No, I don't intend to go see "Sully", as you probably well suspect I wouldn't. To start with, I'm allergic to Tom Hanks* (the first thing I saw him in was by being reluctantly exposed to "Sleepless in Seattle") and, your motive in asking, you know I loathe the Republican-fascist Clint Eastwood.
The only thing I saw about the movie notes that Eastwood, in line with his Republican-fascism, lacking the villain necessary for the intellectual and artistic vapidity of Hollywood film making invented one in where it didn't exist.
The real-life story of Capt. Chesley Sullenberger doesn’t come with a villain (well, unless you count the geese), so of course Clint Eastwood’s hit movie Sully had to invent one. And that’s fine. There’s no problem with using artistic license to inject a true story with the kind of conflict you need to fuel a feature-length Hollywood drama. And as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it in her review, “Isn’t Sully, of all the lionized male figures in recent American history, among the most … unsullied?”
But the conflict Sully invents is a fantasy that aligns itself with some of the dumbest and most dangerous ideas of our era. By making an enemy of bureaucrats, experts, and “facts,” Eastwood has made the perfect movie for the year of the Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.
Well, I don't think the peddling of lies about even recent history and even such relatively minor events is fine, especially when the lies come in a movie and other venues of mass media. And, especially, when they are the product of the imagination of the ideological motivation of someone like Eastwood.
Really, pitch me a harder ball to hit, next time.
* Literally allergic. I was watching Ken Burns' movie, Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, and kept getting more and more annoyed by it only to realize it was because it was Tom Hanks reading the part of Horatio Nelson. And I will never forgive Hanks for his own role in dangerously falsifying important recent history in Charlie Wilson's War so as to remove his and other real life political figures' culpability for one of the more disastrous foreign and military policies. Reportedly Hanks didn't want his character to come off as flawed. Though he was certainly not single-handedly responsible for peddling a falsified history that was to the benefit of Republican-fascists. Hollywood almost always lies about historical events. Hollywood is a lie factory.
"Hollywood is a lie factory."
ReplyDeleteThis is so true. In real life, nobody ever breaks into song like they did in the Fred and Ginger movies.
"Hollywood almost always lies about historical events. Hollywood is a lie factory."
ReplyDeleteThis is so true -- and it's got far older roots. Why, I have it on good authority that that rat bastard Francis Bacon distorted history in Shakespeare's RICHARD III