Jane Fonda was brave enough to march into enemy territory during the Vietnam War, but she’s absolutely frightened by the politicians vying to evict President Barack Obama from the Oval Office in 2012.

Fonda shared her trepidation regarding the Republican presidential hopefuls with, who else, CNN’s Piers Morgan.

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“They all scare me frankly,” Fonda said, when asked to comment on the intellectual capacity of each member of the field. “I get depressed and scared when I look at the Republican debates … “I’m worried about anybody getting elected to office who says we have to do away with or privatize social security, we have to reduce medical health insurance, we have to not raise taxes,” she responded. “And, oh, there’s no problem with the environment, this is all made up by the left, the scientists don’t really know what they’re talking about — this worries me.”

Twenty years ago, Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ was released and was less a film than a Molotov cocktail thrown at the “establishment.”  Stone called his film about the 20th century’s most infamous Presidential assassination “a history lesson” (a characterization he quickly withdrew) and hoped to be vindicated by the passage of time.

Stone’s thesis in a film designed to appeal to middle America is as follows: the military-industrial complex, allowed free reign under Eisenhower, killed Kennedy because he was trying to end the Cold War, especially in Cuba and Vietnam (the latter extremely important to the obsessed Stone).  Their point men were apolitical snipers, vengeful anti-Castroites, and a manipulated Oswald.  Far from being an angry leftist loner, Oswald was in fact a perpetrator for the more dovish elements of the American government’s schemes.  The low-level plotters included Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, and David Ferrie, a member of the Operation Mongoose team, a CIA operation in constant efforts to kill Castro.

Like all history lessons, the yardstick is whether further evidence has proved him correct.  On Shaw being a CIA agent, Stone was on sure footing: CIA Director Richard Helms admitted that the New Orleans defendant was an agent.  On Shaw and Ferrie knowing each other (a charge Shaw denied under oath at his trial in New Orleans), evidence in  the form of a car loan for Ferrie co-signed by Shaw has vindicated Stone.

But other revelations have not been so kind.  Far from being a patsy four  floors down from his supposed sniper perch, Oswald was shown in documents released after the film by the Dallas Police that his fingerprints were on the trigger of his Manlicher Carcano.  Re-created shooting by world-class snipers has shown that the head-shots did in fact come from the Sixth Floor Depository.  Computer analysis applied to the grassy knoll reveals that in order for a shot to have come from there the sniper would  have to have been on a forty-foot ladder (a stance that would have attracted notice). (more…)

73 year-old, two time Academy Award-winner Jane Fonda spends 4200-plus words “explaining” her infamous 1972 trip to Hanoi where she was infamously photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese (translation: the enemy) anti-aircraft gun (translation: a weapon used to kill American pilots).

It’s a long, anguished, intellectually dishonest rationalization from the aging actresses titled: “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi.” 

Not sure it’s worth a read. Up to you. But the real meat is buried under thousands of words:

That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we’d been hearing about.

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.

Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)

The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.

Imagine Jane Fonda’s father Henry Fonda (who, by the way, enlisted to fight in WWII)  saying, “In 1942, the Nazis invited me to Berlin where I was photographed on a Tiger II tank but I also did a bunch of other stuff while I was there, so please judge me by the full context of my trip to Berlin.”

Hilariously, to keep the focus off her fraternizing with an enemy desperate to kill American and allied troops and in the process of  subjugating the sovereign nation of South Vietnam into the slavery of Communism, Fonda crybabies about all the lies told about her trip, especially those told on the Internet. This is a semantic ploy meant to distract from her many serious critics who need not make a single thing up or exaggerated in the least to reveal her actions as despicable and outright traitorous.

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It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

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So an entertaining film comes out about a woman who bucks up against societal norms in the early seventies, puts career over family, and still comes out a winner — sounds like someone’s flirting with Oscar! Strangely, it doesn’t earn a single nomination.

“Secretariat,” a movie about the horse who won more awards than Al Gore, will not be in the starting gate at the Oscars, February 27. What could be the problem? It opened the weekend after the “Social Network,” so it wasn’t like the Academy of ADHD Artists had time to forget about it. It wasn’t that it didn’t have a good enough campaign team working behind it either. Disney pitched it right alongside “Toy Story 3,” a long-shot which actually made it into the Best Picture category, a rare occurrence for a cartoon.

