I’ve been engaged in a twitter discussion with some good friends and acquaintances (and, being that it’s twitter, with some folks I don’t know from Adam) about the upcoming film Act of Valor . The film, for those who were comatose during the Super Bowl ad blitz, is a Navy recruiting video on major steroids that features several active duty SEALs and Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen in uncredited roles. According to the Wikipedia entry: Act of Valor began as a recruitment video for the U.S. military’s Naval Special Warfare Command. In 2007, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh of Bandito Brothers Production filmed a video for the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen SWCC which led the Navy to allow them to use SEALs for Act of Valor. None of the SEALs’ names will appear in the credits of the film. Relativity Media acquired the rights to the project on June 12, 2011 for $13 million and a $30 million in prints and advertising commitment. Deadline.com called it “the biggest money paid for a finished film with an unknown cast”. The production budget was estimated between $15 million and $18 million The discussion surrounding the film has largely been whether it is, in the words of Air Force veteran @JimmySky , “exploitative” – and if so, why that is and who exactly it is that’s being exploited. According to a recent WSJ story on the film , “the project offered filmmakers access to SEALs as well as military assets, but no funding.” The article also notes that: the “goals [of the film] were to bolster recruiting efforts, honor fallen team members and offer a corrective to misleading fare such as “Navy Seals,” the 1990 shoot-em-up starring Charlie Sheen as a cocky lone wolf. “In the SEAL ethos, the superman myth does not apply. It’s a lifestyle of teamwork, hard work and academic discipline,” said Capt. Duncan Smith, a SEAL who initiated the project and essentially served as producer within the military. The article continues: For two years the filmmakers had inside access to the Navy’s elite and secretive force for an unusual assignment: to create a feature film that starred real-life SEALs—not actors—in lead roles. The movie, “Act of Valor,” is not a documentary. Instead, it straddles reality and fiction, military messaging and entertainment. It features strike scenes written by the SEALs themselves, jarring live-fire footage and a body count that would rival any ’80s action flick. Yet the movie, to be released in February, was designed to set the record straight on a group that the military says has been routinely misrepresented in film. Now, I need to offer a dual disclaimer up front: (1) I’ve only seen the preview and this excellent albeit brief review by Jeff Quinton , not the movie itself, and (2) I’m firmly biased in favor 0f pro-military (and particularly pro-SOF) films that provide the greatest level of accuracy that Hollywood can muster. For example, I thought Black Hawk Down was an excellent film (even if Josh Hartnett was horribly miscast as a Ranger), and I share the community at large’s loathing for ridiculous movies like the aforementioned Charlie Sheen Navy SEALs flick. The difference between the buzz about Act of Valor and the better of its predecessors appears to be primarily focused on the fact that Act of Valor features active duty NSWC personnel (and that the movie’s advertising blitz has been very vocal about their participation) in a film that has a fictitious story line, as opposed to , say, Black Hawk Down , which told a true story but used actors to do so (rather than “ being marketed on the basis of [having] real Rangers “). This, in turn, blurs the line between fiction and reality, while using valuable Department of Defense equipment and personnel to (according to former PAO @FPWellman) make money for Hollywood . While I understand the concerns, though, I’m far from convinced by them. Military participation in Hollywood projects is nearly a century old, and the Department of Defense maintains an entertainment media office specifically to provide “U.S. military assistance in producing feature motion pictures, television shows, documentaries, music videos, commercial advertisements, CD-ROM games, and other audiovisual programs.” According to the Armed Forces Press Service: To achieve maximum accuracy in movies