Our “Quote of the day” below, links to an information page about a new film called ‘Slap her… she’s French’.
I was sufficiently intrigued by the title to inquire further and, judging from the serious reviewer, it would appear to be nothing more than a run-of-the-mill, formulaic teen comedy which I shall most likely never see.
But, for some people, it is something far more sinister. Beneath the professional review is a comments box where members of the public (and the clinically insane) can leave their own reviews and where I stumbled upon this hilariously deranged rant:
Hollywood has always been very good at serving Republican propaganda. In the 80’s we had brainless flicks such as Rambo 2, Rocky 4 and Top Gun, just to name a few of them.
Since Bush Junior took the presidency in a quite dictatorial manner, his team and him have separated America from the rest of the world at a point never reached before.
From late 2000 till 9/11, they started spreading hateful propaganda against Russia (trying to wake up ghosts of the cold war?) and racist propaganda against Chinese people, calling US citizens not to treat them as full American citizens. Mr. Bush was desperately looking for an ENEMY. Their ARROGANCE and VIOLANCE is matched only by the one of the Islamist terrorists.
On September 11, 2001, he and his team were served the best pretext they could have ever dreamed of, by people as crazy as them. Instead of analyzing the situation in a pro-active way and fighting terrorism cleverly in order to eradicate it, the reacted like dumb, immature, arrogant teenagers and preferred bombing innocent civilians.
The order given to Hollywood was to use the nations preferring peace than war as villains in their industrial products they deliver to the rest of the planet they so ARROGANTLY SCORNED. Part of this was the `French Bashing’ of which we have excellent examples in NO-BRAINERS such as “Slap Her She’s French” (no comment), `Master&Commander’ (In the book, the villains are British. France saved America from the British invasion in late 18th century; remember La Fayette), `Johnny English’ (ha, ha, ha, a French King trying to take over the British Queen), `Matrix Reloaded’, `SWAT’, `Along came Polly’, etc.
Let’s hope that when Mr. J.F. Kerry has been democratically elected in 2004, this virulent arrogance should come to an end, and America is part of the world again.
But, apart from that, how was the film?
The opening line ‘Hollywood has always been very good at serving Republican propaganda’ is hysterical!
Obviously, this person has no idea Hollywood has collectively banned any and all association with anything ‘Republican’. Tinsel Town is a bastion of looney liberalism gone completely insane and in their dictatorial manner have completely separated themselves from the entire planet!
If one word is spoken in support of President Bush or anything Republican, the Hollywood elitist will have your tongue cut out, so to speak. Most definately they will end careers.
I am an American actress living in NYC who has given up on the idea that Hollywood has anything worthwhile left to offer humanity. Certainly not in the areas of entertainment or art.
And absolutely nothing regarding freedom of expression.
Wow. I wonder what color the sky is on that “critic’s” world? What a fucktard.
heh.
Thats why Islamic terrorists were substituted for new age fascists in the movie version of The Sum of All Fears (I think thats the right title).
Insofar as Hollywood does a lot of dumb things that it thinks will improve its margins, they did try to get in on French bashing. Not in service of a Republican agenda, but of their own wallets. Probably because Hollywood French bashing is so over the top and insincere that it can only be their ‘private joke’ at what they see as trashy American culture.
Clinton bombed Serbia (without UN approval). Johnson bombed Vietnam. Kennedy threatened nuclear retaliation in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Truman bombed Japan. FDR and Churchill bombed Germany. Republicans all?
And Johnny English with its bathroom humor is part of some right wing Bushie plot?
And this is for real?
Or is it?
I love the “history lesson” about Master & Commander. So the villains trying to take a British ship was… a British ship? Love it. This guy should be on TV. He forgot to mention how Lord of the Rings is designed to subjugate American-Mordor relations by their negative and racist portrayal of Orcs.
IMDB allows you to link to his other reviews. Apparently the villain of “The Killing Fields” is one Richard Milhous Nixon!
The major villains in Hollywood movies have always reflected the prejudices of the predominantly Jewish management.
Italian Americans are gangsters, but the equally active Jewish mobs of the 1930s and 1940s are seldom portrayed, and never in their ethnic fullness.
The British are sneering, haughty criminal masterminds or Redcoat persecutors of Americans. We may be America’s most doglike ally but, hey, we held up the establishment of Israel in ’48. Besides, the Brits don’t sue.
The Arabs do sue (and worse) so we tend to avoid the whole subject of Islamism. Change the terrorist in an action pic to a neo-Nazi, and pretend that a system which crashed in flames 59 years ago is poised for a comeback.
Keep churning out Final Solution message pictures, but never ever dramatise the starvation of Chinese under Mao (China is Hollywood’s biggest potential export market) or Stalin’s persecutions. In fact, avoid the whole subject of Bolshevism: rather too many of our people were implicated.
