Sunshine, Lennon and Nixon

Incredible Wife and I went to see Little Miss Sunshine last night. Turn your F-word tolerance to high because of Alan Arkin's role, and you'll enjoy a very funny movie about winners and losers ... and how the real winners are the ones who passionately and compassionately believe in those they love.

Circumstances don't create winners or losers; relationships of the heart and soul do.

There was one tacky moment, in which the parents were fighting in the room next door and the visiting brother-in-law turned on the TV to protect the teenage son from the rancor through the walls. The news comes on with Bush and Rumsfield, the son quickly turns off the TV -- and several people in the audience laughed.

Why? The Nietzsche-reading son is dark and rebellious, but he had taken a vow of silence until he was accepted at the U.S. Air Force Academy so he could learn to fly jets. Why would he turn off war news so quickly? Why would people laugh?

Because for many, Bush is funny on his face, I guess. I don't think that's a vote-getting quality, though.

The evening got off to a very bad start with a trailer for a film "by the producers of Farenheit 9/11" called The U.S. vs. John Lennon. A music-documentary featuring old film clips and current interviews with Yoko Ono, George McGovern, Walter Cronkite and G. Gordon Liddy (!), the film celebrates the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era with the clear intent of justifying and building opposition to the war in Iraq.

And, of course, it fully intends to draw parallels between Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

What we should be seeing out of Hollywood are films that recall the films of the 40s that celebrated the heroic effort against Axis fascism, and of the 50s and 60s that (occasionally) celebrated the cause of freedom against the dark forces behind the iron curtain.

But what we get is a film with a moral core no more complex than "war doesn't feel good, so it must be wrong," designed to sucker more kids into not seeing the vileness of the enemy and the lateness of the hour in this war against Islamofascism.

Prepare for the media onslaught -- this is going to be one over-hyped movie! It opens Sept. 15 -- why not Sept. 11?

Related Tags: Hollywood, Iraq, Bush, Little Miss Sunshine, The U.S. vs. John Lennon