I’ve seen it thirteen times, mainly because I’m a huge fan of C. Thomas Howell. And I’m lonely.

But that’s another story for another time. The film has since been remade, with the producers replacing the Russian bad guys with Chinese.

But now – According to the L.A. Times, China has become such a big market for Hollywood, MGM studios have decided to replace the Chinese with North Koreans.

Yep, in a first for Hollywood: filmmakers actually digitally erased Chinese flags and symbols and replaced dialogue… so now North Korea are the invaders.

Because, with that country, there’s nothing to be gained, financially. It’s as lucrative as a Kathy Griffin porn site.

Color me unsurprised.

Hollywood may be where dreams are made, but it’s also where wimps are cultivated.

I mean, look who they chose, just seven years after 9/11. The Chinese!

How’s that for cowardice? Here real life hands you an honest-to-God adversary – radical Islam – and you choose a country that makes your tennis shoes.

Wusses.

The paper says the “changes illustrate just how much sway China’s government has in the global entertainment industry.”

But an MGM spokesman says no one spoke to anyone linked to the Chinese government.

So i guess they gave in without a fight.

Which makes you wonder how quickly they’d fold when faced with a real threat.

Those kids from the original Red Dawn would be disgusted.

Anyway, I look forward to their remake of the China Syndrome. I hear the new title is “Tibet Sucks.”

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

TONIGHT:

Andreas Tantaros

Chris Rovzar

Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed!)

So much for artistic freedom. And this is likely the wrong kind of artistic freedom to receive any kind of defense in the usual-usual entertainment press.

The L.A. Times:

China has become such an important market for U.S. entertainment companies that one studio has taken the extraordinary step of digitally altering a film to excise bad guys from the Communist nation lest the leadership in Beijing be offended. …

[P]otential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from “Red Dawn,” substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

Wait. I’m confused. Hollywood bashes America constantly. Aren’t we “an important market for U.S. entertainment companies”? I guess some markets are more equal than others. (You’ll be glad to know that I’m now out of Orwell references.)

Back to the Corner, this time Daniel Foster, who points out the utter absurdity of portraying North Korea as any kind of threat to any country other than their own:

[T]he long-stalled remake has become a sick joke. To wit: MGM has taken the extraordinary step of digitally scrubbing the film of all references to Red China as the invading villains — substituting dialogue, removing images of Chinese flags and insignia etc. — because “potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower.” All without the PRC even uttering a single word of protest.

And who are the new invaders? North Korea. That’s right, the starving-to-death, massively brainwashed “Hermit Kingdom.” I imagine at this very moment, Hollywood script doctors are working on a revised first act in which Kim Jong Il decides it’s a good idea to let hundreds of thousands of his captive countrymen travel to America.

So much for realism. Read the whole thing.

Whenever you watch contemporary documentaries about the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Production Code is almost always portrayed as the Great Big Right-Wing Boogie Man. The infamous code was a set of self-imposed guidelines the industry lived under that regulated language, sex, and how much cleavage  Jane Russell could show. Of course, these same documentaries inevitably portray the lifting of this censorship in the ’60s as something akin to the falling of the Berlin Wall. Hallelujah! Free at last! Blah, blah, blah…

Well, to anyone paying attention nothing’s changed except the hypocrisy. We’ve gone from the PC of the Production Code to the PC of Political Correctness. Filmmakers can offend America all day long, but not the Communist Chinese. Storytellers can savage Christians till the cows come home, but Muslims get PSAs, and in-between all those redneck jokes let’s not riff about electric cars being gay.

The old self-imposed Production Code was designed to keep the film industry out of trouble with the U.S. Government and citizen groups concerned with morality. The new self-imposed Production Code is concerned only with offending oppressive governments and the left-wing, PC Sensitivity Police.

In other words, the only real difference between then and now is that today movies suck a whole lot more.

—–

But tonight through Thursday, anyone who is curious about what life is like in that insanely repressive regime can find a rare – literally one-of-a-kind – opportunity to see what goes on inside the borders of that nation, as LA’s Downtown Independent movie theater finishes a one-week-only run of “The Red Chapel,” a film that does not appear to be available on video in the United States. And better yet, the filmmakers behind this incredible film manage to do their expose in a way that blends the harrowing sadness of its citizens’ lives with staggeringly funny moments of outright satirical sabotage against the regime.

