As a professional filmmaker, I have to say I was as stunned as you when I read that the film industry suffered through another lackluster box office year in 2008. The chief reasons for this appear to be the economy and Internet pirates, or possibly that Raisinette ebola scare. Whatever the cause it’s safe to say that it had nothing to do with the screen product, because 2008 was also a landmark year for the kind of ponderous, preachy, high-quality cinema that Americans from Santa Monica to Silverlake are clamoring for. Don’t take my word for it  just look at the record 5,362 awards Hollywood earned from itself last year, up nearly 35% from 2003. Suck on that, stupid box office!
That sounds like a great deal! /Iowahawk sarcasm off
Look, if Hollywood wants these sermons to sell they have to do what churches and universities have done for years – offer absolution for sins, or throw in a sheepskin and a blind eye towards keggers.
Chalk up another year in which the total amount I spent on movie tickets equalled zero. That is, by the way, the precise number of minutes I spent watching any movie awards show.
The abhorrence of anything Hollywood these days to me cannot actually be described by any sufficiently large number. So call it infinite.
I’m not sure if this is a goof, or what.
Is it Hollywoodf through the looking glass?
It’s Hollywood from the perspective of Iowa, TLD.
“Sex And The City II: Hot Flashes. America’s favorite quartet of pre-menopausal Gotham divas return for more breezy mimicking of gay men.
Fearful Silence: Courageous ‘What’s My Line?’ contestant (Leonardo DiCaprio) refuses to answer panelist questions in this game show drama set against the McCarthy-blacklist era. With Ralph Fiennes as Bennett Cerf and Keith Olbermann as Kitty Carlisle.
High School Musical 5: Donner Pass Prom Party. Music, love, and cannibalism are in the air as the Wildcat gang gets stranded in the High Sierras. Featuring the hit Zach Cody – Melissa Vanessa duet, “I Never Thought It Could Taste So Good.â€Â
Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Traci Lords) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Chris Cooper) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.
Zaftig Pi: The Eigenvectress. Plus-size video game super-heroine comes to life, as Oscar winner Kathy Bates battles Christian fundamentalist aliens with kung fu cartwheels.
Lotta Splainin: Javier Bardem plays a verbally abusive Cuban bandleader and Cate Blanchett a neglected woman with a secret Vita-meata-vegamin addiction in this beautifully filmed marital drama set in the repressive 1950s. With Larry the Cable Guy and Kate Winslett as Fred and Ethel.
Silenced 1984: Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the survivors of Hollywood’s notorious Reagan-era ‘Year of Fear,’ when only three McCarthy-themed movies were released.
The Red State Menace: Hollywood patriotism returns with a vengeance in this contemporary crime thriller starring George Clooney as an undercover G-Man who infiltrates a Kansas Rotary Club to uncover Republican subversives for the House Un-Obama Activities Committee/i.”
If only Hollywood wrote stuff as good as this…Most of the crap is either ham handed message movies, remakes, or special effects extravaganzas…
I know Iowahawk is satirizing, but, you know, many a troth is said in jest…
sorry for the effed up formatting…
OOOH!
Hollywood’s revenue was down a whole 4/10 of one percent during the biggest economic downturn since the great depression.
Maybe if American Carol hadn’t have tanked so bad, revenue would have actually been up last year.
Those war movies did great, didn’t they, snippy?
Aw…funnee. [Best Spacey-does-Pacino voice].
One of the things that made ‘All in the Family’ work was that Carroll O’Connor was a great actor. He could portray Archie Bunker and make him believable. And through all of the preachiness Archie was as predictable and as dependable as they came.
It is a pity that the character never was able to articulate this:
“Look, Meathead. Everyday I get up at o’dark-thirty, and shower, shave, and get dressed. I get a couple of bowls of cereal and grab the lunch edith packed for me. Then I go to the garage and take a hack out and I see more people than you ever will in a month. I don’t know when I will be stiffed on a tip, stiffed on a fare, or held up. But I do that everyday, being as polite as I can to the people I drive. And from those tips and my pay I pay for the heat, the electric, the phone, the mortgage, the groceries – everything. Edith, your mother-in-law, does the laundry, cleans this house, buys the groceries, and cooks the meals. I don’t see or hear of you doing one thing to help either her or me, but i do hear you knocking me everytime I sit down. So until you finish your degree and start providing a home for my daughter and her child, or you get a job and do the same, walk a few miles in my brogans, I don’t want to hear you knock me or what I believe in or what I have to do to keep everyone here warm, clothed and fed.
