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.

The plot is a simple one. John Keating (Williams) is the new English teacher at Welton Academy, a respected prep school steeped in oak-paneled tradition and determined to teach its young men “honor, discipline, and excellence.” Keating (a former student) will have none of it, though, and immediately abuses his position to teach his students to be reckless and, worst of all, insufferably self-indulgent.

As a response, the boys begin to break school rules, defy their parents, and devolve into pretentious, narcissistic bohemians who put a higher value on their own destructive self-actualization than anything else –  including their own futures. The young man most affected by all of this is Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), who comes from a loving home with a stern father, a self-made man who’s worked his butt off to give his son the opportunities he never had.

Thanks to Keating’s irresponsible nonsense, Neil lies to his father and accepts a part in a local community play. After he’s caught, Neil’s father decides to ship the defiant boy off to military school. With his head filled with Keating’s nonsense about “seizing the day” and how an unfulfilled life isn’t worth living, Neil blows his brains out in his father’s study.

In the end Keating gets fired, but the closing scene makes clear that the terrible influence this awful teacher had on his students is, tragically, a permanent one.

Obviously, the filmmakers and the film’s one-sided point of view don’t see these events in quite the same way I do. In fact, the story portrays Keating’s influence as a good thing, portrays narcissism as a virtue.

Which is why I hate “Dead Poets Society.”

Both Blu-rays are set for release Jan. 17, and are available for pre-order at Amazon here and here.

——

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.

The only purists in both movements were and are the communists, fascists, and anarchists (but I repeat myself) using all that selfish, crybaby energy to further their own goals.  Oh, and the corrupt MSM  doing everything they can to hide these truths and dim-witted Hollywood one-percenters desperate to  pretend that begging to be a student loan welfare queen by defecating in a ziploc bag in the middle of a park is somehow avant-garde.

Just thinking about all of this makes me want to spend money at Walmart.

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.

Of course, Jane didn’t help her case by declaring publicly that what Vietnam really needed was a ‘victory for the Vietcong’ — the Communist army fighting the U.S. government over South Vietnam.

Another of her ideas was to dress protesters as dead Vietcong fighters — in white make-up and black leotards — to demonstrate on the lawn of comedian Bob Hope, who had been entertaining U.S. troops.

Eventually, Jane split from Sutherland, saying she was moving into a different phase of her life and she couldn’t share it with one man. There were soon rumours that she was having liaisons with various activists.

She supposedly confided during a feminist consciousness-raising session, ‘My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.’ …

Adapted from Jane Fonda by Patricia Bosworth, to be published on October 1 by The Robson Press

Full piece here.

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.

It’s funny that in the September of her years, Fonda would all of a sudden be so gung-ho about putting this shame to rest. My guess is that she pictured herself at this age as one of those artists who spends their twilight being toasted and honored throughout the world; their controversies forgotten, forgiven, and overshadowed by legend. Jane Fonda has lived to be old enough to be allowed a sneak peek at her legacy and she apparently doesn’t like what she’s seeing.

Unfortunately for Fonda, when it comes to most things, we Americans really are a forgiving bunch. Especially in the arenas of personal, sexual, and bad boyish behavior. Time and again, when someone reaches a certain stage of their life, we tend to realize how little the mistakes of their past (which are usually more tasteless, stupid, boorish and self-destructive than anything else) matters within the context of someone who will soon leave us forever.

Something we’re not as forgiving about, however, is the betrayal of our country or the appeasing of an enemy. Fair or not, this is something that will forever haunt the legacies of Joe Kennedy Sr. and Charles Lindbergh.

And so it will with Jane Fonda. 

What she did was morally appalling and narcissistic and arrogant and undermining to an entire generation of men who risked their lives for their own country and to keep free another.  

No spin, no thousands of words, no Academy Award, no legacy or legend will ever change that.

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.

Good people in America are just hating you back, Ms. Fonda. Don’t be so thin-skinned. You started it.

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.

