Posts Tagged → mel gibson
Young Washington movie is 9/10
Last night I was encouraged to go see a movie, which happens quite infrequently lo, these many past years. Because, for many years now, Hollywood has dropped the ball, and has produced only dreck. Like most Americans, I do not pay to see dreck. Hollywood box office bomb after bomb after bomb keeps driving home the point that Americans do not want dreck and will not pay for it. Rather, most Americans see movies to be entertained, informed, inspired. Not to be preached at, especially about counter-culture values emanating from failed frootloop academics living in worlds of stupid theory and perpetual Marxist revolution.
I fall into the camp of Americans that will go see a movie if it informs, inspires, and entertains me. So, last night I went to see Young Washington, a movie about America’s greatest Founding Father, George Washington. This movie informed me, inspired me, and entertained me, and I can therefore recommend it to you, too.
But don’t just take my word for it, Men’s Journal confirmed that this movie inspires its audience because it is factual, and the facts surrounding George Washington are inspiring.
Mind you, Men’s Journal is just one of many formerly useful and interesting institutions/ magazines/ information outlets subsequently captured by the far Left and re-purposed to spew anti-America agitation propaganda, far-Left counter-culture propaganda, etc etc. So the fact that this leftwing outlet asked the question if the Young Washington movie is accurate, is not surprising; Men’s Journal will always seek to criticize any popular movie or book that is patriotic or espousing traditional American values. What is surprising is that the magazine published an article confirming that the movie’s main claims are accurate.
Mind you, Men’s Journal did not list the things that are good or inspiring or entertaining about Young Washington, it just confirmed that it is accurate, and left it at that. They did not encourage you to go and see it. They just did a fact check. As if Men’s Journal does this routinely on any other movies.
What is good and inspiring about Young Washington is that it tells us how young George Washington worked hard, took risks, made sacrifices, and heart-felt earnestly prayed to God a lot. What is inspiring about that is that all of this hard work, risk taking, sacrificing, and prayer paid off. It created a man whom his arch enemy, King George III of England, called “The greatest man in world history.”
The movie perfectly and incredibly accurately depicts the American Indians, caught between French and British forces from north and south, and also being pushed ever westward by impoverished European colonists and their feudal aristocratic overlords. The movie also accurately represents the inevitable tension resulting from the American frontier’s merit-based opportunity system clashing with European feudal entitlement, which ultimately gave way to 1775’s violent rupture between serfs-no-longer American colonists and their overbearing, self-entitled, yet unimpressive European overlords.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” is the logical outcome of the American frontier, on which young George Washington was raised, and tested, then confronting and contesting a feudal Europe. And the free and prosperous America we now live in is the logical outcome of the merit-based frontier having prevailed in that contest.
Seeing a movie capture all of this “first principles” stuff is eminently entertaining, and your money is well spent, because face it, this happens only once every five or twn years these days.
I give Young Washington a 9 out of 10, and not a 10/10, for a couple reasons. First, some of the scenes are kind of hackneyed rote stuff that has been used too many times in most of the Mel Gibson movies (e.g. The Patriot) and similar genre movies. Long, artificially drawn out overly dramatic moments that do not cause tears to fall, but rather tears at the belief and tolerance system. No one takes this long to die in real life. No one acts like this in real life. Ever. Second, I spotted at least two and possibly many more percussion rifles in use by British and Colonial militia troops, as well as by American frontiersmen. Big time no-no for a film based in 1755, when flintlocks alone reigned on the battlefields of Europe and America. Percussion systems first emerged around 1810, and did not become military issue until the 1840s. Lastly, about half of the scenes are filmed in places and on landscapes that just do not physically exist anywhere in Pennsylvania, especially in Western Pennsylvania. That strains credulity, even if I logically accept the plain fact that finding any undistrubed landscapes anywhere to film on is getting difficult.
Many many years ago, as a paid non-profit land conservation professional, I helped the National Park Service conserve the Fort Necessity Battlefield and also Braddock’s Trace, out in Western Pennsylvania. These important places are depicted in the movie. That same NPS park manager and I then went on to work together on conserving the Flight 93 crash site and its surrounding landscape, after 9-11. So, I have some personal knowledge and appreciation for the rugged Western PA topography, and for the specific place where young George Washington put himself to the test, and succeeded.
