“Glee” was back last night after a month-long hiatus, which means that I’m back now – the morning after. Didja miss me? I missed you. And I missed “Glee” too. On what other show can I get my musical numbers and teenaged drama all wrapped in a giant bow of glorious propaganda?

There is no other.

This week, “Glee” was high on love, down on the military, and big on acceptance. Unless, of course, you actually want to join the military, in which case it’s all doom on you, and the military turns you into a drug addict and therefore your widowed mother into a liar.

Hmm… let me back up a moment.

Toward the beginning of the episode, Finn confesses to Mr. Schuester that he met with a recruiter… an army recruiter. The Glee Club coach appears troubled by the news, because you know, who joins the military unless they have to?

Meanwhile, Becky (who has Down Syndrome) decides that she had a ginormous crush on wheelchair-bound Artie and asks him out. Artie initially goes reluctantly to avoid hurting her feelings but discovers that he actually enjoys spending time with Becky. Things get sticky when Becky decides that she wants to go all the way with Artie but he doesn’t feel the same way.

Sue gives Artie good advice (kudos!) by saying that if he doesn’t want to go out with Becky again, he should treat her like a regular person and tell her. She points out that Becky just wants to be treated like everyone else, and Artie of all people should know that.

Artie tells Becky that while he enjoys her company, he’s not ready to move into a physical relationship, and then she and Sue watch Lifetime and share a pint of ice cream. Normal girlness achieved.

Before we get back to the military bashing, let’s take a minute to talk about Will Schuester and his OCD girlfriend Emma. Their relationship has gotten to the point where they’re thinking about marriage, so Will goes to Emma’s parents to ask for her hand.

Let me interject here to mention that in past episodes, Emma’s parents have been portrayed as insane racists, keeping their distance from non-gingers. That’s right; they can’t stand associating with people that don’t have red hair. Moving on.

Emma’s crazy parents come over, and her mom makes a comment about the Christmas tree still being up. “Just be grateful comrade Obama still allows Christmas,” responds Dad. Because, of course, the anti-Obama characters are the ones that are cracked in the head. Whatever.

Emma’s parents don’t give their blessing (probably because Will isn’t a redhead) and begin to nitpick her OCD flaws. Again, anyone that would oppose Obama is the same type of person that would viciously criticize his or her own child.

Despite the lack of blessing, Will proposes to Emma with much fanfare, and she accepts. Squeee! I love weddings, especially musical ones.

Now let’s talk about the military thing, which is a big issue for me because I think our armed forces are freaking amazing, and I thank God every single day for the brave men and women that serve in order to keep my family safe from the bad guys.

I already mentioned Finn’s confession to his teacher that he was considering joining the army. The next time the subject was broached on the show was during an intervention set up by said teacher with Finn’s mom and stepdad. Finn says that he just wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps, who he had been led to believe died a hero in Iraq a decade earlier.

Finn’s mom reveals that his dad didn’t die in Iraq as a war hero but in Cincinnati as a drug addict. Apparently he had been dishonorably discharged and was so traumatized by the war that he couldn’t get his act together. She had lied to Finn all those years because his dad “was so much more than the last few months of his life.”

This part bugged the crud out of me. I will not deny that war is hell or that PTSD is a real thing, because both of those things are true. But “Glee” wasn’t tackling the issue of how to help veterans return to normal life. The only message seemed to be: join the military and your life will be ruined.

And then the episode ended with Finn proposing to his girlfriend Rachel.

Yes, they’re both high schoolers.

I can’t wait to see what happens as the rest of the season unfolds…

—–

Yep, things are changing in Hollywood. Though Hollywood’s far from perfect or fair, this kind of open patriotism and honoring of our military seemed all but extinct 5 years ago.

In fact, 5 years ago Hollywood was shamelessly lying to us about how patriotism didn’t sell.

We’re a long way from “truth, justice and all that stuff…”

Plenty of work left to do but you can’t pretend things aren’t getting better. I have a personal saying that applies here: “If you refuse to be pleased, I’m going to stop trying.”

Not content with achieving Father of the Year Emeritus status for his unique, outside-the-box parenting skills, Alec Baldwin spent yesterday evening on Twitter to once again offer his nuanced, carefully researched insights into a variety of important topics.  In doing so, he offered a powerful challenge to such innovators as Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and even Hanoi Jane for the coveted title of “Hollywood’s Biggest Idiot.”

In the past, I’ve even taken to these pages to defend Alec as a performer.  But as amusing as he is on screen, the fact is that he is a moral illiterate who refuses to let his manifest ignorance hinder his desire to have himself taken seriously as something more than an actor. 

Alec wants to be just like Ronald Reagan, except he’s handicapped by some challenges the Gipper didn’t face – like being a leftist, a jerk and a fool.

The bloviating buffoon apparently got agitated because Georgia decided to execute a cop killer who had spent 22 years failing to convince any jury or judge that the overwhelming evidence against him was inadequate.  Ironically, the police officer Troy Davis finished off with a bullet to the head was an Army veteran – and judging from Alec’s attitude toward our warriors as manifested in his subsequent tweets, he probably thought that fact supported sparing the killer of Officer Mark MacPhail, Sr.

