Sunday, July 28, 2013

"Wrong Is Right" Is...History?

     Hey, try this on for a film: a tabloid-esqe reporter has access to major world leaders; there (may) be a plot to take out a Middle-East Arab leader who's got weapons of mass destruction and plans to use them against the U.S. and Israel and (after some terror-type explosions in malls, etc.) he does appear to commit suicide.

     ...Or does he?  Oh, meanwhile, there's an even scarier outfit taking over the dead leader's country, and now they (probably) have the bombs ("pocket nukes," the size of a large briefcase).  Oh! --Aiding this terrorist group, a turncoat U.S. citizen.

     Reporter gets all tangled up with the CIA and his pal the President of the United States, a plain-talking Texan who just happens to have a slender, well-groomed professorial African-American woman for Secretary of State Vice-President.

     As the complicated plot wends along, there's a lot of patriotic fervor and concern about this unstable Middle-Eastern nation...which, it turns out, has planted the bombs somewhere in the U.S. 

     ...The location turns out to be hanging from a flagpole atop the World Trade Center. Yeah, two big skyscrapers that aren't there any more?  Only the bombs are found and defused just in the nick of time, war is declared against Middle-Eastern Nation, and the troops roar in, on live TV.  But who was it really planted the bombs?  Could it have been...the CIA?

     What?  Some pinko anti-Bush film?  9/11 Truther retconning?  Hey, plausible -- except the film was released in 1982!

     I'm not kidding.  Wrong Is Right is a kind of a spoof starring Sean Connery as the reporter, in a world where TV news has gone...well, very much the way it has gone.  It'd kind of like to be Dr. Strangelove but lacks that film's savage bite; the director gets entranced with a very tricky plot -- what is the CIA up to, anyway?  Did they set it all up?  Part of it?  "What's good for United States is right," the as the top spy tells Connery.

     In the light of subsequent history, this film makes for very strange watching.  I caught it on one of the over-the-air digital subchannels, either THIS or Antenna TV.

     I dunno -- I remarked to Tam, "It's as if The Secret Rulers Of Everything saw the film when it first came out and thought, Oh, why bother thinking up something original -- let's just do this.  Nobody'll notice.  So they did and we didn't." But that's just psuedoparanoid silliness, right?  Right?

4 comments:

  1. I saw it on Armed Forces TV in Korea...

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  2. Good question... Just sayin...

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  3. What's that old line? "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you", or something like that.

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  4. You're going down the right road. Just how many Politicians are sitting in Office as we speak who seem to think that something Fictional on the TeeWee is in fact reality?

    And conversely, how much that is being put on the TeeWee/Big Screen is DESIGNED to help Politicians? Case in Point: Did you hear that NBC is planning on doing a Mini-Series with Diane Lane in 2016? It's called ..... HILLARY!

    Gee, is it possible that NBC is trying to Shill for Mrs. Clinton so as to sway Voters into Voting for her? Probably not, since I'm SURE that the presentation will be a Fair and Balanced description of her Record, without ANY distortion of the Facts whatsoever.

    Or am I being "Paranoid?"

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