Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Inspired by fictional events

Ever notice how some movies that pretend to be about real happenings usually have this sort of claim in the credits: "This movie was inspired by actual events". This basically means that "what you've just seen is about as far from a documentary as we had to go to make this watchable and short enough for 100 minutes. The truth was not really a consideration".

The other night the BBC broadcast a documentary on Islamic extremism in Britain. The documentary included scenes taped from an al Qaeda recruitment video. The scenes were of New York & Washington being destroyed taken from Independence Day and (I think) The Day After Tomorrow.

This says so much about the mind-set of the people we're up against. They live in a fantasy world where just seeing US cities destroyed gives them a rush of blood to the head. They fantasize about being able to duplicate the feats accomplished by aliens as depicted by Hollywood. Independence Day is probably like the ultimate pornographic movie for these nut jobs.

In fact, it occurred to me that at the end of Oliver Stone's movie on September 11 I could expect to see the following in the credits: "This movie was inspired by actual events, which were inspired by fictional events".