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.

“American Sniper” does not follow a regular narrative. There are no larger story arcs: no beginning, middle or end. “American Sniper” is a man’s story, and that man’s life continues, so it doesn’t follow a typical storytelling narrative. Chief Kyle tells us about everything from meeting his wife and BUD/S training to knocking out a rather famous former Navy SEAL who wouldn’t keep his conspiracy theories to himself. He also takes us deep into his deployments to Iraq. He guides us through his major kills as a sniper and the major firefights his platoon found themselves in (believe me, there are plenty).

The book also provides us with occasional thoughts from Mrs. Kyle. She provides her experiences during the Chief’s deployments and the difficulty of raising a family with a Navy SEAL father and husband. In fact, the contrast of the peace of family and the hectic danger of war become contrasting themes in the book. Chief Kyle is open and honest about his back-to-back deployments straining his marriage and how his decision to eventually leave the Navy was a conflicted one, but saved both his marriage and possibly his own life.

But the book never makes these contrasting themes the focal point. This is Chief Kyle’s story. He’s a Navy SEAL, a father, a husband and he has the most confirmed kills of any military sniper. However, what really matters to him are his brothers in arms. Chief Kyle constantly talks of his affection for those who serve, especially his brother SEALs. He says he served America during his deployments, not Iraq. But this, alas, is also not the focal point of the book. “American Sniper” isn’t about Chief Kyle’s viewpoints on the Iraq war or anything else. In fact, he’s too much of a non BS-er to get involved with the foibles of politics, which is a good thing for the reader.

“American Sniper” provides us with a firsthand look at the Iraq war and war and warriors in general. Chief Kyle speaks bluntly and openly. The book takes us deep into enemy territory where we can observe the actions of him and his platoon mates. He never offers apologies and he shouldn’t have to. Everything he does is for the good of the country, and we are all the better for it.

“American Sniper” is a great way to kick off your 2012 reading year. Its blunt style gives it both personality and insight and, most importantly, a great technique to tell the story. Chief Kyle is a real life hero. He’s the guy they make movies about, though he seems to deny this repeatedly. He constantly pushes the adoration towards his fellow SEALs and service men, and his genuine modesty only make him more noble. Pick up “American Sniper” if you want a tough-as-nails account of the war on terror or a tough-as-nails account of a true warrior, because this is both.

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.

Stephen Hunter, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Tom Clancy, Frank Miller, James Ellroy, and Andrew Klavan. These are just a handful of names of today’s top fiction writers. All of them have something in common: they have, admittedly, right leaning politics and philosophies. This does not mean that their books are some kind of weird right-wing propaganda. What it means is that their stories usually make the bad guys who the bad guys really are and their heroes don’t shy away from masculinity or righteous indignation. These writers also have something else in common: they are all New York Times bestselling authors. Try out Stephen Hunter’s new novel Soft Target. It’s a hundred times better and more visually striking than any new action film to hit theaters in the last year. Or try Andrew Klavan’s last adult thriller, The Identity Man. It’s more thought-provoking and more well thought out than any half-baked political thriller cooked up by George Clooney. These writers lead the fiction front in literature today. They put out bestsellers that frequently win acclaim from critics.

As for non fiction…now we are really getting to the heart of the beast. Look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and you are bound to see a plethora of conservative thought. While Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham are regularly blasted in the mainstream media, they regularly put out bestsellers. Others do too. In fact, most non-fiction political books that hit shelves are written by conservatives. Why this phenomenon and why now? Is it that conservatives have been turned away by Hollywood so they have retreated to the inner workings of books? Or is it because right-leaning artists and right-leaning thinkers need more than a 90-minute film to bring across a message and/or story?

Perhaps films are more representative of a liberal approach to storytelling, while writing is a more conservative approach. Films are a collected effort. They takes hundreds, if not, thousands of people to create, and usually have a vision that is compromised by too many cooks in the kitchen. Books, on the other hand, are a celebration of individualism. It takes one person to sit and put his vision down. Maybe this is the explanation, but maybe not.

But whatever it may be, this much is true: if you hit up your local bookstore or head over to Amazon, you’ll find a world of old school storytelling and right-leaning stories. John Wayne and his films ain’t dead, they just grew up. They exist in an entirely new world: the world of books.

Check out footage from the latest Tea Party rally and you’ll see people holding signs referencing classics like 1984 by George Orwell and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Check out footage of the latest Occupy Wall Street rally and you’ll see people wearing “V for Vendetta” masks. That says it all.