It’s tempting to think this is a vanity project for Sinise, now better known for his long-running role on CSI: New York–that like other celebrities, he’s got a pet cause designed to make him look like a good guy. It’s certainly clear the producers ask virtually every interviewee their opinion of the man, but any doubts the viewer entertains about his sincerity quickly evaporate as the film reveals a level of determination and effort that would be noteworthy from anyone, celebrity or no. We see him orchestrate an increasingly elaborate stage show, drawing on his experience running Chicago’s Steppenwolf theatre. We see his family silently bear the burden of his prolonged absences; they miss him but recognize his time away as tours of duty. We realize Sinise and co. aren’t ego strokers reading a PSA script for a check, whipping up crocodile tears over the ozone layer so they can lecture flyover country and feel morally superior. They’re hard-working entertainers willing to put their lives on hold and travel to war zones all to display their gratitude to our servicemen and women.

Aside from the warm fuzzies it’ll put in your heart, For the Common Good is an entertaining and exhaustive documentary. We’re treated to a brief history of the USO, Gary’s young introduction to both music and acting, musical numbers by the Lt. Dan Band switching seamlessly from one concert’s footage to the next, and plenty of interviews with soldiers and veterans. We get to meet members of the band as well, and it becomes rather apparent why Kimo and Gary gravitated toward each other; both are natural storytellers and performers. One of the film’s highlights is Kimo revealing how he almost got shot playing a concert (while still a soldier) at a fire base in Vietnam. Other notable sequences include a view and discussion of the inside of one of Saddam Hussein’s mansions, a “Snowball Express” concert for the children and other family members of deployed soldiers, and a few cameos from other celebrities such as John Ratzenburger, Robert Duvall, Gary Cole, and Jon Voight.

The film’s title comes from an Abraham Lincoln quote that perfectly sums up its themes: “Honor to the Soldier and Sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country’s cause. Honor also the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as best he can, the same cause. Honor to him, who braves for the common good.” In any other context, I know the phrase “for the common good” would cause many here to blow a gasket over its collectivist implications, but in this documentary we see the concept in its noblest form. Our soldiers sacrifice themselves not to prop up dependents but to protect independence, and we see how one man’s thankfulness for that protection plays its own part in carrying our troops forward in their mission.

Lt. Dan Band: For the Common Good is available through On Demand nationwide, or  you can view the film directly through its website.

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.’

For the first time that night, Elvis smiled. Tom was talking his kind of language.

Read the full article here.

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.

Though Bob was eager to fight for his county, upon this dedicated and career military officer’s return, he too is haunted, not only from watching his men commit heinous war crimes, but also that a military more interested in creating heroes than actually being heroic pins a medal on him for accidentally shooting himself — the humiliating reason he was sent home. Military Intelligence finally pushes Bob over the edge by informing him of the affair his wife had with Luke. The military’s insidious rationale for dropping this grenade into Bob’s life is Luke’s anti-war stance. As if shooting himself and Sally’s infidelity weren’t bad enough, the military is now questioning Bob’s patriotism because of his wife’s association with a radical. Stripped of everything he once thought he was — husband, patriot, warrior — Bob suffers flashbacks and becomes violent. But before he can hurt anyone, he drowns himself in the Pacific Ocean.

Bill Munson (Robert Carradine) was in Vietnam for only two weeks, but for reasons that don’t need explaining he came back completely out of his mind and also ends up committing suicide. 

Even though there are as many as 2.5 million Veterans who served “in country” in Vietnam, “Coming Home” refuses to introduce us to a single one who can make a moral case for the war, who believes he fought for the important cause of keeping the South free from communist rule or who didn’t psychologically crack up upon his return. Not to take away from or to dismiss in any way the obvious difficulties all Veterans face upon returning from battle, it’s just a fact that almost all of our Vietnam Veterans came home, kissed their wives, hugged their kids, and then quietly worked through their problems as they successfully slipped back into the slipstream of a productive American life. And yet, though obviously untrue, through films like “Coming Home”, the vision Hollywood has painted of the mentally unstable, disillusioned, and dangerous Vietnam Veteran is so strong that it’s the first that comes to mind. The word defamation doesn’t really begin to cover it.

Of course, this is all part of the agenda, something we see even today; pretending to sympathize with the Veteran even as you turn him into a terrible symbol and stereotype in order to further a political cause.

Furthermore, “Coming Home” was made a couple of years after the April, 1975 fall of Saigon. The horrors that the defenders of the war had warned would occur if the anti-war movement won the day (including, by the way, John Wayne’s “Green Berets”) had and were coming true during the film’s production. But “Coming Home” is its own piece of re-education. Though set in 1968, there’s still an elephant in the room Fonda and company refuse to acknowledge.

