Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Movies

Hollywoods’s New Hostage Thriller Glamorizes The Cia In Iran

"Earlier this year, I was in Tehran for a conference on Hollywood’s power and impact. It was called “Hollywoodism,” featuring many scholars and critics of the values and political ideologies featured in many major movies with a focus on the way Israel (a.k.a., “the Zionists”) are continually portrayed as if they do no wrong.

What we didn’t know then while we were debating these issues was that some of Hollywood’s biggest stars were at that very moment making a movie that will certainly be perceived as hostile to Iran, if not part of the undeclared war that Israel and the United States are waging with crippling economic sanctions and malicious cyber viruses.

The movie is Argo, and the hype for it has already begun. In a business driven by formula, a “hostage thriller” must have been irresistible to an industry always more consumed by itself and its own frames of reference than anything happening in the real world. An NBC entertainment site explains:

“At the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis, the CIA smuggled six Americans out of Tehran in a plot that was a movie maker's dream. So naturally, Hollywood's gonna make a movie out of it.

Superstar Ben Affleck directed "Argo," a film being produced by George Clooney, about former CIA Master of Disguise Tony Mendez and his most daring operation… Mendez smuggled six American's out of Tehran in 1979 by concocting a fake movie production, called "Argo."

Predictably, the background and context of these events is conspicuous by its absence, as are the reasons for the Iranian revolution and the role played by the United States in working with the British in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and support for the despotic Shah.

“It’s not political,” a movie industry insider told me.

A film set in the Iranian revolution, that most political of events of an era, “not political?”

That’s Hollywood for you!"

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