Here’s a selection of some of his inane tweets from his Twitter timeline.  Let’s see who fails to live up to Alec’s exacting standards!

Well, Michelle Malkin certainly does:

C’mon!! Let’s go all Town Hall on that supreme thinker @michellemalkin. A world class, crypto fascist hater!

Davis is dead Does that make you happier, @michellemalkin?

@macandroo @michellemalkin @michellemalkin… Like Palin, but even mire (sic) of a hater.

The ferocious Malkin doesn’t need any help defending herself from this hack’s semi-coherent ranting – though I did jump in through my Twitter account (feel free to review and follow) during the skirmishing to assist by kicking the trembling, twitching carcass Malkin had left behind. 

On the plus side, Malkin can now say she knows what it’s like to be treated like a movie star.  Unfortunately, that star is Kim Bassinger.

Alec doesn’t limit himself to new outrages either – he spices things up with some classics.  For example, he’s one guy who won’t let us forget the nightmare of the Bu$HitlerCheneyHaliburton regime no matter how many years President Obama has been in office:

When do Cheney and Rumsfeld go on trial for murder? Will that trial be in Texas? Georgia?

That’s a great question!  Their crimes include waging war in Iraq, waging war in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo open, and other wars in Somalia, Yemen and Libya!  Oh, wait….

Proving himself totally immune to irony, he also tweeted:

Obama….2012

But it’s not just a few Americans who don’t measure up to Alec’s standards – it’s all of us!

Troy Davis is still dead. The gulf is still contaminated. Fukushima is still radioactive. #wecraveignorancesowecanshoplikeamericans

Wait, I thought that a new day dawned in January 2009 where America was respected and loved again?

US death penalty humiliates us in the eyes of much of the world

Alec leaves unsaid the obvious question – who gives half a damn what the motley collection of corrupt, genocidal losers who make up much of the world think?

And Alec reserved special contempt for our troops:

Right-wingers always hide the shameful policies of their nutbag policies behind “supporting the troops.”

Gee, to the extent that I can decipher what it means to “hide the shameful policies of their nutbag policies,” from my vantage point as someone who did more than play one of the troops, I think right-wingers have been pretty damn supportive.  But why should Alec just limit himself to yapping about things he knows anything about – he must allow his mind to run free so he can provide us with the full benefit of his ignorance!

Then there are these gems:

..soldiers are doing their sacred duty at the direction of maniacs like Cheney. We struggle the longer you won’t face that.

You can support the troops and still face the fact that Cheney and Rumsfeld betrayed their country.

Interesting.  So, by carrying out Cheney and Rumsfeld’s nefarious plots, the troops therefore also “betrayed their country,” right?  Or are the troops too dumb to know what they are doing and therefore get a pass?  Alec, I need to know – are our troops morally bankrupt or just stupid?

—–

Hey, are the ones still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan still betraying their county, or did that change at some point?  Alec, I must have your moral guidance!  I mean, when I need a moral leader with an unerring sense of right and wrong, my first instinct is to seek out the guidance of a Hollywood star like you. 

That, or consult Chet, my talking unicorn.

Well, apparently our generation’s greatest moral referee has come to his conclusion:

Wonder if the McPhail family will seek death penalty for US leaders who killed thousands of US soldiers and countless innocent Iraqis

Wow.  Bravo, Alec – you’ve managed to simultaneously label our troops killers of “countless innocent Iraqis” while also trashing the murdered cop’s family, all in just 140 characters!   Yeah, I suspect the MacPhail family would have happily stayed out of the limelight, except the murderer you coddled kind of drew them into it by finishing off their husband and father by shooting him in the head

Oh, here’s my personal favorite of his Deep Thoughts:

@admiralwaugh US soldiers r brave n true. Their leadership is, by n large, borderline sociopathic. If u don’t have guts to face that……

Well, Alec, save your public “US soldiers r brave n true” line for the rubes.  At least have the guts to go full-troop hater.  You know you want to.

But you try to evade having to take a position that even your stunted moral sense tells you will expose you to the unbridled contempt of every decent American.  You hedge.  You embrace the classic troop-hater dodge of only despising (at least in public) the troops’ “leadership.”

You punk. I’ve been part of that leadership you slander in war and peace.  The leaders of our military, from the newest corporal to the highest general, day and night struggle to accomplish their missions while taking care of their troops.  They spend years away from home.  Many of them get hurt; some get killed.  But they “have the guts to face” America’s enemies and they don’t back down.

On the other hand, you call little girls “pigs” over the telephone.

Alec, you are unworthy of further discussion.  You’re not a thinker, you’re not scholar, and you’re not a man.  You’re a privileged clown without the common sense or the common decency to shut your pie hole about better men and women than you’ll ever be. 

You are nothing.  You are dismissed.  Get out.

INT.   HOLLYWOOD STUDIO CONFERENCE ROOM – DAY

“Hurt Locker” scribe MARK BOAL slams his mighty fist down hard on the conference room table, making the HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVES surrounding him jump in their leather seats.

MARK BOAL

Now listen up.  I don’t care about your liberal preconceptions and your smug certainty that you’re somehow better than those men and women out there in Afghanistan and Iraq just because you work in the movie industry and they actually work!