and on television, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and DoD have liaison offices to help guide filmmakers through the process. The services operate independently of each other in this endeavor but share office space on the same floor of a Los Angeles building. The Defense Department’s entertainment media division is run from the Pentagon. “If we decide to cooperate on a project, we stay with them throughout all the scenes that have military or DoD depictions,” said Army Lt. Col Paul Sinor, a public affairs officer with that service’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs. This task covers a broad spectrum, from making sure uniforms and equipment are correct to coordinating filming on military bases, said Air Force Capt. Christian Hodge, a project officer with the Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office. This cooperation has included technical advice, but it has also included equipment and personnel. The F-14s, F-5s, and A-4s in Top Gun were real military aircraft, as were the MH-60s and Little Birds in Black Hawk Down , and the F-22s in Transformers and Iron Man . However, as obvious as this statement may be, the cooperation goes farther than advice and hardware – it includes people , too. Every live action shot of a military aircraft, for example, includes active military crew members operating those aircraft. The fact they’re not credited among the primary cast is immaterial; they are participants in the film, just as the Naval personnel in Act of Valor are. Further, films like Transformers have featured active duty personnel in significant numbers (such as the Airmen serving as extras in this shot ), and have provoked little if any consternation as a result. Given all of this, it seems clear that the real issue is the fact that the film’s advertising touts the participation of active duty SEALs and SWCCs, rather than their participation. Does that mean, in turn, that the issue with the film is that a conscious effort is being made to make people aware of the presence of active military personnel in the film, rather than featuring military technology without overtly acknowledging the real soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines operating that technology on-screen? The other issue, raised by former Army officer Tim Matthews , is “the general sentiment…’shouldn’t these SEALs being out shooting REAL bad guys?’” I think the response to this one is fairly easy: from Blue Angels and Thunderbirds pilots to the Golden Knights, STARS, and Leapfrog jump demonstration teams, tip-of-the-spear military professionals are put to use on a daily basis not in offensive operations, but in operations that improve outreach and recruiting and build civil-military relations (and still more serve in administrative and staff positions, as liaison officers, etc.). Tim deserves credit for being consistent, as he believes that the “Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Golden Knights, bands, etc, are a poor use of resources.” However, these functions will continue to be performed by those who are skilled enough at their military jobs to participate in them, and outside of the fact that it’s on a big screen instead of over an airfield, I see no significant difference between the role of active duty SEALs in Act of Valor and that of that top 0.001% of F-16 pilots in the Air Force that makes up the Thunderbirds demonstration team. For me, the bottom line with Act of Valor is this: it’s a film that features Hollywood-DOD cooperation just like countless other war and action flicks over the last several decades. Yes, it’s a film with heavy Navy Special Warfare involvement, so I expect a level of accuracy and attention to detail that is far higher than almost any other military or combat film; yes, it’s almost certain to have a level of energy and action that far surpasses the day-to-day experiences of NSW operators; and yes, it is at heart what it’s always been: a Special Warfare recruiting video. H0wever, I’m simply not convinced that there’s any “exploitation,” “opportunism,” or anything else to be found here besides an action film that uses real operators, real support staff, and real stories to achieve a level of realistic sensationalism that very few of its predecessors have been capable of – and that’s just fine with me.