You got it, Meathead?”
And if it sounds like the colonel’s speech from ‘A Few Good Men’ it is. And that is why that speech had such power and resonated so far.
And probably why ‘Gran Torino’ is doing so well.
Why are the number of visitors to wingnut blogs down over 50%, Dan?
Talk about “lackluster” year.
It took a while for a decent Vietnam movie to come out.
There’s nothing very interesting about randomly bombing brown people from a safe distance, so we may never get a good GWOT movie.
There’s nothing very interesting about randomly bombing brown people from a safe distance, so we may never get a good GWOT movie.
Parsnip, are you lying on purpose or does it come naturally? Or do you just think it’s funny to write these things and elicit the oh-so-predictable reaction from the wingnuts?
Before I became a soldier, I’d have been outraged by what you wrote. Now I just think, Ho hum.
You’re a bore, Parsnip. A tedious, tiresome bore. You will never know the bravery of some of the people you’re insulting, and you can’t be bothered to imagine.
The army never gets any respect, not even the Canadians, not even the PPCLI.
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/caj/documents/vol_10/iss_4/CAJ_vol10.4_03_e.pdf
JPS
Thank you, sir, for your service.
Heroes and heroism is, for the Left and those in the Hollywood establishment Left (not all are Left or liberals) passe … like monogamy, heterosexuality, Christianity and the military … unless those things can be mocked, slandered or treated as the Root of Real Evil.
And with the rampant BDS, mendacities such as thinking the American troops just “bomb brown people from a distance”, making movies of even a handful of the heroes of Iraq will only happen via independent producers.
They’re just following the narrative, Darleen. It’s part of Info. War, propaganda. Ignore/destroy your enemy’s myths is part of that. American soldiers are not courageous and brave, they are panicky. They are not decent and liberators, they are baby-killers and torturers.
Darleen,
Unlike your government provided, union protected “job,” Hollywood is subjected to market forces.
If they thought Americans would turn out in decent numbers for the kind of one handed, jingoistic “War” movie you wingnuts seem to crave, they’d crank some out.
Judging by your turnout for “American Carol” they probably figure rightly the market isn’t there.
You guys are a small minority of a minority party.
The most incensed folks I ever knew about bombing brown people were the South Viet-Namese troops attached to my unit, who were really angry at the suspension of attacks on North Viet-Namese targets. You see, they realized it was a matter of life or death to them and their country. I wish Parsnip had been there to explain how uninteresting it should have been to them.
the veggie of pallor is still doing the chickenhawk meme where it comes to anyone holding a real job. Reveals a great deal of its own issues by doing so.
BTW, “gross receipts” may sizzle, but the steak is found in ROI.
Darleen,
Admit it.
The wingnut blogosphere is just desperately trying to leech some of Hollywood’s glamor to rescue their crumbling “MSM replacement” business.
The usual last stop before getting spit out the bottom of the porn industry.
Comment by parsnip on 1/14 @ 9:00 pm #
On the internet, no one knows your a dog.
Everyone, however, knows you’re a jerkoff.
I’d just like to point out that Iowahawk is a friggin’ genius.
The only movie I saw twice in the theaters was Wall-e
highly successful, universally positive reviews and a movie, at its heart, old-fashioned (ie non-Left), traditionally (dare we say “heteronormative”) romantic.
“If they thought Americans would turn out in decent numbers for the kind of one handed, jingoistic “War†movie you wingnuts seem to crave, they’d crank some out.”
Ah yes. They are so astute and attuned to what people want to see that they crank out a series of epic fail war films.
You do raise the bar for stupidity, Parsnip.
parsnip,
I’ve never had the pleasure of directly “bombing” our enemies, but I’ve flown CAP so that the Intruders and Hornets could do so…
I can assure you that those sorties were simply never about randomly bombing brown people from a safe distance; the distance were often not very safe, and the attacks never random…
You know not of what you speak, and while I will not sink to insults and invective, I do take offense at your denigration of my shipmate’s service!