So Anthony Maschek is a student at Columbia University – where he’s studying economics.

But he’s also a veteran of the Iraq War.

He was recently awarded a Purple Heart, after being shot 11 times in Iraq. He spent two years at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and still has to get around in a wheelchair.

He sounds like a pretty amazing guy – someone you’d want to buy a beer or two, given the chance.

Unless, of course, you might be a student at Columbia.

See, Maschek was speaking during a meeting last week at the school, on the topic of getting the ROTC program back on campus. While trying to explain the need for a strong military, he was shouted at, laughed at and called a racist.

It was like he was facing a poltergeist made up of Huffington Post bloggers.

Yeah, some Columbia students suck.

But, look – the fact that they disrespected the soldier only underlines how silly they are. And more important, their behavior serves to remind us that this crap still goes on.

Fact is, we live in a culture where reality TV trumps reality, patriotism seems quaint, and no-talent teeny boppers gain more respect and adulation than our boys at war. We got kids who thinks Skins is hipper than soldiers.

That bugs me.

Anyway, I hope their stupidity, heard by many, prevents them from ever getting a job or having sex with people who bathe.

That’ll only leave them with one option – working at Columbia.

Which, given the school’s track record, will probably take them.

And if you disagree with me, you’re worse then Hitler.

Tonight:

Diane Macedo

Larry Gatlin

Chris Rozvar

—–

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.)

Band members addressed the extreme difficulty they had in even practicing in a city in which every block had either a check point or was controlled by one militia or another. Then there was the electric power issue: during the one concert Alvi filmed (in front of perhaps 20 people, all males), the electricity went out after a few songs. Alvi himself quickly experienced the impossibility of carrying normal western-style interviews in war-torn Baghdad. His crew paid $1400 U.S. dollars a day for two drivers, two shooters, a translator, an armored SUV and a second vehicle, which he thought was a steal under the circumstances. Most of the filming came from hand-held cameras; much of it from the windows of the SUV or in isolated apartments or alleys. Even getting from one block to the next in 2006—before the surge—was difficult, and Alvi found that talking to ordinary Iraqis at that time was impossible. They trusted no one, and the western reporters hid in the hotels, sending Iraqi camera crews out to get footage and report back, whereupon the brave journalists would do voice-overs as if they were there.

The most amazing aspect of “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is that, however representative or unrepresentative Acrassicauda was, they were hardly a jihadist anti-western band. Under Saddam, merely “head-banging” could land you in jail! Acrassicauda sported “Metallica” and “Slipknot” t-shirts; learned their music from American and British metal bands (whom they loved); listened to bootleg American tapes; and flat-out admitted, “we’re not a politic [sic] band. . . . we stay out of politics . . . .” Firas noted “I don’t give a f –k about the news. . . . I’m trying my best to get out of the country [to where] I can have peace.” When Alvi first contacted the group, Saddam Hussein was still in power, and the band members recalled that they were only allowed to play a concert if they wrote a special song to Saddam, which they did. It had “shit lyrics” they agreed: “Following our leader Saddam Hussein, we’ll make them fall, drive them insane.” Come to think of it, the lyrics in Van Hagar weren’t all that terrific, either. By the way, the band’s name, Acrassicauda, is Latin for “black scorpion.”

Indeed, the absence of a jihadist or even Islamic tone to anything was stunning. Instead of praying before playing (as many Christian bands do), Acrassicauda gave a rousing football-type cheer: “Acrassicauda—let’s go!” Firas observes “I’m Sunni, my wife is Shiite,” and suspected “someone else” was causing the violence in Iraq,” though he didn’t name the U.S. “I got nothing against religion,” he said, “I’m a Muslim but I’m not that straight.” During the entire movie, there was not a single Allahu Ackbar or discussion of jihad, paradise, the Great Satan, or holy war. Firas also observed that “people” came into Iraq from “Turkey, Iran, everywhere,” by which he meant al-Qaeda terrorists.

