Cute, huh?
Posted on 07/24/2003 11:28:50 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
In the same week that Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch returned home to waving flags and ovations of love, Hollywood is sending out very different pictures. It's portraying the U.S. soldier as a crook and drug-dealing scumbag. The Miramax movie "Buffalo Soldiers" begins its run in New York and Los Angeles just three days after Lynch's return home.
Miramax, otherwise often known as the dark side of the Disney empire, signed up to distribute the film on, whoops -- Sept. 10, 2001 -- not too good a time to trash the U.S. military. But with the pundits blasting away at the supposedly bleak picture in Iraq, they finally decided to take their plunge into the dumpster.
The story unfolds like this: From a base in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1989, Specialist Ray Elwood is exploiting a dim-witted commanding officer at his supply depot and running a nifty black market in arms, drugs and Mop & Glo to the local area. A new sergeant arrives to clean up the place, and that really kicks up the nasty action. "Steal All That You Can Steal," jokes the movie's poster. In its movie review/salute, the far-left Village Voice reported the movie's malignant tone "is immediately established by an impromptu indoor touch football game during which one drug-addled GI trips, cracks his skull against a desk corner and, ignored by his comrades, dies."
The left would love to see this film not released so it could accuse America of being a tight-lipped dungeon of self-censoring superpatriots. For that reason alone, it should be released. Yes, we should prove that America in the new century is just as tolerant of flamboyantly unpatriotic fare as we were in the last. We all remember nasty films like "Air America" (where the CIA sold dope in Laos) and "Casualties of War" (U.S. soldiers rape and pillage Vietnam) before we even get to the Oliver Stone Historical Revisionism catalogue.
The big problem with this new film isn't really its subject matter. It's that it pretends to be truthful, not just the wildly imaginary plot of an anti-military mind. Director Gregor Jordan told the New York Times the film is "based" on historical events, "but some people want some sanitized, glorified version." Shades of Oliver Stone and his mythical "JFK."
The movie's preview in theaters begins: "All of the significant events in the following motion picture are true." That's ridiculous if we unroll the plotline. The movie tells us Specialist Elwood and the Army stick figures populating this movie set in 1989 are drafted . But the military draft ended in 1973. In reality, the 1980s military was all volunteer, with better-motivated, more professional personnel, and the drug dealers they caught were locked in the brig.
Could we find actual cases of drug-dealing, thieving Army men? Of course. But the movie isn't based on them. It's based on fiction -- a 10-year-old novel. Just nail your combat boots in reality and imagine what would have happened if in 1989, as in the movie, a cast of drugged-out Army idiots in a tank blew up a gas station and ran over cars in West Germany. Can we imagine that socialist news outlets in West Germany wouldn't have beaten the stuffing out of that story, or that Peter Jennings wouldn't have been clamoring for the footage? If any of this had been reality-based, it would have been the stuff of "60 Minutes," not Tinseltown fever dreams.
The problem with all this is that in a country where fewer and fewer Americans have any experience in the military and less and less grounding in history, some people will go to this movie and buy the studio's pitch that everything in it really happened. Take, for example, this confused analysis from an Amazon.com reviewer of the novel: "Many will find this depiction of peacetime Army life to be deeply offensive and unpatriotic, but it's hard to know just how far from reality it is."
Hollywood can say it's all about art -- maybe the movie is fantastically directed, skillfully acted and written with comic flair. Let them admit the obvious: This movie is bathed in liberal politics, dedicated to flying middle fingers at the "establishment." It's so liberal it ignores the echo of its own title. Novelist Robert O'Connor picked his title from a Bob Marley reggae song. But the real Buffalo Soldiers were America's first all-black enlisted cavalry units after the Civil War.
Some people just need to be upset about something, all the time.
One was in Germany 85 86 in Mannheim.
Guy got bummed out stole a tank or tank retriever and started going into downtown Mannheim during rush hour. (Something I always wanted to do.)
When an MP with big ones jumped on the moving tank and shot the idiot.
The other one was at a reserve unit in San Diego 87 88, Cops had to wait till it ran out of fuel.
But what the hey it is holly weird, and if they can butcher Heartbreak Ridge about the Made Arab, Current commander of Centcom, or ruin Starship Troopers, then I guess they can do anything.
This little hit piece film has "flown under the radar", that is, NO hype at all, until now, the week of its release. Methinks someone in its production KNEW how it might be reacted to, and "hid" it. Also, the title, besides being flat-out ignorant, is also a scam...some people might mistake this as being about the heroic Black American cavalrymen of the 1800's.