The fascinating and richly entertaining results parallel the work of “Borat” and “Bruno” mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen, but here the stakes are literally life and death if the filmmakers get caught. And the filmmakers pull off their achievement with taste rather than tastelessness, and do so in the service of a profound and daring mission: to shame the regime before the eyes of the free world.

In my nearly two years of reviewing films for Big Hollywood, I have never felt more compelled to encourage all those who love freedom to see a movie as much as I have this one. And due to the near-guerrilla nature of this film and the fact that the Downtown Independent is a nonprofit with almost no marketing budget, this film was hopelessly under-attended this weekend.

“The Red Chapel” is a 2009 Danish documentary in which a Danish native (a Caucasian man named Mads Brugger) roped in two South Korean-born men (Simon Jul Jorgensen and Jacob Nossell) who were adopted and raised by Danish families and are now popular Danish comedians, to pretend to be an arts trio called the Red Chapel. Even that name has a secret meaning, as it was the code name for Soviet actors who spied on the Nazis prior or during WWII by pretending to perform as a cultural exchange and reporting on German secrets from each of their tour stops.

Mads wants to sneak cameras into North Korea and show Pyongyang and anything else he can shoot to reveal on an unprecedented scale the pure evil of what he terms “the most evil dictatorship ever created.” At the same time, once they get accepted by the North Korean government, the performers reveal that their “show” is in fact a purposeful disaster.

Relying on fart noises from whoopie cushions, off-key singing, terrible acting of children’s fables like “The Princess and the Pea,” their goal is to humiliate the government officials who allowed them to enter, while acting like they have good intentions but simply lack talent. One of the comics, Jacob happens to be a “spastic” (his term, though his condition appears to be akin to Cerebral Palsy) and can not be understood by anyone but his friends.

The fact that he’s disabled helps them get into the country, as the North Korean government is eager to use him as propaganda showing they don’t hate disabled people. Mads’ narration notes that it’s long been rumored that the nation’s disabled babies get aborted or murdered right after birth, or sent to camps to die of neglect. The filmmakers’ advantage with having Jacob along is that he can say what’s really on his mind without the North Korean “minders” and spies understanding him, so he can say that their buildings look awful or food tastes like crap without getting busted, leaving the audience of the film to laugh later now that it’s translated on screen for us. (It’s like “Borat” with an anti-Soviet agenda).

They come up with shocking disturbing footage of daily life, and show how their spy/’minder’ breaks down wailing when asked how she feels about the founder of North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s father. While Mads’ narration explains that they know she’s saying she’s crying out of love for the man’s presence, but in reality is crying because she has to let out her true emotions sometime or go mad.

They also show how little kids are brainwashed in the schools, how the filmmakers are subtly spied on throughout their visit, and how Jacob gets more and more marginalized in his own show because the NK’s actually are deeply prejudiced against the disabled. And yet there is humor and hope and defiance running throughout, a strain of power that pays off triumphantly in the end.

Thankfully, this daring trio of filmmakers made it out alive and were able to share their vision with the rest of the world. Sadly, American filmgoers have received almost no opportunity to see the results.

If you’re really someone who cares about film but also cares about freedom and showing the truth and encouraging more such efforts like “The Red Chapel,” and you live in the Los Angeles area, it is very important to go support this film and the Downtown Independent theatre. Let your vote be heard at the box office and perhaps they can experience a turnaround that can bring the film back or garner it exposure elsewhere across the nation.

“The Red Chapel” plays tonight (Mar. at 7 p.m., Wed. at 4:30 p.m. and Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Downtown Independent Theater, 251 S. Main St. in Los Angeles. Admission is $10.

“Wolverines!”

There are some welcome ideological surprises lurking within the script’s 104 pages.  Shockingly, Hollywood actually seems to accept the premise that if the Chinese and Russkies invade the United States we are justified in fighting back with hot lead instead of teach-ins and choruses of Kumbayah.  But the script also displays a bit of the moral illiteracy we’ve come to expect from the Hollywoodoids – naturally, the script has to imply that we kinda brought the invasion on ourselves and that resisting tyranny somehow means becoming just as bad as the tyrants.

