Good Morning, Vietnam (25th Anniversary Edition) (1987)

25 years ago, Robin Williams was already a household name and television star, but at the time, while I was sitting in the theatre watching this box office hit unspool, I knew Williams had arrived as a full-blown movie star. 25 year later, watching the Blu-ray over the weekend, nothing has changed. The highly fictionalized story of story of Adrian Cronauer, an Air Force disc jockey in Vietnam between 1965-1966, is still just as entertaining, hilarious and clever.

Because director Barry Levinson handles the story’s political undertones with such a deft touch, none of the humor or plot points feel in any way heavy-handed or anti-military. In fact, like Robert Altman’s brilliant “M*A*S*H,” the war and the military feel more like devices used to explore a much larger and more universal theme about individuality and thumbing your nose at authority. And that, my friends, is good stuff.

“Good Morning, Vietnam” is also an opportunity to spend some time with two exceptional character actors no longer with us: Bruno Kirby and as  Cronauer’s primary foil, The Mighty J.T. Walsh. Williams deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for his work, and I think he’d be one of the first to admit that the greatness surrounding him helped to make him great.

This is still one of the best films Williams has ever done, and never let yourself or anyone forget that the real Cronauer is a lifelong Republican who openly supported George W. Bush in 2004.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Everything about director Peter Weir’s handling of an Oscar-winning script written by Tom Schulman about his own personal experiences at a fancy preparatory school for boys is letter perfect. The production design feels like 1959, the young cast is believable in their roles as repressed, wealthy Caucasians who are really artists and poets looking for the opportunity to shine, and as the teacher who inspires them with poetry to “seize the day,” Robin Williams is all warmth and humor.

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Watch Billy Bob Thornton and Aaron Eckhart make perfect sense as Amber Heard practically breaks down crying at the beauty of it all…

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Occupy Wall Street does remind me of the 60’s anti-war movement inasmuch as they were both based on a lie. The dirty, filthy hippies didn’t care about the Vietnam War; what they wanted was an end to the draft. That’s why, after Nixon ended the draft, the anti-war movement broke up even though the war would rage for a few more years.

OWS is based on the same lie. These smelly, selfish, narcissistic, spoiled loser creeps want their student loans forgiven. They claim to be outraged over the government’s bailout of Wall Street (which is worth being outraged over) and yet they want their own government bailout and in large part support President GoldmanSachsFailureTeleprompter.

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Via Daily Mail:

As for Jane, she was constantly being arrested for trespassing on army bases. By mid-1970, she was nearly broke, having spent thousands financing her trips and her many causes. ‘It’s sort of relaxing to be poor,’ she told friends.

It was chiefly to replenish her coffers that she agreed to star as the call girl Bree Daniels in the 1971 film Klute, which won her an Oscar. She also started sleeping with her co-star Donald Sutherland, who fell madly in love with her.

Together, they took a political vaudeville show called FTA — slang for ‘f*** the army’ — across the country. By then, both were under surveillance, so they often talked in code.

FBI agents opened her post, tapped her phone and even planted a false story that she wanted to kill the President. Her FBI files later extended to 22,000 pages.

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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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Should a two-time Oscar-winner like Jane Fonda really be making a spectacle out of the fact that she wanted to appear on a home-shopping channel? What’s next? “Damn those righties! I was looking forward to cutting the ribbon at that grocery store with Leif Garrett!”

Anyway, some shameless whoppers in Ms. Fonda’s own words:

I was to have been on QVC today to introduce my book, “Prime Time,” about aging and the life cycle. …

The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear.

Bottom line, this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.

In other news, for some reason no one understands, Jane Fonda was not struck by lightning.

No one’s criticizing Fonda for her “opposition to the Vietnam War.” It was hanging out with the enemy and propagandizing on their behalf that upsets people. This isn’t 1968 anymore. If nothing else, the Left has figured out that while this country is okay with opposition and protest, the days of tres chic trashing of the troops are long past and beyond the boundaries of decency.

