Chief Chris Kyle was a Navy Seal for ten years. He served four combat tours in Iraq, earned numerous medals, saved countless lives and accomplished more than most men walking around in this great country ever will. He has now retold his experiences in the new autobiography “American Sniper,” which hits book shelves today.

Chief Kyle tells his story in what must be dubbed a “no bull” manner. He has little time for political correctness or even political incorrectness. He’s certainly not a writer. But that is what makes what is written so good and his story so compelling. Chief Kyle ignores irony and trying to push either a political agenda or an emotional one. He simply writes his story. The emotions and everything else come naturally through. You can feel Chief Kyle sitting in a chair allowing us the privilege of hearing his story, his story of bravery. Bravery is too clichéd a word, though. What Chief Kyle experienced is beyond bravery. His pureness in his patriotism, his Christianity, his need for battle, his love for family breathes a freshness into the words on each page. Chief Kyle gives himself to us for 379 pages despite already giving us so much.

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Let’s be honest. Movies, today, aren’t just one step away from being left wing propaganda, they just plain suck.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

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Rock and roll and Islam seem about as compatible as oysters and cheesecake, yet probably to the surprise of many Americans, there is a solid (although perhaps not yet omnipresent) rock presence in the Middle East. Canada’s Vice Films sent a crew under Suroosh Alvi to Iraq in 2006 to document a concert by a heavy metal band, “Acrassicauda,” whom they had been following since 2003. And, yes, Virginia, they did play heavy metal.

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Alvi has a running under-commentary about the on-going ubiquitous Iraq war, which was strangely (and refreshingly) undefined and unfocused. Certainly a critical view of America’s actions underscored the shots of bombed out hotels, of guard checks, and most of all, of the stories told by the band members. “Firas” (who knows if these were real names, given security issues) the bass player, spoke the best English and thus became the central character; “Tony,” the lead guitarist, though hyped as a spectacular talent, was barely average by western standards. “Marwan,” the drummer, and “Faisal,” the second vocalist that Alvi talked to (the first having fled to Syria) offered occasional pity comments. According to Marwan, “if you can teach every prisoner to play drums . . . you’re gonna have good citizens. . . .” (Here in the United States, I think we have tried that by having them do laundry or make license plates. Not sure if that’s worked yet.) (more…)

Few franchises have had a steeper fall than the Alien series. In 1992 Alien³ appeared to near-universal derision. James Cameron nailed the essential problem when he said, “[director David] Fincher pissed me off by killing off Newt, Hicks, and Bishop, essentially trashing the entire ending of Aliens in the first few minutes of Alien³.” Absolutely correct. In the place of Cameron’s great characters, Fincher’s film substituted Sigourney Weaver’s wacky desire to have her character die, use no guns, and (in effect) “make love” to the aliens. The result was catastrophic.

And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”

For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.

It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.” (more…)

What’s not to love about Hollywood? They know exactly what the American people are looking for in a thriller: negative commentary about a war we’re  presently engaged in. And it’s not just that we American moviegoers are absolutely panting for yet another artistically bankrupt anti-Iraq commentary that will make no money, it’s that patriotic Americans everywhere also love to see an ongoing war and those fighting it criticized at every opportunity — especially through the all-powerful medium of the motion picture.

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These Hollywoodists sure have their finger on the pulse of  We The People and those of you still willing to argue about how this industry is driven as much by profit as ideology, may do so in the comments….

AICN: [emphasis mine]:

This is the pure fiction story of Paul Conroy, a truck driver in Iraq whose convoy is ambushed, and who wakes up in a coffin, buried alive. I went to the public screening of this one, and director Rodrigo Cortes gave a lively introduction where he questioned the psychological state of any audience wanting to see an hour and a half film of a man in a box. Then he brought out what he described as “The entire cast of BURIED: Ryan Reynolds!” …  (more…)

Slash Film’s Peter Sciretta:

For seven months now, we’ve been hearing about the secret next-film for The Wachowski Brothers, a Hard-R rated ‘cinema verite-style gay romance Iraq war film set in the near future. We’ve been getting tidbits every couple months, but all we know is the film tells the story of a homosexual relationship between a US soldier and an Iraqi and that it is set in the near future, but then moves back in time to tell the bulk of the story, part of which includes the current Iraq War.  Last we heard, the script was completed and the Wachowskis want to direct.