EXECUTIVE NO. 1

But, but…

MARK BOAL (pointing an accusing finger)

Put a sock in it, meat puppet!  You want to use those American heroes as a backdrop for some politician’s reelection campaign?  Well, you can take my Oscar and stick it in your Fonda-hole!  I’m not having any part of it!

Ed. Note:  We now pause for a photo of sensitive, introspective hipster Boal:

Big Hollywood has been all over the story of screenwriter Mark Boal’s collaboration with the Obama campaign’s usurpation of the work of our SEALs and other covert warriors in hunting down Osama bin Laden.  It’s outrageous – you know you’ve crossed a line in the sand of decency when even Jurassic liberal-saur Maureen Dowd seems creeped out by your shameless SEALS-ploitation.

As Big Hollywood has pointed out before, Boal is Hollywood’s go-to guy for sending the leftist message du jour about our troops.  When President Bush was in office and the party line was that fighting terrorists was a bad thing, Boal was there with In the Valley of Elah (2007).  That one painted our soldiers as hideous psychopaths driven crazy by the war, so nuts and evil they murdered one of their own because of, well, Bush or something.

But always one to be surfing the liberal zeitgeist, Boal caught the wave of supporting our troops with The Hurt Locker.  His script was superficially sympathetic to our warriors, but when you got past Kathryn Bigelow’s well-staged action scenes, all you had was an over-wrought fantasy that depicted our fearless bomb disposal troopers as unstable, undisciplined clowns.  The guy who claims Boal used him as material was not impressed either; he sued.

Not surprisingly, reinforcing Hollywood’s stereotypes about military people as alien, scary freaks, got Boal an Oscar.

Afterward, Boal went back to reporting and writing anti-soldier hit pieces like The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians for that Tiger Beat of the sagging baby boomer set, Rolling Stone magazine.  His laughable reporting drew a forceful rejoinder from the legendary Michael Yon (Calling BULLSHIT on ‘Rolling Stone’).

Yon is the real deal and trusted by the troops.  Yon’s column points out distortions and omissions in Boal’s reportage.  As a reporter, when you get the small things wrong, it’s no surprise when your big picture conclusions are just as flawed.  Not that the liberals whose prejudices his writing studiously reinforce care much about accuracy, but maybe Boal would be better off learning a little more about the organization he purports to write about and spending a little less effort cultivating the neo-hipster, tousled-hair-and-goatee look he’s been rocking in all those paparazzi pics.

Now comes a chance to work hand-in-hand with the Obama campaign to create a movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  Apparently, the hunt for Saddam Hussein was of no interest (or use) to Boal, it having taken place under the wrong president.

What are the chances that Boal won’t come through with what the liberal establishment wants?  About zero – he’s never let them down before.  With an October 12, 2012, release date, this is a transparent attempt to distract attention from the utter disaster the Administration’s ultra-liberals policies have inflicted upon the economy.  Boal, along with director Bigelow and the Obama-backing Sony studio, are eager to help.  Dollars to doughnuts, the focus of this tribute won’t be the men and women who risked their lives but the candidate who made the “gutsy call” that anyone else would have made too.

But then, Boal has made a career of meeting liberal expectations within his little niche as the Hollywood hipster who always writes just what his bosses want to hear about the military.

Boal rises from his chair and takes his Oscar in hand.

MARK BOAL

You make me sick.  I’m done with you.  I’m walking out of here and down to a Supercuts to get a high and tight and to get rid of this stupid hipster goatee.

EXECUTIVE NO. 1

Come back!  What will we do when we need someone to write another script pretending to support the troops while actually depicting them as psycho losers and mindless stooges of the Bu$hitler-Haliburton wars for oil?

MARK BOAL

It shouldn’t be hard to find someone else like that here in Hollywood.  After all, when you’re looking for a turd, what better place to look than a toilet?

Boal takes the OBAMA ’12 button off his jacket and tosses it on the table, then storms out the door and into the sunset. The button spins on the wood surface…..

FADE OUT.

Sadly, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

I don’t know about all dogs, but German Shepherds are bred to be highly focused, which helps explain some of their neurotic, obsessive/compulsive behavior such as digging, chewing, tail chasing, scratching, fixating on red laser points.

If they’re not working, they need to be doing “something”. It’s their ability to focus that keeps them on guard over a flock of sheep, maintaining the perimeter, preventing sheep from straying.

But they also like to focus on their master. They scrutinize every move and gesture I make. What am I doing? What next? Is he getting food? Can I have some? Does he look like he’s about to take us for a walk? He’s getting his car keys. Does that mean we go to the dog park or is he going away to the place where he brings back bags of food? Is he wanting to rub my belly? Huh? Please, can’t you see I’m asking you to with my eyes? Why’s he petting the other dog? What about me? My turn? Can I have some of your food?

The genius of dogs is their ability to read people.

A smart dog has the brain power of a two or three year old toddler which is part of what makes them charming and endearing – they seem like children, permanent children, but this is misleading. An adult German Shepherd is not like a child, but an animal with a set of instincts, built in duties it desires to perform: hunt, mate, nurture, protect – that a child knows little or nothing about.

