Fallujah. Where the US rewrote the book on urban warfare. There is a story there. Even the New York Times reporter had a story from that battle. Look it up.

What about the insurgency tactics of putting a small group of marines into the middle of a city. Dangerous, stories to tell. What about the Anbar awakening, and all that led to that? Very interesting, entertaining, and stories of courage all around. Would make great film.

Maybe it is all too fresh. Saving Private Ryan was a great war movie with a very large audience. I’m sure there are some stories to tell from Iraq. True ones, not something made up. In fact, with a bit of digging, no doubt the truth would be stranger and more fantastic than anything one could make up.

Derek

A Canadian is nothing but a Mexican in a sweater.

* yup we got health care -you got guns… do you think we got something you need? It does no good to blast ppl to ribbons when it costs you your house to get fixed up.

Further, bet you folks wish ya had all that clean fresh water we have lyin’ all over too huh? The mid west of yur coutry seems like its a might toasty right now! Snikerz* Mexico indeed! in conclusion”bite me!”

Mark Steyn, who was a comics fan in his youth, writes in Macleans about superhero movies…

Anyway, no2marriage is clearly just an a**, it has nothing to do with being American. And frankly, there are more Mexicans in America than there are in Mexico, so he was just insulting himself anyway.

As for sports, funny he should make that hockey comment when the only Canadian MLB baseball team is the best one. One Canadian winner and 29 American chasers.

The longer we are distracted from the real issues, the longer those abuses and failures can compound…and the more willfully ignorant we remain, the easier those abuses can continue unabated. But to what purpose?

It’s not “just” for having hundreds of military bases in 130+ countries that they are “allegedly” not at war with, and it’s not for the unjust wars they are currently waging either, but it is because of those few “Americans” who are both intensely ignorant and riduculously outspoken in their idiocy.

Not all “Americans” are inherently evil or imbicilic, mind you. The problem is that those majority of decent US citizens are so rarely heard from, in contrast to the loud-n-obnoxious rednecks that seem to believe that they are representative of the remainder of their compatriots.

THEY ARE NOT.

PS: They’re not “sweaters”, they’re toques. Perhaps you’ll have that updated in your manual at your next anti-MENSA meeting?

So true.

How many movies has Hollywood made that has been against the War in Iraq…which has been propaganda for the enemies of the United States. It is shameful.

This, of course, assumes there will be a movie featuring Hitler–the only acceptable boogyman–ala the all-Hitler-all-the-time, er, History Channel.

There- I’ve just stated a position so conservative and traditional, that I’ve alienated the majority of my fellow American citizens.

That said, when I do attend movies that address real-life political issues, I expect better than war propaganda.

I’m going to leave the “Superhero” genre to the side- I don’t recall making it through an entire sitting, or broadcast, of any of them in nearly 30 years. Which, coincidentally enough, is about the same extent of time since I’ve kept a TV in my house.

I’m fairly sure that last fact largely accounts for how it is that I was able to follow the plot of “Syriana”- which hardly villainizes the CIA while lionizing the adversaries of the USA, incidentally; a book by a CIA agent, Robert Baer, was after all the principal inspiration for “Syriana”, and Baer was a consultant for the film.

I’m more than prepared to read accusations of “snobbery”, in response to those observations. As a cab driver, I admire their absurdity. All I ever wanted to do is stop making myself stupid by devoting so much time to watching TV and movies. I read instead- along with, of course, that much-cherished “real-life experience” that some people like to go on so much about, when they’re trying to impeach a person’s credibility for having too much book knowledge to suit their taste.

“It would actually be edgier to show a true story of American heroism on the battlefield that took place after WWII. A movie featuring an unambiguous hero who didn’t turn out to be so flawed that he’s actually impossible to like…”

An “unamibiguous hero”? Not even the superhero comics I’ve read feature those. Not the ones that people recognize as classics, at any rate.

It sounds like what you have is nostalgia for John Wayne movies.

I wasn’t in Vietnam (19 in 1974; lottery #315) , but I lived in a college dormitory full of Vietnam vets, just returned from places like Khe Sanh. What they told me of their time in Indochina sketched out a place and time that Vietnam vet and Hollywood director Oliver Stone eventually depicted a lot more accurately in the film “Platoon” than in John Wayne’s 1968 movie “The Green Berets.”

That’s reality. There it is.

Incidentally, if you saw “Platoon”, I’d like to know what it was you found so “impossible to like” about Willem Defoe’s character…that he wasn’t perfect?

When was life ever a “Superman” comic book?

Too many Americans getting tricked due to holding a view of the world as made up of cartoon superheroes and supervillains is what landed the USA in Iraq in the first place.

I know nothing more about it than that and so can’t say whether Lee was dumb to assign those rights to SMLI (if he really did so) or if the complainant is, well, a joker; but those Sharpie-bright Spandex boys’n'girls aren’t really heroes, and most of us know from the getgo that it’s really all about money and illusion even before something like this suit comes along to put it all into focus.

Most of us (those of us outside of the prestige media and Hollywood, anyway) know where the true heroes are. They live among us; they *are* us, and maybe it’s good thing Hollywood isn’t trying to exploit that, although the exceedingly poor illusions that they offer for our consumption sure does limit entertainment choices.