Production Weekly is reporting that casting has begun for the project with Lora Kennedy, the casting director of Speed Racer, Romeo Must Die, Swordfish, The Boondock Saints, and Tombstone. …

You might recall that late last year, Arianna Huffington (co-founder of the liberal news website The Huffington Post) published a few tweets claiming that she was shooting a part in a secret Wachowskis Brothers film, a movie about the Iraq War, from the perspective of the future. We wouldn’t have believed it but Huffington posted photos from the set, one of which features Andy Wachowski and Wachowski brother turned sister Lana Wachowski. (more…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see). (more…)

In the comments to Big Hollywood’s recent post about the box office catastrophe that is “The Green Zone,” one frequent poster, and noted leftist, gave us a “teachable moment.”

In a nutshell, this poster said that the antithesis to “The Green Zone,” and diatribes of that ilk, would be some dim witted, cheer leading, Michael Bay style action movie where the Arabs are sneering villains and the American G.I.’s are square jawed pretty boys out to save the world.

Where does one begin?

His post reinforces the primary myth that drives all debate in our country. The central conceit is that leftist ideology is “complex,” “educated,” “nuanced” etc. Conservative and libertarian ideology is “simplistic,” “black and white,” and often times driven by superstitious religious beliefs and not “hard facts and science.” To suppose that the “conservative” version of “The Green Zone” is a movie like 1986’s “Delta Force” misses the point…big time.

As a quick side note, Menahem Golan’s “Delta Force” kicks ass. I recommend it highly.

What is silly about this narrative, especially in the discussion of “The Green Zone” is that it not only knocks conservative ideas, principals, and factual evidence down a few pegs, but it elevates leftist ideas far beyond their merit. (more…)

It’s hard to say this, but say it I must: one of the reasons that so many current conservative films don’t get distribution or gain success is that they stink.  You heard that right.  Many of them simply suck.

Yes, political bias is the main reason conservative films don’t get distribution; there are a ton of crappy liberal films that get distribution.  But that doesn’t change the fact that some of the most highly publicized conservative modern entrees into the field of film have been total artistic and popular bombs.

Filmmaker Michael Pack

When a conservative film gets made that is actually high quality, it’s a surprise.  So when I saw new documentary, The Last 600 Meters, I was shocked.  It’s gripping, engrossing, enthralling.  It’s a movie every American should see.

The Last 600 Meters tells the story of the two deadliest battles of the Iraq war — the Battles of Fallujah and Najaf — from the perspective of the soldiers who fought in them.  We see through their eyes – the footage and stills were taken during the actual battle.  We meet the strong, resilient, sensitive and brave men and women of the armed services who do the fighting and the killing and the dying that we won’t do. (more…)

There are few things I hate more in life than movie trailers that give away the entire plot of a movie. One of the things I do hate more is the modern Hollywood war movie, which is invariably anti-war and, worse, reflexively anti-American or anti-troop.

So when I saw the previews for the new film “Brothers,” I was doubly annoyed. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in the egregiously offensive anti-American film “Rendition” (2007), as well as fellow liberal loudmouth Natalie Portman in addition to Tobey Maguire, “Brothers” had a trailer that seemed to scream out the entire plot: A soldier (played by Maguire) was presumably killed in battle in Afghanistan, which lead to an affair between his widow (Portman) and ne’er-do-well brother (Gyllenhaal) as the brother steps up to help her and her children recover from their loss.

The affair is then disrupted by the fact that Maguire is alive after all, his return heralded in the ads by horror-movie music that makes it look like the entire rest of the movie will center on him being a psychopathic animal, ultimately having a showdown with police in which he screams, “Shoot me!” (more…)

Santa Cruz to Carmel:

Nice spot for dinner

What can you say about a day in the saddle that anyone in the world would love to experience?  The icing on the cake was a dinner at Clint Eastwood’s Carmel Mission Ranch. The whole day was about as good a day as anyone could imagine. The weather was perfect, the ride less hilly than the day before, and the riders were stating to gel. Nate continued to impress everyone as he looks to become the first R2R participant to handcycle from SF to LA. (more…)

So while chuckleheads like Jesse Jackson and Senator Roland Burris hilariously blame George Bush for Chicago losing the 2016 Olympics, whiny columnists like Mike Lupica are up in arms that conservatives might be gloating over President Obama’s big screw-up. Apparently laughing at all this is somehow anti-American, because Obama is our President, and he was doing this for all of us.

