War of the Words

There's a really entertaining -- and by entertaining I mean kind of silly -- fight going on right now between Roger Ebert and the dingbats over at Breitbart's Big Hollywood site. Apparently, Big Hollywood has taken issue with Ebert's overwhelmingly negative review of Battle: Los Angeles, saying that his problem with the movie stems less from its not being all that good than it does from some sort of deeply ingrained, liberal elitist hatred of the U.S. military on the part of the reviewer.

Yeah, they're that crazy over at Big Hollywood.

The initial volley at Ebert was fired by BH's John Nolte, who has a history of being one of the dumbest fucking people currently paid to put his fingers to a computer keyboard, and it casts him as a snob for not loving every second of Battle: LA's nearly two hours of truly impressive explosions and really horrendous writing. Nolte writes: "The Left’s totalitarian streak does not end with politics. It extends to everything, including alien invasion flicks." Ebert responded by tweeting, "Aliens attack from outer space, Marines defend us. Seems OK to me."

But the interesting thing is the notion that the Big Hollywood crowd has claimed Battle: LA as its own, ostensibly because at face value the movie is all kinds of Call of Duty and "semper fi!" But if it weren't for the fact that looking beneath the surface of this kind of movie would be an exercise in ridiculousness, you could easily make the argument that Battle: LA is actually an allegory for our imperial adventures overseas -- you know, the ones where we go in with overwhelming force, crush the resistance and install our own people, all in the name of making sure we have access to that region's natural resource: oil. Once again, I really don't think the writers of Battle: LA thought that far, especially considering how awful the basics of the script are -- the dialogue in particular -- but it's kind of amusing to watch Nolte rally around what's actually a pretty average movie and use it as an excuse to play politics and once again attack one of his favorite targets: Ebert.

Does everything with these idiots have to come down to right versus left? Jesus, that kind of thinking has just got to get exhausting after a while.

By the way, Battle: LA isn't a bad movie at all; it's just a dumb movie, but if you go into it understanding that it's basically going to be a two-hour video game, you'll probably enjoy it.