Posted on 08/05/2007 3:59:25 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Perhaps we should have expected this but apparently The Bourne Ultimatum which opened this weekend is chock full of liberal proganda. So who is making this charge? Some vicious rightwinger with an axe to grind against liberal Hollywood producers? Nope. This is the claim of a liberal movie reviewer, Anthony Kaufman, who wrote the following in his Huffington Post blog, Jason Bourne: An Anti-Cheney American Hero?
A stinging rebuke against Cheney-esque black ops and torture tactics, Universal Pictures' The Bourne Ultimatum is more than just a heart-stopping international espionage thriller: It is Hollywood's most direct attack against the Bush Regime since George Clooney's one-two punch of Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. If those more "sophisticated" dramas preached to the choir about our deteriorating civil liberties and oil-fueled overseas obsessions, the third film in the mega-successful Bourne action franchise offers up a picture of corrupt clandestine leadership for all to see -- where every Matt Damon fan can also enjoy high-powered American government officials as arch-villains committing treasonous and reckless activities without oversight.
In case we have any doubts that The Bourne Ultimatum is a liberal fantasy, Kaufman "reassures" us that it is:
But is the film really a liberal fantasy, where the bad CIA leaders get punished for their penchant for waterboarding, "experimental interrogations," "rendition" and the manipulation of American soldiers' minds with intimidation and humiliation? It sure seems so, as bullish Rumsfeld-like strategies are depicted as inept, while the sensitive, sympathetic touch of Joan Allen's CIA head Pamela Landy is shown as the most effective way to combat renegade forces. If conservatives like to label Tinseltown as leftwing, The Bourne Ultimatum should do little to assuage their concerns.
Thank you for that admission of Hollywood being leftwing, Anthony. At least that is something that most in the media won't admit. Kaufman finishes his review with an admiring look at a scene involving "moral complexity" chock full of nuances that a John Kerry would love:
Then again, perhaps the film allows us to have our blood-soaked cake and eat it, too. Matt Damon's Jason Bourne is a guilt-ridden CIA assassin, who glowers and suffers every time he swiftly strikes a rival down. But as audiences, we still bask in his every murder. Even though Bourne hates being a killing machine, I suspect audiences like it very much. After all, that's the chief source of the movie's thrills. I'd bet director Paul Greengrass (who showed some sensitivity towards depicting the 9/11 terrorists as human beings in United 93) intentionally tried to offer some moral complexity to a scene where Bourne strangles to death an obviously Arab enemy assassin. But how many people will pick up on that? Or will they just whoop and holler with the rising body count?
Most likely, no matter how hard Hollywood tries, most of the audience will overlook the obvious liberal propaganda of The Bourne Ultimatum and "whoop and holler" over the "rising body count" action. Something similar happened with another recent movie, Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg. It also featured the standard leftwing proganda including a portrayal by Ned Beatty as an absurdly charicatured EVIL rightwing senator who practically drooled bile all over himself. So ridiculous in the propaganda department was Shooter that one of the few good guys in the FBI wore a Che Guevara T-shirt when he was off duty. Therefore be prepared for another leftwing proganda onslaught if you see The Bourne Ultimatum. The physical action, as in Shooter, is good but you will have to put on your political proganda filters in order to keep from groaning out loud.
Oh please, don’t even think about it.
It’s obviously fiction - there are CIA operatives who’ve got their stuff together.
The P-40s used in that movie are housed in the Warhawk museum in Nampa, Idaho (Boise metro). I recommend the museum to anyone who is visiting the area.
I agree, but I guess an assassin who looks like a schoolboy is good cover. I look forward to seeing the new one.
I already saw one war movie that had a lot of hardware and deception: Transformers (which I recommend)
And if you want anti-government flicks, then watch "The Simpsons Movie". (Of course, in that one, the overreaching governmental act is in the name of saving the environment!)
Here we see a party that is dipped in a socialism undercoat and painted with Marxist flamboyance for all to see. It’s a party more suited to Marxist Europe if not Russia itself. No lesson from history is acknowledged by them. Whee, let’s do it all again people.
On the one hand we have the left incorporating fascist tactics to gain control of energy and the environment. This translates into an attack on our freedoms, namely land ownership and movement. And it translates to them dictating to everyone else what they can and can’t do. Where have we seen this before? Russia? Germany? China?
There’s a power play going on there. Socialists and Marxists can’t sell their world view based on the hard cold truth they represent. No, you have to find some cause to veil it in. Do you want to kill the planet? Join us! If you don’t you are evil! What’s that you say, Socialism and Marxism are evil. Look, get your priorities straight. The ends justifies the means.
