Dreary theater

I noticed the other day, and today on Drudge that Oliver Stone, one of the few directors who can make me walk out on a movie every single time, is making a film about George W. Bush – probably as good as all of the other movies he’s made that I couldn’t get through because of the blatant mistruths and perpetuation of conspiratorial lies. I’m probably the only infantryman in our history to ever walk out on “Platoon”.

I was reminded again of the dreary state of art in the country while reading Warner Todd Huston at Stop the ACLU this morning;

On the 25th, the Washington Post served up a lament for Hollywood’s dismal box office returns for the many Iraq war pictures it has churned out over the last several years, wondering why they have all failed so spectacularly? The whole article amounts to the Post just not understanding why moviegoers have stayed away in droves from these dark and dismal movies. But with the anti-Military, anti-American point of view depicted in every single one of these movies, it is no surprise that Americans have ignored these self-denigrating flicks.

Now, I love a good war movie, but there hasn’t been one since “The Great Raid” which was doomed at the box office by limited release, however it took me months to find a copy on DVD.

I won’t waste my time watching some drivel written by hacks and acted by drug addicts that preaches to me about how I should feel about war. War movies are about the men that fight in them, not about some director’s political leanings or about elevating a mere actor to the level of some sort of intellectual giant.

In the 1938, Vsevolod Meyerhold, gifted Russian director, said to Stalin’s Committee on Art Affairs (as quoted in Martin Ami’s Koba the Dread);

I, for one, find our theaters pitiful and terrifying. Go on to the Moscow theaters and look at the colorless, boring productions which are all alike and differ only in their degree of worthlessness. In your effort to eradicate formalism, you have destroyed art.

Of course, four days later Mr. Meyerhold was in prison for the remainder of his life, but I’m pretty sure he’d be distressed to learn that his words still apply today – but to the American theater.

Category: Society