Hollywood Promising More Anti-War Movies

Hollywood Promising More Anti-War Movies


Hat Tip: Drudge

Drudge linked to an article this morning in the New York Times where the Hollywood elites in the movie industry promise to be even more brazenly anti-war and anti-American than they have already been (If that’s possible!)

“LOS ANGELES, July 25 — On a night four years ago, five soldiers back from three months in Iraq went drinking at a Hooters restaurant and a topless bar near Fort Benning, Ga.
Before the night was over, one of them, Specialist Richard R. Davis, was dead of at least 33 stab wounds, his body doused with lighter fluid and burned. Two of the group would eventually be convicted of the murder, another pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and the last confessed to concealing the crime.
Now some in Hollywood want moviegoers to decide if the killing is emblematic of a war gone bad, part of a new and perhaps risky willingness in the entertainment business to push even the touchiest debates about post-9/11 security, Iraq and the troops’ status from the confines of documentaries into the realm of mainstream political drama.”

Personally, I don’t know how anyone could have looked at “Jarhead” and felt Hollywood was patting our troops on the back. If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. Our soldiers are portrayed as sexually crazed, murderous killers whose great hope in life in to get laid one more time, and, oh yeah, maybe I can kill someone today. As the end credits roll you don’t exactly feel like cheering to be an American. Boy, we’ve come a long way from “Missing In Action,” “Rambo 2” and “Uncommon Valor.” (And this is giving these movies the benefit of the doubt; the story lines revolve around an American government covering up or refusing to rescue soldiers in captivity. As a redeeming quality, they at least feature a main character who says “screw you” to the government and goes off to rescue their comrades at arms on their own, or with limited help.)

Hollywood is (or should be) thanking the Bush administration for one thing, though: giving them a new setting for their anti-war propaganda; they can finally throw away all those sets and stages of Vietnam. The list of movies NOT encouraging you to raise your flag on Memorial Day:

Full Metal Jacket
Apocalypse Now
and the award winning Platoon. (Never has a movie successfully gone to such great lengths to show the real enemy is the soldier beside you, not the one firing the AK-47.)
Throw in the myriad of comedy’s that show American soldiers stealing everything in Bagdad, or invading third-world countries and you can see how we have gotten to where we are. Yes, I know the latter movie was a comedy and was meant to be funny to us, but run that movie in, say, Fallujah, and it would be the “shock and awe” equivalent of our Hogan’s Heroes did with our opinion of the Germans. Add that to the fact that laughter, much less humor is a foreign concept to jihadists and what you have is propaganda, not a fun night in front of the tube.)

In it’s dedication to broadcasting it’s operation plans to the enemy, the left’s beginning salvo of rocket fire to frag the American psyche for a left-wing political victory begins on Sept 14th with the release of Warner Brothers’ “In the Valley of Elah”:

“On Sept. 14, Warner Independent Pictures expects to release “In the Valley of Elah,” a drama inspired by the Davis murder, written and directed by Paul Haggis, whose “Crash” won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones as a retired veteran who defies Army bureaucrats and local officials in a search for his son’s killers. In one of the movie’s defining images, the American flag is flown upside down in the heartland, the signal of extreme distress.”
You have got to be kidding me!! The only people I know of who use this form of “extreme distress” are gullible left-wing nut jobs who thought “Loose Change” was great, the Palestinian “militants” really want peace, and illegal aliens who are afraid we will actually ask them to come through the front door into this country a few at a time instead of bum-rushing the border.

What else is on tap? Hollywood will revise and re-introduce the military victim again; more veterans coming home mal-adjusted, unable to adapt and cope with society, and waiting for the least little thing to set them off into a murderous rampage on men, women, children, and pets: more vibrant and frightening versions of “Born on the 4th of July” and the first “Rambo.” That will make you feel real good the next time your daughter brings home a sharp-dressed career oriented military man. (You know the only safe bets for well adjusted grandchildren are the long-haired dope-smoking rockers who are more concerned with the preservation of brush fields in Brazil than putting your grandkids into a private school that will teach them to actually read and write at their grade level.)

More movies to look forward to:
* “New Line Cinema will release “Rendition,” in which Reese Witherspoon plays a woman whose Egyptian-born husband is snared by a runaway counterterrorism apparatus.”
* “In “Grace Is Gone,” directed by James C. Strouse and due in October from the Weinstein Company, John Cusack and two daughters struggle with the loss of a wife and mother who is killed on duty.”
* Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss,” set for release in March by Paramount, meanwhile, casts Ryan Phillippe as a veteran who defies an order that would send him back to Iraq.
* “Paul Greengrass, the director of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” in which the bad guys belong to a similar rogue unit, is adapting Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book about the Green Zone in Baghdad, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” for Universal Pictures.”
* “Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” focusing on an Army squad that persecutes an Iraqi family, is to be released in December by Magnolia Pictures.”
* “Sony Pictures is developing a film based on the story of Richard A. Clarke, the former national security official and Bush administration critic.”

Neither is Hollywood hiding the fact that these movies are designed to move the audience to question American policy toward the Iraq War, our involvement in Iraq, and the current occupants of the "Oval Office." Indeed several movies are timed to come out during party elections, and the general election for President. Scott Ruddin who produced the movie “Stop Loss” says about the timing of the upcoming anti-war movies, since we are still involved in the conflict: “Media in general responds much more quickly [to current events] than ever before” adding “Why shouldn’t movies do the same.” His movie is also one timed to come out during the presidential campaign. Director Paul Haggis (he directed “Crash” and has been noted for his opposition to the war) says “This is not one of our brightest moments in America.” “We should not have gotten involved.” He goes even further revealing to writer Michael Cieply that “Valley of Elah” “is meant to raise questions about ‘what it does to these kids’ to be deployed in a situation where enemies are often indistinguishable from neutral civilians, and the rules of engagement may force decisions that are difficult to live with.”
So the latest attempt will be to use “the tear-jerker” and the difficulty of adjusting to life with war injuries and amputations, to roll back support for a war that was meant to secure our country and the world against terrorists who want to have “September 11th”-style attacks every day.

So what’s the answer here? Every red-blooded American who believes in the troop, the war, and/or the president, is going to have to go into flag waving overtime, to compete with the added onslaught of negativity and anti-war/anti-America fervor that will kick up starting in only a few weeks. We are going to have to take our actions to the people and make them as high-profile as possible. Don’t miss an opportunity to speak out because your opposition is not. You might even have to politely get “in the face” of your local activists, but meet them with believe, courage, and conviction. Your cause is right, theirs, though with the best of intentions, maybe, IS NOT.