Saturday, August 01, 2009

Hollywood's Moral Relativism Is Bad for Humanity

John Nolte is a conservative Hollywood insider who - amongst other things - writes movie reviews for Andrew Breitbarts' Big Hollywood. Nolte's take on another anti Iraq war Hollywood film: Green Zone, starring Matt Damon, which is now pushed back from a fall 2009 release to a March 2010 release:
Why would a company interested in making money (so they say) make yet another film trashing the Iraq War? By my count (narratives and documentaries), 13 have already flopped miserably and yet Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass team up for number 14, this one a big-budget studio critique of a war that successfully liberated 25 million innocent people.

Companies truly interested in making a profit don’t behave this way, which is why there’s never been a New Coke 2, much less a New Coke 14. And yet, Universal doubles down on more anti-Americanism using the fig-leaf of “based on a true story” to hide their malicious intentions which — to anyone paying attention — are always exposed by which “true stories” they choose to drop in theaters all over the world.
[...]
Actually, it doesn’t matter how many [anti Iraq War movies] fail. This is an ideological war, not a drive for profit.
It's that "drop in theaters all over the world" part which is especially malicious. Hollywood steadily turns out propaganda about American immorality and guilt, then complains that conservatives cause the world to dislike America. If Hollywood cannot figure out what's so great about America (hint: freedom feeds the human spirit), how can the rest of the world figure it out?

DVDs being sold across the world are increasing Hollywood's ideological influence. It's a problem - and it's especially a problem b/c Hollywood steadily turns out movies without moral centers: aka movies which espouse moral relativism, which are premised on a philosophy that absolute truth does not exist. The continual propaganda is bad for all of humanity.


A reminder of the way Hollywood used to be:

At Big Hollywood, Leo Grin discussed Rio Bravo, Director Howard Hawkes, and John Wayne:
Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards.
[...]
“I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.”

In his now-famous 1971 Playboy interview, John Wayne recalled his own loathing for the film:
Everyone says High Noon was a great picture because [Dmitri] Tiomkin wrote some great music for it and because Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly were in it. In the picture, four guys come in to gun down the sheriff. He goes to church and asks for help and the guys go, “Oh well, oh gee.” And the women stand up and say, “You rats, you rats.” So Cooper goes out alone. It’s the most un-American thing I ever saw in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ole Coop putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it.

No comments: