And a BAD ONE at that!!!!!
It's all a PRODUCTION, Amurka, so you can go back to your shit-slurping slumber!
And besides, the Zionist-controlled, unabashedly pro-Israel New York Times is coming out against the left-leaning, antiwar Hollywood crowd by telling us, once again, that they don't represent America -- even though the TROUBLING antiwar films represent some truths the New York Times doth not tell.
Oh, I guess that's why it's one more rip job from the NYT.
"A War on Every Screen" by A. O. SCOTT
THERE is a lot in Brian De Palma’s new movie, “Redacted,” that audiences are likely to find shocking and painful to watch. An Iraqi teenager is raped and then killed, along with her family, by American servicemen. An improvised bomb blows one character to pieces, and another soldier is beheaded by insurgents. But the most disturbing images come at the end, after the lightly fictionalized atrocities are over. At that point the film’s fake-documentary conceit gives way to the genuine article as the screen fills with photographs of dead and maimed — and very real — Iraqis.
Even though “Redacted” will not open until Nov. 16, these pictures have already been the subject of intense argument, some of it between Mr. De Palma and Magnolia Pictures, the film’s distributor. Because the eyes and some other facial features of the people in the photographs have been blacked out, Mr. De Palma has complained that his film was itself subjected to redaction, its confrontational impact blunted. Magnolia says the modification of the photographs arose from straightforward legal considerations having to do with the risk of showing the faces of real people without permission.
This explanation hardly settles the aesthetic and ethical questions raised by the intrusion of reality into a cinematic fiction. The sickening, saddening power of the photographs is undeniable. But what beyond that stark, literal reminder of horrors outside the movie theater is their purpose, their relevance? What, in the context of a moviegoer’s expectations and experience, do they mean? These are questions that reverberate far beyond those pictures, and beyond “Redacted.” They can also be addressed to a growing roster of movies that try, in different styles and with varying degrees of success, to bring the conventions of cinematic storytelling into contact with the truth of the war. Not just the conflict in Iraq, but also the larger, more nebulous struggle — War on terror? Clash of civilizations? Response to 9/11? Imperial overreach? — of which it is part.
And yet they denigrate 9/11 Truth and all the people who raise questions about any of this.
See how it works? Just wait.
The season started with “In the Valley of Elah,” a somber thriller about Iraq, and “The Kingdom,” a frenetic thriller about Saudi Arabia. “Rendition,” a drama about the kidnapping and brutal interrogation, under C.I.A. auspices, of an innocent Egyptian-born resident of Chicago, opened Oct. 19. Along with “Redacted” November will bring Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs,” in which two soldiers in Afghanistan fight to survive while, stateside, a professor argues with a student about civic engagement, and a senator lectures a journalist on military strategy. And then, in time for the holidays, come “Grace Is Gone” with John Cusack as a military husband who must tell his two daughters that their mother has been killed in Iraq; “The Kite Runner,” based on Khaled Hosseini’s best seller about life under the Taliban in Afghanistan; and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” about American involvement in an earlier phase of that country’s painful history.
This is just a partial list, omitting documentaries and some smaller, independent films. But the upshot is clear: Jihad; torture; suicide bombings; terrible things done by and to American soldiers; official secrets and government lies; the failures and responsibilities of journalists, politicians, law enforcement officials and ordinary citizens in the face of terror — such matters will be hard to avoid in movie theaters between now and Christmas.
Excepting the BLOGGERS, of course!!!!
Except, of course, that the public may well succeed in avoiding them. Even the most politically engaged among us may pause over the movie listings and ask the question that comes up in those last moments of “Redacted”: Do I really need to see this? And soft box office returns — already the fate of “In the Valley of Elah” and “Rendition” — are likely to help solidify the emerging conventional wisdom that we don’t. Public indifference, in turn, may bolster the ideologically convenient notion that Hollywood is out of touch with the American people, and also the economically convenient idea that people go to the movies to escape the problems of the world rather than to confront them.
There you go!!!! Americans WON'T SEE the TROUBLING MOVIES of WAR!!!!!
But they LOVE Clint's two WWII films (as did I) because somehow -- despite Eastwood's point about the humanity of the "enemy," the MSM DISTORTS them and USES them to GLORIFY WAR in the name of its Zionist-promoting agenda!
But the American people -- according to the always wrong NYT -- will turn on these movies because they DON'T WANT TO KNOW about the war and are AGAINST the ANTIWAR CROWD!!!
I guess that's why the Times doesn't report the antiwar protests from their little sister paper, huh?
"10,000 protest against war on Boston Common"
Gee, the Globe picks up enough New York Times News Service" stories these days, you think they missed this one?
