{"id":273,"date":"2006-03-06T15:54:16","date_gmt":"2006-03-06T20:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=273"},"modified":"2006-03-08T00:32:25","modified_gmt":"2006-03-08T05:32:25","slug":"if-hollywood-were-really-brave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=273","title":{"rendered":"If Hollywood Were Really Brave"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of<br \/>\nGeorge Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap<br \/>\nand <em>acts<\/em>) celebrating Hollywood&#8217;s bravery for being willing<br \/>\nto make movies like <cite>Brokeback Mountain<\/cite> and <cite>Good Night<br \/>\nand Good Luck<\/cite>.<\/p>\n<p>Conservative commentators have already pointed out<br \/>\nhow hollow and laughable it is to suppose that left-wing political<br \/>\ncorrectness is in any way &#8216;brave&#8217; in today&#8217;s Hollywood, so I won&#8217;t<br \/>\nre-plow that ground.  Instead, I&#8217;ll propose eight movies I think<br \/>\nHollywood would make if it were <em>really<\/em> brave.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>############################################################<\/p>\n<h3>The Crescent&#8217;s Edge<\/h3>\n<p>This thinly fictionalized version of Salman Rushdie&#8217;s life on the<br \/>\nrun stars Ben Kingsley as a beleaguered leftist intellectual forced to<br \/>\nquestion his own multiculturalist assumptions as he evades fanatical<br \/>\nmujahedeen who seek to kill him for having defamed the Prophet.<\/p>\n<h3>A Nightmare South of Market<\/h3>\n<p>Ray Liotta stars as an idealistic young doctor determined to halt<br \/>\nthe spread of AIDS who crusades against the promiscuity and<br \/>\nneedle-drug abuse endemic in San Francisco&#8217;s gay bathhouse scene.<br \/>\nDon&#8217;t miss Gary Oldman&#8217;s cameo as a homosexual Scoutmaster.<\/p>\n<h3>The Thin Green Line<\/h3>\n<p>Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson star in a gritty war film celebrating<br \/>\nU.S. special forces in Afghanistan, the men who took down the barbaric<br \/>\nTaliban regime.  Audiences at Cannes and Sundance were deeply shocked<br \/>\nby its sympathetic portrayal of the modern American military.<\/p>\n<h3>The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress<\/h3>\n<p>This faithful adaptation of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s 1966 SF classic,<br \/>\nstarring Nicholas Cage as Manuel Garcia O&#8217;Kelly Davis and Mira Sorvino<br \/>\nas Wyoming Knott, challenges viewers to imagine a libertarian future.<br \/>\nGripping SFX of meteoroid bombardment contrast with searching questions<br \/>\nabout the legitimacy of government as the Lunar nation struggles to be<br \/>\nborn.  (Rumor has it that Paul Verhoeven was at one point forcibly<br \/>\nejected from the set of this film.)<\/p>\n<h3>Never Again<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<p>In this sprawling family epic, three generations of Israelis fight<br \/>\nto preserve the Middle East&#8217;s only democracy from implacable and<br \/>\nbloodthirsty enemies on every side.  An ensemble cast of unknowns<br \/>\nstruggles with war, terrorism, and tragedy in a film that unflinchingly<br \/>\naffirms Jewish identity and doesn&#8217;t fear to confront Nazi and<br \/>\nPan-Arabist atrocities.<\/p>\n<h3>A Tree Grows In Harlem<\/h3>\n<p>Morgan Freeman and Halle Berry star as a father\/daughter team of<br \/>\nneighborhood activists who decide blaming Whitey isn&#8217;t enough and<br \/>\nchallenge ghetto blacks to take responsibility for solving their own<br \/>\nproblems. Villains (and victims of this film&#8217;s wicked satirical edge) include<br \/>\nrecognizable takes on Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan,<br \/>\nbut the enemy the two must struggle hardest to defeat is the<br \/>\ngovernment bureaucracy set up to &#8216;help&#8217; their people.<\/p>\n<h3>Unintended Conseqences<\/h3>\n<p>Roy Scheider stars as a dedicated sport shooter who vows to seek<br \/>\njustice after his daughter is killed during a no-knock BATF\/DEA raid<br \/>\non their home.  This searing expose of contemporary American<br \/>\nlaw-enforcement abuses takes on both the madness of the &#8220;War on Drugs&#8221;<br \/>\nand the random but brutal persecution of civilian gun owners.<\/p>\n<h3>The Venona Diaries<\/h3>\n<p>Eric Bana stars as an Iraq-veteran-turned-academic who discovers<br \/>\nthat the shadowy networks of influence set up by the KGB during the<br \/>\nCold War are not only still active on U.S. college campuses but<br \/>\nsolidifying an alliance with Islamic terrorists.  Heart-pounding<br \/>\naction ensues as Bana races to head off the act of mass murder that<br \/>\nwill seal the Marxist\/Islamist alliance in blood.<\/p>\n<p>############################################################<\/p>\n<p>When I say &#8216;brave&#8217;, I don&#8217;t mean &#8216;brave&#8217; as in &#8220;it would lose<br \/>\nmoney&#8221;.  Any of these films could easily be a huge hit with actual,<br \/>\nyou know, <em>audiences<\/em>.  No. I meant &#8216;brave&#8217; as in &#8220;the<br \/>\nself-congratulating limousine-liberal elitists who brought us this<br \/>\nyear&#8217;s Oscar nominees would be out for blood if any of <em>these<\/em><br \/>\nfilms ever got made&#8221;.  It would be a fearless filmmaker indeed who&#8217;d<br \/>\ncourt their wrath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of George Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap and acts) celebrating Hollywood&#8217;s bravery for being willing to make movies like Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck. Conservative commentators have already pointed out how hollow and laughable&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=273\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">If Hollywood Were Really Brave<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}