War movies

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Village Voice, Week of June 19 - 25, 2002

How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The Art of War
by J. Hoberman

A landscape of smoky rubble littered with American corpses: Mogadishu, the
Ia Drang valley, downtown Baltimore. For seven weeks out of the past 22,
the nation's No. 1 or 2 box-office attraction has been a spectacular war
film. Add to these hits?Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and The Sum of
All Fears?such crypto-combat, high-body-count chart-toppers as Collateral
Damage and Attack of the Clones and 2002 has been springtime for carnage,
at least at the movies. 

As Black Hawk Down instructed, "Leave no man behind." Last weekend's
Windtalkers may have been butt-kicked by Scooby-Doo, but more spectacles of
organized mayhem are on the way: To End All Wars continues the World War II
revival, Men in Black II envisions warfare in outer space, K-19: The
Widowmaker and Below bring back the Cold War nuclear submarine drama, Gods
and Generals resurrects the Civil War. Meanwhile, on television, CBS
floated the since-canceled AFP: American Fighter Pilot, and the VH1
reality-based series Military Diaries will soon be joined by ABC's
Afghanistan-set Profiles From the Front Line. 

Not since the flurry of Vietnam movies in the late 1980s has the combat
film been so viable or so visible. And not since the gung ho Reagan-era
warnography of Rambo and Top Gun has the brass been as pleased. Vice
President Dick Cheney took a breather from his undisclosed location to join
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the gala Washington premiere of
Black Hawk Down, the first movie for which (thanks to Rumsfeld's personal
intervention) U.S. troops were dispatched to a foreign country to aid in
its production. We Were Soldiers and The Sum of All Fears have similarly
been treated as official art. We Were Soldiers was previewed for George W.
Bush, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove, and sundry military VIPs at a
well-publicized White House screening. (An aide summarized the president's
evaluation of the movie as "violent" but "good.") The Sum of All Fears had
its world premiere in Washington, D.C., as Paramount took care to alert the
media that the producers had enjoyed considerable, even unprecedented, CIA
access and Pentagon support. 

full: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0225/hoberman2.php

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.