In the end, Alvi’s would-be story of an Iraqi heavy metal band ends up like that of most American rock bands. Unable to practice or play (or, in the U.S., pay the bills), Acrassicauda goes to Damascus where they eventually break up. Perhaps one lesson of “Heavy Metal in Baghdad” is that without the USO, it’s damned tough to have “normal” entertainment in war zones, regardless of the style of music being offered. But Alvi perhaps could have gone much deeper with the more important theme of how these Muslims looked so much like American Christian youth who had fallen away from the church for secular pursuits. And still more important, there is an unexplored question of whose culture is more powerful—the fundamentalist Islam of the mullahs or the freedom, in whatever its lyrics and musical form, embodied in the West.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2008), Produced by Eddie Moretti and Suroosh Alvi, directed by Eddie Moretti and Suroosh Alvi, VBS/Vice Films (148 minutes).

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.”

This sort of creeping socio-political nonsense began with Cameron’s The Abyss, a film that the Los Angeles Times correctly derided by writing, “It’s not hard to think that James Cameron has carried this film in his head since he was seventeen. It’s a seventeen-year-old vision.” Terminator 2 continued that trend, and for me ruined that mythos just as Alien³ destroyed its own franchise. Sure, it made a ton of money, but hey, so did The Phantom Menace. Coming on the heels of The Abyss, it was a sign that the maker of The Terminator and Aliens had lost the essence of what made those two movies great. Twenty years later, Cameron continues to make mega-hits that fall woefully short of that early creative promise.

Making matters worse is how the director has made himself a poster boy for the mean-spirited, audience-insulting, hyperbolic trend in modern Hollywood. He’s called us right-wingers (who form a large swath of his movie-going public) “just people ranting away, lost in their little bubbles of reality, steeped in their own hatred, their own fear and hatred.” Glenn Beck “is a f***ing asshole. . . dangerous because his ideas are poisonous,” while climate-change deniers — i.e., most of the country — are “boneheads” and “swine,” with “their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.”

All of this scattershot name-calling is tedious because it’s such transparent bluster. That’s why, when Cameron boldly called for a climate change debate with his conservative detractors last March, Big Hollywood’s John Nolte was able to accurately predict how it would eventually play out:

If Beck calls Cameron’s bluff (pretty please, Glenn), I’d bet all kinds of money Cameron locks himself in his air conditioned mansion and refuses to come out.

That of course is exactly what happened once Andrew Breitbart picked up the gauntlet that the director — apparently spurred on by an inflated sense of self-regard fueled by his box-office receipts and technical achievements in Hollywood — had so carelessly tossed down. We should remember what Cameron once said about his method of getting ahead in Tinseltown: “So much relies on personality and not logic. . . it’s hype. . . it’s the pitch.” That might work well when selling studio executives on sci-fi scripts, or when producing “documentaries” worthy of Erich von Däniken, but it’s a lot less effective when going up against intelligent opponents well-versed in the minutiae of real-world problems. He thought that, just like in Hollywood, he could bluff and bully his way to victory, but it was not to be. Oh well — as Cameron himself said about Sigourney Weaver after he taught her how to shoot: “Another liberal bites the dust.”

To Cameron’s credit, sometimes he does come down to earth to join the rest of us, as when he called the engineers working on the gulf oil spill “morons,” only to later backtrack and come clean with: “I got into it and I talked to petroleum engineers and we started this study group …They’re not morons. . . There are good engineers out there. . . working very hard. It’s a very, very complex problem to solve.” Indeed it is — so why not refrain from all the knee-jerk vitriol? What possible good can come of a movie director alienating huge swaths of his audience with such crude, simplistic caricatures?

This impulse hasn’t just harmed his reputation, it’s done palpable damage to his filmmaking. Increasingly, the characters in his movies are painfully one-dimensional, while his plots are chock-full of nonsensical holes. “The beauty of movies,” Cameron has said, “is that they don’t have to be logical. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” In truth, many of the same fans who bristled at the criminal stupidity of other mega-hits like George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds also harbor a near-incandescent animosity for Avatar.

My suspicion is that time will not be kind to Cameron’s post-Aliens career, that once the effects and spectacle begin showing their age, there won’t be much left worth revisiting. It’s bittersweet to remember how guys like Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron once entertained audiences of all political persuasions by crafting a shared popular culture that we all enjoyed and took pride in. It was a time when our favorite directors didn’t go on national television to call half of their audience “boneheads” or “swine.” And, perhaps not coincidentally, it was also a time when movies like Aliens — with richly drawn characters, rousing heroism, sparkling humor, and believable, lived-in worlds — came out of Hollywood with something approaching a pleasant regularity.

