Second comment:Regarding the review. How it was chosen seems to be a mystery.The lady is not known to be a major reviewer. In paragraph 7--line 4--, she apparently decides to make up a word jibberish.I cannot find this in any dictionary. I think she is looking for gibberish.Gibberish is a verbal"word salad” of illogical sounds.It is not written.Thus, the lady 1.Writes a bad review 2.Does not recognize shorthand 3.Makes up words 4. Does not know gibberish is a verbal phenomenon. Hard to take seriously and I wonder why the editors let it appear.

In 2002, journalist and filmmaker John Pilger noted ("Hollywood Hurrah"):

“Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion, and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to the rescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These films provided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams - in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current “war on terrorism” is underpinned by the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version of America’s killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural “softeners” before the bombing starts again for real.

“Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they might break ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, a movie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar “bad apple” tale, exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive are its camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstream movies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem for which it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras’s Missing, which was about the destruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet’s puppet masters in Washington, and Oliver Stone’s Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan’s Washington and El Salvador’s death squads. Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, dogged by vengeful court actions.

“The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr’s attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fine action movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (a CIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modern Palestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?”

I haven’t had a chance to see much of the recent crop of Iraq war films, but I’ve seen very little in the reviews that indicates much change from what Pilger observed. In light of Iraq war films (Afghanistan war, etc), his observation is the one most worth contesting or exploring.

During a time when Hollywood has been cowed by un-patriotic charges and has been complicit in creating the anti-Arab-Muslim image as evil terror--reinforcing the Neo-Con agenda, one would hope that a message speaking truth to power would not be trashed by petty dismissal. True, the entertainment industry has been dumbed down, but it has a honorable history of producing an extensive body of social commentary through the medium--and I for one, applaud the return to relevent issues--even if they are painful, uncomfortable and not particularly flattering to our puffed up opinion of ourselves.

Haven’t seen the movie yet but the review didn’t really provide any insight.

What was the point? The critic flexing her critical muscle?

As for these comments below by mmm, this “Excellent civics lesson that” the film is said to “illuminate” - these “lessons” are also false, contrary to fact; thus, if the film actually is perpetuating these views, it’s quite typical of Hollywood productions in perpetuating such crucial falsehoods:

“1.The militaristic response to terroism articulated in a searing performance by Tom Cruise-parts of his view are shared by almost everyone”

In fact, no, not essentially, quite the opposite - unless “everyone” here refers to state-corporate US officials. These officials don’t share the popular (and by far the most effective) view of how to deal with terrorism, which is police work, not militarism.

“2.The changing nature of the free press complicated by its need for access to powerful figures and the take over of this means of communication by corporate America”

The “changing nature”? That should be the essentially “unchanging and unchanged nature” of...not the “free press” - the corporate media - which cannot be “taken over” by corporate America, because it is corporate America.

“3.The fate of those who choose to participate directly militarily in the terroism fight.The apathy and ambiguity of the young and most of the nation.”

There is no terrorism fight. In fact, even the CIA has reported that US military aggression in the middle east is fomenting terrorism, providing fertile grounds for its growth. The same holds for longstanding US economic pressures. Attacking Iraq and Afghanistan serves to increase growth of terrorism, by way of the US fight to gain control of oil that rages and threatens to increase.

As for “apathy and ambiguity of the young and most of the nation” - the point is, compared to what? Compared to US corporate-state officials “the young and most of the nation” are far from apathetic, they are outraged, far from ambiguous, they tried to elect what they thought were antiwar officials, and then seeing them continue fueling the war they give all the officials some of the lowest approval ratings of all time. You don’t have to look too far - though apparently much farther than Lions for Lambs - to see that masses of unfortunately forcefully disorganized people are boiling at what is going on. Ron Paul, for one, is raking in the money because of it - for one indicator. And for another, it’s clear again this election cycle that all the leading corporate produced candidates basically disgust most people. People are disorganized and purposefully and very forcefully and willfully misled - that’s a problem. And yet boiling en masse, often for good reason. To this point, unfortunately, to little avail.

Just so, much illumination of crucial reality is often the first thing sacrificed in many a (perhaps otherwise brilliant) run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie, the type of movie that basically serves to reinforce an unjust reality while perpetuating false or severely limited views of it.

“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 above is false. For example I wrote an investigative anti Iraq war novel within the first six months of the March 2003 ground invasion, and nothing in it is outdated. I got the facts correct then and they still apply today - only moreso. It’s called doing the root research. 

