Althouse: "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran."

April 9, 2008

"Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran."

Says Dick Cheney on page 2 of the screenplay to the Oliver Stone movie about George Bush. Via The Hollywood Reporter.

31 comments:

EnigmatiCore said...: Sounds like that one is going to be a real winner. An Oscar, no doubt.; 4/9/08, 6:08 AM
MadisonMan said...: If it's even made. War movies don't bring domestic gross. You'd think Hollywood would've cottoned on to that by now.; 4/9/08, 7:03 AM
al said...: War movies don't bring domestic gross.

Poorly made war movies don't bring domestic gross - esp ones that tend to slam the US. Redacted, Valley of Elah, and Stop Loss come to mind.

Well made war movies makes lots of money domestically.

Black Hawk Down - $108,638,745
Saving Private Ryan - $216,540,909

If Marcus Luttrell's Lone Survivor gets made into a movie (as is rumored) and it keeps the tone of the book it will do well.; 4/9/08, 7:11 AM
The Drill SGT said...: poorly made anti-war movies make little

I think that Apocalypse Now (79) was the last good anti-war flick and it did well.

Good war movies do very well.

I'd add

Master and Commander
Lord of the Rings
Band of Brothers; 4/9/08, 7:25 AM
MadisonMan said...: War movies while America is at war don't bring domestic gross. That's what I should've said.

The bottom three this week, incidentally: Michael Johns and his shrieking falsetto, Carly, angry Carly, with the Arms That Must Not Be Covered, and Syesha (I agree with Simon: she can do Whitney, sort of, she can do Fantasia, but who is Syesha?); 4/9/08, 8:00 AM
KCFleming said...: So are any folks among the left going to see a movie about a guy they have hated for 8 years, especially as he is ("finally") leaving the world stage?

Because few on the right will see it.

Do they then project perhaps 10 viewers per showing? Are they trying to underperform a Paris Hilton movie, or what?; 4/9/08, 8:15 AM
Roger J. said...: The Valley of Elah has to be one of the worst movies ever made--In its efforts to smear soldiers it posited a scenario that is so improbable as to be laughable.

That a group of soliders who have served together would kill a fellow soldier, butcher him, and burn the remains--and then go out for fried chicken, flies in the face of any kind of of evidence or documented event.

If anyone can cite an incident such as this that has ever happened, I would appreciate it. The movie is pure anti-military crap, subsumed under a broader meme that our Iraq involvement has reduced American soldiers to animals. The meme and story are both offensive. I am sorry that Tommy Lee Jones chose to make it.; 4/9/08, 8:19 AM
knox said...: Oliver Stone seems so twenty years ago. His take on any event just feels utterly irrelevant.; 4/9/08, 8:34 AM
KCFleming said...: If anyone can cite an incident such as this that has ever happened, I would appreciate it.

Such things have happened -even things more horrible- in the USSR, China, Japan and Cambodia, but not by US soldiers, so that doesn't count.; 4/9/08, 8:37 AM
Fen said...: Tears of the Sun; 4/9/08, 8:37 AM
Tibore said...: ""Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran."

Wow... blistering accuracy... such lifelike dialogue too!... :-/

[/sarcasm]; 4/9/08, 8:37 AM
Anonymous said...: Ski Tabriz.; 4/9/08, 8:45 AM
ballyfager said...: Have all of you forgotten Platoon. It's the only good movie Stone ever made. He should have quit after that.

Wall Street was an out and out cartoon.; 4/9/08, 9:43 AM
knox said...: Platoon wasn't a cartoon??! I beg to differ. There are some scenes in that movie that are supposed to be devastating ... watch them now and it's just funny how bombastic they are. The death of Willem DaFoe's character comes to mind: shot in in super slo-mo, arms outstretched "christ-like". That scene makes me blush it's so shameless.; 4/9/08, 10:21 AM
Original Mike said...: I won't see Oliver Stone movies. I don't want, in my demented old age, to "remember" that the government killed Kennedy nor do I want to "remember" that Cheney said "real men go to Tehran".; 4/9/08, 10:51 AM
KCFleming said...: The only good thing remaiing about Platoon was being intrioduced to the music Samuel Barber - Adaggio for strings.; 4/9/08, 10:52 AM
KCFleming said...: One more good thing.

Contradictory as it may seem, I began to gain proper respect for the military watching the soldiers in these movies. I had previously been reflexively anti-war, but these films helped to change my position completely.

