Posted on 04/30/2009 8:07:52 PM PDT by Milhous
For two and a half minutes near the end of "Taking Chance," the new HBO movie about the body of a young Marine returned home for burial, there is no sound except for the salute of the riflemen and the Wyoming wind battering the flags that stand at half mast as the shattered remains of PFC Chance Phelps are placed at rest. The silence amounts to perhaps the most eloquent statement Hollywood has yet made about the Iraq War.
Its main competition is an earlier scene in the same movie. Driving along a country road behind an SUV carrying the casket, Lt. Col. Michael Strobl finds other motorists forming an impromptu funeral cortege out of respect for the departed.
"Taking Chance," which is the only Iraq movie to show the troops in a wholly positive way, is also the only one people are watching. The film industry has reduced our troops to dupes, dopes, deserters and losers in an insane clown posse of laughably bad films like "Stop-Loss," "In the Valley of Elah," "Lions for Lambs," "Home of the Brave" and "The Lucky Ones." To say that these relentlessly skewed movies, made by people innocent of any knowledge of the military, are flops would be an understatement: "The Lucky Ones," for instance, which starred Tim Robbins and Rachel McAdams as desperate and moronic vets on leave, last fall grossed $267,000, a figure that wouldn't even cover the cost of advertising. It was yanked from screens after a single week.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
... The media are not biased against the right. They are openly hostile towards us. They are openly attempting to crush one point of view and elevate another. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply the result of a poisonous conformity, a climate of opinion which the MSM, populated almost exclusively by liberals, barely even realize they inhabit.
...
Examples of the media’s hostility to the American ideal abound, but two have stood out to me in the past several weeks and illustrate the relationship between the media and the culture. The first example was the media’s attempt to ignore, then dismiss and ridicule, the tax day tea party protests that brought hundreds of thousands of ordinary people out in demonstrations across the country. Compare the media’s small, low and dishonest coverage of these protests with their hysterically magnified and hagiographical coverage of Cindy Sheehan’s minor and largely meaningless anti-war protests a few years before. When challenged, the media always have excuses for this sort of hostility toward the right, but they never need excuses for hostility toward the left because they never show any.
The second example was the reception of HBO’s beautiful little film Taking Chance. After some dozen or more bad leftist films attacking our soldiers and our wars against Islamic terror—all of which bombed and many of which won mainstream review praise—this hour and fifteen minute movie simply followed the coffin of a dead marine on its journey home. It neither supported nor attacked the war effort, merely showed the respect Americans give to our servicemen and their sacrifice. It was stark, unsentimental and heartbreaking. And it got more viewers than any HBO film in five years. As for the mainstream media reviews, [1] Kyle Smith of the New York Post brilliantly smacked them down for the same sneering, snarky, low and dismissive tone that the MSM brought to the coverage of the tea party protests.
This is important. The people who tell you Hollywood—and pop culture generally—are governed by money alone simply do not know what they are talking about. Bad reviews such as those directed at Taking Chance have a powerful effect. They’re meant to. They’re meant to string barbed wire around the culture and protect the left’s monopoly of it. They’re meant to make the film makers consider their next project with an eye to getting better reviews. They’re meant to make Kevin Bacon (an outspoken liberal who did a terrific job in the Chance lead) think twice before he makes such a choice of role again. And in general—if you follow the careers of stars like Sally Field and Bruce Willis who have received such left-wing review discipline for straying from the party line and have not made the mistake again—you will see that these attacks do exactly what they’re meant to do.
So all right, now we know. The media are the enemies of the people and they are protecting the culture for the proponents of the state. And now that we do know, it’s time for us to fight back. By us, I mean artists, journalists, thinkers, foundations, investors—anyone who tells stories, makes music or pictures or reacts to them with criticism, ideas, money and praise.
...
ping
Damn I don’t have HBO. Sounds like a good flick.
I don’t have HBO at home but I get it at dialysis. I was surfing the channels when I came upon Taking Chance. It is an incredibly heartwarming and heartbreaking movie. I highly recommend it to anyone of any age. The acting was superb.
It’s an amazing movie, one of the best new movies I’ve seen. Of course, Second Hand Lions rates number one, but this is a close second. Kevin Bacon was very believable and did a great job.
“Taking Chance” is by far the best original HBO film I’ve ever seen and the best film in general I’ve seen in years.
It was extremely patriotic, respectful and a three hanky to boot.
Bruce Willis does not belong in there. He is unappologetically and defiantly conservative. When asked some time back if he was worried about being blask-listed by leftist Hollywood, his answer was basically “I grew up on the streets of Philly, I can go back there” (not that this is likely to happen now). I seriously doubt that he has avoided any roles because of some nasty words from some leftist MSM hacks...
We signed up for HBO just to watch Taking Chance. We watched it three times over a couple of days and cried each time. It really was a wonderful film.
Thanks. I’ll have to make sure that my parents don’t watch it until AFTER my brother gets home from Iraq. Otherwise, they’ll freak out.
I’m not about to sign up for HBO just so I can watch this, so I hope it comes out on DVD. :) Sounds like it’s worth a look.
It’s a fantastic movie - well worth looking for and purchasing the DVD, it it’s available...
Check post 7.
The original story was posted on FR several years ago. That was all it took for me to look forward to the movie.
They film-makers were true to the story.
Reading comprehension pwnz meh :)
The preview causes blurry screen symdrone (but absolutly worth it):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtmiLdzzgGE
Never heard of any of those other movies ...wait, I never pay any attention to Hollywood anyway.
I hope that pinhead Robbins got paid on commission but that would be too good to be true.
I stop on the hill at the new national cemetary north of Ft. Sill at Elgin, Oklahoma and listen to the wind whip the flag. A lonely place but peaceful.
http://www.cem.va.gov/cems/nchp/ftsill.asp#np
Bruce Willis does not belong in there. He is unappologetically and defiantly conservative.You said it! Remember when Willis attended The Punishers’ Ball in 2005 and brought up making a movie about Deuce Four? Heard anything about it lately? Me neither.
And my curse is remembering the darnedest things.
I didn’t know they had a DVD out until I saw the later post.
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