Short Memories
Joe Dante, a cool director who regularly puts satire into his genre films (e.g., Small Soldiers, Gremlins), is getting a lot of publicity for his anti-war (zzzzzz) zombie movie for Showtime, Homecoming. The LA Times Calendar section just had a big piece on it.
The article laughably says Hollywood's afraid to go against Bush. Let's leave aside the neverending flow of high profile anti-War, anti-Bush documentaries. There have been a number of films that, often explicitly, attack him (George Lucas turned a whole epic's message upside-down to get a cheap crack in), but none I'm aware of that even metaphorically praise our war against Islamofascism--if anything, Hollywood pointedly won't make Muslim terrorists the enemy.
Who cares--let them say what they want. It's just when they pretend to be brave that it gets tiresome. Even more tiresome, though, is when they pretend to be original. The coverage of Homecoming heralds Dante for really using his imagination, but this is a very old story. And I don't just mean the cliche of zombies rising up against their creator. I'm talking about the idea of soldiers rising from the dead the fight against war. This is the precise plot of Irwin Shaw's 1936 Broadway hit Bury The Dead.
By the way, if Dante truly wanted to be brave and original, he would have had his zombie soldiers march on Washington and reelect Bush. Now that would be must-see TV.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:45 AM
1 Comments:
I think it's worth retroactively giving James Cameron some credit for True Lies. He was willing to have Arab Terrorists be the bad guys and (unlike Disney with Aladdin) didn't back down from Arab defamation league criticisms. There were good Arabs in TL and bad Arabs - just like real life. Cameron said he thought Arab terrorists were a real threat and predicted a major attack well before 9/11.
As far as Dante, I haven't seen this episode and am willing to give him at least some benefit of the doubt. Both of the corporate heads in Small Soldiers and Gremlins 2, were at least sensible. Dante's movies illustrate a better understanding of real world politics than say, Warren Beatty with all that Bulworth nonsense.
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