I find rather funny that Johnny English was included in that list. I suspect the idiot who wrote it is assuming that no reader has actually seen the film. What a complete moron…Hollywood doing Republican propoganda? Now that is funny.
Frankly, I think the writer has a point. It is about time that right-wing Bush supporters like Barbra Streisand, Martin Sheen, Dustin Hoffman, Danny Glover, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Rob Reiner and all the rest of the pro-war bunch got their hands taken off the reins of power in Hollywood!
I heard Danny Glover owns shares in HALLIBURTON! And Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins once flew over Houston – international headquarters of the world’s OIL INDUSTRY!!! Was that a coincidence? I DON’T THINK SO!!!!! I am sick of PRO WAR ACTIVISTS running Hollywood!
They’re just making this stuff up as they go along, now. What, did the White House just now realize that, “Hey, them durned railroads is already built! Get them Chinese folks outta this damned country!”
I must have been asleep when the great crackdown on Chinese citizens took place.
And he forgot to mention all those Arnie films that, as we now all know, were just very clever election spots. Talk about great planning!
I havent laughed this much since… Kofi Annan had a bounty put on his head!
Great stuff!
WJ Phillips wrote:
There’s a reason that British actors are so frequently used in villain roles, and it’s for your accents. I’m sorry, but I’m from the school where if you want a genteel, ruthless, erudite villain you go with either a Brit, or a Brit speaking in a German accent (ala Alan Rickman). I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Americans haven’t started equating Britishness with villainy, and in the mean time your actors get to play the juicy villain roles that every actor loves to play.
Now, British children are another matter. Hearing British children speak is just damned eery. They sound far older than they should and remind me some 60’s, B-rate, “village of the damned” movie. Absolutely creepy.
Hank: Back in the 1930s Hollywood made a lot of films extolling the British Empire, but after America became top dog, the movie moguls never missed a chance of patronising or rubbishing us. Have you seen “The Patriot”?
I forgot to mention films which insult us by omission, such as the one which showed Americans snaffling the Enigma code books, and “Saving Private Ryan” which implies that there were no British at D-Day. The most praise we get is as a gigantic, quaint heritage park. You have to eat an awful lot of Hollywood crow to be America’s most faithful friend;-)
Well, come on, “The Patriot” isn’t by any stretch a good movie; poor script, bad dialogue, and really shoddy history. If you were a civilian in the Revolutionary War you’d be a lot better off being around the Brits than you would around the revolutionary army. The Brits actually had things like decent supply lines, more discipline, etc. They didn’t have as much incentive to go tearing around the countryside foraging to stay fed.
And yeah, U-571 is also a very bad movie. Why they didn’t stick to the original story of how the Royal Navy acquired the naval enigma codes is beyond me. I think it’s because they perhaps thought the story was too complex for your average cinemadroid. In any case, the true story would have been much more compelling than the load of crap they threw up there on the screen.
I see no real reason to single out Saving Private Ryan, though. Look, as war movies go this one doesn’t have a big sweep like “A Bridge Too Far”, it focuses on one unit. There’d be no real reason to show the British in that film because it’d have been very unlikely that American and British units would have met in that part of France.
The only criticism I have of that movie with regards to the British is the line about Montgomery. We’ve most definitely gotten the wrong impression of Monty in this country… Was he a cautious commander? Most definitely, but that also meant that he wasn’t as prolifigate with his soldiers lives as Patton or Rommel were. Those two generals, while often brilliant, showed a propensity towards gambling that has been way too romanticized. The only real criticism I have of Monty is that he wasn’t really competent in the next level of command; the Eisenhower, theatre level of command. I think Market Garden, which could have been a brilliant coup for the allies if properly planned for, illustrates that.
No, Hank’s right, WJ. The British villain is all about accent. We’d tune in to listen to you guys read grocery lists. And we just couldn’t buy a grandiose plotline expressed in our own patois. Imagine:
Really, if I had to be stereotyped, I’d take evil genius Brit over enthusiastic but retarded Yank any day.
Well, maybe rednecks don’t cut it as James Bond’s enemies, but how about a few patrician WASPy polo-playing Americans as villains? That Harvard/New England drawl is just as weird and sneery as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons. Ah, but those WASPs are the guys every Hollywood mogul whose great-grandfather sold carpets in Minsk hopes his little princess will marry. Wouldn’t do to offend the Cape Cod crowd– let’s hire Ralph Fiennes again.
That Harvard/New England drawl is just as weird and sneery as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons.
I hate to lower your opinion of us any further, but Americans think that Harvard/New England thing is an English accent. (And, actually, I’ll eat my hat if it wasn’t originally an imitation one). Y’see, Son, we generally pronounce our R’s real good and strong ’round these parts, and that “pahk your cah in Havahd yahd” shenanigans don’t hardly sound right.
