Hollyweird Finally Got A Movie Right
By: Rachel Marsden
Hollywood director Oliver Stone recently dropped by Toronto to premiere his
new movie, World Trade Center, about two of the last police officers who were
pulled alive from the rubble of the twin towers after 9/11.
With him was Scott Strauss, one of the real-life police rescuers. Stone says
Strauss and the other 9/11 families kept him in check. That's quite the feat,
given that Stone has called the Cold War "irritating," says nationalism and
patriotism are "evil forces," considers Fidel Castro a personal friend, and
mused that if he was George W. Bush, he would shoot himself.
With this film, which opens today, Stone has created a historically accurate,
riveting human interest piece -- a Hollywood rarity nowadays.
I couldn't help noticing every strong political leader in the movie is
Republican. TV newscasts are shown with a caption that reads "Attack on America"
-- a handy reminder for liberal moviegoers who may have forgotten why we're
still fighting.
One character is a former marine who leaves his civilian office job to help with
rescue efforts, saying to his colleagues, "Don't know if you guys know it yet,
but this country's at war."
He later says the U.S. will need "a few good men to avenge what happened here"
-- and we're told in the epilogue that he re-enlisted in the military and served
two tours of duty in Iraq (you know, that place where terrorists are being
killed every day, even though liberals constantly tell us it has nothing to do
with terrorism or 9/11).
It's a welcome departure from recent self-indulgent Hollyweird garbage. Stone's
movie about Alexander the Great was the next best thing to soft gay porn.
Apparently, this great warrior got about as much action in the sack as he did on
the battlefield. (Why stop there? How about remaking Patton from the perspective
of the general's "privates"?)
What passes for "groundbreaking" in Tinseltown is mind-boggling (e.g., Brokeback
Mountain). Actor/director George Clooney fancies himself a rebel. Last year, he
made two politically skewed flops, all but ignored by most folks except in
Hollyweird.
In Good Night and Good Luck, Clooney sought to demonstrate how U.S. Senator Joe
McCarthy ruined people's lives by targeting communists in America -- but then
failed to show a single innocent person whose life he directly ruined.
And no wonder the Hollyweird left loved Clooney's movie, Syriana.
It was like a Noam Chomsky lecture: Boring, nonsensical, and driven by themes
like "America sucks," "oil companies are evil," and "terrorists are poor,
misunderstood schmucks."
Maybe studios are just tired of losing money on narcissistic flights of
celluloid fantasy that bore the rest of us "unenlightened" folks?
Who wants to watch a feature-length PowerPoint presentation by Al Gore about
toasty weather and melting ice? The penguins are happy and have lots of ice -- I
saw that in last year's March of the Penguins documentary, which, last time I
looked, was still beating Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in box office sales.
PUBLISHED: TORONTO SUN (August 9/06)
COPYRIGHT 2006 RACHEL MARSDEN