The re-imagining of Red Dawn will be released later this year and does very little actual re-imagining of the original’s simple plot.  We first meet some all-American teenagers.  They play high school football, party, and talk and look like CW series cast members – not real bright, but pretty (the pretty part in the script).  For some reason, the Soviets (replaced here by the Chinese with a Russian assist) invade America and seize their hometown.  Their town’s tactical significance appears to be that invading it advances the plot.  Anyway, the teenagers go up into the mountains, score some of the firearms our prescient Founders ensured we’d always have the right to keep and bear despite the best efforts of those gun control-loving wusses, and launch a bloody guerrilla war against the invaders. 

Sure, that sounds awesome in theory, but John Milius’s original Red Dawn was – well, let me be diplomatic – probably one of the silliest movies ever made.  And I loved it.  When you combine killing communists with unbelievable camp – like the teen warriors’ giggle-inducing battle cry of “Wolverines!” and Harry Dean Stanton’s memorable scene that ends with him hollering “Avenge me!” – and then add some beer, you’ve got one hell of an awesome time at the movies.  In the quarter century since its release, it’s inspired a cult following.  A young captain even adapted the title as the name of the Army operation that rounded up the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein.

Now, I’m not here to evaluate the aesthetic worthiness of Carl Ellsworth’s script.  I’ll leave that task to someone with the expertise to properly critique its unique aesthetic qualities – like noted reviewer Hackey von Hackenheimer.  I will say that Ellsworth must have sat through a few of those screenwriting seminars because you can set your watch by the predictable action beats (“Hmmm, we’re three quarters through the script, so time for Act III to begin:  {*types into FinalDraft 8*} ‘MCGUFFIN ENTERS and provides motivation for climactic battle sequence.’”)

Let’s just say you won’t walk out of the theater feeling that your prior conception of what “cinema” is has been radically redefined.

—–

Of course, there’s no Patrick Swayze here.  Boo.  And the new Red Dawn also unforgivably omits the cry of “Avenge me!” in favor of a much lamer substitute.  Those interested in specifics of the plot, such as it is, can peruse this spoiler-filled synopsis.  As John Nolte memorably put it, we’re here to spot the liberal sucker punches for you, not to reveal fanboy-centric plot points like whether Boba Fett’s helmet will be dented on the right side or the left side.

The hero is Jed, probably because Hollywoodoids think everyone who lives east of the I-5 is named “Jed,” or possibly “Zachariah” or “Cletus.”  Jed is a 22-year old Marine who has come home after fighting in Iraq.  I guess the fact that he’s not portrayed as a raving psycho counts as something like progress.  The script’s view of Iraq is ambiguous, as demonstrated by Jed’s exchange with a local hick who incoherently swings between gung ho belligerence and neo-isolationist cliches. 

Returning vets do get into those kinds of conversations, but it’s usually with Blue State quarter-wits sounding off with Mother Jones talking points.  Whatever – we should just be grateful Jed doesn’t launch into a speech about how Bu$hitler lied and his buddies died, or how Dick Cheney, in association with the Carlyle Group, hid WMDs in oil wells to raise Haliburton’s stock price.

There are a couple of nice scenes.  Early on, the escapees get to a cabin and decide to arm themselves with the firearms stored there.  The script does not see this as odd or unusual – it rightly assumes that every American should always ensure his or her ready access to weapons in order to be able to do their duty and defend their society in time of emergency.  However, the cabin’s owner had failed to stockpile a sufficient amount of ammunition, and the script properly points out this major lapse.  All real Americans should always be ready with adequate supplies of arms and ammunition – after all, “Bang” is the sound an American makes while maintaining this country’s freedom. 

Jed trains up his guerrillas and they start killing the Chinese occupiers.  That’s cool.  Some might scoff at the notion that a bunch of armed rural folks could have any effect against a professional army.  I would note the fact that we don’t speak with an English accent and enjoy our beer cold rather than warm and by the pint.  I would also note the example of a Finnish hunter who personally took out at least 705(!) Russian soldiers, and observe that deer are harder to hit than people.  Now, the training scenes are a bit perfunctory (I’d have gone for an 80s-style musical montage myself) and the “Wolverines” go from high school kids to steely-eyed killers pretty quickly – though they sure babble about their feelings a lot.   A lot.

