Like  many Americans in 1986, I went to see Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning “Platoon” under the impression that the critics were right — that it would be one of those existential cinematic experiences that might help to heal and even exorcise the demons of a troubling experience our country was still grappling with a full decade after the fall of Saigon. In that way, the film was almost certainly over-hyped. If anything helped us get over the spectre of Vietnam, it was American military victories in Grenada and the first Gulf War, not a film that plays The Worst Hits of Vietnam – compressing MyLai, Tet, drug use, and fragging,  into a tight, compelling, emotionally-draining 120 minutes.

My wife, however, was interested in the experience for another reason. She lost a brother in combat over there and wanted to better understand what the final months of his life had been like as a new recruit. And this is where the film memorably succeeds. In-between all the cinematic drama and leftist politicking, the story of Charlie’s Sheen’s Chris, a green recruit who volunteered, is the story of a young young man who loses his innocence while grappling with an impossible choice. Will he choose survival in the form of the devil Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) or will he openly defy the seemingly indestructible Barnes and side with the Christ-like figure of Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe).

This classic theme along with the sure-handed direction of a young director who himself volunteered and earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart in Vietnam, gives the story an authentic feel thanks, in large part to the many day-to-day details that ring so true. Because we’re Chris and therefore experience Vietnam through his eyes, everything from the incessant bugs and foul-smelling latrine duty to the awkwardness of not knowing your peace among the men and the cold terror of hearing movement in a pitch-black jungle, feels both visceral and immediate. Long after Stone has had his political say, these are the elements that stay with you.

(more…)

One of the worst Oscar years in recent memory was 2005, a year where the slate of so-called prestige pictures offered little other than self-important, self-congratulatory garbage.  Hollywood has always been very good at patting itself on the back, but in 2005 it seemed like the town had finally managed to completely disappear up its own ass.

The selections for the Best Picture category were dire.  Brokeback Mountain was beautifully directed but otherwise forgettable romance that was notable only for somewhat breaking sexual taboos in mainstream cinema.  Capote was the token annual exercise in mediocrity featuring an actor doing a disturbingly dead-on impression of a dead celebrity.  Munich revealed to us that Spielberg only likes his own people when they’re the helpless victims, not when they actually choose to fight back against tyranny.  Good Night, and Good Luck bravely tackled McCarthyism (gee, I wonder if it was trying to say something about Bush).  Crash, the worst film of the lot, was an overcooked, emotionally manipulative turd designed to help white liberals who live in gated communities and harp on about diversity feel a little less racist than everyone else.

And I’m not even bringing up the socio-political themed garbage that didn’t nab a Best Picture nomination.  2005 sucked.  Hard. (more…)

[Editor's Note: This list is arranged in no particular order. Read Part I here.]

6.  “Nuclear weapons are awful.” – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

There are probably a few inventions that have saved more human lives and prevented more suffering than nuclear weapons.  The wars since World War II, when we quite properly dropped two A-Bombs on Japan and ended the slaughter, have been a mere shadow of what they would have been without our thermonuclear arsenal.  That’s just a fact, and all the posturing about the “insanity” of deterrence in this inexplicably beloved movie can’t change that.  You should love The Bomb.

—–

Of course, Dr. Strangelove provides a better idea than nuclear deterrence by wholeheartedly embracing anti-missile defense.  Nah, just kidding.  The film advocates nothing except ironic detachment, essentially abdicating any responsibility and simply complaining about a strategy that, well, worked.  And let me be blunt – it just doesn’t hold up after all these years.  There, I said it.  Except Slim Pickens – Slim will always rock. (more…)

Selecting the stupidest liberal messages in movie history is sort of like trying to pick the world’s most annoying rapper – the competition is intense.  There are just so many candidates, and they each suck so badly in their own unique way.

Any attempt to pick the worst of the worst is bound to disappoint someone.  This list by no means contains all of the hackneyed, parochial, and just plain obnoxious bits of liberal received wisdom that the Hollywood brain trust has spewed forth over the years.  For every nitwit insight on the list, there are dozens more floating around the nether reaches of Netflix, waiting to annoy the unwary.  No doubt the commenters will find many more.

So, here my top ten in no particular order:

1. “All American Soldiers are psychos.” – Platoon (1986)

It’s pretty obvious that the American soldier is the greatest force for evil in all of human history – or it would be, if all you watched were post-Vietnam War Hollywood movies.  It seems that to most of the hacks in Hollywood, the mere act of donning an Army uniform turns you into a bloodthirsty killing machine with an appetite for murder.  And that’s not just on the battlefield.  In American Beauty (1999), the conservative Marine neighbor not only abuses his wife and son but murders people because he’s secretly gay!  That’s a liberal stereotype trifecta – they probably think it makes him a prime candidate for King of the Tea Party. (more…)

Retired U.S. Marine Capt. Dale Dye says working with director Oliver Stone means hearing two very different nicknames on the set. “The crew calls [Stone] Ho Chi Minh and me John Wayne,” the decorated war hero says.