It was the rugged and demanding wild landscape that created the original Israelites, who gave us The Law, and then it was the rugged, demanding, and wild landscape here in North America that gave the world America, a nation based on The Law and a light unto the nations, really the only light unto the nations on this entire planet. Thanks to George Washington. And this is why conserving rural landscapes is still so important: They are our unique American culture of freedom.
This movie meant a lot to me, more than I would have expected. Maybe you will have the same positive reaction. A lot of us Americans have an awful lot of unrequited expectations built up over the past ten or fifteen years of crappy Hollywood movie output. A lot of un-met need. And this movie, Young Washington, meets those needs.
Poster for Young Washington movie
Trump-Kennedy Center Vacancies Create Opportunity
Nature abhors a vacuum, goes the tried and true adage. This adage is true because wherever an opening occurs in the natural state of things, like a fallow farm field, or a wildfire’s burned out charred hole in the middle of a woods, some plant or animal will find a way to adapt to that unique opening and move into it, make it home. The newly open space creates a home for those who will move into it the fastest, while many cannot or will not leave the comforts of their present niches.
This dynamic fact of life on this planet is the quintessence of competition and adaptation, two primary forces of nature and, as the main tools of God, the main way that living things evolve and develop here.
And so must this same rule apply to the Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington DC, a place I have sat in many times before. Last time was some years ago, to see “War Horse.” Which was quite good as theater goes, which is a big critical compliment from me. See, my theory on theater is that if a play is any good, it will end up as a box office smash movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, etc. et. al.
Every other kind of play will inevitably cause me to slump in my uncomfortable folding chair, and sleep contentedly among the anonymity of a large audience. And also often earning hard nudges from left and right, because apparently I snore when sleeping in public. Most plays are hardly worth the effort of keeping my eyes open.
Which is to say, I am a professional art and theater critic, because I am very experienced, tough to impress, and quite discerning. And I have the acid tongue to match. And thus, my opinion on the ever longer list of “artist” cancellations at the Trump-Kennedy Center is that we now have a gigantic and rare opportunity. In other words, all of the prissy leftist brats who have recently canceled their appearances at the Trump Kennedy Center have left a hole into which other talent can and should move. And it should be new talent, different talent.
Conservative talent.
Patriotic talent. Non-Woke talent. America First talent. Traditional values kind of talent. Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and cry at the National Anthem kind of talent.
America has a new and ever larger opportunity at the Trump Kennedy Center to showcase pro-America/ pro democracy/ pro elections/ pro open minds/ pro thinking entertainers, artists, circuses, acrobats and tumblers, drunks, comics, poets, and writers. Hell, throw in some Capitol Hill staff skits, and the place should be rockin’.
Point being, the absence of the traditional self-anointed far Left entertainment industry (complex) people has created a vacuum into which a new tradition should step and grow. I am thinking Lynyrd Skynyrd or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs a la 2026, whoever that may be. Kid Rock would be a good team leader here, maybe the new facility director or artistic creator or whatever silly high falutin’ name the industry typically uses. Except that whatever it is, we need to mock it into oblivion, like put Kid Rock in a top hat and tails and have him put on dramatically fake airs of superiority and faux seriousness.
America needs new curators of popular culture, which has traditionally been established by our artists, actors, and writers, who like a herd of lemmings in the past fifty years have unsustainably embraced economic and cultural anti-America Marxism. And now we have an opportunity to evolve and build an entire new pro-America genre, housed at the Trump Kennedy Center.
Some nameless, talent-less Washington DC based opera company was among those who ridiculously quit the place in a huff because of the partial name change. Turns out this lame group was only a group because they were based at the Trump Kennedy Center. As in housed there, subsidized there, lionized there, cradled there, simply for being there. May I suggest their replacement? A new group?
We, the new group I am promoting, are named The Kings of Toxic Masculinity, and we may not always sound in tune, or get our lines right all the time, but by God, we will be entertaining as hell for any red blooded American who wants to laugh, cry, celebrate America, and not fall asleep in the usual uncomfortable chair.
Hope to see you there, fellow American!
UPDATE: Days after this essay, President Trump announced the closure of the Trump Kennedy Center to fix the place after decades of deferred maintenance. Smart decision, because there were whole corridors there that smell like mildew, which means physical rot had set in to the building. What a symbol! Nice to know it will be overhauled and fixed up in two years.