We show more restraint than any, ANY!, military force in history when it comes to precision targeting, our efforts to limit collateral damage, and our aid, whenever possible, to those who are forced into harms way by the cowardly actions of our enemies…
And yes, I will question your patriotism for supporting, indeed strongly so, maggots like Hamas who are in league with those who have aided in killing our soldiers-who I remind you are your fellow countrymen…
Criticize the political situation in Israel all you’d like, but don’t sing the praises of thise who would see any of us dead, simply to score cheap political points…
Aaaahahahaha:
The Vespa Diaries: Romantic revolutionary scooterist Pol Pot (Fulgencio Del Taco) and US intellectual Noam Chomsky (Sparky Affleck) find forbidden rainforest love in Steven Soderberg’s Cambodian remake of ‘Roman Holiday’ that had Sundance audiences cheering.
Oh, and fuck off, Snippy.
How many of our jets have been shot down in the GWOT, Bob?
Zero?
You’re less safe driving a school bus.
“Precision targeting” doesn’t mean the same thing as “accurate targeting”…a distinction that only means something to the receiving team.
Close enough for government work, though.
Bob,
That kind of argument is a waste of time.
Monkyboy’s bigoted stereotype of Teh Military has been obsolescent since around 1975 or so, and obsolete since the mid-80s, at least as regards the US military. It works pretty well for the kinds of militaries he admires — Saddam’s Iraqi Army and Hamas, e.g. Unfortunately for anything resembling argument, it is absolutely impenetrable. At most, what you say will trigger some string from one of the stereotypical archetypes that form it, and he will respond with some snark that has about as much bearing on reality as, oh, Wall-E.
Confine yourself to insult if you must respond at all. Monkyboy is very careful to avoid losing his anonymity, for very good reasons. Otherwise discuss the post and ignore the ignorant, prejudiced, bigoted asshole.
Regards,
Ric
We need to ship Osama some good SAMs to placate Snippy.
“You’re less safe driving a school bus…”
Fallacious analogy since any aviation sortie, civilian or military, is statistically safer than road travel…
““Precision targeting†doesn’t mean the same thing as “accurate targetingâ€Â…”
Accuracy is as good as your intel or FAC, parsnip; and once identified my shipmates could put a GBU-12 or a MK 82 exactly where they were told…
And here’s a news flash, we generally weren’t too worried about what the recieving team thought; we trusted our FACs…
Close enough for government work indeed…Close enough to protect the rights of someone like yourself to sneeringly denigrate us!
Why are the number of visitors to wingnut blogs down over 50%, Dan?
Why do you so desperately need validation, tuberhead?
And did you notice the opening numbers of Gran Torino?
Hey Ric,
You’re right Bro. I don’t know what came over me…
God help you parsnip, I’ll be prayin’ for you…
Best Wishes to all…
If you were “protecting my rights” in Vietnam, why do I still have them after you guys lost that war?
“How many of our jets have been shot down in the GWOT, Bob?”
Well, about 2 seconds worth of Google shows that the USAF alone has lost 65 aircraft including shootdowns of jet aircraft, another couple of seconds finds many other aircraft lost for other reasons.
I know, being slightly more dense than depleted uranium as you are, Parsnip, that you think military aviation in the GWOT isn’t dangerous because the comic book image you have of air to air combat isn’t occuring, but it doesn’t matter if an aircraft is not lost due to a “shootdown”, you are just as dead if you hit the ground on an attack run because you are concentrating on hitting the target and not just spraying ordnance indiscriminantly, or have a mid-air because you are flying NOE on NVGs, or have an engine failure, or any other reason.
You have more than proved your consummate ignorance, now try something novel like finding facts – or even vague info – before you post your drivel. Unless, of course, you just enjoy being made to look like an idiot.
I didn’t have the privelage of serving with the brave in Vietnam…
I was with NAVAIR; protecting your rights in the 80’s and 90’s…And with NAVSEA doing so after that…
“Comment by parsnip on 1/14 @ 10:01 pm #
If you were “protecting my rights†in Vietnam, why do I still have them after you guys lost that war?”
