Swimming in the Sewer

I took a dip in Michelle Malkin's cesspool earlier. I wanted to see her weigh in on Superman, America's favorite illegal immigrant. She's predictably inane and pointless. It must be tiring to be so outraged and paranoid all the time.

Anyway, at the bottom of her Superman post, she dug up one of her own meanderings from a couple of years ago where she asked her readers to submit their favorite World War II movies.

Now, Michelle Malkin's an idiot. However, compared to her readers, her IQ is positively stratospheric.

Some of them listed All Quiet on the Western Front as a great WWII movie. In addition to the movie being set in the First World War, it doesn't at all glorify war the way these permanently stunted people think. Quite the opposite, really. Also: Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper, was set in World War One. Not Two. And don't even get me started on including High Noon.

One dumbass actually wrote about "The biggest patriot of them all, the Duke..." without noting that John Wayne avoided military service during World War II. Unlike, say, Jimmy Stewart or Tyrone Power, "The biggest patriot of them all" didn't go overseas to fight. Now, while I like some John Wayne films (Red River, True Grit, and The Quiet Man come to mind), he has an image as a war hero that is entirely the creation of movie studios.

A few people were upset about The Sum of All Fears, the screen adaptation of the Tom Clancy book. Neither the book nor the movie have a damn thing to do with the Second World War. It's kind of hard for these people to stay on topic, I guess. I read some of that book, years ago. It was a typical Tom Clancy book--heavy on technical descriptions, light on everything else. The baddies in the book were terrorists from some Arab/Palestinian organization. They acquire a nuclear weapon and proceed to blow up Denver. As for the movie, I didn't see it (fool me once...). However, it seems that the screenwriters/producers/directors/whatever changed the bad guys from Arab terrorists to Neo-Nazis. That they did so has earned them the undying ire of Michelle Malkin's posse. Let's go to the tape:

My favorite roll-over by Hollywood was the switch from radical islamisists to European neo-nazi's when they made the film "Sum of all fears." Imagine how impactful the story, as written, would have been in a film released in 2002!
Posted by: Bob at June 23, 2004 11:08 AM

What they did to "The Sum of All Fears" was crimminal. They took a book that will give you nightmares and made it almost comical!
Posted by: John Yesford at June 23, 2004 01:21 PM

The simple fact is that the makers of "The Sum of All Fears" chickened out, changing a plot that's very believable to one that's just plain silly.
Posted by: SBK at June 23, 2004 02:29 PM

This makes all the "bad guys" (the terrorists) FAR less threatening and scary, and the movie plots far less believable and less interesting. This change in the movie version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" took a great book and turned into a terrible movie.
Posted by: Bill Holland at June 23, 2004 02:45 AM

See what I mean? I only added emphasis. All else is as it appeared in the original posts.

I've read some great books. I've read some good books. I've also read some horrible books. I don't think The Sum of All Fears deserves the company of or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or A Light in August. Hell, I don't even think it deserves the company of The Hotel New Hampshire. It does, however, defnintely rate better than consignation to the same category as Bill O'Reilly's Those Who Trespass.

Jeez. You'd think that, if only the movie version of The Sum of All Fears had remained faithful to the Gospel of Clancy, we wouldn't have had any problems with al-Qaeda for the last few years.

My favorite comment, however, comes about the Lee Marvin movie The Dirty Dozen. I've seen this movie a few times. Hell, I own it. It's not really about war, or patriotism, or any of that. It's an action movie, full of cliches and bad editing and poor dialogue. It's entertaining because it's got Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, and some other really fine actors. It's also entertaining, in part, because of all the cliches and poor cuts. Anyway, it's not at all a "serious" film. It's a Saturday matinee thing. Even the violence is extremely sanitized, though there's a lot of it.

But back to the lecture at hand. Commenter "Spoons" (Nabil, you must find him and take back your honor), talking about his favorite scene, has this to say about The Dirty Dozen:

It's gotta be the scene in the dirty dozen when the gang kills all of the german officers and their escorts hiding in the bunkers.

If they remade that movie today, they'd either remove that scene, or leave it in as a way of showing that "Really, there were atrocities committed on both sides."

Huh?

So let me get this straight. You could make a shot-for-shot remake of The Dirty Dozen. Hell, you could even reanimate Lee Marvin and have him reprise his role as the tough but caring Major Risen, and shoot exactly the same movie again, and it wouldn't make this guy happy. On the other hand, if you changed anything, it wouldn't make him happy. If the scene gets cut, it's liberal Hollywood just trying to prevent us good 'Merikuns from enjoying the orgy of gasoline-and-hand-grenade-caused death. If the scene gets left in, it's liberal Hollywood trying to show us good 'Merikuns that we're actually just as bad as our enemies (they hate America SO MUCH in Hollywood, don't they?).

This is what passes for thought in some people, apparently. And this guy gets to vote, too.

Ain't life grand?