What a fucking stink rag!
All of which may be true, at least partly. According to polls, a majority of the population is unhappy with American foreign policy under the Bush administration, in particular with the war in Iraq. It may be that this opposition finds its truest expression in the wish that the whole thing would just go away, rather than in an appetite for critical films. It may also be that even the most zealous opponents of the president and his policies don’t want to be preached at when they go to the movies.
UNFUCKING REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I won't go because I HAVE HAD ENOUGH of the REAL THING!!!!!!!!!
ALL ENTHUSIASTICALLY BROUGHT to YOU, somnambulant Amurkn shit-slurper, by the FRONT-PAGE LIES of the New York Times!!!!
Or don't you 'member?
To full of shit Times diarrhea, huh?
When filmmakers leave such touchy, serious political issues alone they tend to be scolded for complacency or cowardice.
And when they do bring it up, they are ATTACKED or DISPARAGED by the likes of the NYT here!
But to describe even a movie as angry and confrontational as “Redacted” as an exercise in finger-wagging or sloganeering is to miss the point. What is notable about this new crop of war movies is not their earnestness or their didacticism — traits many of them undoubtedly display — but rather their determination to embrace confusion, complexity and ambiguity.
“Redacted” itself seems less interested in making a single argument than in staging a series of angry, unpredictable and sometimes incoherent debates between the soldiers. You hear a lot of heated, pointed arguing in “Rendition” and “Lions for Lambs” too. And while it is clearly not the intention of those films to be neutral or evenhanded — “Rendition” is as unmistakably anti-torture as “Lions” is opposed to military adventurism — they try to give a fair hearing to other points of view.
But unabashedly pro-war films are FANTASTIC no matter what!
Hey, that is the history of AmeriKa!!!!!!!
In “Rendition” a high-ranking C.I.A. official played by Meryl Streep lectures a young Senate aide on the strategic necessity and moral defensibility of secret prisons and harsh interrogation methods. Not torture, since, as she says, “the United States does not torture,” an almost verbatim rendition of the real-world administration line. Nor does the steadfast, clear-sighted talk of victory offered by Senator Jasper Irving, Tom Cruise’s character in “Lions for Lambs,” sound terribly exaggerated. His interlocutor, a journalist played by Ms. Streep, must fight to hold on to her professional skepticism, a fight that she is ashamed of having lost when the case for the Iraq war was being made.
No wonder the Times has a slanted commentary on all these TROUBLING films -- especially as they set the table for Iran!
Senator Irving, by the way, is a Republican, with pictures of George W. Bush prominently displayed in his office. This may not sound surprising, but in the movies it is something of an anomaly. A visitor from outer space who tried to understand the American system from recent American cinema would learn something about the institutional tensions between, say, the F.B.I. and the State Department or the C.I.A. and the legislative branch, but not necessarily about the two parties whose rivalry is surely among the system’s most salient real-life feature.
What difference?
I just watched Boxer and Lott on Blitzer's "Late Edition" swear unconditional support for Israel, no matter what, always giving them the benefit of the doubt!!!!!
This was after el-Baradei said that Israel had no business hitting the site in Syria -- whatever it was!!!!!!!
The man is haunted by Iraq, isn't that clear?!
As we all are!
The only real politician whose name is mentioned in “Rendition,” for example, is Bill Clinton, under whose watch the practice that gives the movie its title got started. This bit of accurate historical background is followed by the observation that, “after 9/11” the policy of snatching up suspected terrorists and sending them overseas for interrogation intensified. But the leaders who may have been responsible for this shift — did it just happen, like a change in the weather? — are left unnamed, like the North African country where the interrogation takes place.
GLOBALISTS ALL!!!!!
The vocabulary most of us have acquired over the past six years is heavily edited for entertainment purposes. While there may be an anti-Bush agenda in “Redacted,” “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” and “In the Valley of Elah,” the president’s name is barely uttered. Nor are others, like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, bin Laden, Hussein and Musharraf.
Yeah, wouldn't want people to think TOO DEEPLY about any of those connections!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m not suggesting that filmmakers are obligated to lay out a factual bill of particulars. Realism is a loose cloak, not a suit of armor. And facts are what documentaries are for, at least documentaries like Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight,” which came out last summer and painstakingly reconstructed the fateful decisions made in Washington and Baghdad in the early months of the American occupation.
