The Oscar night of 2006 brought us the unedifying spectacle of
George Clooney (whom I must say I truly admire when he shuts his yap
and acts) celebrating Hollywood’s bravery for being willing
to make movies like Brokeback Mountain and Good Night
and Good Luck.
Conservative commentators have already pointed out
how hollow and laughable it is to suppose that left-wing political
correctness is in any way ‘brave’ in today’s Hollywood, so I won’t
re-plow that ground. Instead, I’ll propose eight movies I think
Hollywood would make if it were really brave.
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This thinly fictionalized version of Salman Rushdie’s life on the
run stars Ben Kingsley as a beleaguered leftist intellectual forced to
question his own multiculturalist assumptions as he evades fanatical
mujahedeen who seek to kill him for having defamed the Prophet.
Ray Liotta stars as an idealistic young doctor determined to halt
the spread of AIDS who crusades against the promiscuity and
needle-drug abuse endemic in San Francisco’s gay bathhouse scene.
Don’t miss Gary Oldman’s cameo as a homosexual Scoutmaster.
Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson star in a gritty war film celebrating
U.S. special forces in Afghanistan, the men who took down the barbaric
Taliban regime. Audiences at Cannes and Sundance were deeply shocked
by its sympathetic portrayal of the modern American military.
This faithful adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1966 SF classic,
starring Nicholas Cage as Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis and Mira Sorvino
as Wyoming Knott, challenges viewers to imagine a libertarian future.
Gripping SFX of meteoroid bombardment contrast with searching questions
about the legitimacy of government as the Lunar nation struggles to be
born. (Rumor has it that Paul Verhoeven was at one point forcibly
ejected from the set of this film.)
In this sprawling family epic, three generations of Israelis fight
to preserve the Middle East’s only democracy from implacable and
bloodthirsty enemies on every side. An ensemble cast of unknowns
struggles with war, terrorism, and tragedy in a film that unflinchingly
affirms Jewish identity and doesn’t fear to confront Nazi and
Pan-Arabist atrocities.
Morgan Freeman and Halle Berry star as a father/daughter team of
neighborhood activists who decide blaming Whitey isn’t enough and
challenge ghetto blacks to take responsibility for solving their own
problems. Villains (and victims of this film’s wicked satirical edge) include
recognizable takes on Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan,
but the enemy the two must struggle hardest to defeat is the
government bureaucracy set up to ‘help’ their people.
Roy Scheider stars as a dedicated sport shooter who vows to seek
justice after his daughter is killed during a no-knock BATF/DEA raid
on their home. This searing expose of contemporary American
law-enforcement abuses takes on both the madness of the “War on Drugs”
and the random but brutal persecution of civilian gun owners.
Eric Bana stars as an Iraq-veteran-turned-academic who discovers
that the shadowy networks of influence set up by the KGB during the
Cold War are not only still active on U.S. college campuses but
solidifying an alliance with Islamic terrorists. Heart-pounding
action ensues as Bana races to head off the act of mass murder that
will seal the Marxist/Islamist alliance in blood.
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When I say ‘brave’, I don’t mean ‘brave’ as in “it would lose
money”. Any of these films could easily be a huge hit with actual,
you know, audiences. No. I meant ‘brave’ as in “the
self-congratulating limousine-liberal elitists who brought us this
year’s Oscar nominees would be out for blood if any of these
films ever got made”. It would be a fearless filmmaker indeed who’d
court their wrath.