H
HagiaSophia
Guest
“Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival wrapped up this past Saturday with an orgy of nihilism – otherwise known as its awards banquet. The winning films glorified the usual assortment of left wing, anti-American, sexually bizarre themes.
The Grand Jury Prize for American Documentary went to Eugene Jarecki’s “Why We Fight,” a film that claims U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been formed not by the need for self-defense, but by an out-of-control military-industrial complex’s desire for profit…”
The other Sundance awards went to such films as “Hustle & Flow,” a drama about a pimp who wants to become a rapper (sold to Paramount for $16 million – the biggest deal of the festival), and “The Squid and the Whale,” a “comedy” in which the “humorous” elements consist of a teacher propositioning sex from an underage student, while his obscenity-spouting young son smears various bodily fluids on the walls of his elementary school.
The pedophilia, rape, incest and underage sex featured in a number of the Sundance films has already elicited much media comment – but is anyone really surprised that the left glories in depicting such behavior? The only revelation now is that liberals still consider themselves oppressed – even as their R-rated propaganda freely travels around the globe.
Hysterical warnings of impending censorship were renewed in Brian Grazer’s “Inside Deep Throat,” an apologia for the infamous '70s porn film (which left its coerced star Linda Lovelace scarred for life). Variety declared in its review that studying “Deep Throat” was more timely now than ever “since forces on the right are currently galvanized for a renewed attack on civil liberties and freedom of expression.” If only these so-called forces onthe right really were as galvanized as liberals fear.
Another Sundance favorite, “The Protocols of Zion,” takes a “serious and often comedic look at post-9/11 anti-Semitism,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Modern-day hate-mongers are put before the unsparing eye of the cinematic lens. “Neo-Nazis, Kabbalistic rabbis, Holocaust deniers, Black nationalists” are held up as examples of virulent anti-Semitism. Muslim terrorists are nowhere mentioned, but in a particularly gratuitous dig, the filmmakers go out of their way to include Mel Gibson and “The Passion” as sources of anti-Jewish hatred.
The rest of the Sundance films were more of the same: Enron documentaries, movies about “delusional” Desert Storm veterans, films about thumb-sucking teenagers living in the hell of middle-class American suburbia (a hell that liberals obviously find worse than the most hideous concentration camp – perhaps the Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn should have ignored the horrors of the gulag and instead focused his literary talents on the much more pressing horrors of American suburbia).
Out of these various cinematic treats, however, the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg deserve a special mention for their bizarre anti-American fantasy, “Dear Wendy.”
“Dear Wendy” is not about a woman, but about two American boys who fall in love with a gun. In some sort of muddled statement about American puritanism and gun lust, the boys aren’t even interested in the pretty girls around them, but would rather spend their days hiding in a cave, dressing up as figures from American history, and shooting off their guns.
According to the Hollywood Reporter’s review, the film is “a powerful indictment of American gun culture.” The reviewer wrings his hands that “like many innocent young men in this country introduced to the mystique of guns, they will eventually be led to slaughter.” (The reviewer never considers that the slaughter might be of America’s enemies.) All this from a filmmaker, Lars Von Trier, who’s never even set foot in America.
Robert Redford stated at Sundance’s opening on January 20 that Sundance was a “festival of dissent, and I’d like to celebrate that.” Redford continued that “this is really a festival about different voices in film that really reflect, a little more accurately, the world we live in.” If Sundance is supposed to be a festival of dissent, where are the truly dissenting films?
As Redford uttered his tired cliches about “diversity” and “dissent,” he never paused to reflect that the Sundance Film Festival, the largest and most powerful film festival in the U.S., is not a voice of “dissent” but actually the voice of a repressive and conformist liberal mainstream. If Redford were honest about celebrating “different voices in film,” he would not show movies that were only exclusively from the left.
