rigorousintuition.ca

"Act of Valor"

2/24/12

"Starring Active Duty Navy Seals"

Just saw the commercial for this on TV during (naturally) a football game.

Looks like a big hollywood action movie.

About an unimaginably horrible terrorist plot! OMG the scary terrorists this time are led by a sleazy-looking greaseball with long hair! And they're coming to our shores and sneaking into the Homeland!

And only the big white guys with the crewcuts can save the day.

Wow.

You really have to see this commercial to believe it. It is, simply, in-your-face propaganda.

I seriouusly thought it was a recruiting commercial at first and had to back it up and watch it again to realize it's advertising an actual movie.

Act of Valor Running Four TV Spots During Super Bowl XLVI

Relativity Media announced today that it will promote the Bandito Brothers' upcoming intense action-thriller Act of Valor, which stars an elite group of active-duty Navy SEALs in a fictionalized composite of actual events, during NBC's nationally televised coverage of Super Bowl XLVI on February 5, 2012. Four 30-second unique Act of Valor commercials, featuring exclusive content, will run throughout the program including two spots that will air during the pre-game, one spot in game during the fourth quarter and one spot in the post-game show.

http://www.movieweb.com/news/act-of-val ... -bowl-xlvi

Bold is mine.

Yikes.

Neon, I just saw that you and I posted about this apparently at the same time!

Did you SEE that commercial???

Unreal.

I was gonna go look for a link now for that commercial if I can.

{SIGH} Yeah, I saw the commercial, prolly the exact same time as you did. Mrs. Neon and I were doing some channel surfing and landed on the Packers/Giants game...then the ad came on. Soon as the commercial ended, I searched for the movie's website (which wouldn't load) and found the "movieweb" article instead.

Sheesh. It sure didn't do much for my outlook.

From the Wikipedia page:

Act of Valor began as a recruitment video for the U.S. military's Naval Special Warfare Command. In 2007, Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh of Bandido Brothers Production filmed a video for the Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen which led the Navy to allow them to use SEALs for Act of Valor. None of the SEALs' names will appear in the credits of the film.

Easy as 1,2,3... (or rather 3,2,1)

erm.. what the F*does this mean... "fictionalized composite of actual events" ?

maybe "anything we want as long as it looks convincing and we can hang it on the story"?, it's just blatant propaganda, right?

Neon LX : " I searched for the movie's website (which wouldn't load) " ... seems the advertising agency did their job, a DOS-by-overhit deserves a spanking big bonus for someone.

nice work if you can get it

Apparently a contest was held to see who could stuff the most cliches into a two minute trailer. The winner:

So he says a perfunctory goodbye to his bland blonde wife & daughters and walks off cheerfully, and then he has a very warm conversation with his smokin' new commanding officer ("You gonn' be a good Dad.") and the commanding officer smiles knowingly, but not unkindly.

Then he joins his buff new buddies, and then all the guys go off in a gang, bonding closely and sweating heavily and killing dark men for the Fatherland, pausing only to rescue a fairly smokin' dark woman, but chastely. ("Ma'am, I'm takin' you home.")

What does it all mean? Lord knows, but there's certainly nothing gay about it. No way.

Is propaganda only "brazen?"
Or is it more pervasive and subtle, too?

What's the science?

smoking since 1879 wrote:

erm.. what the F*does this mean... "fictionalized composite of actual events" ?

I believe that since 1492 this term has been interpreted as "History."

Strength, courage, loyalty, dexterity, quick-wittedness, the ability to swim and run and climb -- these are all indubitably fine things, but I don't see anything essentially manly about any of them. (Ask my grandmother.) What pisses me off above all is seeing all these undoubted virtues served up as mere prerequisites for the supreme task of killing remorselessly in the service of the Fatherland.

Swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, hard as steel.

You'd go to jail or get bombarded with fucking drones if you wanted to make a mirror movie about terrorists, using real terrorists to tell the same story. Racism, war, stupidity is running thick and long any more. And I suppose it always has. Look for cinematic treatments of this era in 2022 much like we were given Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket et al. Still won't change a damned thing.

Do these assholes even think for a minute about being sincere to life and those who live it on the same planet as they during the same time and era? It is an HONOR to live with self same people who share the same planet at the same time. Murdering people you have never met and live thousands of miles away from is fucked and bullshit -- any human should know this from proper liberal upbringing. QED.

MacCruiskeen wrote:So he says a perfunctory goodbye to his bland blonde wife & daughters and walks off cheerfully, and then he has a very warm conversation with his smokin' new commanding officer ("You gonn' be a good Dad.") and the commanding officer smiles knowingly, but not unkindly.

Then he joins his buff new buddies, and then all the guys go off in a gang, bonding closely and sweating heavily and killing dark men for the Fatherland, pausing only to rescue a fairly smokin' dark woman, but chastely. ("Ma'am, I'm takin' you home.")

What does it all mean? Lord knows, but there's certainly nothing gay about it. No way.

Not that there would be anything wrong about it if it were gay.

Srsly, I think this is the problem I have with the soft-core-porn depiction of overly-muscly gay guys, and why I find conventional gay culture so off-putting. It reminds me too much of our military culture.

Yeah, 82_28..."inhuman" comes to mind.

Murdering people you have never met and live thousands of miles away from is fucked and bullshit

Never could understand the appeal of that, personally. I must be wired "wrong".