They didn’t, jerkoff.
The Democrats in Congress did.
“Historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid. Without the necessary funds, South Vietnam found it logistically and financially impossible to defeat the North Vietnamese army. Moreover, the withdrawal of aid encouraged North Vietnam to begin an effective military offensive against South Vietnam. Given the monetary and military investment in Vietnam, former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage compared the American withdrawal to “a pregnant lady, abandoned by her lover to face her fate.†2 Historian Lewis Fanning went so far as to say that “it was not the Hanoi communists who won the war, but rather the American Congress that lost it.†3”
http://hnn.us/articles/31400.html
I said “jets” “shot down” Freddy.
That number would indeed be zero.
39 of your 65 are just unmanned drones.
Only 4 of them are considered “jets” and that low number includes the pig of a B-2 that crashed in Guam.
Why the Air Force was even flying it is a mystery…probably some publicity stunt that went wrong.
The other three…2 B-1s, pilot error.
And an A-10 , maybe it was shot down.
Meh, what’s a couple million Cambodians?
Comment by Bob Reed on 1/14 @ 10:09 pm #
Bob, thank you for your service.
But……..
Trying to reason with alpo is like trying to reason with an intestinal polyp.
You waste your time and the polyp, well, is unintelligent and doesn’t understand reason, argument, or reality.
Comment by parsnip on 1/14 @ 10:17 pm #
And your MOS was……what?
lots o’ worm chow?
“Comment by maggie katzen on 1/14 @ 10:19 pm #
Meh, what’s a couple million Cambodians?”
An orgasm for parsnip.
The slaughter in Cambodia was a bad thing.
Thank Goodness the North Vietnamese commies stepped in to put a stop to what we started, what?
Nono, Froederick. You’re ‘way off base because you have not penetrated to the depths of the matter.
THE ONLY CONSIDERATION IS THE UNDERDOG/OVERDOG RELATIONSHIP. The underdog is always good, pure, and virtuous, and the Overdog is always a vile oppressor. There are no exceptions. Americans have the best military in the world; that makes them always the Overdog, thus always in the wrong.
Issues like “morality” are either irrelevant distractions or attempts by the Overdog to cement its position by denying perfectly reasonable tactics to the Underdog. If the Glorious Resistance in Iraq had been strapping Cemtex to babies and launching them at American helicopters using trebuchets, each and every such child would go in the “killed by Americans” column, and if they actually managed to hit one monkyboy would high-five: “Yes! They actually got one.” Then he’d buy rounds for the bar, and gloat about it at every opportunity until the heat-death of the Universe.
Loss of an American airplane to mechanical failure, weather, midair, etc. is, for monkyboy, grounds for triumphant sniggers. The Overdog ain’t as great as he thinks, hey? Heheheheee.
Similar considerations apply in the case of Israel vs. Hamas. Hamas is the Underdog, Israel the Overdog; Israel is thus wrong from the get-go, and Hamas is purely virtuous. Details of actual behavior of the two sides are not just irrelevant, they will be ignored or mined for trivial details to be used to support the main assumption. For instance, if Hamas were using the above baby-slinger to bombard Israel, and the Israelis caught them before launching and triggered the explosive ahead of time, Israel would be guilty of killing a baby.
Add to that a few bigoted stereotypes about things like “carpet bombing”, and you have most of the military portion of the wall monkyboy keeps between his perceptions and his mentation. He doesn’t respond to you or anything you present, and you can’t make him respond because he never detects what you present — he responds to the construct’s reaction to what you present. Maddening, but it’s kept him going for what, eight years now that I know of?
Regards,
Ric
“That number would indeed be zero.”
Indeed the number is not zero for the USAF, there is at least one A-10 (that would be a jet, but thanks for displaying your ignorance) and one F-15 (also a jet), possibly an F-16 (also a jet).