How pathetic is it when you have to trick people into seeing your movie because it's so damnable ignorant, stupid, and offensive to them?
Cute, huh?
XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN JULY 13, 2003 17:09:28 ET XXXXX
DISNEY/MIRAMAX SET TO RELEASE FILM DEPICTING AMERICA MILITARY AS DRUG DEALERS, CRIMINALS; TIMING SEEN FUELING IRAQ WAR CONTROVERSY
"Here in the UK no one gets upset, but over there, where the President is fighting these military campaigns in the name of democracy, the first casualty seems to be freedom of speech, the cornerstone of any democracy." - BUFFALO SOLDIERS Director Gregor Jordan
The WALT DISNEY CO. is set for maximum controversy when it releases a "warts-and-all" portrait of U.S. Army life with the fuss-film BUFFALO SOLDIERS.
As American men and women put their lives on the line in Iraq and other locations throughout the world, DISNEY and its subsidiary MIRAMAX have set a July 25 opening for the story of enlisted man running a profitable drugs and stolen goods business out of an Army base!
[A promo snap for the film -- "Steal all that you can steal," a riff on the US Army's own pseudo-empowering "Be all that you can be" slogan, while below actor Joaquin Phoenix stands before an American flag -- comes as TIME magazine alleged in a cover story that American troops looted and vandalized the Baghdad airport after it was secured.]
The film's director Gregor Jordan describes SOLDIERS as a robust satire illustrating the corruption, drug use and violence that goes on in US Army bases.
At the film's open, a painted US flag is on the ground and is stepped on by marching soldiers.
The film features an excessive amount of profanity by senior officers, suggestive sex [oral sex in bed, sex in a car, sex in a swimming pool], theft of government property, and rampant drug use by soldiers. Actor Phoenix explains, "I don't know why anyone would be offended. It wasn't a movie that was intended to offend. And if we don't show things as they really happen, then what's that about? Censorship!"
The movie studio has been receiving complaints from military insiders, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
One letter written by a retired Army Colonel, representing the Ninth & Tenth [Horse] Cavalry Association, the group of real "Buffalo Soldiers," warns of the film's racial overtones.
"Scenes show MP's, who are black, committing acts of violence and engaging in corruption," writes Col. Franklin J. Henderson. "These scenes, intentionally or unintentionally, provide a bad image of black soldiers and degrade the sterling service of the real 'Buffalo Soldiers' who were mostly black men."
Director Jordan was so concerned by the mood of the country during the most recent military activity in Iraq that he asked for the movie's release to be delayed from springtime.
"I thought, This is not the time to be putting this movie out. If we leave it a couple of months, the war'll be over and off all the front pages. Then we'll go."
"READY AND FORWARD"
Developing...
----------------------------------------------------------- Filed By Matt Drudge
Reports are moved when circumstances warrant
http://www.drudgereport.com for updates
(c)DRUDGE REPORT 2003
Not for reproduction without permission of the author"
Can you believe that people can be so damned ignorant and arrogant, BUT STILL think we should pay attention to their every opinion and action?!?!?!
THIS ONE ALSO discusses the problem with Hollywood, and touches on the movie a bit.
It also includes my submission to "the Quote Of The Day"..."The Hollywood crowd is as relevant and important to world events as the color of a clown's underwear is to a circus"
They hate us...there's no other explanation for it.
Sgt. Bilko was the first thing I thought of as well..just goes to show that there is no originality left in Hollywood. That said, Am I boycotting if I never intended to goto this movie in the first place?
Sorry for my HTML skills...theyve been poor of late. Happens when you have a (astonishingly beautiful and wonderful) two-week old baby.
As far as I know, SGT. Bilko (played by the great Phil Silvers) never dealt drugs, got stoned, banged his C.O.'s daughter to get back at him, or traded weapons on the black market. Nor, in fact, did LCDR Quinton McHale (Ernest Borgnine) or his crew.
All PFC Kelly (Clint Eastwood) and his men wanted was some gold bars...again, no weapons or drugs changed hands, their war was not ridiculed, nor the job they did in it.
In Stalag 17, the worst anybody did was to gamble.
Even "M*A*S*H*", both movie AND TV versions, wasn't this bad, although it arguably was the genesis for the current H'wood stereotypes present in "B.S.".
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