I tried to sit through a showing of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. I really did. I had to leave when it became apparent the film was just another example of the American Left's historical mythology.
I should have expected as much. Honestly, the Left has such a hold on Hollywood that when I hear some director blathering on about how his next film is going to be "political" or about "issues," I pretty much assume it will be Left propaganda.
Don't hold your breath waiting for a balanced (or even honest) film about McCarthy, et alia. Remember what recently happened when Kazan finally got his due recognition? The white-lipped anger and venom on display? Decades later, when even the Russians have admitted McCarthy was not jumping at shadows, the American Left cannot admit the truth.
I mean, really... would it kill Hollywood to make a movie about McCarthy that acknowledges the reality of Soviet espionage and subversion?
McCarthy & Co. made their share of mistakes, to be sure, but the enemy they were fighting was real and dangerous. Following the end of the Cold War, mountains of espionage and intel documents became available from the former USSR. That, plus now-declassified materials from the USA (such as the Venona transcripts) show that if anything, Americans weren't paranoid enough about subversion and infiltration. McCarthy was not perfect - not even the best man for the job. But he did quite a bit of good. First, and most obviously, the mere act of going on the offensive against Red infiltration put the Soviets on the defensive. They were forced to become much more careful, cut certain recruitment operations altogether, and did in fact lose a number of key operatives to McCarthy and HUAC's investigations. In the end, he was not the best man for the job because he cast his net too wide and wasn't patient enough.
I find it interesting that "McCarthyism" is a voodoo word coined by the very same American Leftists who spent the entire Cold War bending over backwards to avoid confronting the true nature of the Soviet Empire - a political system that raised repression, paranoia and persecution to an art form.
From the first, McCarthy was loudly criticized by his foes - both CPUSA fellow-travelers and patriotic Americans who honestly thought he was wrong. People against him - common citizens as well as political figures - made speeches, wrote books and newspaper articles, went on TV and radio and readily availed themselves of every inch of their 1st Amendment freedoms.
How many were "silenced?" How many doors were kicked in at midnight, the entire family being dragged away for "questioning?" How many hundreds and thousands of journalists, political opponents, artists, scholars and intellectuals were marched away to re-education/work camps - many to never return? How many were tortured or summarily executed?
Even at the height of "McCarthyism," you could slam Joe McCarthy in a New York Times op-ed, published in your own name, go home that night and sleep like a baby. That's what Edward Murrow did, and if George Clooney considers such efforts to be "courage" on the level of some Russian telling Lavrenti Beria to kiss his ass, he is simply delusional.
I'm also getting tired of hearing about all these supposed "victims" of McCarthy and the anti-Communist effort in general. Who were/are these people? How often did the spotlight fall on good Americans whose words and deeds gave no grounds whatsoever to raise suspicion?
Is the existence of actual sedition among CPUSA members, leaders and sympathizers incidental or irrelevant to how McCarthy and the anti-Communist movement more generally are to be viewed?
Or, let me put it this way: Why is the word witch hunt used so often in conjunction with McCarthy or Anti-Communist unless the intent is to suggest that there were as many seditious Communists as there were actual witches in Salem - that is, none?
Why is this? Witch hunt, we hear, over and over again. Could it be that the American Left - and especially their Arts & Crafts contingent in Hollywood - doesn't want anyone to look too closely at just how taken they were with Communism, up to and sometimes including placing themselves in service to the USSR?
If the CPUSA had been a bona fide domestic reform movement, if the anti-communists really were chasing phantoms, that would be one thing. Then I, too, would demonize McCarthy and his allies.
But that's simply not true. The problem was real.
(For how real it was in Hollywood, check out Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left by Ronald Radosh.)
Witch hunt, my ass. There were no witches in Salem, but there sure as Lenin were Commies in Hollywood and the State Dept.
Every serious discussion of this subject must begin with the recognition that the CPUSA was a subversive fifth-column movement controlled by a hostile foreign power. That is an objective fact.
Having recognized this, the question is (and was): What to do about it? The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact; our society has both the right and need to defend itself from those committed to its destruction.
It fits the romantic self-image of the American Left to see those investigated by HUAC, the FBI and McCarthy as martyrs to Cold War hysteria and the eee-vil Right Wing, but the facts do not support that story and never did. Of course, Hollywood is the land of dreams, the American mythology factory, and the Leftists who populate it do their best to keep slicing the baloney.
On a more general note, I would call out both the American Right and Left for their respective blind spots regarding 20th century Communism.
The Right saw Commies behind every tree and was tone-deaf to the real social and political injustices that made Communism so appealing to many suffering and oppressed people.
