How Perplexing

Hollywood discovers the obvious:

Anti-war movies tank at the box office
posted 11/10/07

One of the more satisfying, under-reported barometers of cultural trends is the dismal box office take of recent movies attacking U.S. foreign policy and the war in Iraq.

Read that article in its entirety, and observe that, in all the reasons offered for why these films have met with public indifference and scorn, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is ignored:

These films are all anti-U.S.

In each of them, America is portrayed as the Bad Guy, the Great Satan, the source of all Evil on earth.

Tell me: How does Hollywood expect general American audiences to ratify, with their entertainment dollars, movies that essentially spit in their own faces, blaming them for being a malignant force in the world?

The lameness of the excuses put forth in the article by various industry "analysts" and "insiders" is wondrous to behold.

The films haven't been "entertaining enough," says one. Well, sure: Would you find entertaining a film whose proposition is that you and your country are guilty of nothing but war crimes?

Another declares that people want "escape" from the news headlines; they don't want to be reminded of the war headlines when they go to the movie. Oh yeah? Tell it to the people who made all those patriotic John Wayne flicks during World War II. Filmgoers ate up the black-and-white, good-guys-versus-bad-guys messages of those war films of yesteryear...when Americans were the heroes.

Only veteran TV producer Steven Bochco comes remotely close to this point, when he observes that "World War II was hugely romanticized in terms of its fiction. There were unambiguous villains, and the feeling we were fighting the right people over the right issues, as opposed to this war, which many people feel is misguided."

But observe that he blames the box office failure on controversy over the rectitude of this war -- and not on these movies' unrelenting anti-American messages. In these films, there is no controversy: They all take a side, and that side is that America is wrong, and its soldiers a bunch of rapists, torturers, and murderers.

No, ye card-carrying members of the Hollywood left: All your "explanations" are dead wrong. You just don't want to come to grips with the fact that you hate America but your audience doesn't.

And they aren't willing to pay you to insult them.