http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_urb-war.html

Hollywood’s anti-American war films don’t measure up to the glories of its patriotic era.

Thoughts?

5/16/2008 10:19:06 AM

They poked fun of Apocalypse Now. Worthless article.

5/16/2008 10:26:30 AM

I didnt actually read it.

5/16/2008 4:37:55 PM

Summary: Conservative magazine wants war films to be jingotastic. Conservative magazine is disappointed that they are not.

5/16/2008 4:40:52 PM

It definitely sounds like that when the article brings up The Sands of Iwo Jima, but the main beef is with quasi-intellectual left wing writing that makes every officer a warmonger and every enlisted soldier a mindless pawn for an evil empire.

Quote :

"In Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, and Lions for Lambs—as in more successful thrillers like Shooter and The Bourne Ultimatum—virtually every act of the American administration is corrupt or sinister, and every patriot is a cynically misused fool. Every warrior, therefore, is either evil himself or, more often, a victim of evil, destined for meaningless destruction or soul-death and insanity. These movies’ anti-American attitudes strike me not as the products of original vision and reflection but rather as the tired expressions of inherited prejudices. The films work the way that prejudice works, anyway: by taking extraordinary incidents and individuals and extrapolating general principles from them. Redacted is the worst example. Politically repellent, emotionally dishonest, artistically incompetent, and, at 90 minutes, about an hour too long, the film shows American soldiers raping a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slaughtering her family. Writer and director Brian De Palma, a vastly overrated hack, used the same trope in his so-so 1989 Vietnam film, Casualties of War, which tells you exactly how far his thinking has progressed. The other three films take a more earnest, if smarmy, approach, smothering our fighters in loving pity, but the principle of extrapolation is the same. In Lions for Lambs, patriotic youngsters are sent to die for a wartime scheme meant to advance a cynical conservative politician’s career. In Rendition, the CIA ships off a wholly innocent man to a foreign country to be tortured for information that he doesn’t have. And In the Valley of Elah has enough murderously loony post-traumatic veterans to make up a sort of nutcase rifle battalion. Put on a uniform, serve in Iraq, and zappo, you’re kill-crazy forever. If these stories were representative rather than exceptional, In the Valley of Elah would have at least half an excuse for its disgraceful and infantile final shot, which shows the American flag flown upside down as a token of our terrible distress. But the stories—even though some are based on fact—are not representative at all. The overwhelming impression that reporters with our fighters in the Middle East send back is of professionalism, valor, and continued faith in the mission. These movies, as the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan recently pointed out, simply select modern images that remind them of the old Vietnam-era films and rehash them to support their outmoded political points of view."

I agree with most of these criticisms.

5/16/2008 4:59:13 PM

stories of exceptional heroism aren't representative either, they're just more palatable to people who want to view the united states in a more positive light than is accurate.

5/16/2008 5:03:26 PM

5/16/2008 5:08:22 PM

No one is asking for exceptional heroism. Good war films depict ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

5/16/2008 5:10:25 PM

Now I wanna watch Three Kings.

5/16/2008 5:12:55 PM

What about "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers"

those movies did not depict the govt as evil, the officers as warmongoring, or the soldiers as pawns

or was the article pinpointing movies made about modern wars?

5/16/2008 5:23:04 PM

Quote :

"Despite its virtually perfect cast, 1998’s Saving Private Ryan is no classic. It is marred by two of director Steven Spielberg’s most prominent traits: sentimentalism and a tendency to turn characters into archetypes. These (related) traits served the director well in great films like Jaws, E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they render even his most-lauded historical epics mawkish and intellectually shallow."

5/16/2008 5:24:41 PM

^^ It was mostly about films depicting modern wars.

It's understandable, we haven't had a clear-cut good vs. evil war since WWII. Even some of the modern films about WWII like SPR, The Thin Red Line, and Flags/Letters are moving away from actually depicting war and heroics in favor of exploring moral ambiguity and man/nature juxtapositions. They've been doing that since The Dirty Dozen when people got tired of cliche action hero war films.

Frustration with an unpopular administration and the complexities of the modern battlefield just makes it easier for writers to make the villain some shadowy figure in the government instead of some foreign evildoer.

5/16/2008 5:34:51 PM

It's been heading that way since the start of the Cold War and when JFK was assassinated.

[Edited on May 16, 2008 at 5:39 PM. Reason : paranoid population]

5/16/2008 5:37:36 PM

this article is pretty stupid.

5/16/2008 6:26:18 PM

I actually saw a pretty interesting documentary on AMC about interpreting history through cop movies.

In the 60s it was all cop vs villain stories, then turned into darker corrupt films like Serpico and The French Connection after Watergate, then turned into renegade cops like Dirty Harry who fought crime their own way because the system didn't work. Then the 80s came and people wanted to watch Lethal Weapon instead of heavy cop films.

5/16/2008 6:36:54 PM

They're talking about this in a more even-handed (not politically, just not "these all suck now!")manner on NPR.

5/17/2008 3:55:41 PM