We critique our government on point. If the government is growing too big, we challenge. We don’t want to destroy it. We would rather get it back under control, tweak it, make mid-course corrections. These folks don’t mind demonizing our government for all the wrong reasons. They don’t want to fix it. They want to destroy it. If they can undermine faith in our Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, they’ve done their work. When we see bad actions on the behalf of these government branches, we see the effort to gain control of us being played out. Leftist Legislators, Judges and Presidents are hell bent on destroying our confidence. The worse the decision (at this point) the better. Yes we're tht far down the road. No need to hide the goal any longer.
Now, when the right participates, it just furthers the left’s cause. In the end they hope to install the type of governance that has killed hundreds of millions around the planet just in the last century alone.
Today we see a full court press from the left. They are intent on crippling our economy over the environment. They are intent on spreading disinformation from every possible edifice. They are seeking to break down the government, the community and our families.
In the 60’s my dad used to get angry when he’d see people try to tear down the government. In some ways I thought he was over-reacting. Today I think he was just ahead of his time. In today’s environment ignorance is the only excuse for saying it really doesn’t matter.
Folks, it matters. McCarthy may have been somewhat of a fool, but if you think what he was trying to prevent was a vapor trail, you’re just not tuned in.
No, no, no!!!
A woman president in “24”?? No! Haven’t they learned from that show that bombed, Commander in Chief? Give us a break!
24 put themselves in a bind when they gave us the first black president (who at least could pull it off) and then decided not only to give us a second black president, but he was the brother of the first one. Just silly.
I know and now this global warming kick. It took me forever to find the contact us button to tell them I won’t be watching. Like they cared. LOL
On a realistic note, at the very beginning of the WoT, when the use of harsher tactics of information gathering was mentioned, I was puzzled, because in the entire debate, the *assumption* was that whoever would be coercing information from terrorists would be using techniques that had been used in the 1940s.
That is, those who opposed “torture” *and* those who supported “torture” never even suggested that the US might use anything more technologically advanced then sap gloves and “water boarding.”
How extraordinary! If you look at American violence movies, and even television, they are filled with all sorts of innovative and technologically modern ways of “torture”, far superior to what was used in the 1940s. Even if you dismiss the obviously science fiction methods, you are still left with an “off the shelf” repertoire of “torture” techniques large enough to fill a library.
And you don’t have to be very “extreme” at all. For example, US pharmaceutical manufacturers have hundreds of drugs, many never sold for medical use, that if mis-used, or in this case, “mal-used”, could be very effective tools of persuasion.
We have all sorts of electronic devices that could be implanted in terrorists, from communications devices to bombs. “Return to Sender”, and give them a taste of their own medicine when Mohammed blows up and kills Osama bin Laden with one of his own ribs as a projectile. And no simple search would reveal the 4 pound bomb implanted inside him.
We could use drug-induced hypnosis, reinforced with a small chip implant, and turn die hardened murderers into assassins working for us, who would track down and kill the most hidden terrorist leaders, all the time thinking that they were helping their evil cause.
If nothing else, we could arrest and reprogram radical agitators to be less radical. There is no evil in training someone to not advocate mass murder against innocents, even if it against their will.
Finally, if we did not do these things when we could have, perhaps out of squeamishness, it may have ended up costing thousands of innocent people their lives. And while in most cases, such life-saving ends may not justify the means, in this case a strong argument can be made that they do.
Imagine for a moment if we had some “mass production” means of brainwashing hundreds of terrorists to just go home and not be terrorists, to not advocate terrorism, and to neither encourage others to be terrorists, nor support terrorists.
Who would be harmed? More importantly, who would be saved?
If the terrorists would just stop committing terrorist acts, then the war would be over.
As bizarre as it may seem, expect the kids from 24 to push the agenda. Save your ping for next season.
Now they are both dead, so we can have a female President and Global warming. I understand Keiffer is a Global warming fan. I wish these celebs would keep their personal opinions to themselves; since they usually don’t know what they are talking about.
The first Bourne movie sort of followed the book although not nearly as closely as the one with Richard Chamberlain.
The last two share nothing but the name.
Good Night and what? Syri-who?
For what it’s worth, some of the finest people I’ve ever met were members of the US intelligence community.
Traveling in foreign countries most folks know the United States only from what the see on the big screen.
Hollywood needs to take a very good and long look at it's perverted image and what it is doing to destroy America abroad.
Hollywood is so damn pompous and arrogant they do not have the ability to clean out the rats nest it has become.
Maybe it is time to reinstate the McCarthy commission.
But both are political morons.
I think Matt Damon is always playing Matt Damon and has no range as an actor. I thought he got totally outclassed in "The Departed" where, once again, he was playing Matt Damon while Nickolson, DiCapprio, Wahlberg and even Sheen and Balwin created some great characters. It kills me to admit Baldwin can actually act sometimes but I thought his Irish cop in Departed was really good.
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