Another Hollywood spectacle has come and gone, those Academy Awards, and still no Oscar or even a category for this - Courage. I think it's time.
To be honest, I never cared much for Sally Field, who actually did win best actress Oscars for Norma Rae and Places In The Heart.
Unfortunately, she got off to a flying start, if we (and she) dare recall TV's Flying Nun. Who can forget, who can forgive?
Then, something happened that changed my mind. I caught her in a movie, on TV, where she plays an American woman who is lured to Tehran by her Iranian husband, and there she is, trapped in a hostile land where women have no say. Not Without My Daughter is an awful title for such a terrific movie, a movie that is unblinking in its depiction of a nation ruled by fanaticism.
Based on what really happened to a woman named Betty Mahmoody, that film came out in 1991, as if to foreshadow September 11, 2001. Once in a while, you can catch it on cable. Since then, Hollywood has kept spooling out Meet the Fockers, but hardly anything about "Meet the Jihadists".
Obviously, Hollywood can't handle the truth. For that, we turn to independent filmmakers like Pierre Rehov. His documentaries (see www.pierrerehov.com) actually document truth against falsehood, exposing, as these films do, the fictions of Jenin, Jenin and the Mohammad Al-Dura caper that manipulated the masses and mischievously set off the four-year Arab uprising against Israel.
Rehov (and a few others like him) is ready for his close-up, but he lacks the one thing only a major studio can give: distribution.
Richard Gere is the latest proof of Hollywood's grand delusion, where ego is mistaken for courage. Here's a man who, several months ago, took his stardom to Arab Ramallah, where he urged the Arabs to vote, as if they cared that he was An Officer and a Gentleman. He was greeted unceremoniously by the Arab leadership and jeered by a cast of thousands. Gere appeared on television and actually said that he's speaking "for the world" - a clear case of vanity of vanities.
"War?" says Hollywood. "What war?" The studios prefer to keep fighting the Nazis, since the Nazis have already been defeated. (Well, more or less.) Radical Islam is another story, a story still waiting for a script. Around the same time that Not Without My Daughter came out, 1991, Tom Clancy published The Sum of All Fears; and though the Israelis also came in for a drubbing, the bad guys were the Arabs.
Hollywood turned that into a movie and did what Hollywood does, changed the Arabs into, well, of course, Nazis. And here, too, the date is important. This Clancy adaptation was released in 2002, yes, after 9/11, but the attack that killed 3,000 of our people happened mostly in New York, not on Sunset Boulevard, so who cares?
The studios do care, but mostly about box office, and taking on the world of Islam is a bridge too far. The shame of it is that movies can make a difference. Hollywood courageously took on the Nazis when the Nazis were for real, and did the same with the Soviets when Communism still wanted us naked and dead.
Back then, Hollywood knew the enemy, named the enemy, fought the enemy, opened our eyes as to why we fight, and if directors Frank Capra and John Ford served as propagandists, all the more honor to them. (Capra gave America a seven-part series of Why We Fight, beginning in 1942. Ford, who served in the Navy, produced documentaries along the same theme, and won an Oscar for Battle of Midway, released in 1942.)
So what's changed from those wars to this war? If it's cowardice, then I've made my point that this enemy, radical Islam, is more dangerous, more frightening than anything that's come before. We're up against an enemy that hates life and loves death. The Nazis and the Communists wanted death for us, but life for themselves, so that gave us an edge. This time, no such edge.
If not cowardice, then, as I said, it's box office that motivates Hollywood, economic correctness. That's fair, except that political correctness is an even bigger show-stopper.
Try getting the green light for a coming attraction on Theo Van Gogh; and we already saw the backtracking and groveling at Fox TV for its series 24, which invites us to visit All In The Family Jihad-style. CAIR complained and got painful concessions. (Now, accompanying the program comes a message from 24 star Kiefer Sutherland that Islam is on our side.)
We're Americans and Americans are not supposed to be afraid. Art is not supposed to be afraid. Truth is not supposed to be afraid.
The truth is that we are at war, and fundamentalist Islam is the enemy. If not Hollywood, the headlines of suicide bombings and decapitations tell the story from the Philippines to Israel to Spain to Sudan to Russia and well beyond. Radical Islam is on the march, but Hollywood hears nothing.
A certain author was asked when Hollywood would wake up and smell the jihad and here's what he said: When a hijacked plane manned by "Islamists Gone Wild" crashes into a major Hollywood studio, that's when.
As for me, I've got my own up-with-America and up-with-Israel novel that simply won't sell because: one, maybe it's a lousy novel, and this does happen; or two, as the latest editor put it, "Your Muslim character is portrayed as an extremist and that's unacceptable."
Apparently, that came from someone in New York who was not in the Twin Towers at the time.
Back in Hollywood, another Superman movie is in development. Surely, the man of steel will again be called upon to save the world from an assortment of bad guys. Anybody we know? My money, or rather Hollywood's money, says that the evildoers will come from another round-up of the usual suspects.