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It’s hard to come out of Lt. Dan Band: For the Common Good without a healthy feeling of irony. You’ve just witnessed a prime example of man’s inhumanity and cruelty inspiring a display of man’s greatest virtues–honor, sacrifice, compassion, and unity.  It’s not just a concert film; it’s another illustration of the central thesis of Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation: that pop culture trumps politics without fail. In the midst of a hopelessly contentious and divisive foreign war, our politicians and pundits have nowhere near the profound effect on troop morale as a simple cover band led by a TV actor. The study of the relationship between civilian and soldier in wartime provides a compelling subject for this expansive documentary.

Director Jonathan Flora frames the film around Gary Sinise, an actor and director with a long, intimate history with soldiers and veterans, though he himself has never served. From his brother-in-law, who was killed in Vietnam, to current bandmate Kimo Williams,  a ‘Nam veteran who started jamming with Sinise after they met on a production of A Streetcar Named Desire in the mid-90s, his career has always seemed to providentially intertwine with the military. Following the jihadist attacks of 9/11, Sinise felt compelled to help those directly affected by the Twin Towers’ destruction, volunteering in campaigns to benefit the FDNY. This spirit of volunteerism, in concert with his ever more frequent band practices with Williams,  materialized into a USO tour in 2003. Despite his diverse résumé, Sinise was universally associated with his Oscar-nominated performance as “Lieutenant Dan” from Forrest Gump, so as the group expanded, Sinise named it the “Lieutenant Dan Band,” and the rest is history. (more…)

A great story detailing the friendship of two superstars, but this is a definite highlight:

It was not the only time that Tom had seen Elvis angry. Whenever John Lennon’s name came up, he would fly into a rage.

His dislike of the pacifist Beatle was born from the night I took the Fab Four to his house for their first — and last — meeting.

John had annoyed Presley by making his anti-war feelings known the moment he stepped into the massive lounge and spotted the table lamps — model ­wagons engraved with the message: ‘All the way with LBJ.’ Lennon hated President Lyndon B Johnson for raising the stakes in the Vietnam War.

Presley allied himself with the FBI director Edgar Hoover and ­encouraged him to have Lennon thrown out of the U.S.

‘He should’ve been kicked out long ago,’ Elvis told Tom that night. ‘I had a run-in with him myself,’ Tom said. He made some smart remark at a TV studios in England, where we were appearing on the show Thank Your Lucky Stars. I wanted to take him outside and see what sort of hiding his intellect would stand.’

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“I wanted to be a war hero, man, I wanted to go out and kill for my country. And now, I’m here to tell you that I have killed for my country or whatever. And I don’t feel good about it. Because there’s not enough reason, man, to feel a person die in your hands or to see your best buddy get blown away. I’m here to tell you, it’s a lousy thing, man. I don’t see any reason for it. And there’s a lot of shit that I did over there that I find fucking hard to live with.” 

Why it’s a left-wing film

“Coming Home” was the first film produced under Jane Fonda’s terribly important-sounding production shingle, IPC Films or, Indochina Peace Campaign. She was inspired in part by her friend Ron Kovic, a Vietnam Veteran turned anti-war activist who would later be the subject of his own biopic, Oliver Stone’s “Born on the 4th of July.” Set in 1968 and focusing primarily on three veterans and their personal and emotional struggles after returning home from the war, this well-produced, well-directed and brilliantly acted drama nonetheless aids and abets the left’s monstrous view of the American fighting man and does its part in cementing the unfair stereotype of the Vietnam Vet as victim, dupe, war criminal, crazy and any or all of the above.  

Director Hal Ashby immediately sets his theme in place during the opening scene where a half dozen or so wounded vets sit around a pool table in a Veteran’s hospital drinking beer and debating the war. Quite deliberately, the lone man defending America’s decision to defend our South Vietnamese allies from brutal communist aggressors in the North, is thoroughly drowned out by the “moral authority” of the others (as Jon Voight’s Luke silently listens on). In the end, all voices are quieted by the Veteran who speaks film’s real message, how Vietnam Vets must learn to live with what they did over there.