But Stone and Capt. Dye share something that trumps ideology – the drive to authentically capture soldiers on screen. Capt. Dye has been serving as a military consultant for filmmakers like Stone for the past 25 years.

His expertise has colored projects like “Saving Private Ryan.” “The Pacific” and “Band of Brothers.” When he’s on the set, you can be sure the actors reflect the real spirit of the U.S. military.

For years Capt. Dye would complain about the “offensive” way studios portrayed soldiers.

“It ran the gamut … from the wrong weapons and the wrong uniforms to people doing things they‘d never do with weapons,” says Capt. Dye, who survived 31 combat missions and earned Three Purple Hearts during his military career. “Those [characters] didn’t act like soldiers, didn’t relate to each other like soldiers and didn’t talk like soldiers. That was leaching the true drama out of those stories.”

So after retiring from the military in the early 1980s he started investigating the reasons why such egregious mistakes kept cropping up in film. He learned very few Hollywood players had first hand knowledge of the U.S. Armed Forces. (more…)

Even in the vast annals of Hollywood sycophantic suckuppery, the recent UK Guardian profile of Oliver Stone by Carol Cadwalladr is in a class by itself.  It is a fawning treatise hailing everything about Ollie, from his unique artistic vision to his unique attitude toward self-love – and, unfortunately, I’m not referring here to his narcissism.  Yet this hagiography still provides some intriguing clues about a question that arises every year or so when Stone puts out a movie:  Why does this pretentious clown still get taken seriously?

I think it’s because entertainment journalists seem to think he’s hot.

I mean, after all, Stone “is a man’s man… a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam “

Wow, a Purple Heart “for bravery” – glad we have the MSM’s famous layers of fact-checkers and editors hard at work making sure reporters don’t make basic, embarrassing errors.  But I digress.

The overriding theme of the profile – and Stone’s own personal narrative – is simply how hunky the auteur is.  Whether he’s palling around with Castro and Chavez or simply talking about his Daddy issues – which, trust me, are nowhere near as terrifying as his Mommy issues – we learn that Ollie is all-man, all the time. (more…)

Oliver Stone’s latest desperate grasp at relevance is a new cable series that, among other things, promises to finally place der Furher into der context.  Now, this is where I’m supposed to be outraged, but I’m just not feeling it.  Ollie, I know you’d like us to believe that this isn’t just a pathetic stunt, that this brainstorm was inspired by some peyote-spawned fire demon’s whisperings inside your drug-addled cerebellum and that if we’re truly edgy we won’t dare ignore your remarkable vision.  But I think you’re once again just trying to freak out the squares and this square, for one, is mighty bored.

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense. (more…)

Rather than proceed with the more obvious examples of Hollywood Left … as I had promised, films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Reds and Inside Man, I’m drawn to a much subtler message in the great classic Casablanca.

Perhaps every movie buff has tried to write – if only in his or her own imagination –  a sequel to that great film classic, Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Rick’s advice to Ilsa in the last scene of the film, that the problems of two little people don’t amount to much during World War II?

How could true love be defeated by an obviously Communist father-figure such as Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo?

“That’s a hefty charge, Mr. Moriarty.” (more…)

To begin with, writing this first editorial for Big Hollywood feels as threatening as the moment I entered California to do my first big film-role in Glory Boy, originally and more comprehensively titled, My Old Man’s Place.

“Do I really want that face I see in the rushes  … the one that looks an awful lot like me … do I want it running around the movie houses of the world?”

By then, of course, it was too late. I’d already signed a contract.

Director Elia Kazan accepts an honorary Oscar (1999)

I’ve already said yes to Andrew Breitbart … and though I’ve been writing editorials on enterstageright.com for more than a few years … this actual return to Hollywood … uh … Big Hollywood, no less … is as disturbing as those memories of My Old Man’s Place.

What does Big Hollywood mean?

Is it a tribute or in-house sarcasm? (more…)

27 July 2009
Sangin, Afghanistan

Afghanistan as seen from Washington and London.

(more…)

Hollywood has, for the last thirty years or so, made military members the butts of jokes – they’re either crazy Vietnam vets (Rambo) or corrupt institutionalists (The Hulk).  But most of all, they’re victims (see Platoon).  They’re victims of uncaring governments, of obtuse generals, of racist politicians.

Such portrayal couldn’t be further from the truth.  Since the end of the draft, America’s military men and women have courageously volunteered to defend our country; they have put themselves in harm’s way for a higher purpose than themselves.  They aren’t selfish or stupid – or dupes, as John Kerry suggested (“You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t you get stuck in Iraq.”).  They are heroes.  As Orwell put it, “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”  And today’s soldiers have trained themselves to be rough and ready; they haven’t been coerced or forced.  If the highest sacrifice is the sacrifice by choice, these men and women make the highest sacrifice every day. (more…)