To be honest, I never cared much for Sally Field, who actually did win best actress Oscars for Norma Rae and Places In The Heart.
Unfortunately, she got off to a flying start, if we (and she) dare recall TV's Flying Nun. Who can forget, who can forgive?
Then, something happened that changed my mind. I caught her in a movie, on TV, where she plays an American woman who is lured to Tehran by her Iranian husband, and there she is, trapped in a hostile land where women have no say. Not Without My Daughter is an awful title for such a terrific movie, a movie that is unblinking in its depiction of a nation ruled by fanaticism.
Based on what really happened to a woman named Betty Mahmoody, that film came out in 1991, as if to foreshadow September 11, 2001. Once in a while, you can catch it on cable. Since then, Hollywood has kept spooling out Meet the Fockers, but hardly anything about "Meet the Jihadists".
Obviously, Hollywood can't handle the truth. For that, we turn to independent filmmakers like Pierre Rehov. His documentaries (see www.pierrerehov.com) actually document truth against falsehood, exposing, as these films do, the fictions of Jenin, Jenin and the Mohammad Al-Dura caper that manipulated the masses and mischievously set off the four-year Arab uprising against Israel.
Rehov (and a few others like him) is ready for his close-up, but he lacks the one thing only a major studio can give: distribution.
Richard Gere is the latest proof of Hollywood's grand delusion, where ego is mistaken for courage. Here's a man who, several months ago, took his stardom to Arab Ramallah, where he urged the Arabs to vote, as if they cared that he was An Officer and a Gentleman. He was greeted unceremoniously by the Arab leadership and jeered by a cast of thousands. Gere appeared on television and actually said that he's speaking "for the world" - a clear case of vanity of vanities.
"War?" says Hollywood. "What war?" The studios prefer to keep fighting the Nazis, since the Nazis have already been defeated. (Well, more or less.) Radical Islam is another story, a story still waiting for a script. Around the same time that Not Without My Daughter came out, 1991, Tom Clancy published The Sum of All Fears; and though the Israelis also came in for a drubbing, the bad guys were the Arabs.
Hollywood turned that into a movie and did what Hollywood does, changed the Arabs into, well, of course, Nazis. And here, too, the date is important. This Clancy adaptation was released in 2002, yes, after 9/11, but the attack that killed 3,000 of our people happened mostly in New York, not on Sunset Boulevard, so who cares?
The studios do care, but mostly about box office, and taking on the world of Islam is a bridge too far. The shame of it is that movies can make a difference. Hollywood courageously took on the Nazis when the Nazis were for real, and did the same with the Soviets when Communism still wanted us naked and dead.
Back then, Hollywood knew the enemy, named the enemy, fought the enemy, opened our eyes as to why we fight, and if directors Frank Capra and John Ford served as propagandists, all the more honor to them. (Capra gave America a seven-part series of Why We Fight, beginning in 1942. Ford, who served in the Navy, produced documentaries along the same theme, and won an Oscar for Battle of Midway, released in 1942.)
So what's changed from those wars to this war? If it's cowardice, then I've made my point that this enemy, radical Islam, is more dangerous, more frightening than anything that's come before. We're up against an enemy that hates life and loves death. The Nazis and the Communists wanted death for us, but life for themselves, so that gave us an edge. This time, no such edge.
If not cowardice, then, as I said, it's box office that motivates Hollywood, economic correctness. That's fair, except that political correctness is an even bigger show-stopper.
Try getting the green light for a coming attraction on Theo Van Gogh; and we already saw the backtracking and groveling at Fox TV for its series 24, which invites us to visit All In The Family Jihad-style. CAIR complained and got painful concessions. (Now, accompanying the program comes a message from 24 star Kiefer Sutherland that Islam is on our side.)
We're Americans and Americans are not supposed to be afraid. Art is not supposed to be afraid. Truth is not supposed to be afraid.
The truth is that we are at war, and fundamentalist Islam is the enemy. If not Hollywood, the headlines of suicide bombings and decapitations tell the story from the Philippines to Israel to Spain to Sudan to Russia and well beyond. Radical Islam is on the march, but Hollywood hears nothing.
A certain author was asked when Hollywood would wake up and smell the jihad and here's what he said: When a hijacked plane manned by "Islamists Gone Wild" crashes into a major Hollywood studio, that's when.
As for me, I've got my own up-with-America and up-with-Israel novel that simply won't sell because: one, maybe it's a lousy novel, and this does happen; or two, as the latest editor put it, "Your Muslim character is portrayed as an extremist and that's unacceptable."
Apparently, that came from someone in New York who was not in the Twin Towers at the time.
Back in Hollywood, another Superman movie is in development. Surely, the man of steel will again be called upon to save the world from an assortment of bad guys. Anybody we know? My money, or rather Hollywood's money, says that the evildoers will come from another round-up of the usual suspects.