This concludes our look through a conservative lens at James Cameron and his magnificent space-marine thrill ride Aliens. Come back next week as we study an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

You guys might want to wait until October 25 to watch (or re-watch) Aliens. That’s the day when a humongous new Blu-ray set comes out with all the trimmings. The Cameron movie in the set sports the following extras:

1986 Theatrical Version
1991 Special Edition with James Cameron introduction
Audio commentary by director James Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd, alien effects creator Stan Winston, visual effects supervisors Robert Skotak and Dennis Skotak, miniature effects supervisor Pat McClung, and actors Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn and Christopher Henn
Final theatrical isolated score by James Horner
Composer’s original isolated score by James Horner
Deleted and extended scenes
MU-TH-UR Mode interactive experience with Weyland-Yutani Datastream

Superior Firepower: Making ALIENS
* 57 Years Later: Continuing the Story
* Building Better Worlds: From Concept to Construction
* Preparing for Battle: Casting and Characterization
* This Time It’s War: Pinewood Studios, 1985
* The Risk Always Lives: Weapons and Action
* Bug Hunt: Creature Design
* Beauty and the Bitch: Power Loader vs. Queen Alien
* Two Orphans: Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn
* The Final Countdown: Music, Editing and Sound
* The Power of Real Tech: Visual Effects
* Aliens Unleashed: Reaction to the Film

Pre-Production
Original Treatment by James Cameron
Pre-Visualizations: Multi-Angle Videomatics with Commentary
Storyboard Archive
The Art of Aliens: Image Galleries
Cast Portrait Gallery
Production
Production Image Galleries
Continuity Polaroids
Weapons and Vehicles
Stan Winston’s Workshop
Colonial Marine Helmet Cameras
Video Graphics Gallery
Weyland-Yutani Inquest: Nostromo Dossiers
Pre-Production and Aftermath
Deleted Scene: Burke Cocooned
Deleted Scene Montage
Image Galleries
Special Collector’s Edition LaserDisc Archive
Main Title Exploration
Aliens: Ride at the Speed of Fright
Trailers & TV Spots

—–

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!” … 

But the writer and director get credit too. Written by Chris Sparling with the intention of shooting the film in his buddy’s garage, the script is tight, and has a strong message about America’s conduct in Iraq. A particular focus is the reliance on unscrupulous contractors, and the treatment of their employees. Sparling said he interviewed some contractors as he was writing the script, and was moved by their struggles to get insurance payments for injuries obtained on the job.

Read the full article here.

I may go to Hell, but I’ll have better living quarters than these people.

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.

Was it possible that the Wachowskis have actually sneaked their next film into production without anyone noticing? Or is this just part of a short film, commercial, or test footage for a potential future project? No one had any idea, and nothing more has been learned about the project until today. In May, professional wrestler turned actor turned governor Jesse Ventura dropped word on the Stern show that he just got done filming a movie for the Wachowskis.

Much more here.

In the comments, please explain again how Hollywood is purely money-driven and that those of us who accuse the industry of creating propaganda just don’t understand that.

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).

But the thought of bringing Fair Game to a theater near you or anyone else must have the producers quaking in their Kenneth Coles. After all, they’re facing the almost certain prospect of their political thriller going down in flames a là the recent cinematic Hindenburg known as The Green Zone, which many are claiming is the final nail in the coffin of Iraq-war-themed movies. The Plame project is a joint production of Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation Entertainment and Participant Media, which describes itself as focusing on “socially relevant, commercially viable” projects.

I think they need to adjust their focus. Fair Game not only is socially irrelevant to everyone except obsessive Bush-haters, but isn’t commercially viable either, since American moviegoers have rejected Hollywood’s anti-war propaganda over and over again. Actually, “anti-war” is a misnomer, since if the Hollywood Left were truly anti-war, they would denounce the actual aggressors like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas et al. But they’re usually too busy heaping moral condemnation on the U.S. and its allies to protest against real evil in the world.

And the concept of evil is too simplistic anyway for the Hollywood Left, which believes the world is more nuanced than conservatives are capable of comprehending, much less admitting. “There are no bad guys or good guys,” say writer/director Stephan Gaghan and George Clooney about their 2005 movie Syriana, in which Americans are clearly the bad guys and radicalized Muslims are the moral center. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s morally inverted view of the world, in which leftists are pillars of truth and integrity, bad guys are simply misunderstood, and conservatives are utterly Satanic. “Bush lied, people died” – you know, nuance.

