HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------
"Part of the truth"?? None of the truth, and
racist, jingoistic fantasy, would
be a more apt description of the typical Hollywood horse opera!! This current
crop of Hollywood flicks, allegedly based on current events and recent history
is certainly no better and if anything worse! Part of the truth indeed! Pure,
unadulterated crap, lies and propaganda!!
mart
be a more apt description of the typical Hollywood horse opera!! This current
crop of Hollywood flicks, allegedly based on current events and recent history
is certainly no better and if anything worse! Part of the truth indeed! Pure,
unadulterated crap, lies and propaganda!!
mart
----- Original Message -----
From: Rick Rozoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2002 12:15
AM
Subject: Goebbels In Hollywood: War Movies Strike
Back [WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK]
---------------------------
Daily Telegraph
"No one goes to the western for a history lesson."
War movies strike back
(Filed: 12/01/2002)
After September 11, Hollywood thought the public would
lose its appetite for action-packed war films. But the
suprise success of movies such as Black Hawk Down -
which tells the story of the US military's ill fated
raid on Mogadishu in 1993, shows us something
startingly different, says Miranda Carter
IN the aftermath of September 11, Hollywood - in
common with the entire American entertainment industry
- needed to have a big rethink. Within a few days of
the attacks, the release dates of a number of action
films, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral
Damage, the story of terrorists trying to bomb a
skyscraper, were indefinitely delayed. Brian Grazer,
an influential Hollywood player and producer of Apollo
13 among other films, announced that American
audiences would now be expecting escapism, comedies
and "dramas about family love". His words have been
much quoted. The continuing success of the Harry
Potter movie and The Lord of the Rings, which is
currently at number one in the US box-office charts,
seems to suggest that he was right. Patriotic fare:
Black Hawk Down
In November, however, in an unprecedentedly direct
attempt to woo Hollywood, George W Bush's senior
political adviser Karl Rove went to Los Angeles for a
"war summit", to discuss how the film industry could,
among other things, "show the heroism of American
armed forces". Only a few weeks later, it was
announced that a new big-budget war film, Black Hawk
Down, was being brought forward from its original
release date of March 2002, to open in late December
2001. Another war film, Behind Enemy Lines, a
fictionalised account of the 1995 shooting down of a
US pilot behind Bosnian Serb lines - and how he
successfully escaped his would-be captors - came out
just before Christmas. In its first week, Behind Enemy
Lines came second only to Harry Potter at the American
box office.
It is Black Hawk Down, however, that is the real
story. The film has an intriguing pedigree as Ridley
Scott's follow-up to his triumphant Gladiator and
rather less successful Hannibal; it is produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer, who is known for a string of noisy
"popcorn flicks" including the totemic Top Gun and the
lamentable Pearl Harbor. Bruckheimer quickly
identified the appetite for war movies in the wake of
the September 11 atrocities when he said: "It's about
revenge. People want to get back at the guys who did
this, to feel empowered." Black Hawk Down is based on
the best-selling book by Mark Bowden about the 1993
raid on Mogadishu in Somalia by American special
forces made up of Delta Force operatives and young and
largely inexperienced US Rangers. The mission was to
kidnap two advisers of General Mohammed Farrah Aidid,
the Somali warlord and clan leader whom the US
regarded as the greatest obstacle to peace in the
region. It became the US Army's biggest firefight
since Vietnam. It was also an extraordinary military
disaster in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot
down in Mogadishu itself, two more were disabled, and
18 American soldiers and more than 1,000 Somalis died.
The next day the bodies of several American soldiers
were dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu by
angry crowds. Reading Bowden's book, it is hard to
imagine how one could turn this event into the kind of
exciting, patriotic fare to which American audiences
might flock without actually rewriting history - or,
at the very least, leaving an awful lot out.
That, of course, is pretty much exactly what Scott and
Bruckheimer have done. They have eliminated all but
the most cursory of explanations of the context of the
raid, of why the soldiers were unprepared, and why the
Somalis were so furious. Black Hawk Down is a
well-made action-war movie. There is virtually no
character delineation of the soldiers; the Somalis are
a ferocious black wave, a crowd of careering extras
straight out of Zulu. The hideous confusion, deafening
noise and brutality of battle are exhaustingly
portrayed with an unvarnished vividness that recalls
the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. There is
no overt flag-waving, but the film carries an
unmistakable message. The operation was a noble
failure: it showed the strength of the American army.
Through it all, the soldiers were stoic and brave.