Like Korea, militarily Vietnam was a partial victory. North Korea is a communist hell hole today but our intervention there likely saved untold millions of lives in the South and most certainly saved our allies from the brutal fate that comes with everyday life under Kim Jon-il. Vietnam could have ended in the exact same way. In 1973 the military conflict came to an end with a peace treaty signed between the North and South. America pulled all of our troops out, the fighting came to an end, and like South Korea, South Vietnam could’ve defended itself indefinitely had we kept the aid flowing, which in 1973 was $2.8 billion a year but was cut dramatically the following year.

Unfortunately, after President Nixon resigned in disgrace in late 1974, anti-war Democrats promising to end all aid to non-Communist Indochina took control of Congress in January of 1975 and one of their first acts was to ignore President Ford’s desperate pleas for the increase in aid necessary to save an increasingly beleaguered South Vietnam and Cambodia. Needing spare parts, ammunition, and tactical weapons to defend themselves, in violation of the Paris Peace Accords which promised our allies “unlimited military replacement aid,” Congress sent an unmistakable signal with a 189-49 vote against additional military aid to both Cambodia and South Vietnam.   

Within weeks an emboldened North Vietnam swept into the South and on April 30th Saigon fell — just thirteen days after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

As a direct result, between the re-education camps in South Vietnam and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it’s been estimated that over 3 million innocent people were massacred in what’s been called the Cambodian Holocaust — and “Coming Home” is a Cambodian Holocaust denier, a film set in 1968 that argues — as though millions weren’t dead as a consequence — that opponents of the war were right all along and that every nightmare scenario argued by those in support of the war (in 1968) hadn’t been fully realized … and then some.

The fact that Fonda and her then-husband Tom Hayden vigorously campaigned to turn public opinion against the post-war aid explains a lot.  And it’s worth noting that Jon Voight’s politics have matured considerably since 1978 and that today, during our present war, he has openly and selflessly supported both the cause and the men and women fighting for it in a Hollywood climate where such things can damage a career.

Why it’s a great film

First off, let’s give “Coming Home,” and that era of Hollywood as a whole, credit for not making anti-war films while we were still fighting the war in Vietnam. What today’s Hollywood has done (and continues to do) with at least a dozen box-office flops that, by design, attempt to undermine our country and troops in a time of war is at best traitorous and at worst the enabling of evil. No matter how dishonest and unfair, it’s one thing to create this kind of propaganda after a war and something entirely different to do it during.  Jane Fonda will likely end up in Hell but not for making “Coming Home.” I can’t say the same for Paul Haggis, Brian DePalma, Kimberly Peirce, Robert Redford, and all the rest.

Creatively, within the context of the world created by Ashby, Fonda, Voight and Dern, “Coming Home” is a home run. While the story has some blatantly political moments, they fit as a whole because the individual characters are well drawn and sympathetic. What they do and say, how they change and grow, makes sense and while you have to credit a solid and well-structured script, it’s three astonishingly good central performances that really pull it off.

Both Fonda and Voight won much-deserved Oscars for their work here and it’s a testament to Fonda’s abilities as an actress that once she arrives in character you completely forget what an appalling human being she is. Voight’s just as impressive as Luke, effortlessly and convincingly taking his character from embittered and selfish to someone ready to make peace the world and more importantly, with himself. Finally, there’s Bruce Dern, who plays a thoroughly unlikable character who takes over the third act of the story and in doing so earns so much of your sympathy that his Norman Maine finale is truly heartbreaking.

Wisely, the film mostly avoids melodrama by turning in unexpected directions. You expect the story to cut from Luke chaining himself to the Marine base to him leading a fiery anti-war protest but life doesn’t work that way and wisely the film doesn’t either. It’s a nice touch that Luke’s as surprised by his act of protest as we are and also a nice surprise that Sally and Luke both understand that she’ll go back to Bob when he returns, thus avoiding all the nonsense that usually accompanies such cinematic scenarios.

The great Hal Ashby

Best of all, these are real characters. The film itself might be propaganda but the players are given a depth and humanity that makes them more than just symbols or simple anti-war pawns. Obviously, it helps that you have talented and mature actors playing these roles, but unlike today’s sinister portrayal of our troops as unstable (“Hurt Locker’), dangerous (“Redacted,” “In the Valley of Elah”), and dupes (“Stop Loss,” “Lions for Lambs”), Luke, Bob, and Sally are real people; human, complicated, and ultimately sympathetic.

