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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (65059)	3/25/2008 3:48:50 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

[I]n the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.... .... It’s always worth pointing out that I didn’t leave George Clooney — George Clooney left me. Hollywood Returns To The Seventies By Dirty Harry on General Libertas Russ Douthat’s written an excellent essay looking at Hollywood’s reaction to the War on Terror and the election of George W. Bush, comparing it to the seventies. <<< Less than two weeks before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, in March of 2003, Sony Pictures released a war movie called Tears of the Sun. The director was Antoine Fuqua, fresh off the success of 2001’s Training Day; the star was Bruce Willis, playing a Navy SEAL lieutenant whose platoon is assigned to extricate an American caught up in a Nigerian civil war. The plot was a straightforward brief for moralistic interventionism: Willis and his men flout the orders of their caution-minded superiors and take on an army of Muslim rebels who are raping and pillaging their way through the African countryside. “For all the years that we have been told to stand down and stand by,” one of the soldiers says as they lock and load. “For our sins,” Willis’s lieutenant agrees. Then they sweep in, guns blazing. Tears of the Sun was a relatively modest film, budgeted in the tens rather than the hundreds of millions, but it was significant even so for being precisely the sort of movie 9/11 was supposed to spawn: righteously patriotic, confident in American might, and freighted with old-fashioned archetypes, with the rugged Willis saving the helpless Africans (and the lissome Monica Bellucci) from a horde of machete-wielding savages. It represented the kind of culture-industry sea change anticipated by the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that 9/11 had slain irony. It seemed to vindicate the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John Wayne. And it was the sort of movie the left-wing critic Susan Faludi presumably had in mind when she lamented, in her recent book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, that “the cultural troika of media, entertainment and advertising declared the post-9/11 age an era of … redomesticated femininity, and reconstituted Cold War manhood.” Nothing in this commentary, however, bears much resemblance to the way American popular culture actually has evolved since 9/11. The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. >>> While Peggy Noonan was waiting for John Wayne II and Bush was sending people to Hollywood hoping to enlist their aid in the war, I knew exactly what was coming. Hollywood’s anti-American, pro-terror, pro-defeat surge hasn’t surprised me in the least. What has surprised and heartened me is the American public’s complete and total rejection of these films. I was sure liberals would make them hits, further emboldening Hollywood to ignore their heartland audience. In fact, the opposite has happened. It’s always worth pointing out that I didn’t leave George Clooney — George Clooney left me. In Three Kings, Clooney and Co. blasted Bush The First for abandoning the Iraqi people after the first Gulf War. And I agreed with him. Today, film after film after film has set an agenda for pulling out of Iraq and abandoning the Iraqi people — proving Clooney and Co. couldn’t care less about the Iraqi people. It’s only ever about criticizing America. Modern Hollywood has failed in recreating the glorious, paranoid seventies in most every respect. The films today are about a tenth as good, being humiliated at the box-office, and contain the amoral stink of being released while we’re still at war — something liberal filmmakers did not do during Vietnam. In every respect this current generation of poseurs are doing themselves much more harm than good. The box office hasn’t been good to them, and neither will history be. Hat tip: Kyle Smith libertyfilmfestival.com