The late actor Jonathan Harris (Doctor Smith of Lost in Space) used to say, when asked if he was English, “Oh no, my dear, just affected.”
Good point. That’s why, to my ears, Katherine Hepburn didn’t sound out of place in say, “The Lion in Winter”. She’s got this New England, Vasser sound going for her that while different, just seems to meld right into all of the other actor’s accents. Maybe it’s the crispness of the delivery, because I have a midwestern accent that tends to draw things out. Southern accents likewise, only more so.
I get teased at work by the Gringos over my accent. I don’t think my accent is too extreme but it is public-school-influenced Received Pronunciation. To most Americans this sounds very, very English. I mock them back by kicking it up a notch to sound more like Edward Fox than Colin Firth, say. It’s not my fault I know how to spell ‘cheque’ and ‘colour’, or that I can enunciate the difference between ‘coating’ and ‘coding’.
I don’t think New England accents are an imitation of English accents at all. I think they are actually English accents from the 18th and 19th Centuries. As with a lot of words Americans use that have fallen into disuse in Britain, because there were, in comparison, so few early Americans, their accents, vocabularies and traditions tended to get passed on unchanged while the mother country, with a vastly larger population and with an empire, plus being closer to Europe and always open to novelty, had a tradition of adopting new words and usages ad hoc.
“Fall” fell out of common usage in Britain in the early 18th C, but is the normal word for autumn in the US. Similarly – among hundreds of other examples – we in Britain speak of “forgotten” but we have dropped “gotten”, which the Americans still employ as a matter of course.
Why shouldn’t their accents have perservered too? When we hear an Ivy Leaguer, for example, speak, we are probably closer to hearing our ancestors than we are when we listen to Jeremy Paxman or Jon Snow.
This Ameican finds English accents very sexy.
There was an excellent documentary I saw on PBS a few years ago called “The Story of English”. In it they said that probably the closest corrollary we have to Elizabethan English is the Bronx accent (“youse guys”, etc). I guess some stage directors, for authenticities sake, have done entire Shakespearean productions in this accent.
Bizarre that something we equate with a low class accent is probably the closest thing we have to Queen’s English, but there you have it.
WJ Phillips can usually be relied upon at some point to say “Its all the fault of the Jews! Its the Jooooooooooooooooosssss I tell you!”
Considering the usual mad racist rants he is prone to elsewhere, I am amazed he has generally been so polite and restrained here! Perhaps he knows the proprietors here are fairly quick with the delete and IP ban buttons when people spew that crap on their turf.
Snide – Wrong. The proprietors are actually abnormally tolerant and it takes a lot to have them hit the ‘Blog Roach – Go Away’ key.
Hank Scorpio – “There was an excellent documentary I saw on PBS a few years ago called “The Story of English”. In it they said that probably the closest corrollary we have to Elizabethan English is the Bronx accent (“youse guys”, etc). ”
That’s what makes your “documentary” unexcellent. Where in English literature have you seen ‘youse guys’ written? One example, please. Sheridan? Congreve? Shakespeare? Johnson? And “guys” as a word for a group of men or people? No.
PBS has been playing to the gallery. Study your Shakespeare and Congreve and all the rest of them. Youse guys had never been written before immigrants to the US, trying to learn English and applying the rules of their native language (as we all do at first), came up with this phrase. It is not in accord with rules of English grammer and is nowhere recorded in British writing, so disabuse yourself of this notion.
No need to manufacture references to legitimise yourselves. As I said above, in many ways, American English is closer to its late 17thC/early 18thC roots than anything that is left in England. No need to overlay the Bronx, which was, in any case, surely part of Dutch territory for awhile?
I haven’t, but that’s not what I was getting at. I used it purely as a reminder of what the accent sounds like. If you don’t believe me, please, do some research on the subject. From everything I’ve dug up, most anthropological linguists agree that the Bronx sound probably emulates Elizabethan English the closest. Not necessarily grammatically, mind you, just the sound of it spoken.
Hank Scorpio – Well, this is an obsession of yours and you have all kinds of references! Who knew?
America’s first colonists arrived during Shakespeare’s time. Youse guys is totally, totally alien to English is every respect – despite your vast library of references. The pronunciation of English in those times is probably fairly close to New Englander (for want of a better term) English today. I cannot even imagine what you think the roots of ‘youse guys’ would be, either grammatically, or in sound. You were just eager to have an ignorant, immigrant usage given legitimacy, which leads me to believe you are from heritigate other than British.
Disclaimer: I am not villifying or in any other way attempting to degrade the overlay of English usage by immigrants transliterating their native from areas of the world blah blah blah.
Your PBS, obviously funded by the self-selected and often pretentious, programme, was garbage. Someone should investigate whether there’s a connect with Dutch. Youse = uis, perhaps. Guys definitely sounds Dutch. Not English. Not Elizabethan.
