Scott Foundas apparently thinks the MTV demographic is too dumb to notice Stop-Loss is about Iraq:
Paramount, the studio that produced Stop-Loss …has gone out of its way to keep the words “Iraq” and “war” out of the movie’s ad campaign‚Äîeven trying to put the breaks on potentially beans-spilling reviews like this one.
Whoa! spoiler alert there, Scotty! Stop-Loss is about Iraq, you say? Never woulda guessed from the saturation advertising of, um, soldiers in desert camo and stuff. Way to “spill the beans” there, friendo. And yet Foundas believes the same target audience he belittles are so informed that they’ve seen all the Vietnam movies like The Deer Hunter and Coming Home, as “the film so effectively reconstitutes those Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move,” and therefore we’ll be oh-so-bored with the following tiresome drudgery:
Peirce’s soldiers come back to the good old U.S. of A.‚Äîsome upright, some on wheels. On cue, they begin to go a little bit crazy, picking bar fights, convulsing with night terrors. Not long after, one GI decides to blow his own head off, another voluntarily re-enlists, and a third goes AWOL.
And “on cue,” critics like Scott Foundas dismiss the movie as (*yawn*) been-there-done-that. How awful that Foundas must endure the hardship of seeing history repeat itself, as he sits on his ass through Vietnam and then is required to sit on his now-even-wider ass through the Iraq War. Or — correction — sits on his wide ass through a movie about the Iraq War, because it’s obvious Foundas learned all he needed to know about solidiers and war from sitting through movies about Vietnam.
And whatever bores the hell out Scott Foundas can’t possibly be worth the time of kids from the actual generation who’ll have to go fight in this fucking war, while Foundas carps on and on about how the movie isn’t ballsy and gung-ho enough:
Like Coming Home, it doesn’t oppose the war at hand per se; it objects uniformly to all wars that leave our fighting men in various states of physical and psychological paralysis. It’s a work of blanket pacifism.
Because, yeah, what a crap message, huh? So hey, MTV kids, don’t bother. Nothing to learn here, that you didn’t already learn from Vietnam. You know, before you were born…
Fully 1/3 of Foundas review is devoted to plowing Stop-Loss under the tank treads of Vietnam before he finally gets around to mentioning the movie at hand. And then he concedes:
Following a nerve-fraying firefight in a narrow Tikrit alleyway, the movie really springs to life once it touches down deep in the heart of Texas
and finally ends with this:
Stop-Loss is undeniably some kind of achievement. Five years into Vietnam, American movies had scarcely begun to grapple with what was going on “over there”; at the same point in the Iraq campaign, they’ve already segued from reportage to outrage to something like contemplation. That may make Stop-Loss a necessary link in the bridge from Michael Moore to the eventual Iraq II equivalent of Three Kings. And for that, I salute it.
“…for that I salute it… after I shit all over it,” he forgot to add, the same way he pisses all over the sacrifice of the boys who are trapped in the hell-hole Foundas can barely stand to think about for the length of one piss-ant review.
whew, what a slog, 5 long years of death, destruction and ruined lives, boiled down to 108 minutes. How exhausting and pointless, right Scotty?
Next time save your canned history-lesson-in-a-nutshell, and stick to reviewing the movie, Foundas — instead of sharing the war stories of your trials and tribulations as a critic fighting the evildoers of Paramount — and maybe your column will be worth sitting through.