This isn’t the place for a thorough re-examination of Plamegate or of the justification for going to war with Iraq, which have been written about exhaustively elsewhere: check out Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors, for example, in which he discusses the scandal and eviscerates the Wilsons in the process, or Party of Defeat, in which David Horowitz and Ben Johnson concisely lay out the reasons for going after Saddam. But in case you didn’t keep up with the mainstream media’s four-year, off-and-on front-page obsession with the Plame scandal, here’s a quick recap:

In 2003, the White House sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead that Iraqi maniac Saddam was trying to purchase fissionable materials from Niger. Wilson reported back that the rumor wasn’t credible; but when the Bush administration proceeded to put forth the suspicion as part of the case for going to war, Wilson wrote a controversial editorial entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the wake of which journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of the war, undermining morale and the war effort, although a Senate investigation ultimately discredited the Wilsons’ accusations.

Not to be dissuaded by the facts, Hollywood is dipping into the well again in Fair Game. My own undercover source deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast (okay, it’s Big Hollywood editor John Nolte and his Whistleblower) has slipped me a copy of the script, written by Jez and John Butterworth. I don’t know whether this is a first draft or the final shooting script or some version in-between, but based on what I’ve read, the movie is more than just a desperate attempt to turn this already overblown scandal into a nail-biting political thriller; Fair Game is a full-out assault on Bush’s “war of choice” and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls “neocon evildoing.” (There’s that nuance again).

Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a “coordinated” coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea. He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to “bury” Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being “fair game” – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).

But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation. In other words, as Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, “the entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.” Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush – the whole criminal pantheon of the Left’s fevered imagination – were not responsible for Plame’s outing (Libby was found guilty, though, of perjuring himself during the investigation). 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.

Penn and Watts play the Wilsons as a couple whose only character flaws are their unshakeable professional integrity, love of country, and willingness to risk everything to speak truth to power. The script highlights the personal cost to Valerie Plame; even her friends turn on her for the “betrayal” of keeping her CIA job secret. “You lied to me for 20 years,” says her best friend in the script. “Who are you?”

Except that this isn’t what happened. Valerie says in her own autobiography that her close friends, without exception, were generously supportive and understanding, and that even old friends, distant relatives and long-lost acquaintances came out of the woodwork to offer their support. But hey, in fairness, the filmmakers have to ramp up the drama somehow.

Meanwhile, Penn’s worldly-wise Joe Wilson is busy speculating about government lies, fending off vicious “right-wing reporters” and lecturing captive audiences about having fearlessly confronted Saddam himself. “Have you met Saddam?” Wilson snaps at dinner guests casually discussing the Iraqi threat. “Have you looked him in the eye? Did he threaten to kill you? You don’t know Saddam. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Later, Penn/Wilson complains to the press that “those in the Highest Office sought to destroy the career of a public servant to punish me for speaking the truth.” If Penn, an actor who says journalists should be jailed for criticizing Hugo Chavez, can deliver a line like this with conviction, then perhaps he should get another Oscar.

To make sure we get the message that Penn’s Joe Wilson is a true American hero, one character tells him, “You’re a true American hero.” And modest too: “The real heroes,” he replies, ”are in Iraq right now fighting a war which was prosecuted on lies and falsehoods.” He got that half-right – the real heroes are fighting in Iraq (and Afghanistan), not here in the comfort of home undermining the war effort.

The anti-war Bush-bashing (yawn) continues to pile up. While driving Penn/Wilson in a taxi to the White House, a West African immigrant expresses his gratitude at being in the “Land of the Brave, Home of the Free” and out of war-torn Sierra Leone: “Over there we have no truth. Just power. Over here it’s a different world.” Apparently this praise for America wasn’t “nuanced” enough for Penn/Wilson, who tells the driver, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Leave it to an immigrant from an anarchic hellhole to appreciate America’s freedoms, while the comfortable leftist broods about the “threat” of “right-wing reporters” and speechifies about imaginary Republican abuses of power. In a later scene, Valerie’s father tells her, “One day this country is gonna look back on these years, and it’s gonna hang its head. It’s gonna weep. Then it’s gonna stand up straight and walk on.” That “stand up and walk on” bit feels tacked on, considering that the Left seems to think America should be in a perpetual state of shame and apology.

Coincidentally, Valerie Plame Wilson is back on the fringes of the news again, thanks to the release of politico Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. This prompted terrorist sympathizer and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans to attempt to handcuff Rove at a recent book signing, shouting, “Look what you did! You outed a CIA officer! You lied to take us to war!” (Um, if Evans is going to attempt citizen’s arrests of war criminals, perhaps she could start with her associates in the Taliban and Hamas). Rather than just trashing the book with a one-star Amazon.com review, the Wilsons actually released a statement, dismissing Rove’s book as

a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.