There are other stories to tell and other ways to tell them, and Hollywood, in spite of its reputation for liberal bias, does not like to risk alienating potential ticket buyers by taking sides. This fear may be misplaced, since the highest-grossing Iraq-related movie released is also among the most polemical, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But it is remarkable that nondocumentary filmmakers consistently draw the boundary between fact and fiction in such a way that the most vexed political event of our time has its political meaning blunted.
And he never even went near all the HUGE QUESTION!!!!
But he's learning a bit; jury still out, although he did earn points!
I guess that's why SiCKO was summarily dispatched by the MSM whores!
Instead the movies supply emotion, sentiment, metaphor and abstraction. Even those bloody Iraqis at the end of “Redacted” function as symbols, since we know nothing about who they were or how they died. In other Iraq movies, including quite a few documentaries, the local population is almost entirely invisible. Films set in other contemporary war zones — Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, wherever “Rendition” is supposed to take place — manage to include more Arab and Muslim characters, but their function tends to be symbolic as well.
And your news coverage differs from the movie how, you stinkfuck weasels!??
YOU DON'T EVEN REPORT the DAILY VIOLENCE in your AGENDA-PUSHING SPEW!!!!!!
And the final image of “In the Valley of Elah” — an American flag flying upside down — is, similarly, both disturbing and vague. It is a sign of danger and distress, and it brings home the grief and confusion that have haunted the film’s main character, a retired army officer played by Tommy Lee Jones whose son has gone AWOL shortly after returning from Iraq.
And by extension, the AMERICAN PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!
The grief and confusion are left hanging like that flag, and like the feelings of sorrow, anger and impatience that linger at the end of “Lions for Lambs,” “Redacted” and the others. What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?
Yeah, those movie types have no handles on reality.
Only the New York Times' agenda-pushing newspapers and websites give you that!
Pfffffffttttttt!
During World War II Hollywood churned out combat pictures and home-front melodramas with the speed and efficiency that characterized so much wartime production. Those movies reflected a consensus that it was also their purpose to promote. The best of them were more than simple propaganda, but they tended to share a sense of clarity and purpose in their narrative structure as well as in their themes. Even before the war was over, its desired outcome — the defeat of the Nazis, the rolling back of the Japanese empire — could be prefigured in microcosm. The resistance fighters would be freed; the bad guys would receive their comeuppance; the strategic spot named in the title (“Objective: Burma,” “Wake Island”) would be captured or heroically defended.
No different today; they still glorify it.
And when they don't, the Times rips 'em!!!!!!!
And the Vietnam movies that came after the end of that war could at least rely on a shared knowledge of how the larger story ended, a knowledge that is implicit in the shape of the smaller stories they tell. Their politics range from the wounded liberalism of “Coming Home” and “Platoon” to the wounded conservatism of “The Deer Hunter” and “Rambo,” but they nonetheless agree that the wounds are there, to be healed, avenged or perhaps reopened.
Iraq! Riiiiiiippppppppp!
But how do you end a movie about the war in Iraq or about the war on terror?
UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, how do you end a MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!
How about ENDING the REAL THING!!!!!!!!!?????
How about a DAMN APOLOGY, a REAL ONE, for HYPING and CHEERLEADING these wars, LYING about them, and CONTINUING to promote further conflicts and HIDE and OBFUSCATE todays "news," huh?
See why I rage?
Is it possible to picture victory — concretely, in visual and narrative detail? Is it possible to imagine defeat? To tell the difference? Where will we find the sweet relief or bitter catharsis we expect from movies?
Will we be fighting forever?
We have been told from the start, by both the administration and its critics, that this will be a long, complicated, episodic fight.
That's a GOD-DAMN LIE!!!!!!!
"Six days, six weeks, I doubt six months." -- Donald Rumsfeld, torturer:
"Rumsfeld the Torturer"
And so attempts to make sense of it piecemeal and in medias res, in discrete narratives with beginnings and ends, are likely to feel incomplete and unsatisfying.
The exception, so far, is “The Kingdom,” but not because it offers deeper political insights or greater realism than the other films. On the contrary. It is, without pretense or apology, a genre movie, an action-revenge fantasy in which four tough Americans investigate a crime and collect some payback. They are identified as F.B.I. agents, but really the four are a team of superheroes who take out scores of jihadis and (sorry about the spoiler) return home in triumph. But not quite; at the very end we hear the chief terrorist, as he draws his last breath, promise another round of vengeance. A sequel.
ART IMITATES LIFE, huh?
The only one the Times really liked was the Zio-prop piece the "Kingdom?"
What a SHIT RAG!!!!!
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."
Yeah, an AIPAC/Clean Break/PNAC/MSM FRANCHISE!!!!!!!!!!
Haven't you HAD IT, Amurka (slurp-slurp)????