There is also a rudimentary explanation of the theory of insurgency – Ellsworth rightly does not seem to think his kids can win by literally forcing the stronger enemy to flee by inflicting damage, rather than by forcing their departure by setting conditions among the populace that make further occupation too painful to bear.  Guerrillas who get in stand-up firefights with counter-insurgents tend to become dead guerrillas. 

And there’s a refreshing take on the proper response to those foreigners who murder Americans – the script actually agrees that you fight back and kill them.  I wish I could share the exact quote, but just seeing that sentiment on the page of a Hollywood script is a revelation.  Did someone at a Rodeo Drive bistro secretly spike Ellsworth’s Pellegrino with Awesome Coolness Pills, because Hollywood needs more of that kind of clarity and old-fashioned can-do.  I need a cigarette after reading something like that.

It’s not all awesome.  There are a couple of throw-away lines where the Chinese invasion is explained, in part, by the massive liberal-spending binge debt we owe them.  There are lots of reasons to worry about foreign debt; I’m not sure the threat of repossession is one of them.  The explanation for how the wily, inscrutable Asian enemy (and the script does portray them as wily and inscrutable) pulled off the invasion is pretty lame too. 

Also, there’s an unintentionally hilarious scene where the junior varsity guerrillas get a drop on some US commandos, the leader of which introduces himself as a lieutenant in the Delta Force.  Ummm.  Well, that bunch does not take inexperienced lieutenants.  And they don’t tell outsiders they are from “Delta Force.”  And pulling an AK-47 on one of those guys is a good way to get a 7.62mm suppository – if you’re lucky.

There are no real sucker punches, but there is at least a sucker tap.  The script really falls down on the job toward the middle, where Jed momentarily devolves into the kind of dork who spews the type of moral equivalence that might seem profound to a pampered UC Berkeley sophomore but that is, in reality, really stupid. 

He whines that because he’s using guerrilla tactics that he is now just like the jihadi scumbags he fought in Iraq.  His girlfriend Toni inarticulately disagrees.  This is supposed to be a moving moment, but it only served to move my lunch back up my esophagus.

The character of “Toni” should have smacked some sense into Jarhead Jed since the script didn’t have his drill sergeant around to do it.

You know, the audience is watching an uplifting and inspirational tale of shooting communists and all of a sudden this nonsense pops up.  Just stop.  Let’s try another example.  Nazis liked oxygen.  Hey, Americans like oxygen too!  Ergo, Hitler and Americans are the same, right?  Nimrods.  The fact that we kill bad people for killing us does not make us bad too.  For the perpetual sophomores out there, the test of the morality of a conflict is the cause you fight for; the tools you use are largely irrelevant.  American bayonet – good.  Nazi bayonet – bad.  I blame the public schools for this kind of nonsense and muddled reasoning – the “critical thinking” they purport to teach is actually anything but. 

Let’s clarify for those who remain unclear – the act of shooting, blowing up, bludgeoning or otherwise eliminating those who threaten and murder Americans is an unambiguously good thing. What al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban, Shiite militias, Republican Guards, Viet Cong, North Koreans, Nazis, Imperial Japanese soldiers and their ilk feel or felt deeply in their little hearts and warped minds about their various causes is irrelevant and unworthy of attention — except to the extent that understanding their thought processes facilitates defeating them.  Their destruction was and is a moral necessity and unquestionably morally right; their fighting Americans was and is unquestionably morally wrong.  Always.  End of story. 

Any questions?  No?  Good. 

However, the script is admirably forthright on how best to deal with American traitors and collaborators.  Let’s just say due process comes quickly and in pistol form.  That’s refreshing.  As a lawyer, I appreciate trials and such, but as someone who has known folks killed and wounded by such bastards, my perspective is different.

It’s nice to see that in Red Dawn, Hollywood is at least inching toward ideological sanity.  The Americans are the good guys.  The people trying to kill the Americans are the bad guys.  In this way, if in no other, the new Red Dawn is just like real life.

