As soon as President Bush declared war, Hollywood had a party. It had been the subject for many famous and successful films in the past, and after a short absence, the war films returned to the big screen. 2007 marked the biggest year of such films. Three of the five nominees for "Best Documentary Feature" in this year's Academy Awards examined the war in the Middle East. With good odds, the winner, Taxi to the Dark Side, was one of those three films. But war was not just examined in documentary form; it had a large presence in the narratives. The intention of the pictures was to comment on the supposed unruly actions taking place overseas, and to provide insight of the Iraq War, no matter how fictionalized the surrounding storylines might have been. The problem was that not many people went out to listen to what the films had to say. Studios need to stop releasing anti-war films, because the American audience does not want to see them, and in turn, money will not come in.In order to sell movies these days, studios need big Hollywood names attached to their projects. The narrative war-commentaries that were released in 2007 set out to get big-budget stars, and they did. In the Valley of Elah follows Hank Deerfield, played by Tommy Lee Jones, on his quest to find his AWOL military son and unravel the mystery that surrounds the search. In The Kingdom, FBI special agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper and Jason Bateman) are sent into Saudi Arabia to investigate an attack on Americans. With Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Meryl Streep, Rendition is about an American woman whose Egyptian-born husband is arrested, and the CIA analyst who is assigned to interrogate him. Lions for Lambs revolves around a university professor's (Robert Redford) influence to fight in the war in Afghanistan, a presidential hopeful's (Tom Cruise) new war strategy, and a probing television journalist's (Meryl Streep) report of the strategy. John Cusak in Grace is Gone decides not to tell his two daughters that their enlisted mother was killed in Iraq.
Four out of the five films mentioned above are considered anti-war films (Time, Entertainment Weekly), while The Kingdom holds back on any particular stance during its runtime. Interestingly, the total gross of those four anti-war films is less than the total for the neutral. Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, and Grace is Gone together brought in a mere $31.5 million, while Kingdom raked in $47.4 million. Although Elah was the only film to receive critical praise and Oscar recognition with the nomination of Jones, studios only care about the dollar signs. Hollywood loves to criticize the current Presidential Administration and illuminate the supposed problems, but if these films are not making money, should they keep releasing them?
Hollywood thinks so. By the end of March, already two anti-war films will have been released: Chicago 10 and Stop-Loss (seen on the left). Chicago 10 has not shown much promise in its two week limited release with a $42 thousand box office number. I attended a screening of the film and a question and answer session with the director, Brett Morgen. He expressed his concerns about the marketing of the film and worried whether the right audience (late teens to twenty year-olds) would make its way out to see the documentary. It uses a modern style that is visually stimulating to appeal to the current generation as it follows the story of eight Vietnam War protestors who try to lead a march toward the 1968 Democratic Convention. Morgen said he wanted to appeal to the young audience to encourage them to act out against the current war. I was also able to attend a screening of Stop-Loss. The drama is about a sergeant in the Iraq War who is sent home to Texas only to find out that he must immediately be shipped back for duty. Although the previous numbers presume that the film will also be unsuccessful, it has the backing MTV Films, which should bring in a large young audience. Heart-throbs Ryan Phillipe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt make up the cast of the film, which should help attract the female demographic.
If Hollywood must continue to make commentaries about the war, they should at least give pro-war movies a chance in the box office, for the sake of not only the viewing public, but also the studios. While it was neutral, The Kingdom brought in the money and pleased Universal Studios. Bruce Willis (seen on the right) is one artist that has been pushing to release more pro-war films. It was reported that he is developing a story about the Deuce Four, members of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, who spent a year fighting terrorists in the northern Iraq town of Mosul. However, it seems Hollywood is having a hard time accepting the idea, as they continue to disregard any storylines pertaining to patriotism or pride for our United States of America.Willis, who has visited Iraq, is frustrated with how the media handles the coverage of the war. He was quoted saying that he saw soldiers "helping people in Iraq; helping getting the power turned back on, helping get hospitals open, helping get the water turned back on and you don't hear any of that on the news." The Hollywood celebrity is right. It is more often that when tuning into a news channel, a viewer has a better chance of hearing a report on how many people were killed that day in Iraq, than how many citizens were helped. Hollywood is using the war in the Middle East an easy selling point.