The Left, on the other hand, bent over backwards to avoid noticing just what all that rhetoric about workers and peasants and liberation actually resulted in once the Reds took over a country.
Many on the Left spent the decades from the October Revolution right up until the whole thing collapsed in late '80s hoping against hope that the USSR or some other Red State (heh heh) would incubate the long-awaited socialist utopia and lead humanity into a new and better age.
Marxist Communism is a remarkably "religious" ideology in this way, and those Americans who went beyond hoping and decided to lend a hand - Hiss, Fuchs, Rosenbergs, etc. - were not villains; they were True Believers. They honestly thought they were on the right side of history and human morality. (All the same, this doesn't excuse treason or change the propriety of their punishments.)
Nothing dies as hard as a dream, and it should come as no surprise that many on the Left (in Hollywood and elsewhere) were, and are, loathe to consciously and publicly confront the fact that the Bolsheviks and Maoists took them for a ride, used them and made a mockery of their democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory ideals.
That's why episodes like l'affaire Rosenberg is still so touchy for some. It's bad enough to have to admit that they were spies, after all, but to also acknowledge that they were naive stooges of a horrible tyrant is just more than some people can bear.
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movies. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2008
Movie Hate: War of the Worlds, 2005
I broke my movie boycott to see this thing. L Ron would have wanted me to. Observations follow:
(1) Next time, if there is one, I am bringing earplugs or an iPod to the theater. I could not believe the volume of the pre-show screen adverts, loathsome in-theater radio station yammering and coming attractions. My ears were ringing before the film proper even began. Am I the last person who remembers when people could sit in a theater before the film started and just talk to each other, read a magazine and get an early start on some popcorn munching? Ye gods.
(2) To the fellow who sat behind me: I am tall (6'3"). I am wide. I am a visual obstruction. You should have chosen a better seat. Sorry, but there it is.
(3) Ah, the opening. Good Morgan Freeman voice over. I think he's James Earl Jones' heir apparent for Wise Black Voice now that Ossie Davis has left us. (PS - I would trade the lives of every Gen-X, nose-ringed clown in the theater that night for Ossie to have one more year. What a loss; gifted actor, remarkable man and class act.)
(4) Ah, the film... I was afraid of this. There's an old saying in journalism: Don't bury the lede. It means keep your focus on the point of the story, not the incidental or peripheral. This film sent its lede to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. One might think that the conquest of Earth by aliens (not actually Martians this time) would be the point of the movie, being a pretty important thing, after all. Nope. Here it's merely the setting for a familial reapproachment between an immature father and his children - both of whom are the kind of insufferable "movie kids" I would have doused with A-1 Steak Sauce and thrown to the advancing alien war machines as a peace offering.
(5) Cruise is pretty good, although stopping myself from yelling out Xenu or Katie Holmes jokes caused me actual, physical pain. Truly, I suffer for art.
(6) The aliens are not from Mars, as mentioned previously. Okay. No harm done. And kudos to Spielberg for his old skool use of tripod walking machines instead of the floating manta-rays of Pal's 1953 version - as wonderful as Pal's were.
If the changes had only stopped there. Alas, the 2005 story has the aliens delivering their pilots to machines buried deep in the earth "over a million years ago," as one character observes, rather than the ships arriving in meteor-like LCMs (Landing Craft, Martian).
This revision makes an absolute hash of the invaders' defeat from a microbial Achilles' Heel, since it's inconceivable that such an advanced race, having visited Earth before to bury their machines, would be caught unawares by the basics of Terran biology.
Pal's (and Wells') versions explained this by having the Martians view us from afar, but not actually experience our ecology until the invasion. Wells, in fact, was making a direct reference to the tropical diseases which struck European armies during their colonial and imperial conquests in Asia and Africa.
Spielberg's story has character dialog making pointed references to how well the aliens have "planned" this, yet once they arrive, all it takes is a few deep breaths of our air and a few swallows of water before they're all dropping dead.
(7) Along those lines, how did hundreds of house-sized war machines, buried a few hundred feet under the ground, go undetected by 20th Century human technology? The film takes place in New Jersey, which was (and is) part of the great post-WW2 buildup of America's east coast. Highways, commercial and residential surveying, tunnel excavations for sewers and utility lines... I doubt there's a single square mile of that area which hasn't been explored, mapped, thermal-imaged, sonar'd and whatnot.
(8) George Pal's version alternated scenes of government and military leaders making plans with the personal story of Dr Forrester. By keeping the story locked on Cruise's character and his brats, Spielberg loses the larger view to the detriment of the story. The aliens are handily conquering the word... and then they all just die.