—–

Kang Chol-hwan never learned what crime his grandfather supposedly committed, but he understood only too well what he was guilty of.  He was related to his grandfather.  Such is the nature of Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, where families of ostensive state enemies are purged to the third generation, as matter of course.  Even suicide is not an escape from the Communist North, because it is well understood all surviving relatives would be condemned to prison camps, which is tantamount to a death sentence in most cases. 

Though some might intellectually accept the closed nature of North Korean society and sneer at its inclusion in the “Axis of Evil,” the extent of Kim Jong-il’s oppression truly defies human comprehension.  Intellectual and artistic freedoms simply do not exist there.  It might sound like a sick joke, but concert pianist Kim Cheol-woong explains he had no choice but to cross the border into China once he had been overheard playing the work of Richard Clayderman, a French easy listening recording artist. 

Despite the fact that Heiken never shows her features directly, “Mrs. Kim” is the symbolic face of Kimjongilia.  A dancer in her youth, her great misfortune was to befriend a woman Kim Jong-il took as his lover.  Although she maintains no classified information was ever revealed to her, she was condemned to a concentration camp, along with her entire family. In addition to setting Kimjongilia’s general tone, her story also inspires several brief dramatic interpretive dance sequences interspersed throughout the film (which actually work better in the context of the film than one might expect). 

—–

Not only is Kimjongilia a chillingly portrait of totalitarianism, it is a remarkably well-crafted film.  The sensitive work of composer Michael Gordon and dancers Seol-Ae Lee and Yumi Ahn give the film a classier sheen than the average PBS documentary and actually enhance the emotional impact of the survivors’ stories.  Smartly assembled, Heikin deftly mixes archival footage, the original dance interludes, an animated timeline, and devastating first-person narratives.  She allows ample space for her interview subjects to tell their difficult stories, yet the pacing never flags. 

Heikin documents heartbreaking tragedies deliberately perpetrated by the Kim regime.  It is a much needed dose of cold, hard reality for those who think a goodwill concert by the New York Philharmonic can alter the character of Kim Jung-il.  Kimjongilia is an absorbing and horrifying film that deserves a wider audience.  It opens today at New York City’s Cinema Village, just south of Union Square, a frequent site for left wing protests.

President of all Iranians — both living and dead in the streets — Ahmadinejad still wants to build a few nukes even though Mr. Obama has told him not to. Colonel Qaddhafi, or Gaddahfi or Khaddafi, or Kaddafy or however you spell it, isn’t on board the love train either.

This has not deterred President Obama! Moving swiftly, he said he will name a new Apology Czar, rumored to be either Jimmy Carter or Maxine Waters and set a schedule for more apologies to settle all past wrongs of the United States.

The President is planning a public World Apology Tour for the interventions, imperialism and mistakes the United States has made in the past. The President believes that only then will everyone hold hands with us and join in a rousing chorus of “Kumbaya.”

The Tour Schedule

November 1st – The President will travel to Berlin, Germany to make amends to the German people for our interference in domestic European politics during the First and Second World Wars. Our nation building efforts were unwarranted and resulted in unforeseen liberty and economic development. The President will recommend the return of Poland and France to German control in reparation.

November 4th – The President will stop in Pyongyang, North Korea to offer our apologies to Kim Jong-il for getting involved in what was basically a civil war. The unintended consequence of this action left half of the Korean people living a comfortable and successful lifestyle while their country stole untold millions of car sales from the Japanese.

November 5th - In Tokyo the President will announce the return of the Philippines and Hawaii to the Japanese for our unwanted interference in Asian-Pacific affairs in the 1940s.

November 11th – Set to coincide with Veteran’s Day celebrations, the President will travel to Appomattox, Virginia to apologize to the former Southern states for the Civil War.  He will apologize to the South for imposing the morality of the North and imposing their Judeo-Christian view of slavery on Southern plantation owners.

TBA - Trip to France for apology for taking advantage of them during the Louisiana Purchase.  Date for apology to the British for the American Revolution…

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: President Obama, the Federal Deficit, Nancy Snyderman, ObamaCare, NASA, Cap and Trade, Global Warming, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Billie Jean King, and North Korea.

Which brings me to my subject; did anyone besides me see the irony in sending Bill Clinton, perhaps the most famous serial philanderer of the past two centuries, to pick up two hot Asian girls in North Korea? Was it the ultimate in Asian carry out!