Luke is a Marine who returned from the war a paraplegic and a bitterly angry one at that. Like Ron Kovic, he went to war for God and country and came back disillusioned and haunted by what he saw and did. Eventually he’s able to reenter the world thanks mainly to a tender love affair he engages in with Sally (Fonda), a conservative  militarywife married to the chauvinistic Bob (Bruce Dern), a Marine officer who’s just left for his own tour in Vietnam. Luke’s anger over his war experience soon turns into activism. He vows to stop as many young men as he can from making the same mistake he did, going so far as to chain himself to the front gate of a Marine base. (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…)

Back when I was a young hillbilly, it could be dangerous to go too far into some parts of the woods. The moonshiners there were clannish, hostile to strangers and guarded their stills with rifles and guile. They switched to marijuana cultivation during the late ’60s and became even more deadly to outsiders by placing explosive booby traps smuggled back from Vietnam on their fields’ perimeters. Now things are really catawampus. The boys are not just cooking super addictive crystal meth or “crank,” they’re using it too, and that makes for some truly crazy and outright paranoid ridge runners.

That’s the Winter’s Bone world of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a 17 year old Ozark girl who cares for her two siblings and catatonic mother. She chops wood, shoots and skins squirrels, and she keeps her mouth shut about her crank cookin’ father, Jessup. It’s a world where family trees can resemble telephone poles and family feuds get deadly. No 9-1-1 callers here. The code of honor says when trouble brews, ya’ grab a weapon and take care of things yer own damn self — like the time when Jessup got crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and got shot in the chest. According to Daniel Woodrell’s novel on which the film is based: Jessup “was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor, he drove 30 miles to … the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling.”

Rhee lives strictly by the don’t ask, don’t tell, clan code until she learns she and her family will be homeless in a week because daddy Jessup posted the family home and property for his bail and then didn’t show up for trial. (more…)

So, in that Rolling Stone piece that brought down General McCrystal, the writer spent three weeks with the troops.

What did he find?

Trash talk directed at bureaucrats.

Yeah, I know.

Here’s a fact: if someone followed me around for three weeks, they’d find far more worse. The storage container underneath my waterbed would put me away for life. Fact is, journos like me and those at Rolling Stone are so seedy, we could never survive the scrutiny we apply on others.

Simply put: Soldiers are better people than those who cover them.

But this writer followed the troops, who might as well be on Mars. That’s what Afghanistan is. A weird, scary place without decent cable. They don’t have time to worry about some slimy dickwad writer trying to ingratiate himself into their fold in order to get a damaging tidbit upon which to build a career. These soldiers deal with death. And that’s the irony. While those troops work like hell – in hell – to protect that writer from his own demise, he’s busy orchestrating theirs. How screwed is that? (more…)

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In 1987, my friend Pete and I – editors on our college’s conservative paper – got the chance to interview Vice Admiral James Stockdale.  You might remember him as Ross Perot’s running mate, the man who asked in one debate, only half in jest, “Who am I?  Why am I here?”

But Admiral Stockdale was not the befuddled clown some hack comics tried to make him out to be.  A brilliant classics scholar, he was also a warrior’s warrior.  His evil North Vietnamese captors tortured him unmercifully – not calling him mean names, not dunking him in water as trained medics watched, but real, savage torture that left his body broken.  But it did not break his American spirit; when the communists decided they wanted to film him for propaganda he calmly took a wooden stool and bashed his own face in so they couldn’t use him.  We saw his Medal of Honor sitting in his study surrounded by books.

Pete and I both later joined the Army, and we both served multiple deployments. I don’t know how it affected Pete, but during Desert Storm I took one round out of one of my M16 magazines and kept it in my top BDU pocket.  I’m no Admiral Stockdale, and I figured if I went through my other 209 rounds I needed some insurance that I wouldn’t be getting captured alive. (more…)

“Krankheit” in German is pronounced the same as the “Cronkite” following “Walter.” The German word means “sickness” while the “Walter” word means the man who infected TV news with the gazillion dollar-salary Star Anchor larger than the news he is supposed to be presenting. I don’t say that to be mean-spirited or disrespectful of a man who was “the most trusted man in America,” but nobody else appears to be pointing out that Cronkite was actually a liberal ideologue; an advocate of a politically correct, totalitarian world government who used his trust to influence public policy in accordance with his own beliefs.