And the story itself is a good and compelling one. You like and root and want to know what will happen to the characters and the credit for keeping all the necessary plates spinning to pull that off goes to Hal Ashby, one of the few directors capable of creating character-driven pieces that hold your attention. Set in San Diego, the film also looks great, thanks to legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler who recreates 1968 in such a convincing way that I frequently forget the film was made a decade later. Finally, there’s an almost continuous soundtrack of music from the era, from Dylan to the Rolling Stones, that’s second-to-none.  

I’ve said more than once that if today’s leftist filmmakers had half as much talent as their political counterparts of the late 60s and early 70s, the Iraqi people would be screwed because present-day Hollywood’s wicked cinematic attempts to embarrass the United States into abandoning 25 million innocent Iraqis to death squads and terrorists might’ve hit their mark. And when I say that, “Coming Home” is the example foremost in my mind. 

What’s not on the list

WALL-E (2008) – Charles Johnson’s essay went a long way toward changing my mind about the film. Not completely, but just enough not to rank it here.

Three Kings (1999) – I didn’t leave George Clooney, George Clooney left me! What you essentially have here is a neo-con argument criticizing a President named Bush for abandoning the Iraqi people to violent madmen after a Gulf War. Yeah, it’s the first Gulf War and the first Bush, but the humanitarian plea is the same. If there’s better piece of evidence that Leftist Hollywood is more interested in criticizing America than the innocent people of Iraq, the fact that this same argument was never once made on film during the Iraq War (in fact, just the opposite was made) closes that case forever.

Wall Street (1987) – Not an indictment of capitalism or even Wall Street itself, just the people who break the laws. The characters played by Hal Holbrook and Terence Stamp represent the good in the system as much as Michael Douglas represents the bad. In the end, the system works and Gekko and Bud go to jail. Leftists complained that director Oliver Stone (the son of a stock broker) didn’t go far enough in condemning Wall Street, and that’s a credible complaint from their wrong-headed point of view.

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.

He decided to take the matter into his own hands, but it wasn’t easy becoming Hollywood’s go-to guy for military expertise. He simply couldn’t get anyone in the industry to hear his sales pitch.

His break came in the form of a trade notice announcing a relatively unknown director was about to start production on a new Vietnam War movie to be called “Platoon.”

“If I ever had a shot, this is it,” he says. He eventually got Stone’s phone number and kept him on the line long enough to seal the deal. “We agreed absolutely from an artistic point of view,“ says Capt. Dye, who went on to work together with Stone on four other films. “I’ll never forget him for giving me a start.”

“Platoon” went on to sweep the 1986 Oscars, and Capt. Dye’s phone began to ringing with new film offers.

Dye, a 21 year veteran of the Marine Corps, says his advising work inadvertently sparked an acting career.

“Directors would see me training actors, and I do it in character – I’m not low key at all, and they’d say, ’who is that guy? Can he do that in front of the camera?” says Dye, whose screen credits include “Rules of Engagement” and “Mission: Impossible.”

Capt. Dye heaps praise on actors like Tom Hanks (“Saving Private Ryan”) and Ron Livingston (“Band of Brothers“) for being fast studies when it comes to playing soldiers on screen. And while most of the people he meets on film sets lean left, he’s yet to find an actor unwilling to heed his advice.

“I’ve seen them come full circle, from not being interested in that kind of [military] crap to saying, ’those military guys are really heroes. I need to portray them the best I can,’” he says.

Capt. Dye still talks like a military officer, casually dropping phrases like “know your enemy” and “10-minute drill” into conversation. The former is how he describes the Hollywood establishment, people he found deathly afraid of risk and change.

Now, Capt. Dye is on a new mission. His new literary imprint, Warriors Publishing, hopes to find and promote books that accurately portray military men and women and bring out-of-print titles back to life. He’ll be taking an active role in the new group, writing alongside the authors under the Warriors banner.

“I’ve been a novelist since my last days if the Marine Corps,” he says. “I’ve been noodling around this literary thing for quite some time.”

It’s part of an overall strategy to stay make sure the public understands the true nature of the military. It also keeps him busy.

