February 18, 2008

"Harold & Kumar" Do Gitmo Trutherism

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By Debbie Schlussel

It's not exactly a newsflash that Hollywood sides with Islamic terrorists and is against the impotent War on Terror. And I've noted that actor Kal Penn, who played Kumar Patel in the hit movie, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," is sympathetic with Muslims and Islamic terrorists. He's against profiling of Islamic terrorists and, even though he played an Islamic terrorist on "24," he taught a class at University of Pennsylvania, decrying--among other things--the portrayal of Asian Muslim terrorists on film.

Now, in the sequel to Harold & Kumar, "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay," we can expect more of this left-wing pan-terrorist pap. (Thanks to reader Barry Popik for the tip.) Filmmakers admit that they didn't do any research on Gitmo and just presented things the way they believe they are in Gitmo. Unfortunately, America is populated by airheads like college student Cecily Pirozzoli, who feels for the terrorists, and is the likely audience of the Harold & Kumar sequel:

Harold & Kumar Escape From Gitmo Trailer (This is the WORK-SAFE version, and a lot was edited out.)

(The UNSAFE For Work R-Rated version, below--at the bottom of this entry, shows how stupid and disgusting this movie is.)

Because of some unfortunate confusion on an airplane between a "bong" and a "bomb" [DS: haha, funny], our slacker antiheroes are shipped off to the moviemakers' idea of the worst prison imaginable.

On April 25, on a screen near you: "Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay."

Seriously, dude. . . .

Harold and Kumar's escape is only the latest cultural road trip through the detention center on Cuba's southeast corner. And in most of them, Guantanamo is an eerie outpost, with scorpions, five-foot iguanas and banana rats - rodents the size of small dogs.

The image of a forbidding prison camp is not entirely false. But it is not the picture Bush administration officials would prefer to emphasize. They portray Guantanamo Bay as a clean and modern detention camp, where humane treatment of terror suspects is the rule.

But Guantanamo is no longer just a naval station or even just a detention center. It is an idea in worldwide culture - in more than 20 books and half a dozen movies and plays, with more coming out every month.

It has become shorthand for hopeless imprisonment and sweltering isolation. "The strange new Alcatraz," one writer calls it, "the gulag of our times." [DS: Um, weren't those the words of Amnesty International?] . . .

Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, who runs the camp for the Pentagon . . . said that countering what he called preconceptions about Guantánamo was "probably the biggest challenge that I face."

The focus on Guantanamo as a creative subject can lead to distortions, Admiral Buzby said. "It's as if someone turned up the gain on our life to make it sound really bad." . . .

In her freshman seminar at the University of Denver this fall, Cecily Pirozzoli, an 18-year-old business major, read "Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," a slender volume edited by one of the detainees' lawyers, Marc Falkoff. [DS: Read my post on this absurd book of drivel, here.]

Mr. Falkoff said his goal was partly to humanize the detainees. One poem asks: "What kind of spring is this, where there are no flowers?"

Ms. Pirozzoli said the book gave her insights into Guantanamo that she had not gained from news coverage. "I could feel what these people were feeling," she said.

Pentagon officials simmer at the portrayals of Guantanamo, calling some of them propaganda. But that message has a difficult time catching up to the works themselves. . . .

The "Harold and Kumar" writer-director team, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, suggested in an interview that their script did not worry too much about Guantanamo's actual details.

Mr. Schlossberg said their portrayal of Guantanamo involved darkness and dirt. They filmed at an abandoned prison in Shreveport, La., which Mr. Schlossberg described as "really creepy."

"Our vision for Guantanamo," he said, "was a place that doesn't even feel like America."

Yup, who cares about accuracy, when you're showing your film to millions of Americans and others worldwide? Why bother with the truth? "It's just a comedy, so no-one will believe it." Right?

Don't expect to see the giant halal buffets fit for a sultan, La-Z-Boy chairs and Harry Potter videos, and state-of-the-art gym Gitmo prisoners have, in this BS comedy. Or see the hotels nearby. It's not supposed to "feel like America," remember?

And while this movie will probably be a hit, based on the popularity of the first "Harold & Kumar" installment, it's popularity will not have anything to do with Gitmo. Watch, though, for liberals to claim the opposite, that--despite the steady stream of anti-war box office bombs--this singular movie will prove the popularity of anti-war movies decrying Gitmo.

Oh, and don't expect Hollywood to ever put out this film: "Harold & Kumar Go to the Set of the Nick Berg Video."

Sadly, that one wouldn't be a propaganda comedy, and they wouldn't escape for another sequel. Instead, we'd see "Harold & Kumar's Executioners Meet the 72 Virgins."

***

The VERY UNSAFE FOR WORK version shows how stupid and disgusting this movie is:

Posted by Debbie at February 18, 2008 01:34 PM

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