Posted by
Green Faerie on Monday, November 19, 2007 7:46:27 PM
Like the Queen song goes, "Another one bites the dust."
Redacted, an anti-Iraq war film described by liberal Slate.com as "antiwar porn" and by conservative movie critic Michael Medved as the worst film he's ever seen, enjoyed a craptacular opening this past weekend. Last weekend, the bigger-budget star vehicle Lions For Lambs suffered a similar fate. Other recent anti-war el floppos include Rendition and The Valley of Elah. No amount of pre-release hype, major stars, big-name directors, or lavish praise from largely left-leaning film critics has drawn people into the theaters to see these films.
They say in the business that the audience votes with its feet. Why did the audience then vote to take its feet to Bee Movie instead of Lions For Lambs?
I think I know what's going on. It often takes a couple of years for a script to go down the pipeline from word processor to production to release. At the time a whole slew of these movies were in development, popular opinion seemingly was against the war in Iraq, or at least the way things were going. News reports were full of The Daily Carnage and hype of an impending civil war. Hollywood saw this as an opportunity to return to the Good Old Days of the '60s and '70s, when faltering public support for our efforts in Vietnam resulted in a slew of movies that were antiwar and implicitly against the whole American Way of Life. The Paul Haggises and Brian DePalmas and Robert Redfords rubbed their hands at the prospect of making The Film that finally sends Middle America into the streets to march alongside Cindy Sheehan and Co. and maybe even get Bush/Cheney thrown in the brig for good measure.
There were three problems Hollywood never forsaw. One is that American taste for agitprop vanished sometime back in the '80s. People don't want to be informed by movie stars and directors anymore. They simply want to spend their ten bucks on being entertained. Hollywood figured that perhaps the foreign market, eager for anything that makes America look bad, would turn out in droves for this stuff. Except that even foreign movie goers would rather spend their euros and yen on Transformers than preachy pretentious crud too.
Two, few Americans outside of leftist enclaves view the U.S. of A. as a pit of evil and the rotten treatment Vietnam veterans got from the antiwar crowd has permanently left a distaste for anything that makes a blanket slam against our military.
Three, Hollywood never thought to itself, "Gee, what if this Iraq thing turns around?" It's almost hilarious to see a slew of these antiwar movies come out just as violence in Iraq is decreasing and stability seems to be a reachable goal. You see, this is not a nation of navel-gazing pacifists. We just wanted the mission to succeed.
Oh well.