Casualties were caused in large part by the Rangers'
loyalty to one another, and their determination to
"leave no man behind".
Bowden has announced himself pleased with the film.
But his book, almost despite itself, paints a far
broader and more ambiguous portrait of the
circumstances surounding the raid and reaches a rather
different conclusion. Although he is deeply
sympathetic to and admiring of the soldiers, and is
unwilling to apportion blame, his account shows that
the raid was part of a largely ill-planned change of
policy pursued by the new Clinton administration in
1993 - and opposed by the outgoing chief of staff,
Colin Powell.
Previous raids to weaken Aidid had not gone especially
well. One resulted, ludicrously, in the arrest of nine
UN officials. Another raid on a council of Aidid's
Habr Gidr clan left 54 Somalis dead and 215 wounded,
and enormously alienated moderate Somali opinion.
Bowden quotes, at some length, a Delta Force officer
who felt that the Rangers were not sufficiently
experienced and prepared for such raids. The Americans
seemed to have had no idea of the antipathy that their
switch from providers of humanitarian aid to armed
occupiers had stirred up in the general population.
The soldiers' foes were not all Aidid militiamen
- which is what the film suggests. Many were locals
caught in the crossfire who had come to hate the
soldiers. Bowden describes children pointing out
American positions to Somali snipers, and women using
> themselves as cover for Somali shooters: both featured
in considerable numbers among the 1,000 Somali dead.
At the end of the film, we see Somalis cheering the
returning soldiers as they escape from Aidid's part of
the city. No such image exists in the book. There is a
long-standing tradition in American myth and movies of
turning great defeats into moral victories, and of
playing around with the truth. As the great film
historian Kevin Brownlow has written: "No one goes to
the western for a history lesson." The Alamo, a sacred
event in American national mythology, was a famous
defeat at the hands of the Mexican army. Ron Howard is
said to be planning a remake of the John Wayne movie.
And until well into the 1950s, the reckless General
Custer was portrayed in Hollywood movies as a doomed
gentleman hero - most memorably by Errol Flynn in the
magically titled They Died With Their Boots On.
It is in this context that we should see Black Hawk
Down: as a western. The film is a last-stand movie -
just like the Alamo, where bravery, honour and
principle count for more than mere victory. The film
critic David Thomson wrote recently that contrary to
reports of their demise, westerns - "myth-making
frauds", as he fondly describes them - have never gone
away, but have simply transmuted themselves into other
genres. Thomson cites Chinatown as an example: honest
law man fights local ranchers over water rights,
there's gun play and the good-hearted bad girl gets
killed.
Black Hawk Down is a cavalry western of a type that it
is no longer possible to make in America now that
massacring Indians is seen as a bad thing. Here, the
Somalis are the Indians: a relentless, savage,
anonymous enemy, pouring over the barricades,
merciless and barbarian, allowing the heroes to
demonstrate their strength and honour in the worst of
circumstances. The point is emphasised by the two
Somali characters who are given lines (in two scenes
that Bowden acknowledges were invented for the film):
an evil, Cuban-cigar-smoking arms dealer and a brutal
militiaman. They sneer at the Americans' attempts to
bring peace: this is tribal country where clans have
been pitted again each other for a millennium. Other
war movies have played the same game. In The Sands of
Iwo Jima, another last-stand movie, the Japanese were
the Indians; in The Green Berets, the Vietnamese were.
It is no coincidence that the great film cowboy John
Wayne starred in both. Westerns have always been the
most potent narratives of America's ideas about
itself. In them, the Indians stood both for the
savagery of the untamed West and as the great obstacle
to America's fulfilment of its Manifest Destiny: to
expand across the continent; to bring civilisation.
Manifest Destiny - a potent phrase in American history
- still has a resonance for some today, in the
fulfilment of America's role as the world's
superpower, and in its mission to bring liberty to new
realms, and now to root out terrorism.
Already, Oscar nominations are being predicted for
Black Hawk Down, which first opened in a few cinemas
in New York and Los Angeles and is due for
"saturation" on January 15, three days before it opens
here. Some cynical observers attribute this less to
its excellence than to Hollywood's keenness to appear
patriotic in the current climate. David Denby, film
critic of The New Yorker, has already responded to its
patriotic appeal, describing it as "spectacular in all
the good ways" and praising its "ideal temper for
war-time: matter-of-fact, stoic, resolute, defiant". A
pity that, like so many westerns, it only tells part
of the truth.
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