Sigh. I wish Doug Fairbanks, Sr., and Jack Webb were back with us, and in their prime (Mary Pickford and Sam de Grasse, too, to name two Canadians). Those were good illusionists whose work still stands up well today.

how many true war heros (you know like the guy who stayed in a nest of terrorists to be shot up, so his buddies could get away) occupied headlines or anywhere near the front pages.

But at the end you erroneously attribute to The Incredibles that famous epigram, “when everyone’s special, nobody is”.

In fact it was WS Gilbert who coined the original in The Gondoliers back in 1889 when he has Don Alhambra del Bolero, the Grand Inquisitioner of Venice, convincing gondoliers Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri to sing along with him that (http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/gondoliers/libretto.txt),

When every one is somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody!

Regards,

“Imagine what “Syriana” would have looked like, if only all of that annoying real-life complexity had been jettisoned and replaced by a heroic tale of the Iraq War, featuring Americans wearing white cowboy hats, and Arabs wearing black headdresses.”

Marvel comics is behind most of the super hero adaptions, but they’re comics have become irrelevent even in fantasy land. They did some poorly concieved Guantonomo Bay like story and put it out as they’re big ‘change everything’ story. Yes, it changed everything in the Marvel Universe and introduced a dark look to Marvel but as a long-time Marvel reader I’m sad to report that it was absolutely terrible. It didn’t have much of a begginning as Captain America will lead some super-powered against some government led super powered good guys who lock people up who don’t register. Spider-man became the worst character I ever read and they refused to use the idea of everyone finding out who Spider-man is as a main story because all the Editor In Chief wanted was for him to be not married anymore, possibilities be damned. It really hit Marvel hard and there was no reference to an Al Queda like enemy anywhere in that insipid series. I would hate to see comic books as bland and short-sighted as Movies have become. I hate that idea.

The next series was Africans again…

A Canadian is nothing but a Mexican in a sweater.

I think it was CS Lewis who said things to the effect that it was the whore who was closer to the kingdom of God than nattering politicians and self-rightious finger waggers–though it is not good to practice the arts of either realm, and that not all killing is murder any more than declaring that since they might look simliar, all sex would be rape.

The other problem here, and surely you’d agree with THIS, since you seem to be one who is given to taking even the weakly throbbing cultural pulses that show up on the big screen, is that declarations of some moral claim using the typical, overbearing, and not so clever genre of triteness in film, is really unwatchable.

On the OTHER hand, this is not to say that we should stick with some other new greyer formulations like the anti-hero—–the man or woman “protagonist” (if we dare) so complex and twisted and mired in worldly affectations and dark ruminations, that at the end of our endurance in the chair of this person’s inner closet of demons, we don’t know what the hell just happened to make us spend 20 bucks on this flick when you throw the drinks and popcorn in…

As to “quislingism”, I have to admit to being impressed you know poor Vidkun’s last name.

Few do these days.

The glorious and wonderful Judi Dench mentioned his name in exclamation on As Time Goes By” but that’s about it in popular culture viewing I’ve heard of recently.

God help any man so truly blessed as to have his surname remembered for such traitorous intrigue.

The world IS grey.

However, to my liberal pals this is not so much to be taken as an affirmation by ME of the alleged (but rarely realized now that their turn in power is moralist and slightly amnesiac junta bloodpurge of the CIA and Things Cheney/Bush from some absolutist moral ground in their own right) “moral fuzziness” of things or seeing finer shades of distinction in the fogs of war and their various atmospheric densities, but RATHER, it is my affirmation of CONTEXT. See below, for example, regarding one famous urban legend about the origins of Bin Laden and Co.

Well, that tack of some “connection” of the Religious Right (whoever the hell they really are, maybe the gal Jacob Sullivan called “Maude” who puts dimes in the collection plate at First Church of Duluth Ga) to the head-ripping ways of “conservative” Islam WAS already tried, even if a half truth is more exciting and daring than an outright lie.

For full disclosure, it was not so long ago that the “al Quaida was a creation of the CIA” myth made the rounds of journals with more leverage than the usual Kos (since this was actually before the flowering of Kossette type sites, to be sure, though) and Media Matters sites and the nodding of Bill Moyers.

The myth quietly dried up and blew away like dew in the morning broil of sun, since even the sternest of lies armed with sheer weight of obnoxious reptition will die a grisly death sometimes.

But the core reality that Bin Laden hated America even in the strategic moment where we DID supply Stinger missles to nasty men like Hekmayaer and other jihadists in Afganistan in the context of roil of the Soviet invasion, is TRUE. Without going into the detail I know about that region (one of master of a few trades while jack at most others), this narrow confine of armament, but actually no “training” and “formation” or “creation” (since the warlords needed no prodding or training to attack the Great Bear, but merely weaponry of which the batteries and billing both long ran out…) is about the only “alliance” real or theoretical, that any CIA social conservative would have with the Jihad.

Such is politics. But the implication from my dear pals over the Social War blog, often referred to also by their web sign up called Science Blogs, that there is, per PZ Myers, some “connection” between cultural conservatives and Christians to Islam’s good-cop, bad-cop routine, is sorta goofy.