Cronkite should be the poster boy for full disclosure of a reporter’s politics — something I strongly advocate. Instead, he continues to be lauded as “Uncle Walter,” the journalist who was totally unbiased in his reportage at a time when there were only three networks and the size of his news audience and personal influence on politics and national policy was far beyond anything that can be imagined by those who did not experience it. That meant Cronkite was the national oracle of fact and truth during his time as Anchor and Managing Editor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. But was he really unbiased? Well, that’s not quite the way it was. (more…)

When my son was in high school he was a member of the Air Force ROTC.  As the young men and women drilled around the campus, leftist teachers would slam the doors on them in hate and anger, thus putting the lie to the oft-stated canard, “We support the troops but not the war in Iraq.” 

When we hear about “the culture war” this is the war that we’re in at home, it’s between those who believe in things bigger than themselves and those who fear things bigger than themselves.  Why do they fear patriotic children?  Because patriotism is, to the Modern Liberal, an act of bigotry.  As you watch America’s new Commander-in-Chief running around the world belittle America, apologizing for “wrongs” that weren’t even committed by us (such as “colonialism” which was the Europeans) and literally bowing down before the “Keeper of the Holy places,” the Saudi King, you must recognize that he does so because he believes that love for America is bigotry and if there’s one thing a Leftist is not (in his own mind) it’s a bigot.  (more…)

Not long after our present wars began in Afghanistan and Iraq the letters started to arrive.  One a month, two, sometimes more… We received one just last week. They come from most every military organization you can imagine. Some are about care packages, others are about air conditioners, and a few have to do with adopting a soldier to share correspondence with. None ask for money. They’re thank you notes, thanking “Mr. and Mrs. John Nolte for your generosity.”

Only through these letters do I ever learn of my generosity. This is my wife’s doing.

Since the arrival of the first letter we’ve had some lean years and some flush, but still they come. Only the amount we’re being thanked for ever changes. Frequently, during those leanest of times, my wife would get angry because what she could afford to donate barely covered the costs involved in the sending of the thank you.  So she’d scrape up another donation and send it along with an attached note politely advising: “To Whom It May Concern: No reply is necessary. Please use the money for the troops.” (more…)

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America. (more…)

I have been a proud conservative Republican my entire life. My father and Jimmy Carter saw to that. My first vote ever was for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and I have never voted for a Democrat. Ever. Even today, the reasons for my being so have not changed, despite the media’s and liberal Democrats’ tireless efforts to discredit my belief system. Though the times may change, core principles never do. I have also served this nation proudly in uniform for six years, and don’t regret a minute of it.

In the early 1980s, my military service brought me to some of the darker corners of the world. I spent time in South Korea and Marcos’ Philippines when both countries were under martial law. Knowing I could be shot just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time really woke me up to what exactly it is we have here in America. Seeing a thousand Vietnamese Boat People pulled out of the South China Sea in one day only reinforced my belief in America, Sweet Land of Liberty.

Today, the Party of Lincoln and Reagan appears to be in political disarray, which is why I am writing this OpEd now. Yet many promising developments, along with some huge mistakes by Congress and the Obama Administration, have opened many new doors for us. If only we will enter. (more…)

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If present-day Hollywood had their way here are five things you’d never know…

1. That JFK had way more in common with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush than most of today’s Democrats: By modern standards, Kennedy was a fairly conservative Republican; forward-leaning on national defense and a tax cutter who may not have called it trickle-down but to improve the economy and grow the treasury he cut taxes across the board (yes, including the evil rich). Kennedy’s “tax cuts for the wealthy” not only worked but would become the starter blueprint for both the Reagan and Bush II tax cuts. (more…)