Change Your Image
act-12
Reviews
Home of the Brave (2006)
Exaggeration makes it less worthwhile
This movie is too extreme in its depiction of returning vets. To be sure some do not integrated well back into society, and none quite as before, but most do not end up in the constant and extreme circumstances depicted in this film: as emotional basket cases ready to explode. It's as if everyone who returns becomes a maniac, which is ridiculous. In fact, most legitimate studies have shown just the opposite: their level of criminality, for example, after returning is less than the public they left.
This is not to minimize the difficulties vets have, especially amputees. But this makes vets appear to be crazy people, virtually out of control, which is absurd and which doesn't engender the kind of respect for their sacrifice and for the honor they deserve for serving their country -- and in fact for returning here and being positive contributors to society, in the wide majority.
In all, this movie is too cliché and what you would expect from those who seem to oppose only wars their chosen political parties don't start or often try to blame on someone else. No one argues that war is anything but awful. Then again, it's actually moving that so many vets return and resume productive lives -- not as crazies who take hostages and smash up things all day.
Is there no place for this movie? It has its place as an overly negative portrayal of returning vets, whatever the war. Our times are highly political and reactions to Iraq are what are to be expected. (Unless, you talk about a war like Bosnia and the thousands of Serbs who died in US bombings, but we can't mention such things.) You should watch this movie, just don't accept it at face value.
Romero (1989)
Propaganda piece
This film presents a completely one-sided and often false portrayal of the situation in El Salvador in the late 1970s and 1980s. It offers no context whatsoever, and like so much propaganda out of Hollywood, the movie completely ignores Marxist revolutionary violence in Central America at the time. One is reminded of the movie Outbreak, in which the US Army is portrayed as the villain by Hollywood, when in truth Army doctors saved people from a vicious virus outbreak, as Richard Preston documented in his excellent book, The Hot Zone. It was in fact communist guerrillas who said they would murder anyone found with voting stamp dye on their hands during the El Salvador elections portrayed in the movie. But in a truly heroic act of defiance El Salvadorans stood in long lines for hours to vote under the threat of death by the guerrillas -- not, as the movie would have you believe, the Savadoran army. Similarly, in 1990 Nicaraguans voted against the communist junta led by Daniel Ortega. After watching the movie Romero you would never know these things, but the facts can be easily verified in authoritative historical sources. Of course, as you might expect, the US is another villain in the movie like the brutal El Salvadoran army, and the communists are of course just trying to help the people in a terrible situation. The movie only hints at the role "Liberation Theology" played in the thinking of some Catholic theologians at the time. All in all, this movie is hardly worth the effort and only worth it as a study in propaganda, despite the overtly religious context of the movie. Unless you believe Central America would have been better off under communism, watch this movie with a great deal of skepticism.