You’re giving De Palma too much credit. De Palma may not know and certainly doesn’t care whether this “happens all the time”. He is using it deliberately for anti-American propaganda.

But who makes movies for flyover-country Americans these days? I know the stories are out there, and the way people line up for the occassional movie that does resonate with the American mass audience… I mean that would be a clue, wouldn’t it?

Sadly, I conclude that Michael Medved was right, when he wrote Hollywood VS America; it’s almost wilfully perverse, how just about every virtue and value we cherish is trashed in the movies. I can think of a dozen Iraq war stories that would make great movies, and as many more stories from American history that would do the same… hell, I even wrote one of them myself! (here – http://www.booklocker.com/books/3004.html )but would Hollywood ever give up the foreign market and their own sense of self satisfaction?

The stories are out there, but Hollywood just looks away… which is terribly sad, really. We used to enjoy going to the movies…

Tom,

You are so correct. And in this instance, we are talking about the actions of a handful of soldiers out of 150,000.

I suppose we can now look forward to a movie insinuating that all homosexuals are pedophiles since a small handful happen to be so.

They can also make the film about every illegal immigrant committing vehicular manslaughter while under the influence.After all, we do happen to have a few disturbing cases in the news right now, and stuff like that supposedly gets DePalma’s attention.

If Hollywood were attacked, or needed the National Guard to help with a natural disaster, I wouldn’t blame the military if they stood down and refused to help. Of course, they would never do that, and I’m not advocating that they do so.

I like what naval aviator/blogger Neptunus Lex had to say about San Francisco when the city tried to ban the Blue Angels from performing.

“As a city, San Francisco has long ago stopped pretending that they support their military. We could stop pretending that we like San Francisco.

We don�t have to like San Francisco. We get paid to defend them. It�s our job.

The rest of the country?

We�re doing that for free.”

I think you could easily substitute “Hollywood” for “San Francisco” in that quote.

Thanks, guys. Couldn’t have done it without you.

Notwithstanding a few moments of seemingly muddled moral equivalency at the end, The Kingdom may be the closest thing we’re ever going to get to an honest, pro-American movie about the “Long War” anytime in the foreseeable future. Yes, at its core, it’s basically just a buddy picture, where Foxx is the “fish out of water,” forming a reluctant alliance with the mysterious Saudi guy “in a world where everything is topsy-turvy and anything can happen.” Still and all, when the alternatives to DePalma’s forthcoming Redacted and its ilk are practically nonexistant, The Kingdom deserves to be widely seen and heavily discussed when it goes into general release next month.

Without giving anything away, there will be absolutists who argue that its morally ambiguous ending negates the whole premise of the film — but I would profoundly disagree. In fact, the case can be made that exactly the opposite is true: The ending actually illustrates the utter vacuity of the argument put forth in some quarters, that both (small-L) liberal democracies and (capital-I) Illiberal Islamic societies are driven to conflict by mutual fear, suspicion and illogical hatreds. Indeed, the hollow falseness of that conclusion is convincingly laid bare by the entire rest of the film.

Those who cringe at the thought of DePalma’s agitprop setting the national agenda need to vote with their dollars and make The Kingdom a huge surprise Fall blockbuster! Because, at the end of the day, Hollywood doesn’t care about pro-war or anti-war. Box office is the only language that studio moguls understand, and collecting your dollars is their only agenda.