A dog can go from being a complacent and sweet pet to a ferocious killer in a second, as I saw Ella do on one occasion.

Ella is a timid, self-contained creature. She doesn’t wrestle or mock fight with Lucy and Zoe, as they do with each other. She avoids them when they go into their roughhouse mode.

They all hate (love) squirrels and will chase one out of the yard, or follow one along the power lines in the back behind the house. Sometimes they’ll chase one into a small orange tree in the middle of the back yard, but Lucy and Zoe lose interest whereas Ella will maintain guard and vigil for hours, all day if necessary, in complete stillness as she waits for the squirrel to screw up enough courage to make a break for it so she can chase it once again.

Ella will lie in the house studying the back yard hoping a squirrel will make an appearance. If one does, she will signal her eagerness to get outside, and when I let her out, she is quiet and full of guile whereas Lucy and Zoe storm out the door barking and whining, never coming close to getting a good chase going.

Ella never gets bored and whiney like Zoe. If it isn’t raining, every day is an action day for Ella because there are squirrels in the world, and she just has to wait. 

I was walking Ella solo on a nice fall day. She was behaving well, staying at my knee, stopping when I stopped, following my hand gestures so that I relaxed, and enjoyed paying attention to the start of autumn in River Park, and its bright array of different foliage.

I hadn’t noticed that squirrels were out in force collecting food for winter, and being driven by that need so as to ignore close dangers such as a dog coming to within three feet of one of them.

Ella sprang at the squirrel and caught it by the neck and began shaking it like a rag.

“Stop! Ella!”

She did. She dropped the squirrel who dragged itself away on its front legs as if its spine was broken.

I was mortified. That poor little creature.

I looked at Ella. Her eyes were flush with excitement, her mouth open in grinning happiness, congratulating herself on her prowess, quickness, and ferocity.

I couldn’t rebuke her. She’d done nothing wrong, but had finally gotten to do what she was born to do, catch her dinner.

Yet, in a second she’d gone from a timid and docile pet to a lioness cutting out a wildebeest calf. Incredible. Nature, red in tooth and claw.

That’s one of the differences between a toddler and a domesticated wolf.

You can purchase “A Man with Three Great German Shepherds” at Amazon.

It took forty years, but I’m finally on a roll. In writing fiction, that is.

Back in 1970, I was an eighteen year old, budding virtuoso on acoustic fingerstyle guitar, the kind of stuff Leo Kottke and John Fahey were doing. I was poor, and figured that in order to develop my music as I desired, I’d need a separate income. I was going to junior college, and fell in love with creative writing. Foolishly (hey, I was young!), I became convinced I could make a good living as a writer, and decided to pursue that parallel to my practice of music.

You can hear some of my music here and watch a few videos here:

Fast forward to 9/11/2001. I’d already caught on to reading early bloggers like Instapundit when the monsters struck the Twin Towers. I was shaken and infuriated to the core, and then discovered I had coronary disease after a heart attack three days later. I recovered with two implanted stents. I was not yet fifty, had yet to make a dime on either my music or prose, and now I was feeling mortal, yet patriotic like never before. So I got on the bandwagon and began blogging as Sunny Days in Heaven, a conservative Catholic blog that attracted 50 or 60 readers on a good day. Never had an Instalanche.

I blogged a few years with diminishing returns, and was going to quit when a start-up, Spero News, asked me to contribute. Just then, a Hollywood promo agency decided that bloggers could help sell a movie, and began inviting them to screenings. Free movies? Sign me up.

The first movie I reviewed was the delightful and fun, Serenity. I predicted it would be a smash hit. That was not to be, alas. 

After few years reviewing a hundred or more films annually, 90% that I either disliked or hated, writing negative reviews wore me down, but the thought occurred: I could do better than what I was seeing. The chance of selling a spec script seemed much better than a literary novel. Very few first novels are published any year, and the authors get tiny advances (if at all). But Hollywood buys around 3000 scripts a year for good sums of money even if the stories are never converted to film.

I quickly wrote three (ahem, brilliant) screenplays, and got a brief nibble on one from a budding producer. The fact is, you have to be in LA to sell your stuff, and I couldn’t do that. Too old, too tired, and too unconnected. Late in life I learned you need to make a lot of friends and acquaintances in any business if you hope to succeed. You have to be in the game where the game is played.

The hell with it, then. I couldn’t not write, the juices were flowing, so I started writing funny and serious little novels for a conservative, tradition minded audience in the hope that the Right side of the media might take these things to heart and promote entertainment that encouraged and edified our side of the spectrum.

But there is no Regnery for conservative novelists. Neither National Review nor The New Criterion beats the bushes looking for the next Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. A few Christian agents nibbled on one of my stories. P. J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him) was kind enough to get his editor to read one manuscript (who passed it to his twenty-something asst. who pronounced it “entertaining and well written but I’ll pass”).

I kept writing fiction and pulling my few hairs out. I have to, I must write something commercial that everyone wants to read! That no one can pass on because it’s just too good to ignore.

And it came to me. Dog books do really well. Rescuing Sprite, Marley and Me were mega-hits.