However, thanks for being so obtuse you failed to miss the bigger point, (not that I am surprised), that military aviation in the GWOT is not the cakewalk you would like it to be in your obviously naif and uneducated “mind” just because there are no dogfighting going on.
why do I still have them after you guys lost that war?â€Â
Note the “us” and “them” in veggie of pallor’s hissy fit. VoP is akin to an unsocialized Yorkie prancing and yipping and pathetically attempt to nip…
…tssst…
Ric,
You are, of course, correct, none the less, I remain fascinated at some of the stuff that his Byzantine logic and abject ignorance will come up with to justify his arcane positions.
I fully expect him to come back and try and claim an A-10 is not a jet because it has two turbofans.
You are correcct, freddy, I missed the F-15 and the four F-16s.
So the Air Force has lost maybe 6 jets in the past seven plus yers.
None, that we know of were to enemy fire.
Not exactly Battle of Britain or Midway class movie materiel, what?
Might as well film a bunch of bored pizza delivery people waiting around for their next run.
Has anyone actaully taken a shot at any of the Navy’s ships in the past 7 years?
When I was growing up in New England in the 1960s, one of the worst things you could call someone was “a little shit,” a phrase that aptly captures the essence of a person who is simultaneoulsy vile and inconsequential.
Ignore the little shit.
April 8, 2003 – A-10A 78-0691 of 124th Wing/190th FS shot down by Roland SAM; pilot survived.
April 7, 2003 – F-15E 88-1694/SJ of 4th FW/333rd FS shot down, both the pilot and Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) were killed.
Here is a picture for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kim_campbell_damage_a10.jpg
Yep, just like a pizza delivery.
My only conclusion is that you are not only wilfully ignorant, but a masochist.
That took another two seconds.
You know how many pizza delivery people have been gunned down in the past 7 years, freddy?
oh, I think I saw that in a movie once.
“Comment by parsnip on 1/14 @ 11:00 pm #
You are correcct, freddy, I missed the F-15 and the four F-16s.
So the Air Force has lost maybe 6 jets in the past seven plus yers.
None, that we know of were to enemy fire.
Not exactly Battle of Britain or Midway class movie materiel, what?
Might as well film a bunch of bored pizza delivery people waiting around for their next run.
Has anyone actaully taken a shot at any of the Navy’s ships in the past 7 years?”
So, what’s the deal here, Super Bozo?
It ain ‘t a real war until there are a certaim amount of U.S. jets shot down? More dead Americans is GOOD, huh?
And, BTW, you are about to get what you have been praying for. Hang on, asshole, because it is going to be quite a ride. It might even be America’s last ride, thanks to myopic morons like you. You don’t even believe in God, but you think that God is behind you. Cool, baby!
It’s such a good thing that the white racist elitists who wrote our constitution have been buried in the kitty-litter along with the catshit, eh? Cat shit. That’s all they ever were. Right? I know that’s right because the left absolutely ignores the constitution, and even their own rules when it comes to knighting openly corrupt individuals.
But you can feel good, because in the last 50 years, the “progressives” have convinced enough people in this country that America is BAD, and that individual freedom is the bane of the universe.
So you win. Now reap the whirlwind, but don’t blame it on people like we here at PW. YOU have made OUR choice, so don’t blame what happens next on anybody but yourself and your history challenged comrades.
Fucking clueless morons. The whole lot of you.
Oh I get it, after saying in # 49 that military aviation is as boring as pizza delivery, you now want to say, as a smokescreen to hide having been shown wrong repeatedly, is that it not as dangerous.
Tell you what, let’s compare the risk by comparing the rate of pizza delivery men killed to pilots killed. That would be (delivery men killed/pizza deliveries)X100,000 compared to (pilots killed/combat sorties)X100,000.
Guess which rate will be higher ? The answer is not pizza.
One of your many problems, son, is that you don’t even try.
Oh, you’d better believe it. Snippy the Pinhead is begging for massive US casualties. He hates the US military with every fiber of his being, and he’s made it plainly obvious to even the most causal observer.
Spiny,
I don’t think it is hate, more of a sneering disdain because he doesn’t understand it, can’t understand it, and is afraid of it. Because of that, he has to denigrate it at every turn in order to sublimate his feelings (which are well founded) of inadaquacy.
We are talking about movies here.
Makes for a dull “war” movie when only one side is shooting.
