By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Dante's warpath: Homecoming keeps coming
Joe Dante continues to ignite the lumps of coal in everybody’s political stocking, talking at length with Mark Peranson, editor of Canada’s invaluable Cinema Scope magazine about his politically-charged zombie parable, Homecoming. Peranson observes, Some people are saying, “Oh, Michael Moore cost us the election.” “Which is bullshit. First of all, who knows who won the election? … You’re going to sit around and actually tell me that these people won the election in Ohio ? Where the guy who’s in charge, and the people who make the machines said, “We’re going to deliver the election to George Bush.” The thing that’s amazing to me, and the thing where this movie came from, is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we’re in and what we’ve done to the image of this country around the world… It’s been happening steadily for the past four years. And nobody made a peep about it… The New York Times and all these people, they actually abetted the lies… that went into the making and selling of this war. And now that they see that the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with the toe of their foot to make sure that he doesn’t bite back…. It gets cowardly, and it’s sick, and I think nobody’s done anything about it. And this pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B-movie is the only thing that anybody’s done about this issue? That killed 2000 Americans and untold amounts of Iraqis? It’s sick, it’s fucking sick.”
Dante concedes that George A. Romero‘s Land of the Dead broaches similar material, but “if you’re going code the message to that point, which is the way we’ve all done it… that’s fine, but, you know, it’s not going to reach an audience like a movie that’s overt… and this movie is not exactly subtle, the one I made… It’s really obvious what it’s about and what’s going on. And it seems to me that you have to be. Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. And everybody is afraid to do it. It’s not commercial, and people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Everyday people go through their normal lives and they go ahead and they pick up the mail and they take a bath, they walk the dog, and they do all this stuff and every minute they’re doing it somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish what, a religious theocracy in Iraq ? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it… I’m angry. I’m not the only one, I’m just the one who got to make the movie. But I represent a lot of people who don’t like the fact that the country that they grew up in is saying “Fuck you!” to the rest of the world, you know, without asking me. I didn’t tell anybody that it was okay. Nobody asked me if we should go to war.”
