In The Matrix, Hollywood posited a future where our minds are fed constant images of alternative reality, while our bodies remain prostrate and in limbo.
Of course, as Ed Morrissey notes, that’s pretty much how Hollywood and its echo chamber of MSM big city critics want their audiences to remain all the time, as he compares the critical response to The Great Raid, which was based on actual World War II events, to the fictional The Constant Gardener:
Interestingly, the film industry and its critics have come to the same conclusion: They prefer films that take fiction and pass it off as uncomfortable fact, while excoriating the recreation of real and uncomfortable history onscreen.
Fictional? Morrissey writes that The Constant Gardener is constantly science-fictional in its muddleheaded details:
Most laughably, The Constant Gardener has a stunningly naive grasp of politics and culture. Towards the end, Fiennes must find a doctor (Pete Postlethwaite) who helped conduct the trials in order to find his wife’s murderer. He winds up in a tribal village which is being raided by horse backed riders. In real life, we would know these killers as the Janjaweed–radical Islamist Arabs who are attempting to drive Sudanese animists and Christians off the land. Unsurprisingly, the film leaves this tidbit unspoken.
Later, when an African girl boards a U.N. plane out of Darfur with Fiennes and Postlethwaite, the pilot refuses her entry. When Fiennes offers to bribe the pilot, the U.N. employee stiffly warns the British diplomat not to “embarrass yourself.” Fiennes has found the one U.N. employee not taking bribes. When the girl runs off despite Fiennes’ efforts to rescue her, he asks Postlethwaite what will become of her. Postlethwaite replies that “if she’s lucky, she’ll make it to a refugee center.” That doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke; U.N. refugee centers in Africa hardly provide luck to young girls, as U.N. peacekeepers and staffers routinely turn such unfortunates out as prostitutes who must sell themselves in order to get food and water.
But the U.N. means well, doesn’t it? At least that’s what Sean Penn keeps telling me…
(Via Captain’s Quarters.)
Update: Libertas asks a great question:
An interesting thought experiment, incidentally, would be to imagine the last two years
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