Excerpts:

Braveheart: dancing peasants, gleaming teeth and a cameo from Fabio | Film | guardian.co.uk

Edward I expresses a desire to enforce high taxes on the rich. Apparently, in Gibson’s world, this makes him evil. In case you need even more evidence, on a whim he reinstates ius primae noctis, allowing English nobles to interrupt Scottish weddings and shag the bride. Not only fictional, but profoundly ridiculous.

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After his lady love is murdered by the English, Wallace pretends to surrender. At the last minute, he whips out a concealed nunchaku. Wait, what? Glossing over its implication that medieval Scotland imported arms from China, Wallace’s rebellion gathers pace at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, which the film has inexplicably set in a field. Rather than, you know, on a bridge. For pity’s sake. The clue’s in the name.

There are a bunch of folks I like to think of as Ostrich Republicans (a bit unfair to Ostriches) — a group that includes naive libertarians, subconscious “End of History” believers, individualist types, and typically a combination of these traits (a hypothetical defence of the position: “Yes there were all sorts of bad things like racism, lack of women’s rights, etc. But that’s behind us now and if I do or did not believe in or participate in such things, I should be left alone and the government should get out of it”) — a textbook member is Clint Eastwood, who can strangely reconcile the slumming with bluesmen activities with his homegrown conservatism. What this leads to is the sort of schizophrenia that the following two news pieces bring out. On the one hand, he stands guilty of leaving out (and ignoring when reminded) black participation in WW2, in his new movie:

Guardian | Where have all the black soldiers gone?

Sadly, Sgt McPhatter’s experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island that opened on Friday in the US. While the film’s battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.

The film tells the story of the raising of the stars and stripes over Mount Suribachi at the tip of the island. The moment was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the US war effort. Eastwood’s film follows the marines in the picture, including the Native American Ira Hayes, as they were removed from combat operations to promote the sale of government war bonds.

Mr McPhatter, who went on to serve in Vietnam and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the US navy, even had a part in the raising of the flag. “The man who put the first flag up on Iwo Jima got a piece of pipe from me to put the flag up on,” he says. That, too, is absent from the film.

[...]

Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veterans (2004), wrote to Eastwood and the film’s producers pleading with them to include the experience of black soldiers. HarperCollins, the book’s publishers, sent the director a copy, but never heard back.

“It would take only a couple of extras and everyone would be happy,” she said. “No one’s asking for them to be the stars of the movies, but at least show that they were there. This is the way a new generation will think about Iwo Jima. Once again it will be that African-American people did not serve, that we were absent. It’s a lie.”

The first chapter to James Bradley’s book Flags of Our Fathers, which forms the basis of the movie, opens with a quotation from president Harry Truman. “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” It would provide a fitting endnote to Eastwood’s film.

On the other, we have his fellow conservatives unhappy with his historical revisionism and bleeding-heart liberalism:

The Australian: Republican ragging for bleeding heart Clint

MORE than 50 years after he first appeared in Hollywood as a bright young Republican, Clint Eastwood has been attacked by his old allies as a bleeding heart liberal for his latest film, Flags of Our Fathers.

The $US75 million ($100 million) film, which opened in 1800 cinemas in the US at the weekend, focuses not only on the World War II battle of Iwo Jima but also on the fate of a Native American soldier who, Eastwood suggests, was maltreated by the military after the war.

The Australian article ends with a quote from Unforgiven that immediately came to my mind too:

“The best I can do is quote a line from my movie Unforgiven, where one character says, ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it’.”

[ Link ]

[via J on LBO]

You can watch the trailer and movie bits from "Why We Fight" at the following links:

• Why We Fight – A Film By Eugene Jarecki
• Clips from the movie

Many of this blog’s readers have complained that the content tends to be boring. In particular a large segment has expressed disappointment over lack of exciting news (infotainment). What better way to address that than this entry with some comments by Die Hard hero Bruce Willis:

CHUD.com – Cinematic Happenings Under Development:

[...]

I’m a Republican only as far as I want a smaller government, I want less government intrusion, I want them to stop pissing on my money and your money, the tax dollars that we give 50 per cent of or 40 per cent of every year, and I want them to be fiscally responsible, and I want these goddamn lobbyists out of Washington. Do that and I’ll say I’m a Republican. But other than that, I want the government to take care of people who need help, like the kids in foster care, the half a million kids who are in orphanages right now, they call them foster homes but they’re orphanages. I want them to take care of the elderly and give them free medicine, give them whatever they need. There’s tons, billions and billions of dollars that are just being wasted. Okay? I hate government. I’m apolitical. Write that down. I’m not a Republican.

[...]

Violence — look, we live in a violent world, man. This country was founded on violence. Who’s kidding who? We came here and said to the Native American Indians, ‘OK, we got some bad news, we got some pretty bad news, and we got some really bad news. The bad news is we’re here. The pretty bad news is we’re not leaving. The really bad news is we’re going to take all your land, every tiny little bit of land that you guys have and put you on this little postage stamp of desert where you can’t grow a thing, unless of course we find oil on that land. Then we’re gonna move you to another little postage-stamp place in Arizona, and we’re going to fuck you over and give you blankets filled with smallpox,’ and if that’s not violence, then what is, my man. What is?

[...]

I don’t like the world. I don’t think it’s being run correctly and I think it could be done a lot better and because I’m old enough to have grown up at a time – look, I remember when Jack Kennedy got shot. I remember when the news was just ‘Here’s what happened and we’re going to show you what it is.’ Now the news is manipulated and managed and it’s all meant to scare you. They don’t show you anything good. They don’t show you anything good coming out of Iraq, all they say this many dead since President Bush took office. But a lot of great things are happening over there, I went over and saw things for myself and there’s a lot of jacked up things.

[...]

Look at what happened to James Frey in the last two weeks. That’s a great book, a great book and so is the follow up book. And just because his publisher chose to say these are memoirs, it took it out of being a work of fiction – a great work of fiction, very well written – to this guy being sucker punched on Oprah by one of the most powerful women in television just to grind her own axe about it. Hey Oprah, you had President Clinton on your show, and if this prick didn’t lie about a couple things, I’m going to set myself on fire right now.

[...]

Currently playing on my iTunes: Staralfur by Sigur Rós. Its a nice, haunting song (Epitonic will even let you legally download it), though the more uppity types might find it (as always) pandering or trite. One way to identify the uppity types ;-) is by their unfaltering admiration of Springsteen — I think the thing for this crowd is the Woody Allen trick of mixing the trivial (baseball) with the allegedly profound. Anyway this is not one my pet rants, though it sort of turned out this way. Just wanted to point you to the song.

And also a very interesting movie (which falls into the same classification as the song) called The Girl in the Cafe which I picked up quite by change because of the dratted free coupons that Blockbuster wastes my time with (because of my erstwhile DVD subscription). The movie in short: idealistic, simple, young girl meets nice, old, shy bureacrat resulting in trip to G8 summit and question of poverty, hunger, etc. Includes statutory Bono (One!) blurb at end, and all in all leaves one feeling empty and disgusted about oneself and the world (factoid from the movie: a child dies every 3 seconds due to entirely avoidable causes), except of course one is one of those sophisticated, uppity types described above! The movie ends with Staralfur in the background.