Taking Chance: Hollywood Finally Does Iraq Right - And (Surprise) Gets The Ratings

Image: Kevin Bacon in "Taking Chance."

From The New York Post:

For two and a half minutes near the end of "Taking Chance," the new HBO movie about the body of a young Marine returned home for burial, there is no sound except for the salute of the riflemen and the Wyoming wind battering the flags that stand at half mast as the shattered remains of PFC Chance Phelps are placed at rest. The silence amounts to perhaps the most eloquent statement Hollywood has yet made about the Iraq War.

Its main competition is an earlier scene in the same movie. Driving along a country road behind an SUV carrying the casket, Lt. Col. Michael Strobl finds other motorists forming an impromptu funeral cortege out of respect for the departed.

"Taking Chance," which is the only Iraq movie to show the troops in a wholly positive way, is also the only one people are watching. The film industry has reduced our troops to dupes, dopes, deserters and losers in an insane clown posse of laughably bad films like "Stop-Loss," "In the Valley of Elah," "Lions for Lambs," "Home of the Brave" and "The Lucky Ones." To say that these relentlessly skewed movies, made by people innocent of any knowledge of the military, are flops would be an understatement: "The Lucky Ones," for instance, which starred Tim Robbins and Rachel McAdams as desperate and moronic vets on leave, last fall grossed $267,000, a figure that wouldn't even cover the cost of advertising. It was yanked from screens after a single week.

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My Comment: I live in the far north of Canada .... alas, I have no HBO.

Downloaded the movie from RSLinks .... and I just finished watching it.

I was riveted throughout the film.

It is a must see movie.