Similar to Anderson, Chris Stephen notes:

“[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! And educational films and books don’t educate and affect what people think, which is why textbooks are so zealously regulated and censored by the culture police, etc, ad nauseum. There are no messages in getting crucial facts and analyses right. It could mean anything! Knowledge and drama that reveals powerfully the illegal and immoral nature of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq would never be used to stop the ongoing crime and bring those who carried it out to justice! That would make too much sense. So Hollywood, following Tiffany’s line of thought, must not produce it. Not because it’s too threatening to the powers that be, as it is, but because whatever is too threatening to the powers that be is inherently not “entertaining” - nobody is moved in film by anyone being brought to justice, or by ending great wrongs. That’s boring!

Obviously Tiffany’s comments are contradictory. Well-placed and well-analyzed and well-dramatized facts carry messages and have certain rather predictable effects that experiences lacking that sort of thing don’t. All movies, etc, have such messages. Better to know what you’re doing, and that you are doing something, and be responsible for it, than not.

And Chris Stephens is as mistaken as Kasia Anderson when he guesses,

“But perhaps the greatest problem facing Hollywood is that reality keeps outpacing fiction.”

Yet somehow with scant resources beyond the “activist” reporting and analyses found on the internet, along with some facts marginally reported in corporate media, I was able to write an investigative anti Iraq war novel during the 2003 ground invasion that is not outdated today and will never be outdated, because the facts that basically structure the drama are central and accurate, not only to the Iraq War but to much US policy and private US reality long past, very much present, with serious effects, at the least, that will be felt for a long time to come. It’s not at all as if the conflict in Iraq is some brand new phenomenon that has suddenly blown in from nowhere, or is somehow murky in its central and even peripheral features. The exact opposite is true.

Thus the problem in producing quality and fully illuminating films is totally not that “reality keeps outpacing fiction.” The problem is that such quality fiction can too easily keep up with a reality that continues to play out its old themes along traditional power lines, long since overtly articulated and investigated (however marginalized in its attempted burial by corporate-state power). And corporate America (Hollywood) is loathe to touch such reality-illuminating fiction. Corporate-state America is not going to condemn its own transgressions; not when there’s a profit to be made, at least; and is there ever - if perhaps somewhat less in certain types of would-be “entertainment”.

I liked what Kasia had to say.  It was well written!
We need more.

Not interested anyway...Tom Cruise, like Mel Gibson, gets not a penny from me.

How can one comment on a comment of a movie unseen?

Tell me, which Hollywood studio will produce these Mainstay Press / Lib Lit productions?:

The Publisher - by Joe Emersberger:
A Canadian newspaper publisher confronts his complicity in the Canadian, US and corporate backed coup and mass murder in Haiti.

Storyteller and East Timor - by Andre Vltchek:
On a ship leaving East Timor, a wrenching conversation about the US-backed Indonesian conquest and slaughter of East Timorese.

Homefront, a novel:
Exposes the religious and academic, corporate and governmental forces that built support for the US invasion of Iraq and continue to maintain the occupation that has been judged to be illegal by the head of the United Nations and legal experts across America and the globe, and has had the predicted effect of increasing the likelihood of attack against America, and was based on fraud as known in advance, and meanwhile has killed thousands of American troops, and has wounded or debilitated tens of thousands of others, and has killed upwards of 1,000,000 Iraqis, maimed countless others, and created millions of refugees while destroying their country? Where are the didactic, polemic, partisan novels and films on the fundamentally criminal nature of the ongoing American aggression in Iraq?

Big Hollywood money doesn’t care. Any Little Hollywood money that does, doesn’t dare.

In the LA Times, Ann Donahue reports:

“On Friday, the megawatt-star-powered “Lions for Lambs” opens. Will it be the one to break the [Iraq War] 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,” [said historian and critic David Thomson].”

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. And what of Truthdig’s capacity for imaginative works and fiction and film coverage? Does it do but little more?

Liberation Lit: http://liblit.org

“...at a time when we could really use original and effective stories about the state of our world - no matter where they come from.”

Such stories come from Mainstay Press and its fiction journal Liberation Lit, should any publication care to look or otherwise deign to notice: http://liblit.org/

The Meryl Streep character sounds a bit like the former New York Times reporter Judith Miller who was a conduit for Bush-Cheney administration people to send out false info and propaganda about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Miller’s articles reportedly were significant in helping push others in the media, Congress and the American people toward the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the Bush-Cheney administration and their associates.

Info on this in the article ...

“Society of Professional Journalists’ Award to Judith Miller Helps Cover-Up?” (Oct. 27, 2005)

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle. asp?articleID=3287