Interesting: Anti-American Movies Flop In America, But Make Some Money Overseas

Thus, these movies aren't as money-losing as it seems.

Several questions enter my mind. Given that Hollywood is playing for the anti-American foreign crowd, pandering to them, and calling itself brave for doing so, why can it not also pander to (get this) the American crowd at home? They always tell us they have to make G.I. Joe multinational and Captain America "not a flag-waver" because that would be bad for business overseas.

Isn't it strange they don't mind awful US business if they can recoup costs from an anti-American foreign audience? Huh. Why doesn't that work in reverse?

By the way, "The Kingdom" is used there as a "control" because the analyst says it's "politically neutral."

Let me just say that while this movie was rejected by conservatives when it came out, because it does in fact feature a few lines suggesting "we're just like they are" and "we're part of the cycle of violence," it is otherwise pretty... well, maybe it's not pro-American but it's definitely anti-Al Qaeda. The terrorists are depicted accurately -- by which I mean, monstrously -- and there is a shoot-out in the end, in an Al Qaeda dominated neighborhood of Ridyah (I'm guessing), which is just dynamite, and maybe the movie is trying to avoid easy rah-rah moments but damn if every time one of those bastards got his head ventilated if I didn't feel a rah-rah moment.

The analyst is right, I guess, to call it "politically neutral." And maybe conservatives reject it because they don't like neutrality when it comes to terrorists. (I agree.) But actually mere neutrality, rather than active jihadi-supporting anti-American terrorist-sucking, actually makes it more conservative that just about any movie I can think of in dealing with this topic since 9/11.

All I can say is edit out, in your head, those two or three "cycle of violence" moments and what you're left with is a brutal depiction of how vicious and backwards and ugly terrorists are (and, also, really not very good "warriors," either, so much as barely-competent murderers with make-pretend military-style ranks) and Americans killing the shit out of them.

Thanks to geoff, who had this in the sidebar.

posted by Ace at 07:03 PM

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