Amos - You may well be right in what you say. I was in a rather jaundiced mood when I posted above. I agree that many individual people have found their souls in the past few decades, so it wasn't individuals I was focusing on, but rather the marketing culture itself. Anyway, I'm not totally cynical...just cynical about the entertainment media for the most part. They usually fall so horribly short of what they could accomplish, and produce the same old empty, high-tech, beautifully photographed dreck.

Doug R - You're right that the old movies were full of extreme flag-waving. No argument there. What's in the newer movies that I don't like is the very unreal behaviour of the actors (especially the younger male characters...). They mouth dialogue that is totally unlike the way people behaved at the time. They act like they're in a music video. If you watch an old film like "From Here To Eternity", then you get a feel for the way people actually carried themselves back then.

I guess it's the combination of flag-waving along with total unreality that bugs me. After all, some fool like Rambo goes around slaughtering hundreds and hundreds of Vietnamese, Russians, Arabs or whomever, when you know darned well that in real life he would be dead in the first five minutes, killed by some ordinary citizen soldier. That's real war.

John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima" at least gave the impression of the actual reality of war in a pretty accurate way.

Now it all looks like some spectacular video game in which young hunks like Ben Affleck or Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise perform extremely unlikely (if not impossible) feats of derring-do at bizarre camera angles....just like a rock video or a nintendo game.

toadfrog - Point taken. Yup, civilization has been going to the dogs for the last 15,000 years or so. :-) I do think that specific societies go through cycles of maturity/immaturity...complacency...rise and fall. The problem with the present North American society is that it is glutted on consumer goods, greed, convenience, and luxury...and that seems like a sliding into decadence to me. (*** "Give me Convenience or give me Death" ***) It cannot go on indefinitely, and it's going to lead to some pretty uncomfortable adjustments eventually....for the whole world.

Tora Tora Tora (1970) was an accurate, if slow-paced film about Pearl Harbour, and it made a genuine effort to show both sides of the story.

- LH