You know… kind of like when Bush was trying win a war in Iraq – and all those left wingers stood behind him.

And that’s my first point: The right has every right to gloat over Obama’s humiliation, because, thankfully, NO ONE DIED. Unlike, say during the Iraq war, where, whenever there was a roadside bombing, the progressives did their own special victory dance – using the consequences of war to gloat over an embattled president and an unpopular country. I didn’t hear much of the smarmy press calling them out. (more…)

Filmmaker George Romero has had exactly one good idea in his life: the original, 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead. Since then, he has been coasting on a reputation as a maker of smarter than average horror films. Although he has made some good movies since Night of the Living Dead, few of his films have above par for the horror genre, and the average quality of horror films in the decades since his breakthrough movie is a very low bar to surpass. 

In particular, Romero has revisited the zombie film in quite a few movies over the years, usually providing the press with some serious intellectual/social/political commentary his latest film is supposed to make. So it is once again with his new film, the Venice Film Festival entry Survival of the Dead. Reuters reports that Romero, age 69, said his new film deals with questions about when it’s right to go to war:  (more…)

06 June 2009
Filed From Chaghcharan, Afghanistan

Overview

Until recently, Afghanistan was called “The Forgotten War.” The dramatic domestic, regional, and international politics of the Iraq war largely eclipsed the fact that our people were fighting just as hard in Afghanistan. Although we’re paying attention to AfPak now, off the radar screen an important and related fight has been unfolding in the Philippines.

At the invitation of the Philippine government, the U.S. maintains about 600 troops, including Army Green Berets, Civil Affairs, and Military Information Support teams, Navy SEALS and Seabees, along with Air Force personnel and Marines.  Our military forces are deployed in six locations: Zamboanga, Mindanao, Jolo, Basilan, Tawi Tawi, and a small number of liaison staff on Luzon. Their mission is to help the Armed Forces of the Philippines eliminate terrorist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group and to prevent them from establishing safe havens from which to train other terrorists, both internal and external. (more…)

I just wanted to drop a quick note to all members of the extended military family: active duty personnel, veterans and those who stay behind to keep the home fires warm.

Thank you.

To those on active duty, I say thank you for your continued service. Many of you signed up knowing full well that there are two shooting wars going on. That takes a special kind of guts. Your performance in defense of freedom continues to be an inspiration to me, personally. Thank you.

To all the veterans, I remind you that your service and sacrifice have not gone forgotten. Whether you served in war or in peace, you had a hand in keeping America safe from some of largest threats in history. You also, by your very existence, kept other dangers from materializing. Thank you. (more…)

I lost the biggest job I ever had as talk show host on KFI in Los Angeles largely because I called out another host on the station for flip flopping on the Iraq war in a move that I was sure was designed to pander to the audience who at the time had been duped by the media into thinking the effort was a failure.

While I have suffered greatly because of this stance I took, I have tried hard to not complain too much about what happened because I know to do so would be embarrassingly selfish and shortsighted. After all, the tiny risk I took and the price I paid is absolutely nothing in comparison the risk that every single member of our military takes on a regular basis and the real price that far too many are forced to pay every single day. (more…)

The Ride 2 Recovery kicked-off today with a ride from the National Memorial Parade to Manassas. The 50 mile journey, with about 2,000′ of climbing, would take the riders down the beautiful George Washington Parkway, past Mount Vernon and the west to the town of Manassas.

250,000 people lined the route

The Parade features many Military groups and R2R was honored to be a part of such a great event.

The riders left the Parade area and headed down the GW parkway under the usually great escort of the American Legion Riders. (more…)

Note:  Part 1 of this 4 part interview can be found here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

J.R. Head:  I felt that one of the most important things about the film was that it allows the folks that are left behind, the friends and loved ones, to get a glimpse of a soldier’s everyday life.  I served during relative peacetime but, even for me, it was difficult to explain what my day was like to my girlfriend, to my family… They were always imagining something bad happening.  And, let’s face it, peacetime or wartime, sometimes bad stuff happens.  We train hard, there are accidents and sometimes people die but for the most part you’re just doing your job.  I felt like “Brothers at War” gives folks a good look at what really goes on and allows them to relax a little bit.  Y’know, there’s not, say, a mortar attack every five minutes. 

“Brothers at War” Director, Jake Rademacher:  It’s a great tool for a soldier to allow loved ones a window, a good look at what life is like for them during a deployment. (more…)