Tag: movies/film/video

Rambo, Cheney, Rice, and Burma

Truthdig by way of USA Today notes: 

If the combined power of thousands of Buddhist monks staging a nonviolent protest isn’t enough to oust Burma’s oppressive junta, one American hero (cue movie trailer voice-over) is coming to fight for democracy in a faraway land—or at least stick his nose in another nation’s business.  Yes, Rambo is ready to exact vigilante justice in Burma in the fourth installment of the Stallone series called, well, “Rambo.”

My crossposted comment:

Yes, it’s quite comic what the movies can do – “cultural softening” and purging and all.

Continue reading Rambo, Cheney, Rice, and Burma

Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead – World War II and Today

Norman Mailer and the “Good War”

by Martin Smith

Each Obituary did at least mention The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first and most important novel. It is one of the great antiwar classics in literature and a book that speaks to all activists committed to ending the brutality of wars for empire.

Yet The Naked and the Dead is barely known today outside of academic circles–because it challenges the standard assumptions about the Second World War as “the good war,” and unmasks the hidden motives of U.S. involvement.

The Naked and the Dead is the story of a suicide mission by a reconnaissance patrol that is ordered to assess a Japanese rear position on the island of Anopopei. If the soldiers survive and return, General Cummings plans to send out a company for a surprise attack, a daring tactical move that would likely lead to his promotion.

Lions for Lambs Iraq War Movie Critiques

Reviewer Kasia Anderson writes at Truthdig: 

“After all, given filmmaking conventions and production timelines, the odds are stacked against any dramatization of current events achieving some semblance of intelligibility within 88 minutes of footage cobbled together to form a finished product long before reality could easily make a mockery of its driving premise.”

The claim is false. Continue reading Lions for Lambs Iraq War Movie Critiques

Filmmaking and the Unjust Status Quo

Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle writes, Lions for Lambs “is responsive, engaged filmmaking, the kind of movie they say Americans don’t make.”

On the contrary, Hollywood makes “responsive, engaged filmmaking” continuously. The problem is that it basically reinforces the unjust status quo about fundamental economic and military matters, especially.

Continue reading Filmmaking and the Unjust Status Quo

Hollywood – Just Another Part of the Debased Establishment

Don’t Mention the War

by Ann Donahue:

On Friday, the megawatt-star-powered “Lions for Lambs” opens. Will it be the one to break the box office curse and give credence to early Oscar buzz? “If Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep can’t get it over $100 million, I don’t know what can,” Hartigan said. But reports that the film is too preachy could sink its chances. “Americans are extremely unhappy about this war…you’ve got to be awfully clever to get them to buy it as entertainment,” Thomson said.

And therein lies Hollywood’s debasement. Such “awful cleverness” doesn’t deserve to work. People don’t see the war as entertainment, of course, thus they don’t want to be clevered awfully into having it turned into entertainment. Most people’s view is partisan, and rightly so, thus it follows that they would respond to partisan movies, even polemic movies, not entertainments. But “entertainment” is about all that corporate dollars are willing to fund, advertise, allow. The corporate censorship of and over American culture continues.

A Slew of Iraq War Films

Tuned into a nation’s slowly changing mood

Chris Stephen writes:

[Black Watch director John] Tiffany thinks directors are barking up the wrong tree if they think in terms of movies-with-a-message. “Don’t kid yourself that you can change the world through art,” he says. “You can’t tell an audience what to think – all you can give is a greater understanding.”

Right, and advertising has zero effect on audiences, doesn’t affect people’s thinking at all, which is why corporations spend a monstrous amount on it. No message there. Don’t buy our product! Continue reading A Slew of Iraq War Films

Robert Fisk Reviews Rendition

 On Rendition:

Go and see Rendition – it will make you angry…

…is Hollywood waking up – after Syriana and Munich – to the gross injustices of the Middle East and the shameless and illegal policies of the US in the region?”

Hmm – not exactly:  

Bush’s thugs didn’t get fazed like Streep’s CIA boss. Continue reading Robert Fisk Reviews Rendition

A. O. Scott on Iraq War Films

A War on Every Screen:

And this may be the lesson that filmmakers need to absorb as they think about how to deal with the current war. It’s not a melodrama or a whodunit or even a lavish epic. It’s a franchise.

Frankly, he’s wrong. The war is a criminal melodrama, a criminal whodunit, a criminal lavish epic, and a criminal franchise. Continue reading A. O. Scott on Iraq War Films

Why They’re Afraid Of Michael Moore – by John Pilger

A ZNet Commentary

Moore’s “threat” is his unerring view from the ground. He abrogates the contempt in which elite America and the media hold ordinary people. This is a taboo subject among many journalists, especially those claiming to have risen to the nirvana of “impartiality” and others who profess to teach journalism. Continue reading Why They’re Afraid Of Michael Moore – by John Pilger

Guantanamo lawyer says film Rendition “surprisingly courageous for Hollywood”

By Mark Trevelyan

Reuters

Hollywood‘s latest take on kidnapping and torture in the war on terror is surprisingly bold and realistic but won’t change people’s views overnight, a prominent lawyer for Guantanamo Bay prisoners says.

Continue reading Guantanamo lawyer says film Rendition “surprisingly courageous for Hollywood”

Brian De Palma’s Iraq war film Redacted has been Redacted by its financiers

Laurie Heifetz: 

A seething feud between Brian De Palma, director of the fictional Iraq war documentary Redacted, and the film’s financiers, billionaire Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, erupted at a New York Film Festival press event Monday.

There Will Be Blood – Oil! – Upton Sinclair

Review by Scott Weinberg of film There Will Be Blood based in part on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!

Also: more recent, in “This Land of Hope,” a detailed overview of Upton Sinclair and his novel Oil! in relation to the recent film There Will Be Blood:

In its obsession with the road and the roadside poster, Sinclair’s novel overlaps with other key American novels of the pre-second world war period. Another portrait of an American money-maker who has accumulated his fortune dangerously, The Great Gatsby, which just beat Oil! to the bookshops, crucially involves a motor accident and is visually dominated by a huckstering hoarding for an occulist.

And Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men, which charts the introduction of marketing tactics and financial corruption to American politics, begins with a description of a new freeway across a state which is so similar to the prologue of Oil! that it must be presumed a deliberate tribute. In any case, in all of these novels, the car is the star, although it is already also cast as a possible villain, at least in its potential for ruining tycoons.

What notoriously disappears from even the best cinematic adaptations of novels is the writer’s style, and the biggest surprise of my rereading was the grandeur of Sinclair’s narrative voice. In common with other popular American novelists of his generation – such as Penn Warren and Thornton Wilder – Sinclair was greatly impressed by the Greek and Latin classics, and seems to have been attempting some kind of coalition between ancient poetics and modern subject matter, a project encouraged by America’s self-conscious ambition to become a great republic.