“The Devil’s Double” is director Lee Tamahori’s adaptation of the life and autobiography of Latif Yahia, an Iraqi soldier forced to become the fidai (meaning body double, or more literally, “bullet catcher”) of Saddam Hussein’s brutal son, the “Black Prince” Uday. Set to the driving beat of ’80s pop, against a backdrop of grainy Gulf War footage, the semi-factual tale chronicles Yahia’s life from surgical transformation into the decadent and horrific world of unbridled lust and murderous rage he was forced to witness and live.

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Even though it chronicles Yahia’s time in Uday Hussein’s service, the film is less a factual retelling than a retro-gangster flick. The film’s producers hired director Tamahori (the man behind the explosive “Die Another Day”) to helm the project because he saw it as a “Scarface” style tale, not a biopic. Tamahori said that, “the truth doesn’t set you free in movies. Truth layered with fiction sets you free.”

In this case, maybe that’s best. Screenwriter Michael Thomas said of Yahia’s life: “There’s a lot more, and a lot worse on the record than what I was even able to touch upon in the screenplay.” The film gets pretty brutal. Reality must have been hell. At a party, Uday – high on cocaine – slices a man’s stomach open and Yahia is nearly killed several times by rebels mistaking him for Uday, and even by Uday himself.

Unfortunately, the brutality and gangster glorification of Uday’s life and Yahia’s experience couldn’t cover holes in the script. Numerous narrative arcs are introduced in one scene and quickly concluded in another – with little explanation for character transformations. These occur mainly as the film moves from the dark glamor of Uday’s life to Yahia’s efforts to escape it. Despite these hasty arcs, the film somehow gets boring in the middle as it portrays the daily revelry and debauchery of Uday, and Yahia’s public tour as his double. Unlike “Scarface,” there’s nothing good in this glamorous life to cling to at any point, as Uday’s obsessions and brutality lead him into child rape (not shown) and torture. The scenes are difficult to stomach and impossible to glorify.

What saves the film is its acting. Dominic Cooper stars as both Yahia and Uday in two very distinct performances. Cooper as Uday is brash, passionate, violent, uncontrollable, and insatiable – while he seems charming and funny on the surface, he viciously murders a friend of the family, kidnaps a schoolgirl, and beats Latif. As Yahia, Cooper is reserved, quietly rebellious, and stubborn – a subtle force that eventually bursts forth. With different hair styles, an altered voice, and false teeth, Cooper convincingly switches between Latif and Uday. Tamahori seamlessly combines the characters in numerous scenes.

Ludivine Sagnier also delivers a strong performance as the sensual Sarrab, Uday’s favorite girlfriend. Additionally, Philip Quast gives a minor role as Saddam Hussein real weight.

Fortunately, the film chronicles not only Uday’s terrifying reign as Black Prince, but his fall as well. And while fact and fiction are blurred, one thing at least is true: Uday was eventually killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom. And while at film’s end you might wonder what was fact, at least there’s comfort in knowing that you didn’t have to watch the worst of it.

Slash film:

Sacha Baron Cohen will indeed reunite with his Borat and Bruno director Larry Charles [Ed. note: both pictured above] for The Dictator, a new comedy in which the actor will play both a dictator and a goat herder. Paramount has set a release date: May 11, 2012, so this one is happening soon. And it will draw inspiration from one of the most revered sources of comedic influence: Saddam Hussein.

Deadline also offers up a logline: The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. It is inspired by the best selling novel, Zabibah and The King, by Saddam Hussein.”

Guardian:

Zabibah and the King was published anonymously in 2000, complete with a strapline that promised royalties would go “to the poor, the orphans, the miserable, the needy”. It is widely accepted within Iraq that the book was authored by Saddam, although the CIA later concluded that it was probably produced by ghost-writers, acting under direct instruction from the Iraqi leader.

The book charts the chaste love affair between a medieval monarch and the soulful Zabibah, who lives unhappily with her abusive husband. But what appears, at first glance, to be a sweet, simple folk tale actually contains pools of hidden meaning. It was intended to be read as an allegory for Iraq in the years following the first Gulf war, with the king representing Saddam, Zabibah embodying the Iraqi people and her husband standing in for the cruel and evil US forces.