Bottom Line: As befits a Spielberg film, the technical quality is outstanding. And there are a few scenes - such as the hellish, apocalyptic spectacle of a burning train roaring through a railroad crossing - that are simply marvelous.
Alas, there's too little of that and too much family drama. Near the end I wanted the aliens to disintegrate them all so the narrative could move on to a more interesting viewpoint.
A few other things:
- How did Cruise's son survive? Do the alien war machines have a Great Walls of Fire attack which can obliterate a battle line of armored vehicles but is too weak to take out one moody teen in a hoodie?
- The "All Tom's Children" material was bad enough, but why did the writers have to hit rock bottom by including the I must! / You can't! moment between Tom and his son?
I mean, COME ON. Does it get more cliche than this?! When you have characters literally yelling out their motivations to the audience and each other, are you even telling a story anymore?
Finally, was there a scene cut wherein it's explained that the red vines were part of the aliens' (orig. Martians') ecosystem, which were transplanted here in order to reform the environment to their liking? Note to screenwriters: not everyone read Wells' book.
(1) Next time, if there is one, I am bringing earplugs or an iPod to the theater. I could not believe the volume of the pre-show screen adverts, loathsome in-theater radio station yammering and coming attractions. My ears were ringing before the film proper even began. Am I the last person who remembers when people could sit in a theater before the film started and just talk to each other, read a magazine and get an early start on some popcorn munching? Ye gods.
(2) To the fellow who sat behind me: I am tall (6'3"). I am wide. I am a visual obstruction. You should have chosen a better seat. Sorry, but there it is.
(3) Ah, the opening. Good Morgan Freeman voice over. I think he's James Earl Jones' heir apparent for Wise Black Voice now that Ossie Davis has left us. (PS - I would trade the lives of every Gen-X, nose-ringed clown in the theater that night for Ossie to have one more year. What a loss; gifted actor, remarkable man and class act.)
(4) Ah, the film... I was afraid of this. There's an old saying in journalism: Don't bury the lede. It means keep your focus on the point of the story, not the incidental or peripheral. This film sent its lede to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. One might think that the conquest of Earth by aliens (not actually Martians this time) would be the point of the movie, being a pretty important thing, after all. Nope. Here it's merely the setting for a familial reapproachment between an immature father and his children - both of whom are the kind of insufferable "movie kids" I would have doused with A-1 Steak Sauce and thrown to the advancing alien war machines as a peace offering.
(5) Cruise is pretty good, although stopping myself from yelling out Xenu or Katie Holmes jokes caused me actual, physical pain. Truly, I suffer for art.
(6) The aliens are not from Mars, as mentioned previously. Okay. No harm done. And kudos to Spielberg for his old skool use of tripod walking machines instead of the floating manta-rays of Pal's 1953 version - as wonderful as Pal's were.
If the changes had only stopped there. Alas, the 2005 story has the aliens delivering their pilots to machines buried deep in the earth "over a million years ago," as one character observes, rather than the ships arriving in meteor-like LCMs (Landing Craft, Martian).
This revision makes an absolute hash of the invaders' defeat from a microbial Achilles' Heel, since it's inconceivable that such an advanced race, having visited Earth before to bury their machines, would be caught unawares by the basics of Terran biology.
Pal's (and Wells') versions explained this by having the Martians view us from afar, but not actually experience our ecology until the invasion. Wells, in fact, was making a direct reference to the tropical diseases which struck European armies during their colonial and imperial conquests in Asia and Africa.
Spielberg's story has character dialog making pointed references to how well the aliens have "planned" this, yet once they arrive, all it takes is a few deep breaths of our air and a few swallows of water before they're all dropping dead.
Tripod driver Xerghon: Sir, do you smell that?
Tripod commander Gharzhek: Smell what? That's just Terran air.
Xerghon: I don't feel so good...
Gharzhek: Stop goldbricking and get this thing moving. We're due in TEE-neck, whatever that is.
(Xerghon coughs, falls over backwards and dies.)
Gharzhek: What the...?!
(Gharzhek vomits his innards across the control panel, then dies.)
(7) Along those lines, how did hundreds of house-sized war machines, buried a few hundred feet under the ground, go undetected by 20th Century human technology? The film takes place in New Jersey, which was (and is) part of the great post-WW2 buildup of America's east coast. Highways, commercial and residential surveying, tunnel excavations for sewers and utility lines... I doubt there's a single square mile of that area which hasn't been explored, mapped, thermal-imaged, sonar'd and whatnot.
