At Steady Diet of Film, Erin has a great post about two not-so-great film recommendations that came her way via form emails from John Kerry and the ACLU. Particularly alarming (to me, anyway) is Kerry’s endorsement of Paul Haggis’ In The Valley of Elah. In the portion of the email that Erin excerpts, Kerry essentially uses rhetoric to fight rhetoric. Elah is not “an ‘anti-war’ film,” he says (his fear quotes, BTW), because that term is too “too cheap and easy and clichéd.” “No,” says Kerry. Elah “is a film about soldiers and families.” Nothing easy or clichéd about that!

To which Erin responds:

I thought [Elah] was terrible overall but the near hateful depictions of military families and PTSD were especially galling. I understand the desire to be a booster for films that address topics that are woefully misunderstood in our larger culture but getting behind films that portray soldiers with PTSD as bloodthirsty psychotic killers is not a productive step towards getting people the help they need and deserve.

And FYI Hollywood, I grew up in a military family and I spent my entire adolescence around other military families. I’ve never met a single person who made their bed (with extra the tight corners!) the way every single military person in a movie does.

It amazes me that someone like John Kerry doesn’t have a handler warning him away from endorsements of critically and politically specious films such as Haggis’. If he really wants to push the edutainment angle, why doesn’t he give a helping hand to one of the many independently produced documentaries that could really use it? If he really wants to talk about “soldiers and families,” what about Operation Homecoming, or Body of War?

On second thought, Kerry probably *should* stick to pumping shit films. I can’t imagine his endorsement would, at this point, actually do a deserving film any good.