Saddam’s drama hits its crescendo when Zabibah is sexually assaulted by a mysterious figure who turns out to be her spouse. “Rape is the most serious of crimes,” she explains helpfully. “Whether it is a man raping a woman or invading armies raping the homeland.” Zabibah is later tragically killed on January 17, the date of the US’s first aerial bombardment of Baghdad in 1991.

——

We shall see. Rest assure, this script is now number one on our “get” list.

Fish’s main point is that in the new True Grit, purposely there is no relationship between physical heroism and virtue. To the professor physical heroism is displayed by almost everyone in the new film, “‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and the universe seems at best indifferent, if not hostile.” He sees young Mattie Ross as far more heroic for her acceptance of the world as random and brutal, Jeff Bridges Cogburn’s heroism is merely an after thought. The professor didn’t in the least misunderstand my desire to instead see the kind of heroics John Wayne displayed in the original film when he takes on the outlaw gang single-handedly with his “Fill your hands, you son-of-a-bitch!” charge to glory.

Justifiable violent responses to real life threats are often not random. America has always had common men heroes and well trained professionals who can reach down deep into themselves and find the kind of inner courage needed to risk life and limb to save the life of another or stand up to the evil and power hungry. The elitist left who for the time being control most of the public debate on popular culture would have us believe that all is relative. Despite the current “no tolerance” foolishness in American schools, sometimes you have to hit back, and hard, or else the bully will take far more then just your lunch. You’re own personal dignity is indeed something worth fighting for.

A lying scumbag like Michael Moore might ridiculously offer up that al Qaeda terrorists are as brave or braver then our own and is awarded and feted for his cowardly idiocy. Physical bravery in the service of recognizable evil, whether it be Hitler’s SS or the Taliban and al Qaeda, irrevocably negates that supposed bravery, one that is also further negated by extremist brainwashing. Flying jets into civilian occupied buildings, suicide bombings – especially those directed at civilians and throwing acid into the faces of Muslim school girls isn’t brave, it is every bit as evil and perverted as Hitler’s death camps and Saddam’s torture chambers.

Professor Fish points out that in the new True Grit, there is no score card for the after life, “…in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.” Really…? God may be forgiving, but Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Manson, and others most certainly have a special place in hell that is personally reserved for them.

Which leads me back to John Wayne: Why do the liberal elitists and academics deny a healthy society’s need for the kind of physical courage John Wayne best represents in our popular culture?  Most heroes in today’s films wear tights and sport some sort of super-human power in fantasy fare with no relation to the real world. Yet, just last year Wayne still ranked third in the annual Harris poll of most popular American movie stars, where he has been in the top ten every year since the poll’s creation in 1994.

John Wayne films like Stagecoach, They Were Expendable, The Sands of Iwo Jima, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man through Rio Bravo, The Shootist and yes, True Grit showed true to life heroics that represented America in a particular time and place. The men Wayne played weren’t super human, but possessed hard earned skills and a well defined moral compass. As Wayne’s character in his last film The Shootist tells a teenage Ronnie Howard, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted and I won’t be laid a hand on. I do not do these things to others and demand the same of them.” Sounds like a damn good way to conduct yourself to me.

Far better then the elitist left, Middle America recognizes the values that Wayne’s celluloid bravery represents. The seriously wounded and bitter Vietnam Marine Corps vet Ron Kovik damned John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker in Born on the Fourth of July. Yet, far more seriously wounded American heroes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some suffering the loss of multiple limbs or first degree burns over ninety percent of their bodies, often react first with concern for their fellow soldiers and then a stoic “I guess I just had a bad day at the office.” Where do such amazing Americans come from today? Most often, though not exclusively, they come from traditional backgrounds and the South and rural West where John Wayne’s films are still shown to appreciative children and grand children.

Two years ago I was standing behind the chutes at a college rodeo in Cody, Wyoming with one of the rodeo committee members when we overheard two young bull riders talking about John Wayne’s excellent 1972 film The Cowboys, which had just played again on cable. It’s a film that in no small part is famous for Wayne actually being killed on screen, after beating the hell out of a murderous rustler leader while defending his very young trail hands.