If there is any “dissent” within the film industry today, it is from filmmakers on the right. Here’s to these filmmakers succeeding, and showing Robert Redford and Sundance the real meaning of diversity and dissent.
newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/2/3/144934.shtml
The Grand Jury Prize for American Documentary went to Eugene Jarecki’s “Why We Fight,” a film that claims U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been formed not by the need for self-defense, but by an out-of-control military-industrial complex’s desire for profit…”
The other Sundance awards went to such films as “Hustle & Flow,” a drama about a pimp who wants to become a rapper (sold to Paramount for $16 million – the biggest deal of the festival), and “The Squid and the Whale,” a “comedy” in which the “humorous” elements consist of a teacher propositioning sex from an underage student, while his obscenity-spouting young son smears various bodily fluids on the walls of his elementary school.
The pedophilia, rape, incest and underage sex featured in a number of the Sundance films has already elicited much media comment – but is anyone really surprised that the left glories in depicting such behavior? The only revelation now is that liberals still consider themselves oppressed – even as their R-rated propaganda freely travels around the globe.
Hysterical warnings of impending censorship were renewed in Brian Grazer’s “Inside Deep Throat,” an apologia for the infamous '70s porn film (which left its coerced star Linda Lovelace scarred for life). Variety declared in its review that studying “Deep Throat” was more timely now than ever “since forces on the right are currently galvanized for a renewed attack on civil liberties and freedom of expression.” If only these so-called forces onthe right really were as galvanized as liberals fear.
Another Sundance favorite, “The Protocols of Zion,” takes a “serious and often comedic look at post-9/11 anti-Semitism,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Modern-day hate-mongers are put before the unsparing eye of the cinematic lens. “Neo-Nazis, Kabbalistic rabbis, Holocaust deniers, Black nationalists” are held up as examples of virulent anti-Semitism. Muslim terrorists are nowhere mentioned, but in a particularly gratuitous dig, the filmmakers go out of their way to include Mel Gibson and “The Passion” as sources of anti-Jewish hatred.
The rest of the Sundance films were more of the same: Enron documentaries, movies about “delusional” Desert Storm veterans, films about thumb-sucking teenagers living in the hell of middle-class American suburbia (a hell that liberals obviously find worse than the most hideous concentration camp – perhaps the Soviet dissident Solzhenitsyn should have ignored the horrors of the gulag and instead focused his literary talents on the much more pressing horrors of American suburbia).
Out of these various cinematic treats, however, the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg deserve a special mention for their bizarre anti-American fantasy, “Dear Wendy.”
“Dear Wendy” is not about a woman, but about two American boys who fall in love with a gun. In some sort of muddled statement about American puritanism and gun lust, the boys aren’t even interested in the pretty girls around them, but would rather spend their days hiding in a cave, dressing up as figures from American history, and shooting off their guns.
According to the Hollywood Reporter’s review, the film is “a powerful indictment of American gun culture.” The reviewer wrings his hands that “like many innocent young men in this country introduced to the mystique of guns, they will eventually be led to slaughter.” (The reviewer never considers that the slaughter might be of America’s enemies.) All this from a filmmaker, Lars Von Trier, who’s never even set foot in America.
Robert Redford stated at Sundance’s opening on January 20 that Sundance was a “festival of dissent, and I’d like to celebrate that.” Redford continued that “this is really a festival about different voices in film that really reflect, a little more accurately, the world we live in.” If Sundance is supposed to be a festival of dissent, where are the truly dissenting films?
As Redford uttered his tired cliches about “diversity” and “dissent,” he never paused to reflect that the Sundance Film Festival, the largest and most powerful film festival in the U.S., is not a voice of “dissent” but actually the voice of a repressive and conformist liberal mainstream. If Redford were honest about celebrating “different voices in film,” he would not show movies that were only exclusively from the left.
If there is any “dissent” within the film industry today, it is from filmmakers on the right. Here’s to these filmmakers succeeding, and showing Robert Redford and Sundance the real meaning of diversity and dissent.
newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/2/3/144934.shtml