Right Wing Swarms Film Critic For Calling Their Jingoism Jingoism

[phantom power]

Texas, where men listen to their mothers. And celebrate their culture of lax regulation and industrial accidents. And teach bronze-age mythology as science in their public schools. And threaten to shoot Californians who look too much like they aren't just passing through...

Oh boy, another fun story for the right wing random harassment files. Amy Nicholson, a critic for LA Weekly, wrote a review of Lone Survivor, as is her job. She did not like it. She wrote quite entertainingly about how she didn’t like it.

Here’s a movie that’ll flop in Kabul. Lone Survivor, the latest by Battleship director Peter Berg, is a jingoistic snuff film about a Navy SEAL squadron outgunned by the Taliban in the mountainous Kunar province. After four soldiers — played with muscles and machismo by Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster — get ID’d by Afghan goat herders, they’re in a race to climb to the top of the nearest summit and summon an airlift before these civilians can sprint to the nearest village and alert local leader Ahmad Shah. It doesn’t go well.

It’s extremely important to note, going forward, that her delightful pan of the movie in no way actually attacks any of the people involved in the actual incident portrayed in the movie or in the book, which was ghost-written by a novelist paid for by the U.S. Navy and not actually by Marcus Luttrell, the main character, who was too busy serving to write books at the time. That Luttrell didn’t write the book is a fact, not an opinion. This is also very important to remember.

Glen Beck did not like this young woman who writes for a living pissing all over his propaganda by describing it as propaganda. Propaganda works best if everyone pretends that it’s not propaganda, you see, and telling the emperor he has no clothes is, in Beck’s eyes, are particularly egregious error if one happens to be young and female. He dared Nicholson to read the review to Luttrell’s face (it seems unlikely he asked Luttrell before bothering to offer him up for this confrontation) and he got all gross and weird about her gender while doing so:

“And Amy, Marcus is a Texan,” Beck added. “That’s different than an American … He listens and obeys his mother. He treats his wife and all women with respect … You’ll walk into the studio and Marcus will know who you are, and Marcus will hold the door open for you even though … that will drive you out of your mind. He will treat you with respect.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/16/right-wing-swarms-film-critic-for-calling-their-jingoism-jingoism/

[marmar]

1. The trailers for that movie scream "Propaganda" ...........

....... I have no desire to see it.

[enki23]

2. Wait, wait. The Navy outright paid someone to ghost write a propaganda book?

.

[monmouth3]

3. Your tax dollars at work....

[deutsey]

4. The comments under her LA Weekly review are disgusting

[MO_Moderate]

5. Great movie

[WatermelonRat]

6. According to a review I read:

"The film never makes a grand statement about whether or not the war in Afghanistan is, per se, a mistake, but it does portray war itself as a disgusting folly."
http://www.thewrap.com/lone-survivor-mark-wahlberg-peter-berg-taylor-kitsch-emile-hirsch-war-hell

Going by this and other reviews (most of which portray it as a gritty "war is hell" sort of movie), I think it would be inaccurate to simply write it off as propoganda. Of course, I'm not really interested in war movies to begin with, so I probably won't see it anyway.

[bemildred]

7. I really really do get sick of the violent cop and war movies.

Such tedious bullshit.