I’ve been engaged in a twitter discussion with some good friends and acquaintances (and, being that it’s twitter, with some folks I don’t know from Adam) about the upcoming film Act of Valor . The film, for those who were comatose during the Super Bowl ad blitz, is a Navy recruiting video on major steroids that features several active duty SEALs and Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen in uncredited roles. According to the Wikipedia entry: Act of Valor began as a recruitment video for the U.S. military’s Naval Special Warfare Command. In 2007, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh of Bandito Brothers Production filmed a video for the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen SWCC which led the Navy to allow them to use SEALs for Act of Valor. None of the SEALs’ names will appear in the credits of the film. Relativity Media acquired the rights to the project on June 12, 2011 for $13 million and a $30 million in prints and advertising commitment. Deadline.com called it “the biggest money paid for a finished film with an unknown cast”. The production budget was estimated between $15 million and $18 million The discussion surrounding the film has largely been whether it is, in the words of Air Force veteran @JimmySky , “exploitative” – and if so, why that is and who exactly it is that’s being exploited. According to a recent WSJ story on the film , “the project offered filmmakers access to SEALs as well as military assets, but no funding.” The article also notes that: the “goals [of the film] were to bolster recruiting efforts, honor fallen team members and offer a corrective to misleading fare such as “Navy Seals,” the 1990 shoot-em-up starring Charlie Sheen as a cocky lone wolf. “In the SEAL ethos, the superman myth does not apply. It’s a lifestyle of teamwork, hard work and academic discipline,” said Capt. Duncan Smith, a SEAL who initiated the project and essentially served as producer within the military. The article continues: For two years the filmmakers had inside access to the Navy’s elite and secretive force for an unusual assignment: to create a feature film that starred real-life SEALs—not actors—in lead roles. The movie, “Act of Valor,” is not a documentary. Instead, it straddles reality and fiction, military messaging and entertainment. It features strike scenes written by the SEALs themselves, jarring live-fire footage and a body count that would rival any ’80s action flick. Yet the movie, to be released in February, was designed to set the record straight on a group that the military says has been routinely misrepresented in film. Now, I need to offer a dual disclaimer up front: (1) I’ve only seen the preview and this excellent albeit brief review by Jeff Quinton , not the movie itself, and (2) I’m firmly biased in favor 0f pro-military (and particularly pro-SOF) films that provide the greatest level of accuracy that Hollywood can muster. For example, I thought Black Hawk Down was an excellent film (even if Josh Hartnett was horribly miscast as a Ranger), and I share the community at large’s loathing for ridiculous movies like the aforementioned Charlie Sheen Navy SEALs flick. The difference between the buzz about Act of Valor and the better of its predecessors appears to be primarily focused on the fact that Act of Valor features active duty NSWC personnel (and that the movie’s advertising blitz has been very vocal about their participation) in a film that has a fictitious story line, as opposed to , say, Black Hawk Down , which told a true story but used actors to do so (rather than “ being marketed on the basis of [having] real Rangers “). This, in turn, blurs the line between fiction and reality, while using valuable Department of Defense equipment and personnel to (according to former PAO @FPWellman) make money for Hollywood . While I understand the concerns, though, I’m far from convinced by them. Military participation in Hollywood projects is nearly a century old, and the Department of Defense maintains an entertainment media office specifically to provide “U.S. military assistance in producing feature motion pictures, television shows, documentaries, music videos, commercial advertisements, CD-ROM games, and other audiovisual programs.” According to the Armed Forces Press Service: To achieve maximum accuracy in movies and on television, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and DoD have liaison offices to help guide filmmakers through the process. The services operate independently of each other in this endeavor but share office space on the same floor of a Los Angeles building. The Defense Department’s entertainment media division is run from the Pentagon. “If we decide to cooperate on a project, we stay with them throughout all the scenes that have military or DoD depictions,” said Army Lt. Col Paul Sinor, a public affairs officer with that service’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs. This task covers a broad spectrum, from making sure uniforms and equipment are correct to coordinating filming on military bases, said Air Force Capt. Christian Hodge, a project officer with the Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office. This cooperation has included technical advice, but it has also included equipment and personnel. The F-14s, F-5s, and A-4s in Top Gun were real military aircraft, as were the MH-60s and Little