I’ve twice read Patrick Goldstein‘s 11.6 column about Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, those Bush-shilling film lovers who run the Liberty Film Festival (Friday to Sunday at the Pacific Design Center), and I’m wondering yet again where all the good fascist entertainments are hiding these days?

Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire was the last Hollywood-produced, high-quality, conservative-minded, get-those-godless-third-world-scumbags movie, and that was a couple of years ago. I’m saying there’s room in my liberal head for good right-wing films if they’re well-made enough. (What a thing to say on Election Day!). Problem is, they’re all but nonexistent.
What was the first mainsteam example of a “fascist” entertainment? Dirty Harry? (Pauline Kael famously thought so.)
I wonder what the Liberty guys thought of that excellent hand-held video movie about a couple of young guys going to Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden as a revenge move for 9/11…you know the one I mean. (I just did a search and can’t find it.) I wonder what Aputo and Murty thought of Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Night- mares, or whether they even had the character to sit down and watch it? Or if they had the curiosity to read Paul Haggis‘s Against All Enemies script? What did they think of The Fog of War, I wonder?
The LFF’s site indicates they’re showing films that Cheney and Wolfowitz would be very happy to see. Pierre Rehov’s Suicide Killers and From the River to the Sea, which “both deal with the origins of Islamic terrorism in the repression of Islamic societies.” They’ll also be showing Border War, about those terrible conniving Mexicans slipping through the border in order to perform bottom-rung jobs that nobody else wants. Plus some “exciting” short films like The Road to Ramadi and A Journey to Iraq, plus, narrative features like The 9/11 Commission Report “that deals with Clinton’s failure to get bin Laden.”
The Bush adminstration has been choking for over three years on the lies and denials that have fortified the Iraq debacle, and the Liberty guys are supporting a doc that nails Clinton for not doing enough to get bin Laden back in the late ’90s? This is revolting.
I don’t know the details (haven’t made the call to Mark Ebner), but I’m also wondering why aren’t they showing Patrick Dollard‘s pro-troops documentary that he’s been shooting in Iraq, or at least a portion from it? Dollard has been filming for quite a while now. That I would pay to see.