Everybody's a Critic

You all remember Bill Bennett, right? He's the charming former Secretary of Education, Drug Czar and current loopy right-wing talk show host who recently suggested that aborting all black babies would be a good way to reduce the crime rate.

You may also recall the revelation that Bennett, who publicly opposes legal gambling and even wrote a book on morality in which he decries gambling as sinful, in truth had lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas as a high-stakes gambler.

So, yeah, he's a racist fool and hypocrite. But did you also know he was an amateur film reviewer?

Has anyone seen, does anyone know of, a movie depicting the war we are in now, the fight against the barbarians? We've had movies about the first Gulf war, and a morally ambiguous fiction about something or somewhere called Syriana--but anything about our over-four- year- old fight for civilization against the Islamist barbarians, based on fact? Anything? Anyone?

Props to Alicublog for catching this hilarity. Check out their response, which imagines Bennett going into a video store and asking this question. Funny stuff.

Bennett, in his lame attempt to attack Hollywood for somehow "ignoring" the War on Terror, only demonstrates his total lack of knowledge about film production and cinema history. One need only look to the Vietnam era to see how big studio movies tend to deal with the issues of the day without depicting them, head-on, for fear of being seen as insensitive or inappropriate.

Audiences don't want to see the grim reality of a news broadcast when they go see a movie. That's why, during and immediately after the actual Vietnam war, movies tended to either substitute other wars in place of Vietnam (like the Korean war film M.A.S.H.) or go totally allegorical (like Walter Hill's 1981 Southern Comfort). You didn't start seeing a lot of mainstream movies set in Vietnam until after the war.

Likewise, today we're seeing a lot of movies about paranoia, corruption, terrorism and technology. Because that's where we're at as a society. Only morons need everything spelled out plainly for them. Can't Bill Bennett see that, though Jarhead may take place during the first Gulf War, and Munich is set in the 70's, and Syriana isn't the actual name of a real place, that all of these films are dealing with the current War on Terror?

You sense Bennett won't be happy until we have the Hollywood of the 1940's again, with big studios urging people with each new picture to buy war bonds, support the president unquestioningly and enlist to go overseas and fight the evil, faceless enemy. After you see Bruce Willis and Josh Hartnett in Operation: Tikrit, you can proceed immediately to the lobby where recruiters will serve you hot buttered popcorn while they describe to you the many different ways you can nobly die for your country. But don't forget to return to your seat in time to catch the serial and the newsreel!

Also, I hadn't realized we declared war on the barbarians. Are they still sacking our border villages, burning the straw huts and kidnapping the womenfolk and the livestock? Can't we just call their heathen leader to our capital city, ply him with the gift of 20 gold coins and his choice of maiden from the king's harem and send his dark armies along to seek plunder from the Phoenicians or the Visigoths?