Birds in Black Hawk Down , and the F-22s in Transformers and Iron Man . However, as obvious as this statement may be, the cooperation goes farther than advice and hardware – it includes people , too. Every live action shot of a military aircraft, for example, includes active military crew members operating those aircraft. The fact they’re not credited among the primary cast is immaterial; they are participants in the film, just as the Naval personnel in Act of Valor are. Further, films like Transformers have featured active duty personnel in significant numbers (such as the Airmen serving as extras in this shot ), and have provoked little if any consternation as a result. Given all of this, it seems clear that the real issue is the fact that the film’s advertising touts the participation of active duty SEALs and SWCCs, rather than their participation. Does that mean, in turn, that the issue with the film is that a conscious effort is being made to make people aware of the presence of active military personnel in the film, rather than featuring military technology without overtly acknowledging the real soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines operating that technology on-screen? The other issue, raised by former Army officer Tim Matthews , is “the general sentiment…’shouldn’t these SEALs being out shooting REAL bad guys?’” I think the response to this one is fairly easy: from Blue Angels and Thunderbirds pilots to the Golden Knights, STARS, and Leapfrog jump demonstration teams, tip-of-the-spear military professionals are put to use on a daily basis not in offensive operations, but in operations that improve outreach and recruiting and build civil-military relations (and still more serve in administrative and staff positions, as liaison officers, etc.). Tim deserves credit for being consistent, as he believes that the “Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Golden Knights, bands, etc, are a poor use of resources.” However, these functions will continue to be performed by those who are skilled enough at their military jobs to participate in them, and outside of the fact that it’s on a big screen instead of over an airfield, I see no significant difference between the role of active duty SEALs in Act of Valor and that of that top 0.001% of F-16 pilots in the Air Force that makes up the Thunderbirds demonstration team. For me, the bottom line with Act of Valor is this: it’s a film that features Hollywood-DOD cooperation just like countless other war and action flicks over the last several decades. Yes, it’s a film with heavy Navy Special Warfare involvement, so I expect a level of accuracy and attention to detail that is far higher than almost any other military or combat film; yes, it’s almost certain to have a level of energy and action that far surpasses the day-to-day experiences of NSW operators; and yes, it is at heart what it’s always been: a Special Warfare recruiting video. H0wever, I’m simply not convinced that there’s any “exploitation,” “opportunism,” or anything else to be found here besides an action film that uses real operators, real support staff, and real stories to achieve a level of realistic sensationalism that very few of its predecessors have been capable of – and that’s just fine with me.
I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher’s Guide to Wine By Roger Scruton (Continuum, 219 pages, $17.95) “This book,” author Roger Scruton claims in his preface, “is not a guide to drinking wine, but a guide to thinking it. It is a tribute to pleasure, by a devotee of happiness, and a defence of virtue by an escapee from vice. Its argument is addressed to theists and atheists, to Christians, Jews, Hindus and Muslims, to every drinking person in whom the joy of meditation has not extinguished the pleasures of embodiment … [M]y purpose is to defend the opinion once attributed to Plato, that ‘nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by gods to man.’” That’s quite a lot to do in less than 200 pages of actual text but, in his florid, erudite, extended-bravura fashion, Professor Scruton makes a pretty good job of it. Readers capable of both intelligent thinking and intelligent drinking will find much that pleases and only a little that annoys in this brilliant, idiosyncratic ramble—sometimes brisk, sometimes staggering—through a world of wine occasionally watered down by philosophy. It may be significant that the Prof, an Oxford fellow, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and distinguished monthly columnist for this magazine, chose a few lines from the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz to serve as verbal frontispiece to this slender but animated tome: Come—the palace of Heaven rests on pillars of air.Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind. Hafiz, a celebrated sot as well as a great poet, is telling us very much or very little here: Wine is the key to the riddle of being? Life and eternity are illusions; only wine is real? Or is it just a pretentious way of saying, “To Hell with everything; let’s have another drink!” A case can be made for any or all of the above…and any or all of the above may be the underlying message of I
