And More Of The Same From Tinseltown

From the addictive conservative Hollywood website Libertas:

Today I alert your attention to writer/director Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana , starring George Clooney, Matt Damon ... Gaghan is most famous for writing Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic , for which Gaghan took home an Oscar. He’s also responsible for ruining … excuse me, writing the screenplay for the revisionist The Alamo that lost Disney a mountain of money.

Gaghan’s Traffic , of course, attacked the government’s ‘war on drugs’ as futile and destructive. [This is the ’sophisticated’ interpretation of drug-policy enforcement, you know.] The Alamo presented a pantheon of American heroes as drunks, cowards and indifferent louts. Now Gaghan has turned his discerning eye to what the Internet Movie Database refers to as “a first-person account of the CIA’s false confidence concerning the future of the Middle East after the end of the Cold War.”

...

Get the picture, here? For those of you who may be a little new to this, let me translate the storyline:

1) Oil companies=bad. Government regulation of oil companies=good.

2) Muslim terrorists=tragic/’complex’ figures, well-intentioned, good hearts.

3) Bush Administration I=the root cause of 9/11. Eight years of intervening Clinton foreign policy had NOTHING to do with it.

Get ready. 3+ years after 9/11, and a year removed from Fahrenheit 9/11 , Hollywood is now getting comfortable telling you what they really think about the War on Terror. And now they’re not going to use documentaries - they’re going to tell their stories in glossy, big-budget extravaganzas designed to “make us think.”

Yep. A nice bookend to The Interpreter.

Hollywood hasn't figured out that anti-Americanism is now the norm. Is now playing it safe. Is now not-original. Is now not-revolutionary. These unpatriotic artistes may feel radical, but in fact they're the farthest thing from it.

There is no safer political movie to be made in Hollywood than one which attacks America. It takes no guts to create such a thing. There's no radicalism in that. In fact, it's really toting the corporate line and kissing the industry's ass. In other words: Selling out.

The new revolutionaries in the film world will be the ones who depict America fairly and with respect. Who are unafraid to portray Muslims as terrorists and America as the victims of 9/11. Who will portray Bush as the liberator of Iraq and Afghanistan. Who will portray Reagan as the peacemaker of our time. Who will portray people of religion as the caring decent people most of them are. Who are unafraid to film the truths of America when we have risen and selflessly sacrificed for others. And yes, we have. Often.

Those filmmakers will be the brave counter-culture-ist radicals these super wealthy pansy-ass lefties think they are even as they're greenlit, feted, chauffeured, toasted, and honored everywhere they go. Yeah, you got real guts Gaghan. Couple of brass ones. Swimming with the tide, you man you.

BTW: I find it wonderfully ironic John Wayne's Alamo treated Santa Ana's men with considerable respect and Gaghan's Alamo treated our men as trash. Note to Hollywood: Anti-Americanism is intolerance. Hating Americans is racist. We are a race after all. And self-loathing racists are still racists.

John Wayne, often written off as a right wing bigot by the left, was one of the first directors to not portray Mexicans as gold-toothed sweaty drunks going on about "steenking badges." Unfortunately, Gaghan was unable to muster the same tolerance towards the Americans in his Alamo. It's called prejudice. It's also called lying.

Comments

[Mike]

There does seem to be a trend. Two recent, reasonably good movies found it necessary to put in the "Americans Bad" bit: Hidalgo, which starts with the massacre of an Indian village (Wounded Knee). I forget the other one, but it was also a Western and included the same kind of bias.

(Sure, it happened. It happened on both sides.)