I love dogs. I own dogs. I have two German shepherds. I had another one who died before these two. Okay. A story about my dogs. But what can they do? They just lie around the house. They don’t have adventures apart from the occasional squirrel chase and cat hunt.

Money. The story should involve money. Everyone cares about money. Since the last market crash, I finally bought some gold. What if the story was about dogs and real gold? Bingo! A Man with Three Great German Shepherds . . . and 1000 troy ounces of gold.

Logline: A retired Navy man with three beautifully trained German shepherds flees from Sacramento to Idaho with the IRS after his gold.

And I was off to the races. Agents loved the concept, my blurb and synopsis. But these three passed because their clients had dog books. These ten passed because it’s not an area they usually represent, but this one agent took the bait. He bit. “At last,” he said, “a Christian novelist who’s actually a fine writer first, and not like the Zondervan junk you always see.” We talked about signing a contract. 

A week later, he informs me that his colleagues have convinced him that the fine Christian writer he’s been looking for all this time won’t do well in the Christian market. No deal. But but but, I sputtered, “You don’t know what a market will bear until you test it.”

Sorry, Charlie.

The hell with you all. People are selling tens of thousands of ebooks by pricing them for 99 cents. I’ll hit every libertarian, Christian, conservative online e-zine or blog, and every dog loving group in existence and maybe, just maybe, even National Review might sit up, take a gander and notice there are other writers on our side beside Andrew Klaven, Vince Flynn, and Brad Thor.

When folks have decided they love A Man with Three Great German Shepherds, well, I’ve got a catalogue and more good stuff to come.

And if you love dogs, how can you resist this.

Ed. Note: Tomorrow and Wednesday we will run excerpts from “A Man with Three Great German Shepherds”. — JN

—–

Yeah, it kind of did that, I suppose.  Except I was too busy wondering why the central premise somehow had to be that American military personnel are sadistic, bloodthirsty, cold-blooded murderers.  Then I remembered that this is Hollywood.

Now, to talk about Super 8, I will have to reveal what some might call “spoilers.”  Except, they aren’t really “spoilers” because to be that the plot points I reveal would have to be unexpected and surprising.  Sadly, Super 8 adopts the same tiresome clichés that have been wrecking Hollywood films for the last 40 years.  The only surprise was the total lack of any surprise.

What do we have? Crazy, evil military officer as the baddie?  Check!  Kid with daddy issues?  Check!  Climax where the hero rescues the girl from monster’s lair?  Check!  Monster that is the real victim even though he’s freaking killing US military people and eating civilians left and right?  Check?

Let me throw something out there.  The premise here is the space monster crash lands on Earth, then the Air Force gets him and won’t let him leave, and the monster gets mad, then escapes, and it’s all the fault of the mean colonel who was keeping him that the monster is devouring people.  Maybe I’m biased after two deployments, but a character kills an American soldier onscreen and my sympathy meter drops into the red – Avatar, I am looking at you too.  Maybe the cinematic deaths of some American military folk might be no biggie in Tinseltown, but some of us take it personally.  Perhaps I’ll drop J.J. Abrams a line and invite him to the next memorial I have to attend.

Am I overreacting?  Maybe.  I can see the misdirection of the counterargument – “Crazy Conservative Says ‘Super 8’ Promotes Killing Soldiers!”  What you won’t see is a good explanation of why our own troops almost always end up as the bad guys.  Perhaps the Hollywoodoids don’t see anything wrong with making US military people the villain so often.  After all, most of them have nothing but contempt for soldiers despite their poses to the contrary, and US military people won’t send a suicide bomber into your Beverly Hills offices – unlike certain real villains who liberals won’t dare name.

Hollywood can make the movies it wants – the First Amendment is one of the things I made a miniscule contribution to protecting.  But I can refuse to waste my money on a movie that depicts American servicemembers as psychos who literally murder American citizens in cold blood.  And so can you.

Look at the far superior Close Encounters.  The American military is an obstacle to the hero, not a malignant enemy.  There, the military (and other agencies) are trying to make contact with the aliens; the military is benignly keeping folks away from Devil’s Tower.  But in Super 8, they murder them – and that’s not an off-hand, one-time event but a key plot point.  The American military have somehow become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys (though there are welcome exceptions like Battle: Los Angeles and even Speilberg’s own Saving Private Ryan), but we don’t have to sit back in our seats like zombies and take it.

Disgusting slander of our folks in uniform aside, Super 8 has some other significant problems.  First, it’s slow.  Way too slow.  There’s a lot of talking and most of it is about feelings.  I don’t go to summer movies to be babbled at about people’s ungovernable emotions.  I go to escape people babbling at me about their stupid feelings.

Second, the movie makes no sense.  Zero.  Things happen not because they would happen but because they have to happen to facilitate the plot.  Here’s an example:  A key point is the heroine’s father missed a shift at work at the steel mill, which the hero’s mother took and where she was killed in an accident.  The heroine’s father comes to the wake and the hero’s father – a deputy – arrests him.  Huh?  Punch him maybe, but arrest him?  Well, it makes a good visual I guess, but it makes no sense.  The rest of the movie is similar – totally bizarre things just kind of occur and everyone just nods and moves on.  “All the dogs have left town, stuff’s exploding and a bunch of people are missing – yep, sounds like a good time to share our feelings!”