The historian Newt Gingrich was wrapping up a history lesson reminding South Carolina Republicans of his political accomplishments. “You’re right, I think grandiose thoughts,” he concluded. “This is a grandiose country of big people doing big things and we need leadership prepared to take on big projects.” It is tempting to ridicule the Bigness of Newt, as Rick Santorum did in eliciting this immodest soliloquy from the former House speaker. “Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich,” Santorum cracked. “He handles it very well.” Gingrich’s grandiosity is starting to wear well with a Republican primary electorate tired of the small-ball conservative initiatives of the Bush years or the calculated banality of scripted Mitt Romney. Gingrich follows no script. Instead he follows an adage: Go big or go home. When his campaign was broke, when his aides were defecting en masse to frontrunner du jour Rick Perry (remember him?), when the Washington journalists had all filed their political obituaries, it looked like Gingrich was going to go home. Now he is bigger than ever, coming off a decisive victory in South Carolina and threatening to win Florida next. How fitting that Gingrich once bore the title of speaker. With free media and a little cash from his friend Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich has literally talked his way to the front of the Republican race. He puts debate moderators in their place. He tells his opponents to cut the “pious baloney.” He promises to out-argue Barack Obama in a series of “Lincoln-Douglas-style” debates, becoming the first articulate GOP nominee since Ronald Reagan. Fittingly, Gingrich tried to channel Reagan when he acknowledged the role debates have played in his dramatic campaign turnaround. “People completely misunderstand what is going on,” Gingrich said in his relatively subdued South Carolina victory speech. “It is not that I am a good debater, it’s just that I articulate the deeply held values of the American people.” Reagan said he was less a Great Communicator than a communicator of great things. Rhetorically, Gingrich actually owes little to Reagan’s style (though he does borrow famous quotes from the 40th president, such as “We win, they lose”). Gingrich is a cross between Tony Robbins and Spiro Agnew. Like any motivational speaker, Gingrich has his list of the five things you must understand or the three ideas that will “fundamentally transform” Washington. Candidly and frankly, nothing can be merely be changed. It must be changed profoundly and fundamentally. Like any self-improvement guru, Gingrich promises to empower his listeners to take their lives back. If only Newt is allowed to lighten the load of bureaucracy or deliver government services at the speed of a fiber optic cable or give inner-city youths jobs as janitors or outsource immigration and naturalization to American Express. In just three easy steps, paid for in five monthly installments, you can reclaim your party, your government, and your country. In the self-help world, the enemy is usually complacency or self-doubt. The enemies standing in the way of grandiose thoughts and grandiose dreams are less abstract. That’s where the comparison to Tony Robbins ends and Spiro Agnew begins. Gingrich is running against Saul Alinsky radicals, media and political elites, Washington and New York City, “anti-religious bigots,” and people who want to turn America into some third-rate rip-off of a financially, morally bankrupt European welfare state. To some people, this kind of talk sounds over the top. Many liberals detect sinister dogwhistling when Gingrich calls Obama (who is black) the “food stamp president” or takes Juan Williams (who is black!) to task on a racially charged issue at a Southern debate. But Gingrich isn’t George Wallace, as much as he may share the latter’s disdain for “pointy-headed bureaucrats.” Gingrich was a Nelson Rockefeller backer in 1968 because he supported the civil rights movement. He has generally been squarely within the Jack Kemp “rising tides lifts all the boats” tradition of the Republican Party (unless the tide rose because of Bain Capital). He believes all Americans, black or white, prefer paychecks to foodstamps. His ideological color-blindness blinds him to the possibility that anything he says could be racially offensive, even when expounding on the “Kenyan anti-colonial” mindest that allegedly pervades the president’s garden-variety liberalism. Millions of Americans see Hollywood, Washington, and New York forming not an axis of evil, but certainly an alliance of elites — to use Gingrich’s word — who have contempt for people like them. That’s why they rallied to Sarah Palin when liberals made fun of her. But unlike Palin, when Gingrich fights back against those who sneer at him he is glib enough to beat them at their own game. Last night’s debate to some extent probed the weak underbelly of Gingrich’s campaign. Between the triumph of the 1994 election and his embarrassing exit from the speakership four years later, Gingrich often talked a better game than he played. His big ideas may not withstand scrutiny. Do you want a local board in Berkeley, California deciding which illegal aliens can remain in America? Where in the Constitution does the president or Congress have the authority to hire school janitors? But for now, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Newt Gingrich has something to say that resonates with the Silent Majority. He is speaking for them and the Republican establishment is going to have a hard time shutting him up.
