Hollywood Is Casualty Of War As Movie-Goers Shun Iraq Films - RawStory

<snip>

The wave of recent films set against the backdrop of war in Iraq and post-9/11 security has failed to win over film-goers keen to escape grim news headlines when they go to the movies, analysts say.

In a break with past convention, when films based on real conflicts were made only years after the last shots were fired, several politically-charged films have gone on release while America remains embroiled in Iraq. Almost without exception, however, the crop of movies have struggled to turn a profit at the box-office and in many cases have received a mauling from unimpressed critics as well.

"Rendition," a drama starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal about the CIA's policy of outsourcing interrogation of terror suspects, has taken just under 10 million dollars at the box office, a disastrous return.

Oscar-winning director Paul Haggis's latest film "In the Valley of Elah," about a father investigating the death of his son in Iraq, earned favorable reviews but less than seven million dollars following its release in September.

Even the action-packed "The Kingdom," starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, fell well below its 70 million budget with around 47 million dollars in ticket sales.

The poor returns do not augur well for more war films due for release in North America later this month, notably the Robert Redford-directed drama "Lions for Lambs" and Brian De Palma's hard-hitting "Redacted," based on the real-life rape and murder of an Iraqi schoolgirl by US soldiers.

Lew Harris, the editor of website Movies.com, said the films have struggled to be successful because the subject matters of Iraq and 9/11 remain too close to home. And in many cases, the films have not been entertaining enough.

"These movies have to be entertaining," Harris told AFP. "You can't just take a movie and make it anti-war or anti-torture and expect to draw people in. "That's what happened with 'Rendition' and it has been a disaster," he said.

"People want war movies to have a slam-bang adventure feel to them ... But Iraq is a difficult war to portray in a kind of rah-rah-rah, exciting way.

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Link: http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Hollywood_is_casualty_of_war_as_mov_11092007.html

Apparently, Americans want more car chases.

:banghead:

-- we can look at and squarely acknowledge what's happening in real life. "We" meaning our representatives ceasing to be "charmed and impressed" by Bush and understanding that this administration must be held accountable, instead of their offering up heartfelt, but bizarre justifications as to why holding Bush accountable just isn't all that important.

And they don't like tragedy to be exploited. It's no mystery why these movies aren't doing well.

Just entertained.

I told a number of friends and co-workers that I'm going to see 'Rendition' this weekend for my birthday.

Almost every single one of them said, "What's it about?"

:banghead:

Or did you just sneer at them and walk away?

What is Rendition about? The very specific story. :shrug:

Link: http://www.apple.com/trailers/newline/rendition/

And no... I didn't sneer and walk away. I told them what it was about.

You gotta problem with us elitists?

:rofl:

so does the rest of the country. But hey, keep sneering at the country and wondering why nobody will vote for you. Idiots.

THAT... is a two way street.

And while I can find plenty of fault with our media and our educational system, at least some of us have done our homework.

And I don't feel particularly groovy with pandering to the dumbest kids in the class (ie. lowest common denominator).

:shrug:

The oldest extant Greek play is The Persians by Aeschylus about the invasion of Greece by the Persians, and Greek tragedy often used the mythic material as a scrim through which one saw the present. For more recent plays, we have The Crucible. In painting, some of the most powerful art are works like Guernica which evoked the aerial bombings of that city, or Chagall's The White Crucifixion come to mind.

These movies may or may not be exploitive - haven't seen them yet. It might also be that they are primarily propagandistic. In short, they could be lousy art. Those, though, are very different issues. More generally, it could also be that without some kind of allegorical/ historical scrim separating ourselves from the material, it can be too close. If you look at art that dealt with World War I, it really came forth beginning in 1928 or so. Vietnam, the films and writing really takes off after 1977/1978. Even the Twin Towers - it is only now that we are dealing with it - DeLillo, Speigelmann, others. But again, those are very different aesthetic and cultural issues than suggesting people don't like to be exploited. Might not like it, but it happens all the time. And if we see all art as a kind of expropriation/ exploitation of material, well what that is what tragedy it.

It depends on how it is handled. Sorry to go, but this is an issue I have just finished dealing with in two of my classes ( they really don't get Antigone)

and no, I'm not being sarcastic :)

Makes me miss college and my Film As Art class, I loved it, symbolism, etc.. I miss having conversations with really intelligent people...

Not trying to sound like a snob, which ain't hard in Bush's "be a retard or Die" culture, just thinking that I need to find some folks like you to talk with..

I was telling my neighbor yesterday, who plays scathing guitar, like Hendrix, Beck (the OLD Beck) and Clapton combined, which I'll never attain, that i once wrote a paper in college about "fourth dimensional synthetic cubism", and how it gets a little lonely when you want to GAB about shit like that :)

Good for you, keep stretching that mind, man! I have a theory that as America grows ever more Stupid, that smart People get Even Smarter :)

Michalangelo was depressed a lot. Said the thing he suffered from most in Life was Lonliness, wonder why...

Take a look at symbolman.com, tell me what you think :)

depressing week in the trenches. I will also check out symbolman.com

really gives a shit about film as art.

Jim-Bob at the mechanics shop might very well give a shit about film as art.

With that kind of snootiness, you must be prone to nose-bleeds!

wow. what a shithole around here today. see ya.

(or anything else) as art, per se, what constitutes art or anything else like that. But they were about the function of art and how artist/people/cultures deal with events and turn it into art. From the reviews I've read so far, it seems that Lions For Lambs is didactic(telling instead of showing), and probably might tank for that reason. In short, it might be bad or mediocre or weak.

