Registered: Aug 2000
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Posts: 7920

This is an interesting article by john pilger about how hollywood culture is shaping our public to believe the mythical just imperitive of Americian Military action. Unfortunately I predict that this will be moved to politico. It's a shame that most interesting topics languish in there.
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Hollywood Hurrah
What about Hollywood making a film called Operation Cyclone, telling how the CIA trained Islamic terrorists and starring Bruce Willis as Bush?

http://www.zmag.org/content/Foreign...erHollywood.cfm

by John Pilger

I sat down the other night to watch Mai Masri's film Frontiers of Dreams and Fears. It was on videotape; like most of her remarkable work about the Palestinians, ten films in all, it has not been shown in the cinema or on television in this country. From Shatila refugee camp in Beirut and Dheisha camp in Bethlehem, the film tells the story of two refugee girls and their journey to the chain-link fence that divides their homeland and separates them from each other. It is a rare glimpse of the truth behind the relentless news from Palestine.

I watched it on the night the Oscars were shown, and during pauses in the video, images of Hollywood intervened: unctuous and jingoistic actors, and clips from blockbusting money machines that are the exact opposite of Mai Masri's truth. Perhaps the Oscars seem a harmless circus: until you stop and think of what they represent. David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer, raised this question in the Guardian recently. He described the failure of popular cinema to reach out to the "millions of young people [who] are growing up in refugee camps" and "the potential for a devastating explosion". He added: "If we [in the west] simply become manufacturers of films which rely on technology, special effects, emotional simplicity and so on to portray the world, then I fear that the dislocation between mainstream cinema and any perceptible reality will simply become too great - with consequences which will affect us all."

The dislocation is now so great that the cultural propaganda that was always Hollywood accounts for more than 80 per cent of the films seen in Britain and many other countries. The power of their message about "the American way of life" is such that it seems we are back to the post-Second World War era when the American business establishment promoted a paranoia about enemies within and abroad.

Foreigners fell neatly into categories of worthy or unworthy: for America or against America. In Hollywood, history was reduced to screen "epics" such as Exodus, in which worthy (Jewish) refugees settled in the Holy Land and unworthy Palestinians, made refugees in their own land, were invisible. These dispossessed people are now portrayed in American action movies, along with other Muslims, as terrorists. 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?

"The appalling images of [11 September] had all the resonance of a contemporary Hollywood movie . . ." wrote David Puttnam. "The temptation to try to comprehend these images in cinematic terms was a testament to the power of film. But the analogy felt entirely inadequate . . ." That may be true if you rule out film-making that allows us to comprehend why 11 September happened. The title of such a movie could be Operation Cyclone, the code name the CIA used when it set up an Islamic terrorist organisation in 1979 on the secret order of President Jimmy Carter. Funded by $4bn of American taxpayers' money, the tutors of Operation Cyclone trained terrorists at camps in Pakistan and in Virginia, and recruited them at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated twin towers. Indeed, the terrible spectacle of 11 September could be the final sequence, with the patriotic Bruce Willis playing George W Bush.

John Pilger's new book, The New Rulers of the World, will be published next month by Verso
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The thing that quickly rushed thorugh my mind while reading this was the Oscar for best editor went to Black Hawk Down, a movie that had direct involvement of the US Department for Defense in the editing process.
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Originally intended to open in March, Black Hawk Down was rushed forward to January in the US and Europe, as threats of the US invading Somalia loomed on the horizon. The movie, set during the 1993 US invasion of Somalia, presents the mission as humanitarian-as did the Clinton administration. But when US forces dropped into a teeming market in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, 18 US soldiers, and over a thousand Somalis, were killed. President Clinton called the massacre one of the darkest hours of his administration.

While the film's producers say the release was timed to make the film eligible for the next Academy Awards, many say that the events of September 11 and the US military interest in Somalia had something to do with it. All actors had extensive prior training with the forces they were portraying, many who are now stationed in Afghanistan. For $3 million and script approval, the US Department of Defense gave director Ridley Scott its full support. "They saw this as a recruitment film," says Scott.

But not everyone agrees with the film's message, including one of the actors. We are joined today by Brendan Sexton, an actor from Black Hawk Down who gets killed by a missile early on in the film. He spoke an anti-war forum at Columbia University organized by the People for Peace Coalition last week.
http://stream.realimpact.org/rihurl...a&start=40:22.0
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Do you think think hollywood should make more stories reflecting the truth in the region or should hollywood continue reflecting the politics of the American culture and focus on violent entertainment? SHould the pupose of movies be to educate, indoctrinate, or just entertain without message? It's a tough call. Movies will be made regardless, and the hollywood screen writters, currently and for the foreseeable future, will come from America, write about America, and see the rest of the world through American glasses. It's rare to see a movie like "Traffic" get a green light and afterward, also recieve critical acclaim. What if the rest of the world got to tell it's story? Would that be something you'd pay money to see?

BTW, I rented Salvadore last night and I'll give a review of it prehaps tomorrow. (I haven't seen it yet.)
Cheers.

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Beatrice, Nebraska
Posts: 18808

Bruce Willis is sexah. That's all there is to that.

Dubbya is not.

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Registered: Aug 2000
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Posts: 7920

I think it'd be interesting to make a film about Anniston Alabama (although it will never get made.) This is one of the unluckiest towns in the Northern Hemisphere.
First Monsanto dumped PCB's into the river:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...2¬Found=true
They beat monsanto,
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/02/22/m...erdict/?related
then the government starts distibuting gas masks to the population because they want to start incinerating chemical weapons there.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0703-02.htm
http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion...t-2b28u0058.htm
There is a movie of the week in here man. That's intriguing stuff.

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Registered: Mar 2002
Location: Ljusdal, Sweden
Posts: 196

I think it's important that filmmakers either stick fairly close to what actually happened when they make movies such as Pearl Harbor, the Patriot and so on, or that they stop pretending they do atleast. No one will be interested in a movie that's supposed to be about an actual event but have only the location right. Atleast that is what I hope, it really annoys me when it is claimed that a movie is based on a true story but then the moviemakers have sort of re-written history.

This is for keeping the international audience, if Hollywood wants their movies to be spread worldwide:

Something that is important is to try and stay in the sane zone when it comes to showing patriotism in movies, such as in Independence Day. I really dislike that movie because it just gets too much, for example the speach that atleast meant this: "this day will be remembered as the independence day for the whole world" and of course that day was the fourth of July. I don't know how much money Hollywood movies make outside of USA but if it's much then things like these are not a good idea. A little moderation is what I ask for.

If I may add one thing it would be that I urge the screen writers to consider who they use as bad guys in movies and how they portray them. If someone would have their opinions on muslims, black people, native americans, asians based on what he had seen in Hollywood movies then that person would be considered to pretty fucked up in the head.

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Registered: Aug 2000
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At least hollywood got the story right in U-571.
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0141926

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Registered: Aug 2000
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BTW. I made a post in Politico about a situation that has made me furious.
http://www.asylumnation.com/asylum/...&threadid=21928
An Israeli attack of jawdropping proportion is being perpetrated on the city of Jenin and ... fuck it. If you weant to know about it, click the link. If not wait for the movie and eat your popcorn.

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Registered: Mar 2002
Location: Ljusdal, Sweden
Posts: 196

Edit: This is in response to the first of Thimbles posts

Hehe, yeah that was pretty weak. Oh well, atleast they were right on ... no, no they were not.

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