Day By Day

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Hollywood on Iraq

Mickey Kaus, a sane liberal and one of the most astute political observers anywhere, asks, "Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a self-mocking puppet cartoon)...." [here]

The answer, Mickey, is "No! Not a single one, and several more anti-Bush screeds are already in the pipeline."

"No End in Sight" [a virulently anti-administration documentary on the fall of Baghdad], "In the Valley of Elah" [Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron discover that the Army is covering up the murder of a soldier], "Lions for Lambs" [a Robert Redford production, Tom Cruise is an evil Republican pushing for war in Iraq], an untitled Oliver Stone film on My Lai, "Charlie Wilson's War" [Tom Hanks helps to create Al Qaeda during the Cold War], "Stop Loss" [Ryan Phillippe is a soldier who refuses to return to Iraq on moral grounds]....

and so it goes..., and so it goes.

UPDATE:

Jonathan Foreman, in the NRO, writes:

Hollywood, in its collective wisdom, has decided that now is a good time to make a handful of movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They are antiwar movies, of course. Rest assured that they won’t exclusively depict G.I.s and Marines as bestial rapists, murderers, and torturers oppressing populations that were happy and prosperous under Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

They will also depict good American soldiers, like those refuse to fight in an unjust, imperialist racist war against the Vietnamese — I mean — Iraqi people. Inevitably there will also be tales of veterans driven mad by Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or tormented by guilt. And, there will be portraits of whistleblowers putting their lives on the line to expose all those atrocities so regularly committed by America’s callous, cruel G.I.s and Marines.
Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE:

And then there's this from Greg Gutfeld

From the Bourne Ultimatum to the Shooter, Hollywood wants it both ways - their heroes need to be battle-tough American soldiers with millions of dollars invested in their training. But they want that expertise focused not on the enemy, but the government that trained them! We have no external enemy - the enemy is always us. Hollywood capitalizes on the military's amazing supply of heroism, but it's too damn cowardly to attach real, moral value to it. That avoids some embarrassment in David Geffen's hot tub.

Read it here.