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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Semantics? Apparently More

After running my Flags of our Father review, I got a lot of letters with a similar issue to the following

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15 Responses to “Semantics? Apparently More”

  1. palmtree says:

    Marines are a type of soldier. I can see how it could be seen as an insult, but I doubt it affects anyone outside of the corps.
    “So much for love of country and patriotism, this is a different era.”
    Now THAT’S insulting.

  2. Sandy says:

    “So much for love of country and patriotism, this is a different era.”
    Now THAT’S insulting.
    I agree – why is it that not going to see FOOF in the theaters is perceived as being unpatriotic? It all comes down to what is entertaining at the movies….I bet FOOF will do just fine on DVD…but please don’t call the generations after WWII unpatriotic.

  3. Eddie says:

    I wasn’t aware it’s insulting to call Marine’s soldiers.
    However, commenting that it’s wrong to like a gangster movie over a WWII film is pretty nonsensical. Shouldn’t quality count more than genre?
    I’ll take pretty much any Gangster picture over Pearl Harbor, and that includes Corky Romano.

  4. Wrecktum says:

    How about The Crew?

  5. Sam says:

    As Ebert is fond of saying, “It’s not what it’s about, but how it’s about it.”
    Obviously in terms of historical significance, and importance in human history, the battle at Iwo Jima is far and away greater than any fictional gangster story.
    This has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Flags of Our Fathers or The Departed is the better movie.

  6. dangeruss says:

    what bothers me is that people are upset over david calling marines soldiers but nobody is discussing how FOOF failed to show any black soldiers at Iwo Jima. I know david posted the article on moviecitynews.com the other day but obviously that is less important then someone calling marines soldiers. how come marines arent making a fuxx about that?

  7. Wrecktum says:

    Marines don’t care about that. They just don’t want to be called soldiers.

  8. jeffmcm says:

    Because the military was segregated at this time in history – Eastwood is not going out of his way to make his movie all-white/Native American.

  9. Tofu says:

    The designation of not calling Marines soldiers is quickly eroding in these days where we use them for far more than just water to land assualts.

  10. Cadavra says:

    “Soldier” is now a perjorative. I am SO sick of everyone being a victim. Grow the fuck up, people!

  11. So who can we call soldiers, for future reference?

  12. ployp says:

    “…I find it disheartening that a gangster movie would be the preference over one of the epic battles of World War 11.”
    I’m speechless.

  13. jeffmcm says:

    I hadn’t even noticed that until now.

  14. Blackcloud says:

    It’s more like World War 8 or 9, but whatever.

  15. jeffmcm says:

    Are we counting the War of Spanish Succession?

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon