Fox News loves to present itself as the champion of troops and, as evidenced in Fox's week long propaganda blitz directed towards critics of the movie, "Lone Survivor," Fox is also the champion of whatever war that the US is involved in. It's fascinating. I don't seem to recall that there was anywhere near as much Fox outrage over the abysmal conditions at Walter Reed as there seems to be about movie critics who feel that this movie, co-written by the liberal hating sole survivor of a Navy Seals fire fight in Afghanistan, is pro-war propaganda. As of last night, there were five Fox pieces in which Fox talkers portrayed the movie's critic's as downright un-American. So it wasn't a surprise that the oh, so patriotic Bill O'Reilly, who only served with a pen, got in on the action on last night's Factor during which O'Reilly made his usual baseless claims. As Jon Stewart says "crank up the grampalodian!"
O'Reilly began by quoted from the negative reviews, including one from the " very far left" NY Magazine. O'Reilly, who does his own share of race baiting, accused the woman who wrote the article in the LA Weekly of "injecting race" into the discussion. He told his guest, movie critic Richard Roeper, that he doesn't understand why liberal critics are saying that "Lone Surivior" is a propaganda movie because it's based on fact. Roeper validated this when he said that "calling a war movie violent is like saying the Titanic has too much water, that's what war is all about."
Roeper praised the movie as a realistic depiction of war and accused other critics of having "political agendas." He referenced, how, in the early part of the film, the Navy Seals choose not to kill civilians knowing that that choice could result in their deaths. He asserted that racism was not a factor.
Roeper didn't mention that the context of the LA Weekly's "brown people, bad; American people" comment: "When the guys debate whether to kill the three goat herders who've stumbled onto their hiding place — a dilemma that, morality aside, could have been solved if any of them had recalled that middle school logic problem about the fox, the chicken, the feed, and the too-small boat — Foster grabs an unarmed teenager by the face and insists, "That's death. Look at death."
O'Reilly noted that film critics are, in general, liberals. He suggested that these critics "bring a perspective to a film that you don't like your country, all of these things, reviews have one thing in common, the view is that they don't like the United States" because they say that the Navy Seals are heroes "but their heroism was performed on behalf of a racist country, a violent country, an exploitative country..." (And what part of that isn't true?) He asserted that this is what the critics bring to their review and "that's what they build their career on."
Roeper agreed and spoke of a segment, in the movie, which showed Afghan villagers being hospitable. O'Reilly, in doing a reprise of Joe McCarthy's claim that commies are everywhere, claimed that this anti-American stuff "bleeds over" into all aspects of the culture and he's "tired of it."
This is vintage O'Reilly albeit with much less bluster than in the old days. In order to reinforce his and Roger Aile's belief that liberals are a bunch of commie pinkos, he baselessly accuses film critics, except for his guest, of being America haters. But the best take away is his comment that if something is fact based it can't be propaganda.
Fox News and the Factor are based on fact and are still pure propaganda. Oh, the irony!
Seriously, you want all the scenes that were debunked as impossible, or that the official account has them as never happened? Go Google, or if you saw the movie, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You could tell who wasn’t a flag waver because they were snickering at those scenes, that’s how easy it was to catch it.
For me, it was just the sheer narcissism of how Marcus Luttrell painted himself- Not to mention the disrespect towards the others it created. I haven’t been this offended by a biopic’s fact-free vanity trip since “Patch Adams.”
I’m not a big fan of biopics in the first place because they’ll just do whatever the hell they want with the story, and cast the biggest name they can get that still looks enough like the person. Sometimes it makes a good movie (Erin Brockavich, People v. Larry Flynt), other times, it makes a piece of crap that people force themselves to like because of who’s in it, or because it falls close enough to the right nerve (Patch Adams, Public Enemies)…
This movies falls into the latter. The end.
That’s my review- Try twisting that into a hatred of America, Bill. And sorry in advance if it went too far off topic, but I will preemptively defend myself with that I thought what I think of the movie was relevant at the time.