I suspect that wasn't Stone's intent.; 4/9/08, 11:04 AM
Peter V. Bella said...: knoxwhirled said...
Oliver Stone seems so twenty years ago. His take on any event just feels utterly irrelevant.

Maybe he could get a position at the UN, they are so forty years ago and their take on anything is totally irrelevant.; 4/9/08, 12:39 PM
blake said...: Damn, Pogo beat me to it.

I was going to say, you know, if you cut out the visuals--and the dialogue--Platoon is a pretty good movie.

It was the last Stone movie I saw. Such blatant propaganda with weird messages like "Good guys smoke pot. Bad guys drink beer."

Of course, it was only the second Stone movie I had seen, with the first being The Hand, which was reasonably promising.

I did watch the first few minutes of The Doors. But that was all I could watch. So maybe it's not a political thing so much as a stylistic thing.

I'd say Stone feels so 40 years ago, not 20.; 4/9/08, 2:37 PM
JohnAnnArbor said...: It's a bad comic-strip line; only a committed Hollywood lefty would think it approaches reality.; 4/9/08, 3:53 PM
Revenant said...: The last good Oliver Stone movie was "Conan the Barbarian". :); 4/9/08, 4:38 PM
blake said...: Rev,

But he didn't direct. John Milius did. Milius wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now. I gotta believe he was behind writing the answer to "What is best in life?"

And he was the basis for "Walter" from The Big Lebowski. So, there's that.; 4/9/08, 5:12 PM
Revenant said...: Stone didn't direct, true, but the screenplay was an excellent adaptation of Howard's original stories, lifting elements from lots of them and wrapping them around a coherent narrative.

The "what is best in life" speech was cribbed from Genghis Khan.; 4/9/08, 5:50 PM
blake said...: Rev,

Huh. I don't consider the movie adaptation that successful, artistically. They don't feel like Howard to me. (I think I saw the movie first and was surprised at how much I enjoyed the stories in comparison.)

Although, it was rather eerily prescient when they fight the evil W--er, wizard.; 4/9/08, 5:56 PM
Trooper York said...: The best movie news I have heard in a long time is that there are movies in the works about Robert E. Howard’s great characters Solomon Kane the Puritan swordsman and Bran Mak Morn the king of the Picts. Robert E. Howard was one of the greats and it would behoove the powers that be to mine the pulp goldmine that is his collected works.; 4/9/08, 7:02 PM
Trooper York said...: The pulps from the thirties and forties are a resource that has been sadly neglected, and now that we have the computer technology such as was used in the Lord of the Rings and Narnia, we can readily make some of the classic pulp fiction stories that will be a million times more entertaining than any crap from that asshole Oliver Stone.; 4/9/08, 7:05 PM
blake said...: I'm a big fan of the era, myself, Troop.

Robert Howard, H.P. Lovecraft (they were friends, of a fashion), Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc Smith....

Burroughs could get a little political, which is sort of awesome in retrospect. There's a Tarzan book where a civilization of tiny people is crushed by...the income tax.; 4/9/08, 7:12 PM
Trooper York said...: But just think of all the great stories that would entertain from
Clark Ashton Smith, August Delerth and the great Talbot Mundy. Tros of Samothrace would beat the hell out of HBO's Rome miniseries. And of course someone with a little brains would make a movie out of any one of John Normans books. Just think how many times teenage boys would go to see Slave Girls of Gor on the big screen. Boys of all ages for that matter. They should give me a movie studio to run.; 4/9/08, 7:38 PM
blake said...: Actually, they made two movies out of Gor, cheesy Italian sword-and-sandal flicks. featuring Rebecca Ferrati's assets as their primary assets.

Also a pre-Oscar Palance.; 4/9/08, 7:54 PM
Revenant said...: We'll have to agree to disagree about the merits of the first Conan flick, blake. But could we get a consensus that the Kull movie was an unspeakable atrocity? :); 4/10/08, 12:11 AM
blake said...: I'll assume you mean Krull. Yeah. Trivia: Krull was initially a(n even more blatant) D&D ripoff. TSR sued and the script was altered. A friend of mine whose father was on the case claimed that he had been an expert witness for the prosecution at the trial.

I did sort of like Sword and the Sorceror, with Lee Horsely. But it was top-to-bottom cheese.; 4/10/08, 2:30 AM