qaeda has to do or Sadr has to do is kill a few people in Baghdad and it gets on the Evening News and Iraq looks bad.
Celebrity Political Donation List
I'm hardpressed to find anyone missing.
It shouldn't be a problem. Let's simply move the war into Iran. ...no more Iraq war, no problem.
Somebody correct me if my memory is faulty.
The anthrax attacks happened after 9/11. Early speculation in the media was that Sadam Hussein and Iraq were the source of the anthrax because the strain used in the attacks was the same strain that Iraq was known or suspected to posess.
The Bush administration, to my dismay at the time, because I was convinced that Iraq was to blame, vehemently denied that the anthrax attacks were committed by Iraq.
If the Bush administration was so dead-set on going to war with Iraq prior to 9/11, prior to the anthrax attacks, wouldn't the overwhelming sentiment that Iraq was behind these anthrax attacks be the perfect pretext to go to war?
Is anyone in the national media looking at the information pouring out from translations of the Iraqi documents that were released recently on the web?
Or am I hallucinating?
The most fearful thought about the Hollywood influence is that it will ignore the evidence and focus on trashing the Bush Administration regardless of facts.
Is Fox News on this?
Exactly. The WWII equivalent of this spittle-flecked, hateful tripe would have been movies depicting FDR conspiring with Churchill to ignore an impending attack on Pearl Harbor to hasten America's entry into the war. Once the war machine cranked up, the White House would be depicted as laundering huge kickbacks from Ford, Kaiser, and Boeing. The cameras would then lovingly linger over the Japanese internment camps, and slyly insinuate that Roosevelt threw them all behind barbed wire because a few may have known the inside details of his "conspiracy". After FDR's death, other films would speculate that a few Japanese who really did know the true facts of America's "racist war against those with yellow skins" had escaped to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman then had to nuke those cities to continue the cover up of the evil Democratic "rush to war" plots that had cost almost a half-million American lives. The Americans who knew were tougher to shut up - those folks had to be dealt with in postwar atomic tests to ensure premature death from cancer.
There, would that bring Sam Goldwyn and Louis Mayer up to modern standards?
Thanks for giving me yet another reason to ignore your output this year, Hollyweed.
Not ten words into the article, there's already a lie.
"Next year the US death rate will slow and Iraqui deaths will slow."
But in Afghanistan, these figures will rise as we chase the insurgents out and they head for Pakistan and Afghanistan. It has already started and will probably get worse.
Not ten words into the article, there's already a lie.
Let them tag the Iraq conflict as "Bush's War". They tried the same kind of sneering condescension with SDI, lampooning it as Star Wars. It helped lead to the downfall of the Soviet Union, and stuck in the craw of every embittered lib who struggled to explain the deep respect shown nationwide on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's death.
I predict that the same aged crew of frustrated, snarling leftists will be trying to spin away those words when George W. passes from the American scene.
Some personal experiences on war and propaganda.
While at school in the Middle West, I once heard a group of fraternity boys singing "Franklin Roosevelt told the people how he felt, they almost believed what he said. He said 'I hate war and so does Eleanor, but we won't be safe 'til everybody's dead'." This was around 1958, and presumably these guys were pro Republican. When I went home over Christmas, I asked my parents about the song. They had been active in various 1930's political movements. They told me that this had been an old Communist Party song against Roosevelt, when Russia signed the Hitler/Stalin peace pact.
If those boys had known this I think they would have been most embarrassed.
In 1961 I was volunteering at the Washington, DC Officers Service Club. I spoke with a Coronel who told me he was about to go to Hollywood to help advise on some pro war movies. This would have been to promote support for the Vietnam War.
BRUCE WILLIS! HELP!
Bruce Willis comes out fighting for Iraq’s forgotten GI heroes
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1892675,00.html
"ANGERED by negative portrayals of the conflict in Iraq, Bruce Willis, the Hollywood star, is to make a pro-war film in which American soldiers will be depicted as brave fighters for freedom and democracy.
It will be based on the exploits of the heavily decorated members of Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has spent the past year battling insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul."
bookmark
A year from now, we'll hear Liberal Hollywood blaming the internet and piracy for the unexplainable drop in revenues. Of course, the observation that nearly all movies suck these days seems to elude Liberal Hollywood.
He should have said Hollywood's willingness to put out anti-American movies about an on-going war is unprecidented.
I didn't see Jarhead, so I don't know if it counts as anti-American or not.
Who's going to do the one about the soldiers who are committed to this mission and go out risking their lives on the mean streets every day with enthusiasm? And the ones who have made great strides in "winning the hearts and minds" by going into the villages and helping to get water purification systems up, playing with the children and giving them gifts, helping the citizens rebuild their homes, and providing much-needed medical care and supplies?
How about a scene showing people who have been oppressed for decades going out into the streets under threats of death to vote for the first time in nearly half a century, tears of joy steaming down their faces?
I wonder when those movies will be made?
How much you want to bet they will have an Abu Ghrieb movie before produced before president Bush leaves office?
To renege now and leave our soldiers without backing is the worst kind of human treachery. Once more, shame on Hellywood and all its sympathizers.
These Holliberal idiots are damn anarchists.
Where were these Hollywood DUmmies when there was war against Somalia and Yogoslavia? Did they slam Clinton enough, as his air raids on Iraq?
Guess he never watched "They were expendable", "December 7th" or"The Battle of Midway".
So I must conclude that the "professor of popular culture" means that he only knows what happened in the past five minutes.
That seems to be pretty much par for the course anymore.
"Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, says this willingness of Hollywood to make movies about an ongoing war is unprecedented"
This nutter seems to have forgotten about Hollywood in the 40's, but then again, they weren't turning out movies that trashed Roosevelt or our miitary.
A movie about the "experiences" of a proven liar and borderline megalomaniac.
Meanwhile Kimberley Pierce... is set to start shooting Stop Loss, about a Texas soldier who refuses to return to Iraq and fight.
And here, they will be glorifying a deserter.
Those are off the top of my head. I'm doubtless forgetting a bunch more.
Thanks for the ping.
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