Yes, very nuanced. But ultimately it’s hard to see the real-life Wilsons as victims. They ended up as the toast of the elitist, anti-war Left, with a glamorous Vanity Fair spread, a $2.5 million book deal for Valerie, and a feature film glorification starring Hollywood A-listers – albeit a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.

One has to wonder if Sean Penn simply doesn’t care whether this movie does well at the box office – after all, how could he expect it to?  Back when anti-war activist Robert Redford directed the 2007 talky bore Lions for Lambs, it was still possible for Hollywood to delude itself into thinking that America would flock to see such superstars as Redford, Cruise and Streep in a sanctimonious plea for pacifism.

But Lions for Lambs fizzled, as did every other Hollywood attempt to flagellate America for the supposedly pointless waste of Bush’s wars, all the way up to last month’s disastrous The Green Zone. (Meanwhile, the 2006 movie 300, an unabashed celebration of warrior virtues and love of country, has racked up $457 million without a single bankable star). If the American people can’t be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood’s leftist morality tales even by a Bourne-style thriller featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?

Americans aren’t buying it. They simply aren’t the morally unsophisticated, uninformed dullards that a condescending Hollywood believes them to be. Or is that too nuanced for the Hollywood Left to grasp?

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.

“The Green Zone” is based on a leftist fantasy. The film’s plot is rooted in a conspiracy theory that is no more factual or logical than 9/11 Trutherism. The fact that publications like the New York Times, major news networks, and supposedly respected leftist bloggers reinforce and repeat this fantasy does not make it true. The fact that leftist film critics have embraced this film as “speaking truth to power” is laughable and should discredit these individuals rather than give credence to the film’s plot and supposed revelations.

To embrace the ideas behind “The Green Zone” is to indulge in simplistic, blinded, poorly informed, and historically detached information. There is nothing “educated,” “nuanced” or “complex” about the idea that the United States government lied to the world to depose Saddam Hussein in an effort to steal Iraq’s natural resources. To believe that requires a lack of intellect and critical thinking, not an elevated amount of intelligence.

All conspiracy theories tend to fall apart when you analyze the facts and examine the motivations. Toss in the fact that it is difficult to keep even a few people quiet about things, and the possibility of grand conspiracies becomes even more remote.

Most “factual” accounts of the theory behind “The Green Zone” start their time lines after 9/11. Bush wanted to invade Iraq. It was a foregone conclusion they say. Regardless of the evidence, the administration wanted to invade Iraq and would do whatever they could to manipulate the facts to support their plans. Of course, this would mean that Bush had many accomplices, and that the plan began far before 9/11. In fact, the plan would have to begin before Bush even took office or was elected. Throughout the 1990s there are tons of interviews, articles, news reports, etc. that addressed Iraq’s WMD program. Rove, Cheney and Bush would have had to recruit a bunch of other politicians and world leaders to lay the ground work for their nefarious plot. People like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry must have subscribed to the plot years before the invasion, for all of them believed that Saddam was packing heat and that he posed a threat to the world.

The WMD story predates Bush and is a global narrative, not one cooked up in Dick Cheney’s secret bunker.

Of course, Saddam himself could have put an end to the speculation by complying with the weapons inspections that were a provision of the peace agreement he entered into after the first Gulf War.

The biggest ally in the Bush/Rove/Cheney/Simon Barsinistar plot, it seems, was Saddam Hussein!

What about the motivations? Again, examining the facts reveals less about the dark hearts of the Bushies and more about the ignorance of the educated and enlightened left.

Letfists don’t understand money. This is a well documented fact and a fact that they seem to reinforce daily. Read any Paul Krugman op-ed and you will see what I mean. With that in mind, how much money would Bush and Co. make off the war? Who makes the money? And how much money would individuals make compared to the money that these individuals already have? Sure $500 million sounds like a lot to the average person, but is that worth the risk for a multi-billionaire? And these supposed oil, war, and reconstruction “profits” are all being paid to publicly held companies. Those profits are offset by costs, and then those dividends are divided amongst shareholders. So, a billion dollars paid to a company results in a few hundred million in “profit” that then is reduced to millions when it filters back to the executives and high level shareholders. Is that enough motivation to risk the consequences should one person start singing like a canary? Besides, no one who subscribes to this mythology has ever provided a distinct money trail, choosing instead to offer nebulous anecdotes about oil companies, Haliburton, and other generic Texas residents who’s net worth is over a million bucks.

