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…)

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Today’s New York Post:

Even for Hollywood, “Green Zone” is dumbfoundingly brazen in its effort to rewrite the facts. As any reasonably informed person knows, many intelligence services (including the French, German, Chinese, Russian and British) believed Iraq had WMDs. And the CIA (which along with Chief Miller is a hero of “Green Zone”) was among them. Plus, such intel reports predated the Bush administration — and Saddam’s refusal to allow the UN weapons inspectors to finish their work gave us every reason to think he was hiding something and sealed his fate.

It’s one thing to make a fantasy film laced with snarky jibes at the United States and its military. It’s of another order entirely for an American studio (Universal, a unit of GE) to perpetrate, during an ongoing war, such vicious anti-American lies disguised as cheap entertainment.

“Green Zone” tells US troops that all of their efforts have been based on a deliberate deception. Worse, it blames the insurgency that has killed so many of our fighting men and women on US treachery. (more…)

“The Hurt Locker” lost me when the David Morse character, a Colonel in the field, ordered his men to stop treating a wounded prisoner — ordered that the prisoner be left to bleed to death. This monstrous moment wasn’t even necessary to the plot. It’s just thrown in as an awkward, spellbreaking aside to smear our troops. Then there’s Jeremy Renner’s protagonist who’s so PTSD-riddled and addicted to the adrenaline of war he constantly puts his own men in danger until his ongoing Iraq experience finally strips him of so much of his humanity that he can no longer love his own son.

That’s pro-troop? Well, a lot of people said so and argued with my review – even some conservatives. But one day before Oscar ballots are due, some Iraq veterans are speaking up:

Sunday’s Washington Post:

But to those who were there, Iraq is real life. And they’re very sensitive — some would say overly so — when their war is portrayed via a central character who is a reckless rogue.

Hence a rising backlash from people in uniform, such as this response on Rieckhoff’s Facebook page from a self-identified Army Airborne Ranger:

“[I]f this movie was based on a war that never existed, I would have nothing to comment about. This movie is not based on a true story, but on a true war, a war in which I have seen my friends killed, a war in which I witnessed my ranger buddy get both his legs blown off. So for Hollywood to glorify this crap is a huge slap in the face to every soldier who’s been on the front line.”

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The lead for this story might be Matt Damon’s heartbroken disappointment over Obama’s inability to strip away our health care as the millionaire actor holds on to his, but the news about “Green Zone” — which hits theatres March 12th — is the more interesting part:

It’s hard to think of a movie that’d play better in the Obama White House screening room than Matt Damon’s new Iraq War thriller, “Green Zone,” in which the Oscar-winner adroitly portrays a soldier fighting to expose the Bush administration’s weapons of mass destruction deception. …

Damon … vouches that “the people who worked on ‘Green Zone’ come from all across the political spectrum.”

His character, Roy Miller, is based on real-life Army chief warrant officer, Richard (Monty) Gonzales, whose Mobile Exploitation Team was charged with finding the WMDs during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Monty was a Republican – he’d voted for Bush,” Damon told us at Nobu 57 after the movie’s Cinema Society premiere. “He went to Iraq with the absolute conviction he was going to find the WMDs.”

Makes sense. After child-raping directors, Hollywood’s favorite hero is The Disillusioned Republican. (more…)

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In my role as Executive Director of Ride 2 Recovery, a mental and physical rehabilitation program for injured veterans that makes a difference in the lives of those who come thru our program (more info: Ride2Recovery.com), I am asked to preview movies, music, and all things military and, or veteran related entertainment. Since we deal with a lot of PTSD patients, the scars of war are all to familiar and the haunting that they feel and the effects it takes on their families is hard to explain to those who do not know these brave men and women or experienced war and its related hardships themselves.

So it was last Thursday that I, along with a few other military organizations came to meet for a viewing of the upcoming movie “Lifted.” Because the director was a noted Hollywood liberal, I was not really sure what I was about to see.

In this ever polarized environment we live in today, it is rare to find a movie about the War on Terror that takes both a decided anti-war theme, but yet gives supporters of the conflict a chance to feel pride in the way a boy and his family overcome the struggles of deployment. (more…)

This billboard hovered proudly over Hollywood Boulevard soon after the great man’s 2004 re-election. As the Beautiful People filed into the Kodak Theatre for that year’s Academy Awards, this billboard, like most of America, look down on them and laughed.

In just a few short years the very worst among them, the very worst among all of us, would double down on their stupidity and mercilessly launch a cinematic propaganda war whose sub-human endgame meant abandoning 25 million Iraqi innocents — people our nation had promised to protect — into the hands of a terrorist and death-squad meat grinder…

All in the name of proving George W. Bush wrong.