And the alien has all these powers – he scares all the dogs out of town, makes lights go on and off, and can dig enormous caverns without generating any huge piles of dirt.  I’m guessing he can also probably make the Earth cool, the oceans recede and keep unemployment under 8% by spending a trillion bucks.  Regardless, none of these magical abilities make sense.  Oh, he is the size of a Mac truck but he’s harder to spot than “Where’s Waldo” when he cruises around town – no one ever sees him as he steals entire auto engines, microwave ovens and whole junkyards.  I like how the hero constantly hears it loudly banging around town, the noise echoing across the burg, but no one else seems to notice.  And then, for some reason, the city water tower turns into a space ship.  Whatever.  I should have pounded a couple of my usual pre-movie Dos Equis – it may have made more sense.

Oh, and the alien eats the regular, hard-working citizens of Lillian, Ohio, which no one seems to think is a big problem.  See, the alien says he was oppressed, so whatever he does is excusable.  In this way, Super 8 is the ultimate liberal morality tale.  The alien says he was oppressed, the message goes, so you decent folk can just pick up the tab.  How dare you object to being used as cattle – didn’t you hear?  The alien said he was oppressed.  Shut up and take whatever happens to you.  Substitute getting munched by a space spider with being forced to pay ever higher taxes to support subsidies to the Democrats’ favored deadbeat constituencies and Super 8 becomes – quite unwittingly – a Tea Party manifesto.  To liberals, the devastation inflicted on normal people for the benefit of their chosen special interests is just well-deserved collateral damage.

Let me sound off on one other thing – I’m throwing my beer at the screen if I see one more scene where a character sneaks into the villian’s lair to rescue his girlfriend and, instead of getting the hell out, they stand there and hug and start babbling about  – yeah, you guessed it – their damn feelings.  Maybe your emotional breaktrhough can wait until you’re away from the intergalactic tarantula.  Oh, and the intergalactic tarantula looks kind of doofy; we could be reaching the limits of what CGI can do.  It also looks way too much like the Cloverfield creature, though, considering it is J.J. Abrams, that may not be unintentional.

All I wanted was to recapture some of the magic of those exciting, technically breathtaking movies I grew up with.  It sure looked like them – the cinematography was right out of the Spielbergian playbook.  The plucky youngsters were engaging too, though none are memorable except for Elle Fanning as the teen heroine.  She’s going to be a HUGE star, mark my words.

In the end, I could have gotten past the flaws and enjoyed Super 8 except for the relentless trashing of the men and women who, frankly, made it possible with their blood and sacrifice.  After 40 years of this nonsense, I’m bored and I’m disgusted with it.  I still haven’t seen Avatar because of how it slimes my fellow vets, and had we known what Super 8 would do (which the trailer carefully obscures) the Hot Wife and I wouldn’t have dropped $38.50 on it. 

You can make all the military-trashing films you want to, Hollywood – you’re welcome for the freedom to do so, by the way – but in the future you can count me and my money out.  And I bet I’m not the only one.

His current anti-soldier hit piece, The Kill Team, is about a group of disgraceful scumbags in Afghanistan who decided to murder several civilians.  With it, Boal seems to be following his tried and true formula – write something for publication in a past-its-prime magazine that makes American troops look like cro-magnons then work to turn it into a movie.  He took a Playboy article on Americans murdering each other and soon we had In the Valley of Elah.  You may have seen it – though the odds are stacked against it.  It was ignored by popular demand.

Another article, this one on bomb disposal experts, became The Hurt Locker, which took some of the bravest and most dedicated people in our armed forces and made them out as undisciplined, drunken, unprofessional clowns.  In fact, Boal got sued by one of the guys he allegedly wrote about.  To be fair, it did win an Academy Award . . . from the same band of geniuses who passed over Saving Private Ryan in favor of Shakespeare In Love and once picked as “Best Song” the unforgettable hit “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”  So, there’s that.

Boal’s technique is to chronicle the most degenerate fringes of the warfighters’ experience and repackage the most sordid episodes as its totality.  One can easily imagine the Rolling Stone editors eager for the chance to please their dwindling audience of aging Garfunkel-digging hippies and Chomsky-devouring clove-smokers with another prejudice-reinforcing piece about how those Middle-American Army guys are barely one step above gorillas.  Rolling Stone even promises a glimpse at the grim photos the mean old Pentagon doesn’t want you to see – as if there was some moral imperative for the military to provide gist for the jihadi propaganda mill.  Hey, that’s Boal and Rolling Stones’ job!

What is particularly cunning in his approach is that there is no excuse for the crimes these savages committed, and Boal uses this fact to deflect any kind of perspective.  Hundreds of thousands of young, heavily-armed and stressed American men and women have served overseas since 9/11.  Several dozen have murdered people.  You won’t find any city in America with a murder rate like that for that demographic. 