“Two bad they had to kill the Duke off like that,” the one nineteen-year-old rodeo hand offered up. To which his fellow bull rider replied, “Maybe, but you know he did the right thing. He reminded me of my dad and grandpa, that’s how they would handle that kind of deal.” You won’t hear that kind of sentiment in Brentwood or on the upper West Side, but behind the bucking chutes at a rodeo in Wyoming waiting to get down on a 1500-pound bull, it’s about as normal as a really great slice of apple pie at the local diner.

Recently in the Los Angeles Times, Kim Darby, who played Mattie in the original film, told a wonderful story about a major star photo shoot on the Paramount lot soon after the filming True Grit ended.  The shoot included, Clint Eastwood, Barbara Streisand, and John Wayne. “I was sitting on the curb a ways away watching,” she said.  “The Duke stepped out of the picture and he said, ‘Hey, kid.’ He put out his arms and lifted me up and brought me over and put me in the center of the picture. How wonderful is that?” Wayne was the biggest movie star in the world at the time and Darby was still yet unknown. While Wayne was the ultimate representation of courage on movie screens, off screen he was also the most generous and giving of super stars, as well.

A nation and culture that denies physical courage in their own legends, fiction, and popular culture also denies the same bravery in real life, very much to its own peril, if not its own destruction. Go rent one of Wayne’s really good films, maybe even the original True Grit, and show it to your kids. His virtues on and off the screen need to be kept alive.

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

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).

So, what does he mean by “moderate?”

I suppose, maybe, “only gassing half as many Kurds?”

 
 Kurds gassed by “The Moderate”

Perhaps he was going to instruct his sons to only rape women on “every other weekend.”

Or maybe, to help the environment, he’ll only electrocute citizens using recycled car batteries.

Anypoop – Engel’s wrong. He makes the point that Saddam would be more accommodating, but you can’t be more accommodating than when you’re dead. I think even Saddam would agree, if he were alive. But he’s dead, so he can’t.

In that sense, I guess he’s not that accommodating (which does poke a hole in my theory).

More important, Engel should remember that one of the real benefits of that war is reminding dictators and homicidal maniacs that they are not impervious. The U.S. can and will stand up against evil – and Engel knows that many evil bastards were against the war for precisely that reason. It scared them.

Finally, Engel bases everything on a basic premise: all war is bad, even wars we win.

But we all know war sucks. We hate it when people die. And a lot of people had problems with the Iraq War, myself included. But the fact is, we won, and Saddam -who Engel calls a very bad man – is gone. That is a major accomplishment, and it strikes me as wrong not to give our armed forces massive kudos for that tremendous achievement.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist Islamophobic homophobe.

“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.

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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.

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?

Last week in San Francisco, Obama headlined a three million dollar fundraiser at the Westin St. Francis Hotel. The San Francisco Chronicle reports about 160 people paid $30,400 or more per couple for a private dinner with Obama followed by a reception costing $500 to $1000 that drew over 900 attendees. Among those at the dinner was the leftist, so-called antiwar group Code Pink co-founder, Jodie Evans.

The Chronicle reports Jodie Evans had a several minutes long conversation with Obama at the fundraiser.

Why does Jodie Evans merit such face time with the president even though she acts as an agent of influence for the anti-American governments of Iran, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as Middle Eastern terrorists?

Over the life of the campaign, Jodie Evans became one of Obama’s top donors, giving the maximum $2300 to his respective primary and general election funds and tens of thousands of dollars more to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint Obama-Democratic National Committee fund.

(more…)

I am not a Birther. Which is not to say that I think the question of Barack Obama’s US citizenship has in anyway been adequately answered, it has scarcely even been addressed other than through sneers and accusations of racism (and yes, a Certificate of Live Birth and several conflicting CNN statements…).  Rather, I just don’t believe it in anyway likely that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the country when two Hawaiian newspapers reported at the time that he was.

