Hollywood still won't touch anything remotely honest or
reality based in our post 9/11 world.....
Betsy's Page
Diana West has an impressive lists of TV shows and Hollywood movies that are whitewashing terrorism because they are afraid of offending some Muslim somewhere. So they make up mythical terrorists, preferably white ones so as not to remind anyone of who is actually responsible for so much of the terrorism around the world.
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Take Sydney Pollack's new movie on international terrorism, "The Interpreter." Stepping back from even the outermost brink of reality, it switches the source of terrorism from a fictional Middle Eastern country to a fictional African country.
"We didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way," Kevin Misher, the movie's producer, told The Wall Street Journal. Politics? How about encumbering the film with a little history, or maybe a few current events?
But fantasyland is where Hollywood lives these days. The world burns and Steven Spielberg remakes that sci-fi chestnut "The War of the Worlds." The producers of last summer's "The Manchurian Candidate" drop an Osama bin Laden-like character for being too "Tom Clancy." Meanwhile, Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" was also too "Tom Clancy," so the 2002 movie adaptation replaced the Islamic terror cell of the 1991 book with some generic old Nazis.
Then there's "The Great New Wonderful," the first movie set in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. But, as newyorkmetro.com reports, "The completed script never mentions Bush, terrorists, Michael Moore, Fox News or even Sept. 11." Don't look for Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama bin Laden or the fall of the Taliban, either. Why not? As director Danny Leiner put it, "I just wasn't interested in anything didactic." Didactic? What is "didactic" about our cataclysmic national experience? A potentially significant industry revels in its own irrelevance.
Of course, it gets worse. The New York Daily News reports that actress Maggie Gyllenhaal credits "Wonderful" with dealing "with 9/11 in such a subtle, open way that I think it allows it to be more complicated than just, 'Oh, look at these poor New Yorkers and how hard it was for them.'" She continues: "I think America has done reprehensible things and is responsible in some way and so I think the delicacy ... allows that to sort of creep in." Creep is right. Good thing "delicacy" is never, ever "didactic" or "encumbered by politics."
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posted by Betsy Newmark
betsyspage.blogspot.com
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