Original post:
Motivational Speaker
The Artist , by the French director Michel Hazanavicius, begins with the noise of an old-fashioned projector and a black screen. Music then comes up, a jazzy tune reminiscent of the 1920s without being quite of the period. The titles which then appear are entirely of the period, known to us now as “the silent era” — as is what we are soon seeing on the screen, which is a lurid adventure yarn in living black-and-white. Called “A Russian Affair,” the movie has reached a peak of excitement as the hero, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is being tortured with an electrical current through his head, administered by a couple of sinister-looking Russians. “I won’t talk!” he cries to his torturers by means of a dialogue title printed on the screen. “I won’t say a word” — a promise that the film allows him to keep in spite of the word he has just supposedly spoken. “Speak!” the Russians command him, also by inter-title. But he remains silent — then and throughout both that film and the one we are watching. It is a good joke and one that Mr. Hazanavicius returns to several times, as when he shows Valentin gathered with his fellow stars on the other side of the screen, awaiting their cue to appear for a curtain call at the film’s premiere under a sign reading “Please be silent behind the screen.” Later, his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) ominously says — again in print, of course — to Valentin: “We have to talk, George.” Alas, George has already told Al Zimmer (John Goodman), the studio boss of Kinograph pictures what he told the sinister Russians, namely that he’s not talking. Shown his first talkie, George tells Al via another dialogue title, “If that’s the future, you can have it.” Well, Al does and he doesn’t. Sticking with silence, he takes a bath with a self-produced film in which we see his character sinking into quicksand at the end. Virtually overnight, he’s all washed up. While he is on his way down in the quicksand of post-crash 1929, sinking into despair and alcoholism and, therefore, cliché, a young ingenue called Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), with whom he has had a brief but unforgettable flirtation in his glory days, is on her way up. She becomes, in one of the film’s few false notes, a “superstar.” For although the OED gives a date of 1925 for the first appearance of this word, I think for most people at the time just being a star was quite enough hype to be going on with — and quite enough, too, to make the familiar, melodramatic point that youth must be served and the old must give way to the young — as the wounded and failing George overhears Peppy saying to an interviewer. But this isn’t, quite, A Star is Born , for we also know from the larger-than-life faces of these two extraordinarily attractive people — which are all that we have to go on, after all — that their love is a different and brighter cliché. That love conquers everything will go without saying. George’s trademark on screen and off is his little Jack Russell terrier. “If only he could talk,” he says of this beast, though his own words are equally unheard. The inarticulate but obviously highly trained animal is also a reminder of the origin of the movies in vaudeville — where animal acts had absence of speech in common with early movies. Both were necessarily founded on familiar conventions, also known as clichés, but at their best — as they are in The Artist — these are clichés that preserve, somehow, an unexpected freshness. In The Artist this is owing, I think, to the unfamiliarity of modern audiences with the conventions of silent film. So much can be conveyed in the absence of speech partly because the absence of speech is, to us, so shocking and unusual. I think that our visual sense must be more acute in compensation as well, for we are continually struck by the long-forgotten silent-movie experience, especially the larger than life beauty of the two principals and, therefore, of their not quite tragic love for each other. To me, at any rate, it was like watching the familiar story for the first time. The unfamiliar context created sorrow at the lovers’ partings and joy at their reunions that would hardly have been possible in a more straightforward — and spoken — telling. The movie is a love story, but the yearning it expresses is not just of two people for each other but of a whole world for articulacy and understanding. At one point George has a dream where everything around him makes its appropriate noise — all noises we can hear on the sound-track — and only he is mute. Maybe, too, I was moved partly by the evidence that Hollywood story-telling is not quite dead after all, as I have so often suspected it is in recent years. Although the movie was made principally by French people, there was enough of a Hollywood presence in it, even beyond the setting in the Southern California of the heroic period, to make it a hopeful sign and an example to its models and idols to return to their roots.
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The Artist