That said, I find the way that people who do believe that is a possibility are being treated by everyone – from the White House, to the media, to many even in the conservative blogosphere – to be completely unfair. Birthers are treated as kooks and extremists, banned from the comment sections of websites, and given less respect or voice in the media than those detached enough from basic reality to believe that passenger planes didn’t hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 despite, you know, the video of it happening and the missing passenger jets full of people. It begs the question – Is uncertainty about the citizenship of the President of the United States really so offensive? Certainly no one expressed this kind of outrage when John McCain’s eligibility was questioned due to his birth in the Panama Canal Zone. And I say rightly so. Here is why:

The list of qualifications for the presidency as spelled out by our founding fathers is remarkably short. As it turns out, almost anyone can be president, as long as they meet three, and only three, basic criteria. One, that they are a natural born citizen of the United States. Two, that they are at least 35 years old. And three, that they have maintained US residency for at least the last fourteen years. Citizenship, Age, and Residency, and that’s pretty much it. You don’t have to have any particular philosophy (which is good for Mr. Obama, considering he rejects the founding principles of the nation he now leads as “fundamentally flawed”), you don’t have to have any particular experience (which also serves Mr. Obama since his meteoric rise to fame seems to have skipped from local political agitator directly to elected government official without ever landing even for a moment on real-world employment), you don’t even have to like America itself, or Americans (those bitter folk who cling to their guns and their religion, or ‘stupidly’ behaved police officers for example). Amazing really. Our founders enumerated almost no restraints whatsoever on who might serve as president, and yet two of the three requirements they did write into the document that is America, citizenship and residency, make clear that they were very concerned that the president be, well, American. That tells me that a president’s citizenship is an important issue indeed.

Of course, the reason our founders cared about this issue so much is obvious. Citizenship is about identity. It’s about who a person is, and what values govern them. It is about loyalty to one nation over all others, which in the case of this new America wasn’t just about geographic-jingoism at all. To them, America was less a place than an it was an idea – An idea that men should be free from the tyranny and that that government serves best which serves least. Since the founders were trying to grow their new country out of a continent of colonies there-to-fore governed by an entirely different nation, and peopled by settlers from diverse nations around the world, the opportunity for competing interests and loyalties was pretty high. They didn’t want to give the keys to just anyone. No, the President of the United States was to be a citizen of this country, holding up this country’s values and ideals, and loyal to this country alone. The president was not to be a British Citizen, or a French Citizen, or a Global Citizen, but an American Citizen.

And that is what the Birther Movement is really all about. It’s about who we are as a people, and whether or not Barack Obama is one of us. And I am not using the term “us” here as some thoughtless code-word for race as undoubtedly those too infantile in their thinking to even have a discussion about race without shrieking accusation and ad hominem in the first place will bemoan, but to talk about Americans – those people of all ethnicities and backgrounds who are defined, not by the color of our skin, but by our common values and loyalty to the idea that is America. What the Birthers see in Barack Obama is a man whose values and loyalties seem to starkly contrast with those that have so long defined us as Americans, a man dedicated to ideas that are foreign to our own.

We see America as a melting-pot, where a singular culture is born out of many. E Pluribus Unum, we say. Barack Obama sees America as a multi-cultural balancing act where each person’s first loyalty is to those most like themselves in class or race or gender, and where those diverse groups can only co-exist with the guidance of government.

We see America, from the Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact to the Biblical scholars (yes, even Jefferson and Franklin) who birthed the nation, to the spirit of sacrifice and charity that thrives to this very day, not as a nation of Christians (for that freedom is at the deepest core of our common philosophy) but as a Christian nation. A nation conceived in and dedicated to those Biblical principals (as directly expressed by our founders and philosophical forbearers all the way back to John Locke) of liberty, self-government, an independent judiciary, forgiveness of debt, mercy, and honor of history . Barack Obama says, “We are not a Christian nation, at least not anymore…,” and subscribes to a personal religious theology rooted not in grace and love and freedom, but in anger and conquest.

We see America, from our victory over British oppression, to the liberation of Europe from the national socialists and defense of her against the communists, to the defeat of the Taliban and toppling of Saddam Hussein, as a force for good in the world. Barack Obama travels the world apologizing for the very actions we have always called our national pride, always quick to point out what he sees as America’s meddling, but never mentioning the communist elements, oppressive regimes, or extremist agitators that typically drew our sons and daughters into those regions in the first place.

We view our progress, our innovation, our freedom as unparalleled on the stage of history because the system of government we have created empowers men to their own highest achievement rather that seeking to regulate them into conformity with the plans of others. Barack Obama speaks of world orders, more intrusive government, and sees America as merely one color in a vibrant tapestry of nations, no better than any other, and perhaps worse for our arrogance and greed. Instead of celebrating us, he decries us as in need of reform in the image of European governments that aren’t ashamed to call themselves socialist.