(8) George Pal's version alternated scenes of government and military leaders making plans with the personal story of Dr Forrester. By keeping the story locked on Cruise's character and his brats, Spielberg loses the larger view to the detriment of the story. The aliens are handily conquering the word... and then they all just die.
Bottom Line: As befits a Spielberg film, the technical quality is outstanding. And there are a few scenes - such as the hellish, apocalyptic spectacle of a burning train roaring through a railroad crossing - that are simply marvelous.
Alas, there's too little of that and too much family drama. Near the end I wanted the aliens to disintegrate them all so the narrative could move on to a more interesting viewpoint.
A few other things:
- How did Cruise's son survive? Do the alien war machines have a Great Walls of Fire attack which can obliterate a battle line of armored vehicles but is too weak to take out one moody teen in a hoodie?
- The "All Tom's Children" material was bad enough, but why did the writers have to hit rock bottom by including the I must! / You can't! moment between Tom and his son?
Dad (yelling into son's face): You can't go! I won't let you!
Son (yelling into dad's face): I have to go!
Dad: I can't lose you again!
Son: I have to see! I have to fight!
Dad: No!
Son: Yes!
I mean, COME ON. Does it get more cliche than this?! When you have characters literally yelling out their motivations to the audience and each other, are you even telling a story anymore?
Finally, was there a scene cut wherein it's explained that the red vines were part of the aliens' (orig. Martians') ecosystem, which were transplanted here in order to reform the environment to their liking? Note to screenwriters: not everyone read Wells' book.
Flash! (Aah Aah)
I've had people literally backpedal away from me when I told them that one of my favorite movies is the 1980 Flash Gordon. (That, along with my belief that the horror flick Se7en should have been a musical.
I admit the film is more than a bit gay. The Queen soundtrack. The extravagance. The costumes. The guest spot by Richard "Rocky Horror" O'Brien. The brain-melting awfulness of former Playgirl Centerfold Sam Jones - born and raised in the USA, yet spoke English like a third language. Come on.
Flash was, in fact, my introduction to 'camp' and the pleasures of Badfilm (as SubGeniuses call it).
Which is all fine with me. Aesthetically, I'm one of those 'straight fags' or whatever the current term is. Play some Sylvester and I will bop my head and tap my foot unless physically restrained.
Back to Flash (aah aah)... Max von Sydow did a terrific job as Ming. The production values were wonderful. Who didn't want a set of Klytus' armor?
What really turned a lot of science-fiction fans off the film - apart from the dour, tight-assed pedantry such folks are known for - is not that the film was a betrayal of the classic Alex Raymond stories... but exactly the contrary.
It's an eye-opening to go back and actually read the original adventures of Flash, Buck, Cody and the rest. 'Camp' doesn't begin to cover it. There's wince-inducement of a quantity to knock John Waters off his feet. There are enough grating characters, bad writing, jaw-dropping plot holes and clanging dialog to make Phantom Menace look like The Left Hand of Darkness.
Not to mention some retro elements considerably less amusing - racism, crypto-fascist 'Strong Man' worship, etc.
Flash Gordon 1980 is a lot closer to Flash Gordon 1935 than most science-fiction devotees are willing to admit. Perhaps that's what bothers them so much?
I admit the film is more than a bit gay. The Queen soundtrack. The extravagance. The costumes. The guest spot by Richard "Rocky Horror" O'Brien. The brain-melting awfulness of former Playgirl Centerfold Sam Jones - born and raised in the USA, yet spoke English like a third language. Come on.
Flash was, in fact, my introduction to 'camp' and the pleasures of Badfilm (as SubGeniuses call it).
Which is all fine with me. Aesthetically, I'm one of those 'straight fags' or whatever the current term is. Play some Sylvester and I will bop my head and tap my foot unless physically restrained.
Back to Flash (aah aah)... Max von Sydow did a terrific job as Ming. The production values were wonderful. Who didn't want a set of Klytus' armor?
What really turned a lot of science-fiction fans off the film - apart from the dour, tight-assed pedantry such folks are known for - is not that the film was a betrayal of the classic Alex Raymond stories... but exactly the contrary.
It's an eye-opening to go back and actually read the original adventures of Flash, Buck, Cody and the rest. 'Camp' doesn't begin to cover it. There's wince-inducement of a quantity to knock John Waters off his feet. There are enough grating characters, bad writing, jaw-dropping plot holes and clanging dialog to make Phantom Menace look like The Left Hand of Darkness.
Not to mention some retro elements considerably less amusing - racism, crypto-fascist 'Strong Man' worship, etc.
Flash Gordon 1980 is a lot closer to Flash Gordon 1935 than most science-fiction devotees are willing to admit. Perhaps that's what bothers them so much?
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