I think you will find “youse” in Irish English and in Liverpool English.
You will also find “gotten” in Irish useage,
“The major villains in Hollywood movies have always reflected the prejudices of the predominantly Jewish management.”
WJ has his tin foil hat back on, now he’s added Hollywood Jewish conspiracy theories to his ignorant anti-Americanism. Hardly surprising considering he thinks the American government is run by ZOG.
Andrew K – ‘Gotten’ was perfectly normal usage in Elizabethan English. It gradually lost its currency and is no longer used in Britain, although, irrationally, we still retain the use of forgotten.
Liverpool English is/was very Irish. The way English was spoken throughout England was not with a Liverpool accent. Still isn’t. The PBS programme was wrong. They should try scanning Shakespeare to pick up clues.
This movie “Slap Her, She’s French” probably began production before the incident at the Security Council with France.
This says the film was released in 2002 which means it was made in 2001. It was released in Switzerland on January 31, 2002, which means this film has absolutely nothing to do with geopolitics.
Oh, here’s the link to the imdb.com.
The big Jewish movie moguls of the 1930s and 1940s were generally speaking rabid Anglophiles who made movie after movie in the Whig tradition of history, making Robin Hood the Saxon resistance against the Normans (froggies again!) and Lord Nelson, etc. etc. from 1939 through 1941 they made tons of movies about the brave Brits standing up against Hitler. Movies didn’t really acquire an Anglophobic tint until the late 60s, as part of a general revisionist tendency — they also turned anti-American at that time. By then Holywood was a lot *less* Jewish than it once had been. As for The Patriot, it comes out of Mel’s long history of anti-English movies, from Gallipoli through Braveheart through the Patriot. That comes more from Aussie Pommie-bashing than yank prejudice.
As for survival of British Isles accents in America, the master text is David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which deals with these issues very thoroughly.
The movie Slap Her, She’s French was on TV here last week. I only caught a few minutes of it somewhere near the beginning, but it clearly has the potential to set back US-France relations for a generation. The French girl of the title wears a beret (!) and not styishly, cardies and dowdy skirts, and is taken in hand fashionwise by the Britney lookalike American princesses of the high school. She also has the phoniest French accent imaginable. I got the impression she might be someone masquerading as French, but did not stick around to find out.
Jim Bennett – Thanks for the tip.
Jim Bennett. are there any books about this or links you can refer me to regarding how the content of Hollywood films has changed over the years?
Actually, three U-Boats were captured during World War II, two by the British and one by the US Navy. Two sets of Enigma equipment were taken; one of the British captures was able to destroy it.
U-571 was not a very good film, however.
http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/U505/index.html
There is another reason English actors are popular.
They are cheap.
Eamon
Slap Her, She’s French is a surprisingly good satire disguised as a teen flick, with a very intelligent and witty script. One of the funniest films I’ve seen in years, in fact. Anyone who thinks it’s anti-French or produced on the orders of Bush clearly hasn’t seen it: from the outset, it mercilessly takes the piss out of Texans. It is insanely over the top. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
“Don’t you miss your old home?”
“Oh, no. For me, France will always be a place of existential death.”
I liked Slap Her, She’s French but I was really surprised. Lately Hollywood has been making very few movies that can be interesting for me. I’m so tired of stupid jokes and banal plots. Slap Her, She’s French is much beter then most movies I’ve seen recently. It’s worth watching as well as Fahrenheit 9/11.
I’d like to see an English Villain with a *real* UK accent – how about a broad Yorkshire or Lancashire accent? Or maybe a Bristolian accent (but not a pirate – pirates stereotypically speak with a Bristol accent; something to do with Blackbeard being from there)
“”From late 2000 till 9/11, they started spreading hateful propaganda against Russia (trying to wake up ghosts of the cold war?) “” Something as idiotic as this could only have been written by an ignorant who knows nothing about what’s going on past his american backyard. Hateful propaganda against Russia? Are you really that blind? You Americans have NO IDEA what Russia really is or what it does. You’d just most gladly believe the democrat crap, shut your eyes on anything and everything and stuff your bellies.
Russia has never changed, the cold war has never really ended, it just warmed up a touch. Putin is a despicable, lying SOB, and his malicious hatred for us Poles and you Yanks makes me feel like ripping his damn head off. Sorry to burst your bubble, democrat-sympathisers… everyhing bad you’ve ever heard about Russia was true, but the sad truth is, you’ve only seen the tip of an iceberg.
P.S. Rambo 2 was a good movie… forget the poor acting, it was painfully true. Alas, some people prefer to turn heads away and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. So what’s next? Are the democrats going to say that nazis were good guys and holocaust never hapened, because you guys want good political relations with Germany? Are you out of your mind??? We have a term for that kind of thinking here… political whores, that’s what democrats are.