Let’s face it, the GWOT ain’t exactly the Normandy invasion.
People like snippy exist, if only, to provide a mathematical proof.
Just because America’s enemies are going to kill you last, doesn’t mean they like you.
Stupid.
You are, nothing short of, a useful idiot. Period. End. Stop.
Oh, lemme guess, “but…but…dissent is patriotic!!”
Uh, huh. I’m sure Judas considered the same argument before he had the decency to hang himself.
You bore everyone here and consistently hi-jack threads with your special-ed, 3rd grade, bed-wetting, liberal boiler-plate tedium.
I honestly have trouble believing that you’re real and not some tired, pathetic parody. An amalgam of DU, DKos & HuffPo personalities that is, apparently, shunned by it’s own and has no where to go.
Since you’re stupid, I’ll paint you a picture.
Imagine a turd that won’t flush.
That’s you. Congrats snippy.
You are a giant, annoying turd.
Feel free to put that on your resume.
Slumdog Millionaire!
Never thought I’d say this, but thanks thor.
I was looking for a reason to play hookie tomorrow and watch Pineapple Express.
Thanks Lamont.
I was going to suggest that the best shot for a decent GWOT movie would be a comedy along the lines of a Catch-22 or a Full Metal Jacket and then you remind me there are no funny right wingers.
Looks like you guys are stuck with dopey angst-ridden teen romance GWOT flicks.
[Yawn]
Only tuberhead would argue that we haven’t had any jets shot down, naval ships attacked, or been attacked domestically, but we are losing the war.
“Comment by parsnip on 1/14 @ 11:00 pm #
You are correcct, freddy, I missed the F-15 and the four F-16s.
So the Air Force has lost maybe 6 jets in the past seven plus yers.
None, that we know of were to enemy fire.
Not exactly Battle of Britain or Midway class movie materiel, what?”
See, the intestinal polyp would actually love to see a weak America, the same kind of feckless pacifistic weakness displayed by Britain and America before WW II.
It ain’t FAIR that we have the best, the brightest, the most experienced and battle-hardened, the best equipped and the most compassionate military in the world.
Well FOAD, polyp.
Here’s something I can safely say, there is no way that this little shithead would ever say any of this to any member who has served or been a part of it. Because I can assure you he does not have the courage to back his pussy little rantings. Fucking Budd Siegel, aka Buddy Blue of the Beat Farmers had a cool web page. He was a proud Republican hating commie. He hated everything I stood for. But you know what? He respected every person that entered our military. He respected their actions. He even respected that part of me. No, Parsnip will never say this to anybody’s face, he might end up with an injured vagina.
“…he might end up
withan injured vagina.”TFTFY
Oh, look, a dummy wearing a flag pin:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/01/barack-obama-fo.html
Oh, yeah, I forgot: fuck you, thor.
And in more news of the O!:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/14/barack-obama-inauguration-cost
Economic crisis? We don’t have no steeenkin’ crisis.
Thanks for the help Mr. Obrain.
#58 LYBD:
I agree with what you wrote, except for the word “useful”.
That made me laugh out loud, even though I haven’t done eigenvalues in at least a week.
parsnip almost certainly has some kind of structural brain damage; it’s not nice to make fun of the disabled. My left pinky toe has a greater understanding of USAF aircraft, targeting systems and missions, and will continue to have same long after I’m dead.
Another thread hijacking…..sigh.
Snippy is playing for the other team. Too bad for them.
What’s funny to me about this thread–and I am in no way minimizing the contributions of our aviators–is that Parsnip seems to think the GWOT is primarily an aerial campaign.
P.S. to Darlene: Thanks for your kind words. I really haven’t earned your thanks yet, but I’ll try to. Meantime, I work every day with men and women who are the walking refutation of every cheap crack Parsnip has made about soldiers these days.
[Damn! Sorry, Darleen.]
#73 Major John: Well, no, actually, or at any rate it wasn’t monkyboy who hijacked it. He did do a lot of flagwaving that led people off track, but that’s their fault for not paying attention. Remember you aren’t dealing with a person; you’re dealing with a simplistic construct. So back off a bit, assume a conception of “war” and “the military” that ends with, approximately, Tarawa and cannot be updated, then rerun the sequence.