Diane Lane put in an undeniably Oscar-worthy performance that recalls some of the most glamorous actresses of a Hollywood’s golden age. She played Secretariat’s owner, Penny Tweedy, with the poise of Grace Kelly, the brash of Katherine Hepburn, and the warmth of Donna Reid. John Malkovich should have been a shoe-in, with one of his quirkiest characters to date, as the trainer Lucien Laurin; a role that recalled some of the greater comedic sidekicks from the heyday of Disney like Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Buddy Hackett

Perhaps the PG rating made it into a film that no one in the Academy bothered to watch. After “The Blind Side” took two nominations last year, the members of the Academy became aware of the disturbing trend of solidly entertaining family pictures that are uplifting and not vulgar. Perhaps a few more jokes about cleaning out the stables could have won a PG-13 rating and a couple seats in the Kodak Theater. (more…)

When the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, announced that they were going to remake True Grit, it sparked all of the usual arguments about the merits and demerits of such undertakings.

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original? (more…)

When I read that 72-year old Jane Fonda was about to release two new workout DVDs “geared to the 100 million Baby Boomers and older adults,” two words kept popping into my head: “Hanoi Jane.” (I had a similar experience when she tried to re-emerge as a viable actress in Hollywood with the movie “Monster-in-Law” in 2005. Except the words that kept coming to mind then were “traitor” and “back-stabbing communist sympathizer.”)

What is Fonda’s deal? Doesn’t she know that real Americans have been sick of her since she took North Vietnam’s side during the Vietnam War? Does she really think she can pose for pictures in her workout clothes in 2010 and we’ll somehow forget about her posing for pictures with a North Vietnamese Anti-Aircraft gun in 1972?

Surely she knows we’ll never forget the radio broadcast she made to the North Vietnamese population in August 1972: a broadcast in which she referred to American fighting forces as “U.S. imperialists,” bragged that President Nixon would “never be able to break the spirit of [the North Vietnamese] people,” and then said Nixon “would do well to read…poetry written by Ho Chi Minh.” (It was during this same trip to North Vietnam that Fonda referred to our soldiers as “war criminals” and accused American POWs of lying when they alleged that the North Vietnamese had tortured them.) (more…)

One of the things that I find most unpleasant about the current movie-going experience are the trailers. They’ve become slicker and louder than ever, but nevertheless a relentless homogenization has set in. The reason that a spoof video called A Trailer for Every Academy Award-Winning Movie Ever Made went viral earlier this year was because it deftly mocked a great number of the tired conventions used by modern-day Hollywood’s editors and marketers. See for yourself:

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen

The above short wouldn’t be so funny if the horrid little things weren’t so ripe for parody. To be fair, the trailers of old were just as bad in their way — if you watch classic film DVDs and take the time to run the special features, you’ll soon grow weary of seeing every film advertised as the GREATEST CINEMATIC TRIUMPH EVER! But we’re supposed to be better than that these days, we’re supposed to have evolved, right? In truth, our stuff’s just as cheesy, and will be revealed as such in a couple decades, when people yet unborn will watch them on some as-yet-unfathomed format and chuckle at how predictable and “of their time” they are.

Every once in awhile, however, a trailer comes along that’s startling in its freshness, that manages to break all the rules and become memorable in its own right. So it was with the two-minute teaser to Aliens, first spied by my then fifteen-year-old self in the spring of 1986. Can’t remember which movie I was at — Cobra probably, or maybe The Karate Kid Part II. But I’ve never forgotten that daring, brilliant bit of marketing: (more…)

“Is the ecstatic truth actually a religious term?”

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

Whoops — guess Herzog didn’t get his marching orders this awards season! (more…)

If you’ve seen Superman: The Movie (1978), you surely remember the character of Perry White, the tough-as-nails editor of The Daily Planet. Played pitch-perfect by actor Jackie Cooper, he’s one of the comedic highlights of the picture. “I want the name of this flying whatchamacallit to go with the Daily Planet like bacon and eggs! Franks and beans! Death and taxes! Politics and corruption!”

Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ. (more…)

“At eventide we buried our heroic dead, the last salute from their comrades and their officers.” That’s the narration which accompanies the poignant funeral scene in John Ford’s The Battle of Midway. The man who conceived that film — and its brother-in-arms, They Were Expendable — is dead, destined never to return to this world. The men who wrote the words are also dead, as are the men who spoke them. The young soldiers saluting rows of flag-draped bodies, the priests praying over them, the audiences weeping in their seats at the theater — all dead. Time passes, and the next generation remembers a little bit less about their forefathers. The generation after, less still. Before long, all that’s left to remind us of our debt to the past are yellowed documents, faded photographs, and weathered headstones.

And, of course, old movies.

By 1944 John Ford already sensed the onset of these creeping forces of forgetfulness, and so when the time came to make Expendable, he hatched a strange plan. First, he confronted Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, and demanded that he be paid $300,000 for helming the picture, more than any director had ever made for a single film. Appealing to Mayer’s patriotism, he said he wasn’t going to keep a single cent of it — it would be used in toto to establish a special place of military honor and memory, a shrine “for Pennick and the boys.” Mayer agreed, and after Expendable was finished Ford used the money to buy eight acres of land in the foothills north of Los Angeles, and to build upon it what became known as The Field Photo Farm.

By the time Ford’s funds were exhausted, the property sported stables with horses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond, and a large parade ground — all of it reserved for the veterans of his OSS Field Photographic unit. A big clubhouse contained glass cases filled with the war medals of Field Photo’s heroic dead. A beautiful chapel was constructed on-site, with the names of the men lost under Ford’s command engraved therein. The list included Jack MacKenzie Jr., the young assistant who had narrowly avoided death alongside Ford at Midway and who had survived the rest of the war, only to be tragically killed in an August 1945 Jeep accident in Los Angeles. In 1947, They Were Expendable’s brilliant cinematographer Joe August collapsed on the set of his 277th picture, dead of a heart attack. Ford dutifully had his name added to the chapel’s grim roster. (more…)

My father Roger E. Tapson, a former United States Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II, died five years ago and was buried near a small lake in the rolling, pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands of other veterans - their names, as poet Stephen Spender might say, “feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud, and whispers of wind in the listening sky, the names of those who…left the vivid air signed with their honor.” It’s exactly the kind of place my dad would have described, without a hint of Oprah-fied, feminized, New Age devaluation of the word, as “spiritual,” which was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.

Spiritual indeed, but not in the same degree or kind as ”civilian” burial grounds. Not to diminish the final resting place of anyone interred in the latter; but to stand in a military cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn reverence. The aura of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra, because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and sacrifice – and to the warriors who once embodied them. Those grave markers stand as a challenge to those of us who remain. (more…)

The warrior cried, but not for himself.

His tears flowed from the blessing of the little girl — the one with the angel-voice. And, as we stood in ovation in the American Legion Hall her lyric, “… I once was lost, but now I’m found. Was blind, but now I see” reminded him why his military service and the forty-odd years since had all been worthwhile: her Freedom, our Freedom.

As our tearful eyes locked, he restrained in a whisper, “See that? That’s why I lost my legs in Vietnam.” But then he smiled, “losing my legs is the best thing that ever happened to me… it’s why I am here right now, and it’s given me a great life.” 

Of course, I can never truly know the depth of my new friend Duane Wagner’s struggles in meeting his post Vietnam war challenges, but I was privileged to share with him a true moment of ‘amazing grace’ in the knowledge that his sacrifices – and all those of his compatriots — were not in vain. (more…)

According to studio estimates, Watchmen (Warner Bros) will finish the weekend with an estimated $55.65M. After seizing $4.5M in Thursday midnight business, there were rumblings about $29M on opening day and an opening weekend of $70M+. When the picture scored a lesser but still good $25.2M Friday, weekend estimates were revised downward. As of Saturday morning, my projection was for $57M, and Watchmen came in even lower than that.

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s densely written graphic novel tumbled 24% from Friday to Saturday. Granted, midnight shows took a lot of steam out of the movie, but that’s a pretty significant fall given that the Males 25 Plus demo – a key one for this film – were not likely part of the Thursday fanboy crowd and, despite the current unemployment rate, were working on Friday.

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