“You learn quickly in Hollywood you don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he says, adding when he‘s not writing or advising film productions he‘s helping video game titles like “Medal of Honor“ to be as accurate as possible.

Capt. Dye is busy with his literary endeavor, but he’s also gearing up for a new assignment – film director. His debut feature, “No Better Place to Die,” begins shooting in Budapest this April. Even if he doesn’t become the next Steven Spielberg, he’s happy to leave a mark on Hollywood.

“It’s hubris on my part to say I have that big an influence. I’m willing to say I’ve had an effect on a generation of young actors who look at the military [now] in a whole different light.“

He says military misinformation still pollutes the culture, which means Capt. Dye’s work is far from over.

“I’m going to do everything I can in every medium to try to correct that in some way,” he says.

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.

Bail bondsman Satterfield (Tate Taylor) thinks Ree knows where Jessup is. So does Sheriff Baskin (Garret Dillahunt), who tells Ree that her father wouldn’t have gotten himself arrested if he’d stuck to growing marijuana. Well, Ree doesn’t know where daddy is, but she’s got to find him fast, and that means getting up the nerve to do something that just isn’t done in those parts. She must trudge from house to cabin through the woods to ask some mighty scary meth cookin’ members of her own family if they know where her father can be found  — and they might kill her just for asking.

One after another won’t tell her anything even though it’s plain they know something. “Aren’t we all supposed to be kin?” she asks many times. “Conversations just make witnesses” one says. Jessup’s brother, uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), grabs Rhee by the throat to emphasize the gravity of her questions. “Are you going to kill me?” Ree asks after a group of women led by the wife of the clan patriarch beat the holy Jesus out of Ree and tossed her in a barn. “That idea was talked about,” is the blunt reply.

If that all seems a bit “over the top” as one might say in  metrosexual society, please understand that violence and defiance of overreaching authority are integral parts of the Scots-Irish DNA that settled the Appalachians and Ozarks. They are the descendants of King William III’s “Billy Boys” (the arguable origin of the term hillbilly) and the Scottish Covenanters. The former warred against the Catholic supporters of James II for the English, Irish and Scottish crowns. The latter were Presbyterians who signed covenants of war in their own blood against bishop rule and unlimited royal power in the bloody Bishop’s Wars which preceded the English Civil War. Because the Covenanters wore red scarves around their necks, the English ruling class called them rednecks and the name stuck. No wonder the British Crown shipped my ancestors to the colonies. They spread the libertarian virus of individuality and self sufficiency that undermines authoritarian rule and collectivist schemes here to this day. It is the culture the political left understands it must compromise in order to conquer the American soul.

Back in the woods, Ree’s search for her father has upset her own plans to join the U.S. Army and bank the signing bonus for her family’s benefit. Military service is considered honorable among the poor southern whites who have traditionally composed its backbone (especially in the elite combat units), but she’s not old enough to enlist without her parents signature, and that’s tough to get when daddy is missing and mommy is out of it.

To Ree’s surprise, the same Uncle Teardrop that grabbed her throat comes around to help her search for his brother. He even makes Sheriff Baskin back down in a terrific scene.

“Is this gonna be our time?” Teardrop asks, Ruger rifle at the ready, as he watches Baskin in his side view mirror.  The sheriff has pulled his gun and ordered Teardrop out of his truck for no apparent legitimate reason. The subtext implies Baskin knows something about Jessup’s whereabouts and wants to stop Teardrop and Ree from looking..

Ree eventually does find Jessup with the help of some women aged by meth far beyond their years, and that made me rethink my fond memories of Sadie Hawkins Day. That’s the day cartoonist Al Capp invented in his Li’l Abner comic strip when mountain women get to chase down the man they want to marry and he has to comply.  It was a fine fantasy when many backwoods women I saw as a kid looked like young Dolly Partons or Capp’s Stupefyin’ Jones. But crank has got to be the closest thing to an ugly pill yet invented, and the sight of those worn women’s  faces so wonderfully cast by director Debra Granik really made me think how my old world has changed.

Thanks to Granik’s attention to authentic detail, Winter’s Bone never offers up silly Dukes of Hazard stereotypes, and that makes it work for me to the point of causing a bit of nostalgia for those woods even if I don’t miss eatin’ possum, raccoon and chitlins.