Another George W. Bush accomplishment, another reason we owe so much to him, is due to his unique ability to always be himself — a trait which so frustrated his opponents that many of them inadvertently revealed their ugly true selves to the world. And Leftist Hollywood’s depraved indifference to innocent human life — to millions of Iraqi women and children — was the most striking. (more…)

My ex-wife pulled off one of the most diabolical stunts ever perpetrated on one human being by another.  When she was a kid, she took it upon herself to teach her younger brother the names of all the different colors.  But for reasons known only to her and Satan, she taught him the wrong names.  So, although he wasn’t color-blind, he wound up being what you might call color-dumb, believing that purple was yellow, green was orange and white was brown. 

What brought this to mind was discovering that it was the late Tim Russert who labeled liberal states blue and conservative states red.  Inasmuch as red had long represented the Soviet Union and the politics of those lunkheads around the globe who were devoted to Communism, I wonder if Russert had intentionally set out to muddy the waters or if he, too, had had a sinister older sister. 

A great many people, including right-wingers who should know better, have given Obama high marks for antagonizing his liberal base by deploying 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.  For one thing, General McChrystal had started out requesting 80,000 additional men and then lowered his request to 40-60,000 when it became obvious that Obama, even after spending two years insisting that Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, was a good war that had to be won, actually believed that he could personally beguile Al Qaeda and the Taliban as easily as he had America’s lap dog media.  (more…)

First of all, sorry for the delayed release of this, I got a few big ideas for some big changes, and technical issues that arose in the process prevented me from meeting the series debut date of the 5th. It was a nightmare, and more work could be done, and it’s sans a real final credit sequence, but it’s time to roll.  You get the basic idea here. There will be a different final version for DVD.  Combat sequences  in the prologue were shot by myself or Marines.

Series Prologue:

Episode 1: “Return To Ramadi”:

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[Ed. Note: See below for a special DVD purchase promotion for Big Hollywood readers. Own a great film, save a little money, and best of all, support our troops and their families.]

The moment I saw that long line of soldiers making their way down the tarmac and watched as Joe waved goodbye from the steps of the plane, I knew that I had just witnessed something very important and very special.   I had just seen an early cut of Jake Rademacher’s amazing Brothers at War.

I knew Jake from seeing him around the William Morris Agency (they’ve since merged with Endeavor) where we are both represented as voiceover actors.  While sitting in the waiting room one day, preparing to read our copy, we got into a conversation about current events and the subject of Iraq came up.  It came out that I’m a former Marine and, although I served years ago, Jake was interested to hear my take on things.  Soon after, he invited me to watch his film and give him some feedback.  Of course, he prepared me by giving me a few disclaimers (it’s still a little long, there’s no music, yet, etc.) but otherwise just let me watch it uninterrupted in a tiny editing room in Burbank.

When it was over, I was blown away.

If you don’t already know, Brothers at War follows the Rademacher family as three of their sons deploy to and return from Iraq.  Two brothers, Isaac and Joe, are soldiers.  One, Jake, is an actor and filmmaker.  Jake wants to know what his two brothers are really doing in Iraq, so he takes a camera to go and find out.  The result is the best and most straightforward modern war documentary that I’ve ever seen.

Brothers at War doesn’t take a clinical outsider’s view of the war in Iraq and the men and women fighting it but, rather, feels as if it actually puts you in the boots on the ground among our soldiers and Marines.  It is an extremely personal experience filtered through a lens of simple curiosity and a thirst for understanding. (more…)

13 December 2009
Kandahar, Afghanistan

People are confused about the war.  The situation is difficult to resolve even for those who are here.  For most of us, the conflict remains out of focus, lacking reference of almost any sort.  Vertigo leaves us seeking orientation from places like Vietnam—where most of us never have been.  So sad are our motley pundits-cum-navigators that those who have never have been to Afghanistan or Vietnam shamelessly use one to reference the other.  We saw this in Iraq.

The most we can do is pay attention, study hard, and try to bring something into focus that is always rolling, yawing, and seemingly changing course randomly, in more dimensions than even astronauts must consider.  All while gauging dozens of factors, such as Afghan Opinion, Coalition Will, Enemy Will and Capacity, Resources, Regional Actors (and, of course, the Thoroughly Unexpected).  Nobody will ever understand all these dynamic factors and track them at once and through time.  That’s the bad news. (more…)

It seems these days
I’m in a haze,
And I can’t concentrate on things,
Don’t eat or sleep,
Feel incomplete,
And kinda scared and creepy.

I look over my shoulder lots
And shudder when I watch TV.
I bite my nails and cuticles
And watch my words very carefully.
I bite my lip a lot
And fidget with the buttons on my blouse.
Why?
…BECAUSE THERE’S A COMMUNIST LIVING IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

I’m jittery, my teeth I grate
I twitch, I shake, I ruminate
Lately I’m perplexed and pinched
In pain, I pout and ponder. (more…)

Mark Twain’s famous quote, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” resonates loudly in my mind as I finish Sarah Palin’s captivating story, Going Rogue.