You see? There were/are no clouds of Iraqi fighters rising to oppose the doughty Americans; it therefore follows that you can’t make Twelve O’Clock High or anything like it; it therefore follows that you cannot make an Air Force movie about Iraq — at least, you can’t make one that will satisfy monkyboy’s preconceptions about what “wingnuts” want to see in a war movie.
See how simple that is?
Of course monkyboy’s preconceptions about what we want in a war movie are equally stylized, outdated, and unmodifiable, but that doesn’t enter into it — consider the source.
The real problem is that Hollywood is in the same shape. They, too, have no applicable life experience, and make their decisions based on the same sort of assemblage of stereotypes and bigotry. In their case, the problem is compounded because they are students of cinema — their “knowledge” of any given subject is confined to what other movies have said about it. Stewart and company could make Twelve O’Clock High because they’d been there, and could draw on wide experience of others who’d been there; Heller could write Catch-22 because he was involved, and Nichols could make a movie about it with some success because there were still people around who were intimately involved. (I had a relative, dead now, who was a pilot for the group Heller caricaturized. He enjoyed the book tremendously, thought the movie oversimplified and in some ways wrongheaded. He also was one of many who completed the missions required, hung up his headset, walked away, and never took the controls of an airplane again.)
What we have in Hollywood, now, is an industry of Rooneys. “Boys and girls, let’s put on a show!” The result is that they end up making incestuous crap about themselves and previous movies. If Breitbart were anything but a politician, what he would do is move to Irving, TX (where there are a lot of film and TV production facilities, used by commercial makers and the Christian film industry), collect some people around him who’ve seen the elephant, and start cranking out movies based on current experience of war instead of forcing everything into a WWII-based mold as modified by Slaughterhouse-Five. I reckon they’d get a decent box office.
Regards,
Ric
Is it sad that “Dark Spinach” actually appeals to me as a concept?
I thought Gregory Peck was the star of Twelve O’Clock High?
My brain must be fading.
No, you’re right. Peck is the star. Error on Ric’s part.
On the other part, you’re wrong. A brain like yours can never fade.
Thanks, Andrew. Quite correct.
Regards,
Ric
And to add —
Sy Bartlett, one of the two writers of Twelve O’Clock High, served as a bombardier in WWII.
Beirne Lay, Jr., the other (credited) writer, served with the 8th AF, and was co-pilot of the last ship in formation for the Regensburg raid.
These were people who knew their subject. Name me a Hollywood writer today with comparable experience.
Regards,
Ric
Oliver Stone?
Except for “Platoon”, that experience is sadly lacking any coherency in his films.
Oh and coming up with “Oliver Stone” as comparable experience, the maker of “JFK,” “Nixon,” “Alexander the Great” and other fevered hallucinations is just too precious. Stick with the “Bloodrayne” movie series, it’s more to your level of development and will save you having to face the answer to the question of why none of his recent films made more than about $1.78 each at the box office.
Ric,
Have you seen J.D Johannes flick? Might be worth a try.
My image capturing was almost always still shots, m’self…
I hear that John Kerry got some great war footage. He should look in on that, as a side-line, in case Theresa ever kicks him to the curb.
I must be the only one who liked Nixon. It wasn’t quite the gong show I was expecting.
I even thought Alexander had its good points. The problem was that that story can’t be fully and properly told in just one film. It needs a trilogy. Also, Colin Farrell tries hard, but can’t fit the right pathos to the right scene.
Andrew the Noisy
I haven’t seen “Nixon” yet… some of the clips look good but I think for me it will be the willingness to disbelief that will be the hardest to achieve… I’m old enough to remember watching some of the original Frost/Nixon intervews and I can’t quite watch this movie without feeling I’m watching people in rubber masks.
Now, I came at The Queen wondering if I could buy the acting, but Mirren was so spot on I was drawn right into the story.
Also, as an American, I’m that much further removed from having the Brit Royalty showcased on a daily basis, so buying the actors as their characters was easier.
That really is one of the problems about doing movies about contemporary historial figures.
“historical”