How did that go down? Was Bill sitting in his Laze-E-Boy while Hillary was talking on the phone to the North Koreans? She hangs up and says, “I got the release all worked out. Now ,if I could just find someone who wouldn’t mind sitting on a private jet for twelve hours with two hot Asian women.” Before you can say Paula Flowers, Bill is on his way to the airport with a blue suit and a bottle of Viagra.

Did the women know the ride home was going to be with the biggest snake of them all on the plane? I wonder how the North Koreans broke the news.  “Listen ladies, you can go home with Bill Clinton or stay here for ten years of hard labor.” They look at each other and say, “How many years was that?”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy for Ms. Laura Ling and Ms. Euna Lee. There are some questions that need to be answered: Why were two of Al Gore’s employees hanging on the China/North Korea border? Why didn’t Big Al hop on one of his carbon-neutral personal jets and go pick up these two women? What were they doing there to begin with? Did the Chinese government know they were there?  What did we give the North Koreans for the release of these two women?

Call me cynical but I don’t think a few pictures with Bill Clinton and some carbon credits from Al Gore would do the trick. Once again the Obama administration has shown that it’s business as usual in Washington where the same old people get all the good gigs.

It all played out a little too perfect — a surprise last-minute swoop by Clinton into enemy territory to heroically stare down the world’s most blood-thirsty dictator and rescue two damsels in distress.  The press asked the White House how Bill Clinton became involved in the rescue of the two American women, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, trespassing into North Korea and sentenced to “10 years hard labor.”  They said they had no involvement.  Of course, Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary works for President Obama as Secretary of State; certainly, the press surmised, she must have been responsible.  The response from the State Department was that Bill Clinton was on a “private humanitarian mission.” How does one pull off such an extempore feat without government help?  Why, call a movie mogul — of course!

Steve Bing, the multimillionaire behind “Beowulf” and “The Polar Express,” now has a new blockbuster in his collection — call it “The Pyongyang Express.”  Clearly a man who knows how to make things happen, Bing didn’t have time for protocol, pesky nuclear disarmament concerns or international law.  He fueled up his private Boeing 737 and before you could yell “Action!” a former U.S. President was on his way to meet Kim Jong Ill, a sworn enemy of the United States — who just a month ago was launching missiles aimed precariously close to Hawaii.

But it doesn’t stop there.  As any mogul knows, making the picture is one thing — but it’s all about marketing it big, baby!  No worries, Bing’s Hollywood P.R. firm Rogers & Cowan was brought in to arrange a spectacular homecoming.  Since the women being rescued worked for a company of Academy-Award winning, greenie Al Gore, the firm wisely chose a solar powered facility to accommodate press events.  Meanwhile, the pictures coming back from North Korea were playing out beautifully.  Clinton looked so glum and stern next to a clearly delighted, but frail Kim Jong-Il.  It reminded the world how wonderful Clinton can play emotions for the cameras: “In this scene, Bill, you are meeting a man who wants to take over the world — remember, you’re Luke Skywalker, and he’s Darth Vader.”

Back in Tinseltown, the set folks were readying a hangar at Bob Hope International Airport in Burbank for our hero’s triumphant return.  No official U.S. government personnel in this scene.  No, this is where tears are shed, and father-figure Al Gore emerges to hug the dear employees he feared were lost forever.  One of the rescued women said Clinton’s team was “super-cool,” and she was right.  Welcome to the A-List sweetheart.  No disrespect to the woman, but the team may have done too much of a super-cool perfect job — usually prisoners look a little more shaken and stirred as they descend the airplane steps back into captivity.

These rescued prisoners had make-up, wardrobe and perfect hair that gleamed under the lights of the awaiting cameras.  Thankfully, no hard labor evident.  But something about this blockbuster leaves the audience feeling a tad anxious after the credits roll.  After all, the bar has certainly been raised.  Will there be more cinematic rescues of American captives — servicemen and women in Afghanistan who are taken by the Taliban or captured in Iraq by roving militias?  The three “hikers” who crossed into Iran and were taken prisoner?  Should Clinton be dropped by helicopter onto ships seized by Somali pirates?

We’ll have to wait for the sequel.