The War Room

DOSSIER # 5:DINNER AND A MOVIE ON A HOT SUMMER NIGHT?

NOTE: A different version of this essay by me first appeared as a letter published on the Los Angeles based website www.hollywood-elsewhere.com. Hollywood Elsewhere is written by film critic Jeffrey Wells. Wells’ politics are very different from most of the people who will read this blog, but I recommend him highly for an entertaining and knowledgeable read of how the film industry works and why. Understanding culture and film as it relates to political ideology will continue to be a major theme at The War Room.

Please be warned that some language in this essay is of a graphic or adult nature.

I do not know if anyone reading this has a passion for film but as this is the summer season, I spend a lot of time in a movie theatre. The main stories in the industry trades nowadays detail that the film industry is in the biggest slump it has been in for almost 20 years. Reasons for this vary from DVD, to the state of theatrical exhibition, to the quality of films being made. Last year The Passion of the Christ helped increase the spring/early summer box office average but without it, this years’ first quarter has been down. Not even Revenge of the Sith or Batman Begins has been able to reverse this trend.

As a film school graduate who has loved and devoured film history since a child, I can say that I am truly bored with a great majority of the stories being told through the mainstream of the American/Western film industry. Hollywood has been in an overtly left-wing ideological paradigm for almost 2 generations now and certainly all of my life-time. This is not a question of politics. It is a question of bad story telling. It makes films predictable.

Old fashioned to me is not a rigid evangelical going to church on Sunday. Old fashioned to me is wife-swapping, wicca and gay bath houses. Ideologically, for as long as I can remember, and with precious few exceptions priests, evangelicals, businessmen, corporations, conservative politicians, uptight white folk and (insert bad Hollywood stereotype here) are always the villains.

I did not need Michael Medved to tell me the ‘twist’ in Million Dollar Baby. As soon as I saw the religious imagery in the trailer released in November and read web-columns saying how shaken people were from the initial pre-screenings I had my suspicions. The day it went into limited release in mid-December, I waited until about 3:30 pm (after the first early matinees), went onto some Clint Eastwood fan chat rooms and had my thoughts confirmed. M$B would have been unpredictable had Clint NOT euthanized Hillary.

I saw M$B and The Sea Inside when they were called Brian’s Song with James Caan and Who’s Life Is It Anyway? with Richard Dreyfuss. Hearing Julia Roberts in Closer talk about ‘cum’ was about as shocking to someone my age as…hearing Julia Roberts talk about ‘cum’. ‘Prestige’ films like Vera Drake, Kinsey, Frida, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Hours, The Dreamers etc. do not titillate or offend…they bore. They do not speak to people of a younger generation because we have had their leftist ideology rammed down our throats culturally from birth.

These films are well-made but indulgent and poorly researched polemics made by people who still pine for an era that no longer exists…the sixties. The new generation of film fans are not shocked by Deep Throat. We are weaned on Trey Parker and yawn in the face of it. By contrast, Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man is a film that I could not recommend more highly with its inspiring tale of a man defending his family against all odds. By today’s standards, it’s positive view of a traditional family and the role of religion in it is positively refreshing.

As I said to an older, very left-wing reporter friend of the family after the American election who could not understand why I would support President Bush; I’ve never been silenced or censored by an evangelical, but I do have first hand experience of a raging, foaming at the mouth PC university student pointing his finger at me saying I am a “poor quality human being” because I ‘dared’ to make a short film with the phrase ‘chick’s ass’ in it. I know first hand of a film professor who found himself as the subject of a tribunal because he dared-DARED!- to show an excerpt of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet during a class on voyeurism. The more ‘enlightened progressive’ types decided that he was implicitly endorsing rape.

Hollywood now forsakes ideology for art and films that truly break new ground artistically (The Passion of the Christ, Fight Club, Hero) are derided or not rewarded because of their ideology. It says something about our times and the history of film that we are constantly told how shocking, daring and controversial left leaning films are/were (F911, Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, Last Temptation of Christ), yet by any standard, the most controversial film since 1915’s Birth of a Nation was made by a conservative Catholic director who made an R-rated film about a man on a cross who died 2000 years ago.

For a community that says it is so culturally curious about all walks of life where are the stories depicting the plight of the millions slaughtered under Joseph Stalin? For every ten Hollywood love songs to Marxism/communism, where is the director who dares tell the story of those brave students who died in Tiananmen Square? How about an Oscar caliber film detailing the slaughter of the three million Polish Catholics killed in the Holocaust? For every story about how repressed America was sexually in the fifties, how about a film detailing the pure intellectual repression caused by leftist speech codes on modern university campuses?

Most modern Hollywood/Western films don’t dare us to think, they ask us not to. I suggest that if Hollywood ‘artists’ want to become relevant again, perhaps they should quit calling everyone who disagrees with them ‘uncurious’ and become a little bit more curious themselves.

posted by Nicol DuMoulin @ 9:38 PM