Unless it involves pirates, robots, or blood-thirsty Spartans, none of the top fifteen highest-grossing films of 2007 have anything to do with war. Clearly it does not take criticism or analysis of what is happening in the Middle East to sell films. Movie-going is a time to escape from the realities of the world around us. Audiences already see coverage of the war on their television sets and do not want more of it on movie screens. They want to be moved, captivated, enthused and, overall, entertained when they visit the theater. Until Hollywood decides to bring forth the positive stories of the Iraq War, viewers will continue to shrug off the pessimistic commentaries that studios repeatedly churn out.
2 comments:
I like the way you open the post. "As soon as president Bush declared war, Hollywood had a party," is both fun and inviting. It makes me want to read the rest of the article, and conveys the sense that you have something to say. It really is a shame that, these days, Hollywood considers a war a good thing, given that thousands of young lives are lost. But that seems to be the truth of the matter. The more people that die, the more controversy. The more controversy, the bigger ticket sales. Or so is the correlation that Hollywood makes.
After your second paragraph, which, while definitely a biased POV (I actually thought "In the Valley of Elah" was a very good movie), is a solid, thought provoking entry,I feel like the post falls off in quality. It's not that the writing is poor, it's just that the overall message of the post seems a little rash and unsubstantiated. Sure, I'll give it to you that there aren't many movies in Hollywood that promote the war in Iraq, but given that you admit it's all a matter of making money, you should know that something as unpopular as the war would be a tough sell. I think the story that Bruce is working on sounds like a good idea, but even that, once drag through development hell, will likely end up a character driven story, basically about brotherhood in the face of a hard war. Furthermore, you neglect to mention that there are plenty of films which indirectly lend support to the war. For instance, you mention "300.""300" may not be about Iraq, but I think, if anything, it heavily favors the (English speaking) Spartans standing up to the indomitable (Middle Eastern - non English speaking) Persians. If you think about it, while there may not be so many films overtly about Iraq out there, pretty much the entire action genre (See "Rambo," "Die Hard," "Shoot 'em Up,""300" among others) supports the troops at least indirectly.
On a final note, I think the way you write, with a little more substantiation, would be very persuasive. The previous two blogs that I've read suffered from similar mechanical problems (word-redundancy and lack of sentence variation). But I don't think your post has many of these problems. Overall, it is an easy read, and even if I ultimately disagreed with it, I was able to get through it quickly and without losing any information.
First I'd like to say I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, and for a few reasons. First your blog is very nice aesthetically, and you utlize many of the technical aspects (links, images, etc.) very well through out all of your posts. What is perhaps most interesting about your entry to me is that I too am in the cinema class in which both Stop Loss and Chicago 10 were screened and discussed, and came out of the films with very different opinions.
I like how you addressed the aspect of whether or not these films are profitable. It is interested to see those numbers first hand, as it is something I had not considered before. However, I feel your entry falters a bit when you go on to express how anti-war films should not be made and supported. While your argument was strong with the support of numbers, it seems to drift a bit when your opinion becomes more evident.
While I certainly agree that anti-war movies can be potentially harmful for a nation at war, we differ in the sense that I did not necessarily see these two films (Chicago 10 and Stop Loss) as anti-war. I believe instead that these two films present seperate and unique instances. In the case of Chicago 10 it shows the way a group of people acted during a time of unrest. I do not think Morgen is trying to insight unruliness towards the war in Iraq, rather illuminate how people have reacted in the past and the impact of social movement. I do not believe that just because a film features characterizations of people whose disagree with war that it makes it an anti-war film. Instead, I saw these films as pro-thought and pro-idea, and believe that even if these thoughts and ideas contradict the choices of the government, they should be heard in film.
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