Michael Yon, who has embedded with the unit involved, sums up his feelings in the title of his response: “Calling BULLSHIT on ‘Rolling Stone’”.  Unlike the chaotic rabble Boal imagines, the unit Yon embedded with was squared away and effective.  Yon’s critique of the story is devastating and deserves a close read.  And Yon knows what he is talking about; in contrast, when Boal makes obvious errors, like referring to a battalion commander as the “battalion chief,” he self-identifies as a poser.   

For his part, Boal chooses to focus on one squad out of dozens, a handful of losers out of several thousand in a Stryker brigade, and to subtly extrapolate that the entire brigade was on some sort of rampage.  His article contains lots of hints about a greater, grander conspiracy, but offers nothing like convincing evidence to anyone familiar with either the law or the military.  In fact, it was the Army that investigated every aspect of the case.  The murderers are going to jail for decades, yet he leaves the impression that there was some sort of collective shrug of the shoulders on the part of the Army – despite the fact that the Army uncovered, investigated and prosecuted the case long before ace reporter Mark Boal appeared on the scene with Final Draft loaded on his iPad.

What’s missing from Boal’s article is the usual implication that these murders are simply a manifestation of some sort of malignant wink and nod from the very highest echelons of power.  Of course, with the Bu$Hitler/Cheney-satan cabal out of power, instead of the evil originating in the Halliburton-spawned machinations of the neo-con White House, today it simply bubbles up from the poisonous minds of those poor, benighted Americans unfortunate enough not to be born in New York City and who enlist for the sole purpose of living out their homicidal fantasies.  Boal’s nothing if not fully in tune with the expectations of his Hollywood masters.

Of course, there’s plenty of innuendo in there about the officer corps too; if he’s going to sell the screenplay, he needs some villains and the killers themselves are already slotted as the designated victims of a murderous American culture.  Boal describes ominously how the brigade commander, a decorated colonel, has critiqued the current counter-insurgency strategy.  Now, being part of the liberal media establishment, Boal is probably not used to the idea of diversity of thought.  Since he and all his friends think exactly alike, he probably can’t conceive that within the military community and its many professional journals there is a healthy and invaluable debate about the best way to fight a guerrilla war. 

The fact is that an infantry squad leader – the toughest job in the Army and one that should only be entrusted to leaders of the highest moral caliber – appears to have carefully surrounded himself with a small collection of thugs and weak-willed pawns and lived out his sick fantasies in a combat zone.  He is a disgrace to every NCO who ever wore stripes.  He and his band of misfits did their best to exploit the understandable and justified leeway given to troops in a hostile fire zone to hide their crimes.  Boal seems to see this tragedy as his next film credit; unfortunately, the American men and women in Afghanistan will be paying the price for these criminals’ actions – amplified by Boal’s breathless reporting – for a long time. 

The real story of American warriors in Afghanistan is one of courage and compassion, of bravery in the face of almost overwhelming challenges.  You won’t see that in Boal’s article or his movies.  The truth is off-message.  The truth doesn’t pay.

Let me share a story from Desert Storm 20 years ago that sums up the truth about American soldiers.  The ground war had just started and I had to go out to a field hospital in the middle of the desert to take care of some business.  I was in a tent with a young specialist who had – as American troops will do – decked it out pretty nicely.  Among his amenities, he had a small fridge packed with sodas running off a generator. 

There was an announcement that a Blackhawk was inbound with a lightly wounded Iraqi prisoner – the big, bad Army sent a crew in a multi-million dollar chopper forward to pick up an enemy with a minor injury to take him to an American hospital for treatment.  The specialist thought for a moment, went into his fridge and grabbed a Coke.  Then he looked at me and said, “Do you think he’d want one of these?”

That’s an American fighting man – an unequalled warrior in battle yet compassionate and kind when the shooting stops.  I’ve seen it.  Millions of other vets have seen it.  Millions of civilians all over the world have seen it – in fact, they are seeing it as we speak.  But we won’t see that in Boal’s next opus.  Boal knows what sells in Hollywood, and it sure as hell isn’t the truth.

The good news first – there’s no pinko sucker punch in The American despite the presence of chatty progressive George Clooney in the title role.  Sure, there’s a tiny bit of the hackneyed “American learns about life from the earthy foreigners who truly know how to live” cliché, but not much.  Now the bad news:  Not only is there no sucker punch but there’s no punch at all.

—–

This is a technically well-written script by Rowan Joffe that tells a story that made me want to lick my finger and stick it in a socket to jump start my soul.  Stop me if you’ve heard this before, which pretty much means stop me now.  Clooney plays a hit man who “wants out” and hides in an Italian village while he puts together his One Last Job.  He interacts with a few locals, sips coffee, acts paranoid, and awaits the series of twists and betrayals everyone sees coming a mile away.  Arrivederchi, two hours of your life.

I almost wish that the script had empowered Clooney’s Hollywood lib instincts so I could have felt something while reading the script other than the same exhausted ennui that the main character is supposed to feel.  Yeah, he’s burned out and morally and emotionally bereft.  We get it.  I mean, we’ve only seen this movie and this character, what . . . 500 times?  Except this one is hiding out in the same soul-regenerating village Italian countryside we’ve seen in, what . . . 500 other movies? 

Call it Clash of the Cliches.  Too bad they never actually unleash the kraken.

Let’s catalog some of the other clichés:

Car chase through village?  Check.

