Word: hollywood
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...different is Sept. 11, 2001, the day that triggered the so-called war on terror. And how diminished is the movie industry's response to it. Hollywood has produced just two films that are directly about the conflict, and both deal with the immediate response to the al-Qaeda assault. Paul Greengrass' United 93, released in April, dramatized the commotion and heroism on the one hijacked plane that didn't reach its landmark target. Now Oliver Stone has directed World Trade Center, Andrea Berloff's script about two Port Authority cops who were among the last of 20 people saved...
...That mind-set has been the subject of two smaller films, the Palestinian Paradise Now and the New York-based The War Within. Hollywood hasn't touched the Jihadist ethic, even to create a villain out if it. Nor have American movies taken the All the President's Men approach to the Bush Administration's post-9/11 game plan. Where is the film industry when it could explain concerns on every viewer's mind? To paraphrase the old refrain, What if they gave a war and Hollywood didn't come...
...HOLLYWOOD HIDES...
...Golden Age of the '30s and '40s, the industry was often accused of escapism. And certainly the films in Hollywood's war effort portrayed the conflict in terms and tones that would comfort as much as enlighten the audience. A neutral eye might see them as propaganda. But there was no neutrality in movie theaters. So the Germans were painted as sadistic dandies, the Japanese as deranged barbarians. And the American GIs, in a platoon of varied ethnicities (all white - this was before the integration of the Army), were steely men of purpose, risking their lives, sometimes dying, to defend...
...Maybe it was; or you could argue no. But at least moviemakers of the '40s didn't ignore the war that defined their decade - as Hollywood has done in our decade, in a conflict that has now lasted more than a year longer than America's involvement in World...