And incidentally, the Jim-Bobs at the mechanics shop may or may not know about "art," from an academic standpoint, but they do know what moves or excites or stimulates them. Sometimes I really like to watch shit because it's fun. Sometimes a work rips your soul out. We can have Dalton Trumbo, who knew what he was doing when he wrote "Spartacus," and we can have Franzoni writing "Gladiator." Kevin Jarre wrote "Glory," and he wrote "The Mummy."

In short, I think about art the way your hypothetical Jim-Bob thinks about carburetors and for the same reason - because it is my job. In that movie theatre, with that book, watching that drama ( or comedy), in front of that painting, we get to experience it.

If I am misreading you, sandnsea, I apologize. And I certainly don't mean to get into a pissing match. I just think we might have different definitions of what art is ( I am not thinking good/bad/indifferent/ high vs low), or possibly who (or how one) experiences it.

pontification disguised as film... propaganda... manipulative, exploitive - like I said.

Not having seen this particular film, I can't say. I disagreed with your basic premise about what people may or may not want. Could be pontification. Don't know. You did seem to miss my point of concession where I said some material might be too close without some masking. Well, it is off to the movies this evening.

who did film reviews, it was "Jim-Bob at the Drive-In" or some shit like that in the 80s

Are you fucking kidding me? extant Greek plays?? :eyes:

And you wonder why we can't reach regular Americans.

Is R peoples learning?



:rofl:

Isn't the laziness of thinking you can learn through the teevee something everybody around here opposes? The box office is supposed to be different?

These movies were deemed "controversial" at the time, and they informed as well as they entertained.

To Kill A Mockingbird
Guess Who's Coming To Dinner
The Graduate

Just to name a few off the top of my pointy little head.

:shrug:

Not political foreign policy about war. Completely different.

War has no social impact? Foreign policy has no social impact???

Maybe YOU need to go back to school.

:wtf:

Most people around here are very upset about using Katrina to make a series that perpetuates a particular political view of New Orleans and is exploitive of the people still suffering. People see these movies in the same way. They're manipulative and exploitive of horrific death and destruction. It's Hollywood shoving a particular viewpoint down the public's throat, which would be as readily rejected if Hollywood were shoving the Bible down everybody's throat. If you weren't so enamored with yourself, you'd have some objectivity and could see it clearly.

The Ten Commandments
The Greatest Story Ever Told

The Longest Day
The Sands Of Iwo Jima

It wasn't until fairly recently that films dared not always portray Americans as the heroes, and gave us films with unhappy endings.

ie. Reflecting real life!

:shrug:

coming from but you might be getting bad art and the actual mater4ial from which it comes a little bollixed up. You (not "you" but general you) can exploit material for political or whatever reasons. You can let your own feelings about a subject get in the way. It can result in propaganda,didacticism, mawkishness or whatever - crappy - movies, films, books. Likewise, groups can get on a bandwagon and we can have a glut of movies on the same subject - some good, some bad, but after awhile exhausting.

But the content is a different issue. Politically, I find On the Waterfront a piece of junk. It is about naming names and Kazan worked it partially as a response to selling out. As a movie, it is beautiful and powerful and great. Ezra Pound was a fascist shit. And his adaptation "The River Merchant's Wife" breaks my heart.

I do see where you are coming from. I hate work that gives up being great or even good to be propaganda. But that concerns how material is handled.

Case in point about the Bible as material: Greatest Story Ever Told and The Gospel According to Matthew. One is okay. The other, from my take, is pretty great.

What a ridiculous complaint! Are you saying that someone making a classical reference in an art critique is somehow a political liability? If so, that would be very sad.

The OP is about movies failing at the box office, not why people aren't enrolling in film classes.

You have no idea why these movies aren't doing well..pure speculation.

:eyes: I've read the responses all over the internet to some of these movies and it's all the same, they're pontification disguised as film. People hate it. Very simple.

are all that.

the time will be right to see this exposure when they come out of DVD.

That's when I see my movies.

I am a reasonably informed person--none of the subject matter in these Iraq films is news to me. I get the majority of my news from LBN right here on DU, various other sources on the tubez, and my local alt-weekly.

This stuff is just too close to home for me to see them without turning into a mess. I lived through 9/11 and I have no desire to see films about it, whether they are high art, documentaries, or patriotsploitation. I have friends and family who are serving in Iraq. I'm not going to spend money to see a movie about what is going on over there. I have a hard enough time compartmentalizing this stuff when I'm reading about it to stay informed. I'm an empath and I have to be very careful about films that strike too deep of an emotional chord. V for Vendetta was a great movie, I went to see it in the theaters, but the scene with the lesbian subplot reduced me to a blubbering mess in the theater.

This is not to say that there is something inherently wrong about making Iraq and 9/11 movies. I agree with the people who say that it really depends on how the material is handled--if it's rah rah patriotsploitation, or whether it is a raw, honest examination of the truth. The latter is what it should be about, and I applaud these types of films. What I'm saying is that I simply can't watch most of them. If that makes me a bad liberal, then whatever.

Most people do not know what extraordinary rendition is, and are unaware that we have been committing it.

Worse... there are many that think that it, and torture itself, is just fine with them.

I was hoping that that movie might just open some more eyes, and maybe change some minds.

The box office reality is that not that many people went to see it, and that is a shame.

:shrug:

It's ostrich syndrome. If they don't see it, they don't have to think about it.

Then you've got the Babs Bushes who don't want to trouble their beautiful minds with it. I know a lot of fundies like that. :puke:

Otherwise the studios will not even bother to make them in the future.

We'll all be waiting for Dukes Of Hazard XXV.

:puke:

was supposedly the THE Viet Nam movie..:puke:.. It wasn;t until years later that the REAL ones came out..

Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket et al..

It's too "close".. people feel uncomfortable..and the end is not in sight..

Americans love winners. War is seen as the ultimate blood sport. Most do not want to be
reminded of losing carnage.