Envelope of cash handed over at restaurant?  Check.

Covert bad guy following anti-hero who could not be more obvious if he wore a neon sign reading “Hi! I’m Jeff, the disposable evil hit man coming after you!”  Check.

And we get lots of scenes of Clooney’s character making a special assassination weapon of a very specific make and model that is utterly inappropriate for the detailed specifications the plot provides.  I note the trailer shows him with a different, much more appropriate type of rifle.  So it’s got that going for it.

The rest of the script though . . . .  Clooney goes to a café.  Clooney does exercises.  Clooney talks on a pay phone.  Clooney trades portentous, pseudo-significant insights with a priest.  Yeah, you’re burned out.  Yeah, you’re morally empty.  Yeah, we get it.  Now will somebody please freaking DO SOMETHING BESIDES SIT AROUND TALKING ABOUT THE SAD STATE OF HIS SOUL!

We never find out much the anti-hero’s back-story, which is okay because we really don’t care.  His tattoo reveals that he is ex-Special Forces, because, as we know, all Green Berets leave the Army to join that giant high-priced international hit man industry we somehow never hear about in real-life.  If in reality half as many people were employed as high-priced, professional assassins as Hollywood movies depict, the unemployment rate would only be 9% and the Administration would point to it as evidence the stimulus is working.

Maybe it’s time to stop making movies about the trials and tribulations of a group of people that doesn’t really exist.  Most real-life “hit men” seem to be border-line degenerates shooting somebody’s husband or another petty criminal for $2,500 bucks which they never get to spend before the police round them up.  Unless I’ve missed the epidemic of politicians, international businessmen and such being eliminated by uncatchable pros, stories about the moral turmoil and emotional troubles of a secret breed of jet-setting assassins seems kind of pointless.  Maybe instead we can get some equally relevant movies that dare explore the secret lives of unicorns or delve into leprechaun relationship issues.

So, the story is boring – though the script is technically proficient and evocative, meaning that I could clearly and fully visualize all of the tired, hackneyed clichés.  On the plus side, other than the “You Americans don’t know how to live life” crap, it’s not political.  It’ll be equally dull for adherents of every political stripe. 

Also a plus, it will be directed by the talented Anton Corbijn, last seen directing the very cool Joy Division movie Control (for a sample of Corbijn’s visual style, check out its awesome trailer).  Terrifyingly, a true story about a Goth band and its lead singer’s eventual suicide has more laughs than this script does, which is to say at least one.

And there’s another upside – there’s a hot Italian girl character in it and pretty much every scene she’s in has her taking off her clothes.  I don’t mean just once or twice.  I mean this gal makes Lindsay Lohan look like a particularly repressed Amish chick during Sunday school.  So, Clooney gets to pick up a big paycheck for hanging out in the Italian countryside surrounded by hot naked girls (yeah, there’s more than one), so I can see what was in The American for him.  Unfortunately, I still can’t see what’s supposed to be in it for the rest of us.

It was the Reagan era, and I wanted no part of it, or it’s popular films. Looking back I realize that I was probably too hard on both the President and the genre. Most of my opposition to Reagan was his crackdown on drugs, and that probably came from his youth. In old Hollywood, it was the communists who tended to be dope fiends, so in his mind there was a correlation. (Come to think of it, most of the dope fiends in MY youth were communists as well.)

Looking back I realize that I agree with much of what Reagan stood for. His opposition to an ever growing government, matches mine; and his love for America’s promises of freedom prosperity and liberty, are things I cherish as well. Today, I can also enjoy a good action film.

I still remember going to see Rambo: First Blood Part II at a drive-in movie with a girl who was in the Army Reserve. She loved it, but all I could do was mock the picture. I didn’t understand the patriotism she felt watching the Vietnam War won by a man who went back fighting to win, without the bureaucracy holding him back.

I thought the film was quite stupid. At the time I was more of an art-film fanatic. I wanted a film that was dark and dreary and ended with questions unresolved. I really liked David Lynch. Needless to say, the date ended badly; there was no reason for me to be in a drive-in that night.

I was a post-punk. Much like my compatriots, I rebelled against everything American, without even stopping to think what it meant to be an American. As I grew older I realized that few places outside of this country gave its citizens the ability to make total asses out of themselves. I had the freedom to dress stupid, and the freedom to say stupid things onstage. I even had the freedom to watch long monotonous pictures, which someone had the freedom to make.

Now that I’m older, and a little less serious, I look back on the action films as the comic book films of their day. Sure they were silly, and you had to suspend your disbelief, but not nearly as much as you do today, when you are forced to pretend that Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon are tough guys.

They were done without computer effects, million dollar car crashes, or latex costumes to give the girlish male lead a masculine physique. Back in those days, when you saw a guy jump off of a building, you knew that a real human being actually jumped off of a building. (And if the shot got messed up, he did it twice.)

Much like my comedy at the time, I didn’t realize that the sole purpose of entertainment was to be entertaining. It’s okay to suspend the rules of physics for a couple hours and imagine a world where good guys are shot at for two straight hours, only receiving a couple of glancing wounds; and bad guys all suffer painfully horrible deaths, falling in slow motion.