Indeed, if you understand money and government, you can devise numerous other, better schemes to make a ton of cash. After 9/11, Bush could have used oil resources as a signature issue. Bankrupt the terrorists and their Middle Eastern enablers. The Republican controlled Congress could have acted in the same underhanded manner as the current Congress to force drastic changes in environmental and oil policy. Bush could have forced drilling in Alaska, coastal California and other places, awarding no bid contracts to both construction and oil companies to develop the new sites. Couple that with some protectionist trade rules through executive orders that barred oil imports form specific countries or groups (like Opec) and within five to ten years the “Rethuglicans” and their evil cronies could have remade the world oil market and had more money than they could ever hope to siphon from Iraq.

This oft repeated conspiracy simply doesn’t add up. I can find more circumstantial evidence and better motivations behind the theory that Elvis is alive and living in Ohio than I can the drivel that masquerades as the plot for “The Green Zone.”

Those who believe these stories are not “smarter” or more “complex” than the rubes, like myself, who understand history and economics. Quite the opposite. Like Obama’s speeches, these narratives are juvenile, emotional, and partisan rants wrapped in big words and condescending tones. You can add as much faux sincerity and shaky cam as you want; it doesn’t change the fact that at it’s core “The Green Zone” is a sophomoric, under thought, and ignorant story.

As for the conservative Iraq movie, I would focus on individuals. Complex narratives start with the journey of a character, not convoluted plots. I personally know three Iraq war veterans and their stories of heroism, danger, tragedy and triumph could fill ten screenplays.

And not a single one of them would be about America as a villain. That’s just stupid.

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.

The images are stunning.

We watch a firefight in a magnificently archaic and overbuilt cemetery outside Najaf.  We learn about a terrorist-created deathtrap known as the “Hell House” in Fallujah, where our troops demonstrated their heroism and creative thinking while taking heavy casualties.  We observe as our troops invade the house of Shia Islamic leader Muqtada al Sadr – and find, in his bedroom, framed photographs of American tough-guy action stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Clint Eastwood.  We follow our troops as they go house to house finding huge weapons caches and terrorists.  And yes, there is an actual scene with American soldiers walking through the smoking ruins of Fallujah while singing the Mickey Mouse Club song, a la Full Metal Jacket.

What’s just as stunning is the take from ground level on the geopolitical decisions being made by politicians at the highest level

We’re one day from taking Fallujah in April 2004 when Al Jazeera begins hijacking CBS’s satellite feed from a Fallujah hospital, then adding their own spin – and the resulting media furor causes the Bush Administration to end the action.  The result: terrorists from across the globe come to Fallujah to establish a base, and we have to re-enter a few months later to wipe them out.

In Najaf, our troops fight their way through city streets and converge around the central Imam Ali Mosque, where al Sadr and his terrorist followers are holed up.  They meticulously avoid firing their weapons around the mosque.  They train Iraqi special operations units to make the final entry into the mosque.  And then, just as they’re about to finish off al Sadr and his men once and for all, al Sadr, in a deal brokered by the Iraqi government, turns over the keys to the mosque to Ayatollah Sistani, the highest ranking Shia figure in Iraq.  And our troops pull out of Najaf, handing the city back over to the insurgents.

If this film has any political content, it’s a pro-troops content.  Yes, our troops are pro-war – one of the officers makes an impassioned speech about the value of fighting terrorism and spreading liberty in Iraq.  But the film is just as critical of the top-down decision making that led the coalition forces to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory over and over again.

What comes across throughout The Last 600 Meters is the incredible value of the men and women of our armed services.  They know that their job isn’t to make the political decisions – it’s to implement them.  They’re there to take those policies “the last 600 meters.”  And they get the job done, no matter what the obstacles.

I spoke with Michael Pack, producer of the film.  It will be shown on PBS in a few months, but he is looking for a distributor to get it shown as a mainstream feature.  If ever a conservative film deserved that sort of support, this is the one.  It is a tremendous demonstration of the fact that conservative films can be more than just conservative – they can be truly great.

[An interview with filmmaker Michael Pack and producer Stephen K. Bannon can be seen here: Part 2 -- Part 3.]