We see America as not without fault, but unparalleled in our goodness in all of human history. He sees America as flawed, though perhaps not beyond his own repair.

For all of these reasons and many, many more, Barack Obama seems to be, if not un-American, then at least not-American. Which brings us back to citizenship. The question the Birthers are really trying to ask isn’t ‘is Barack Obama one of us.’ He plainly is not one of us. The real question is ‘why not?’ The Birthers think the answer might be as simple as that he is not an actual citizen of this country. They think he must have been born somewhere else, like Kenya, to have the views and values he expresses. Others think that Mr. Obama was born here, but that perhaps his parents renounced his citizenship while he was living in Indonesia as a child, maybe to get him into certain schools or just because they thought at the time that they would live in Indonesia forever. Maybe that would explain how Mr. Obama paid from his Harvard education, through programs aimed at helping foreign nationals get American educations. Which might explain why none of his collegiate records or papers have ever been released. Which might further explain why there is just so much about his past that has been deliberately withheld from the public, or colorfully rewritten in his artificially sweetened autobiographies. I don’t happen to agree with the Birthers or their legal-citizenship cousins, but my question for the Birthers-haters is – When did it become incumbent on citizens asking reasonable questions about their president’s life, experiences, and even his eligibility to be president, to simply accept the that president at his word? Is it not reasonable to expect an elected official, especially one who has promised unprecedented transparency, to simply reveal the documents relevant to answering the biggest questions about his life? Are we supposed to take all of our government officials at face value now, or just this one? Why does the media, whose job it is to hold the government accountable deride the Birthers and not demand the president simply remove the cloak he has so effectively hidden himself behind? Agree with them or not, the Birthers are just trying to answer the perfectly legitimate questions created by the patent dishonesty about and obscuration of most every aspect of Barack Obama’s life. Who can blame them?

As for those of us who don’t subscribe to the conclusion of the Birthers, the truth is that even worse questions remain for us. After all, if the answer isn’t that Mr. Obama is not a legal American citizen, then the question that remains is how is it that a young man who was born here, was raised here, is from among us could be so foreign in his views of who we are as a people? What weakness in our system has allowed to fester on our own streets beliefs, loyalties, and sensibilities so antithetical to the ones that have so long defined, propelled, and strengthened us? And perhaps even more troubling – If the President of the United States really has nothing at all to hide in the past he has so sought to conceal, then why has he concealed it at all? Is it simply distrust of his fellow citizens, or dislike? Does he think himself so far above the rabble that he is simply beyond having to expose himself to our judgments? Or is it that Barack Obama simply wants to be left alone to define his own life, to continue writing his own narrative unencumbered by fact or evidence or inquiry, leaving history to believe about him whatever he himself conceives or constructs? Is he a leader whose legacy is his own declaration? If so, he may be even less American than the Birthers themselves fear.

I wrote about this two years ago, just when Hasbro and Paramount execs decided to give GI Joe a makeover. Back then they felt the world would be too pissed at us for getting rid of Saddam Hussein to go see a movie about an American hero. As it turns out, they were wrong – the backlash over Saddam’s death had less impact than Norman Fell’s.

But for a moment, let’s attempt to use Donny’s logic on other flicks. “Sex and the City,” my favorite film – made a pile of money around the world, and it was about five American chicks exercising their rights to both unfettered capitalism and sex. According to Deutsch, it would have been better to make them all multi-racial, transgendered dolphins – and stationed them in Brussels in a cool undersea condo shaped like Earth. Granted, that does sound awesome – but it probably would have been less successful than the original concept (which made me cry).

Fact is, our mainstream media feels awkward about anything “American,” and finds the idea of an international force (made up of everybody!) stamping out evil far more palatable than America running the show. But hey, that fantasy doesn’t exist – and if it ever did, Americans would have to run it.

The ugly truth: the world loves America more than MSNBC talking heads are willing to admit. And they like our heroes even more: our Rambos, John McClanes, Supermans, Dirty Harrys and Charlotte Yorks. We make great heroes, because our country is full of them.

Unlike MSNBC.

They’re just full of it.

Tonight we’ve got: Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, comedian Paul Mercurio and Patti Ann Browne. Plus more junk!