Arts & Ammo

Comedy 9/11

If the Erfurt Opera can make a mockery of 9/11 by staging Verdi at ground zero, should we expect something better from Hollywood? Politico.com reports on the upcoming 9/11 comedies:

Consider Boll’s “Postal,” opening nationwide May 23. Touted as a “shock comedy,” the film begins by depicting the Sept. 11 hijackers making moronic comments about the paradise that awaits them. The film is likely to offend just about everyone with its premise that includes “a gang of bosomy commandos [who] face off against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in an epic battle that will determine the fate of the world.” Since its opening cockpit sequence was first promoted on YouTube last May, it has been viewed more than two million times.

This comes as Victor Davis Hanson laments that Hollywood

. . . is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

Why do these movies bomb? According to Knight Ridder:

Americans recognize that there’s something tasteless about directors living their cushy, sheltered lives in sunny California and making films that savage the behavior of soldiers in a war while those very soldiers are still fighting and dying for their country.

War comedies are not unheard of, but Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz would not have been funny in 1944.

April 22nd, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Film | 2 comments