But Palin ain’t buying it by the barrel, she’s got a whole pipeline of pure grade indigo flowing from the North Slope as she pumps up the volume on her NY Times #1 bestselling memoir.

When I got about halfway through the book I set it down, stepped outside of my Washington, DC townhouse and went for a run around the U.S. Capitol. Listening to the Outlaws, Marshall Tucker Band, and Lil Bow Wow (my daughter slipped that one in there) on my iPod, the recurrent thought in my mind was that this woman is far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant of the White House. (more…)

We debated whether to rank “The Messenger” as “abhorrent,” but there are some lightly positive things about it. The more we thought about this movie after seeing it, however, the more the bad content in it stood out and annoyed us. 

Basically, the movie is about a sergeant wounded in the Iraq War who gets assigned to notify the next of kin of recently killed soldiers. Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery, played by Ben Foster in a star-making performance, is assigned to fellow officer Tony Stone, played by Woody Harrelson (also excellent), a recovering alcoholic who has never really seen action. Cynically, with a touch of sarcastic humor, Tony tries to show Will the ins and outs of performing this onerous duty. Even so, both are surprised by some of the reactions they get. One father angrily spits at Will when Will gives him the news about his son’s death.  (more…)

The situation in Afghanistan is like a poker game. There are only three options for action: raise, call or fold.  The President seems to be unable to pick one that doesn’t have Americans on both sides of the debate pulling out their hair.

During his campaign for the White House President Obama said, “We have seen Afghanistan worsen, deteriorate. We need more troops there. We need more resources there… I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.”

He promised to send another ten to fifteen thousand troops to help those already there. He also declared that the war in Afghanistan was the proper front in the war against terror. Now that he is Commander-in-Chief, his vision seems to be less clear.

The military commanders gave the President four troop deployment options earlier this week but he refused all four. Not for military reasons but because of some hooey about the corruption of the government in Kabul and their inability to run a fair election. Mr. President, if our support for governments was based on whether they are corrupt or not and could run a fair election, we would have pulled federal funding from Chicago years ago. The problem with pulling out of Afghanistan, or Chicago for that matter, is that they would fall into violent anarchy. We have already seen that happen in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (more…)

Nobody liked this movie when it was called “Body of Lies.” 

This is the most revealing trailer yet and thankfully we’re given a heads up as to what the story might really be about. Hollywood will look for cover with the excuse that “Green Zone” is based on a true story, but we all know which “true stories” Leftist Hollywood cherry picks in order to fulfill the demands of an anti-American narrative. For example, the true story of 100,000-plus Americans risking their lives to liberate and protect from terrorists people they’ve  never met is one “true story” we’ll see in hell first.

Everything you’d expect from director Paul Greengrass and Damon is here, including that goddamn shaky-cam (it’s not saying the Lord’s name in vain if you mean it). Damon’s character is the protagonist and he’s there to do good but it’s not the terrorists who are the antagonists getting in his way … no, it’s The United States of America personified by the Greg Kinnear character. (more…)

November 04, 2009

Helo Halo

Luminous halos twirled above a Boeing CH-47 Chinook on a recent night around 11:30 p.m. local time at Forward Operating Base Jackson in Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as helicopters ferried casualties and supplies in and out of the base. The photographer was independent journalist Michael Yon, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who has covered Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines with a camera. Helicopter pilots don’t have a name for the effect, but one explained to Yon, “Basically it is a result of static electricity created by friction as…dissimilar material strike against each other. In this case, titanium/nickel blades moving through the air and dust.” Yon says, however, that a researcher studying helicopter brownout emailed him to say that scientists are not 100 percent sure what causes the effect. Depending on the viewing angle, it creates dazzling little galaxies. An even longer exposure reveals stars and another aircraft marked by a string of lights at upper left of center; Yon suspects this aircraft was a Predator or Reaper UAV, which, unlike manned military aircraft, fly with their lights on in the Afghan night to avoid collisions. Yon, who made these shots with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50 mm lens at an ISO of 800, claims that the night was far darker than his sensitive camera conveys, as evidenced by the green chemlights on the ground to guide the pilots. He was moved to create a name, the Kopp-Etchells Effect, for the rotor phenomenon to honor a pair of fallen soldiers, U.S. Army Corporal Benjamin Kopp and British Army Corporal Joseph Etchells, who died one day apart in July after fierce fighting in Helmand (Kopp had been evacuated to the U.S. before he died). “The tent in the foreground is a medical tent,” says Yon, “so that casualties can be kept in a tent until the last minute. A substantial number of British casualties in Helmand have been lifted off of this exact spot…because this is probably either the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, or nearly the most dangerous.” (more…)