To the barricades! Mainstream American film strikes back!
Anxious that his product not be rejected as pro-American propaganda, George Lucas has put a few obvious slaps at George Bush in his last Star Wars film:
(At the Cannes premiere) there were murmurs at the parallels being drawn between Bush's administration and the birth of the space opera's evil Empire.
Baddies' dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts being needed to bring "peace and stability" to the movie's universe, mainly through a fabricated war, set the scene.
And then came the zinger, with the protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, saying just before becoming Darth Vader: "You are either with me -- or you are my enemy."
To the Cannes audience, often sympathetic to anti-Bush messages in cinema as last year's triumph here of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 attested, that immediately recalled Bush's 2001 ultimatum, "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror."
However, another film at Cannes had the opposite message:
George Bush and Tony Blair will whoop for joy. A strongly pro-war film has been premiered at the Cannes film festival -- and it comes from Iraq.
The main part of Hiner Saleem's Kilometre Zero, premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or, is set in 1988 against the backdrop of the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Kurds at the hands of Saddam's cousin, "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid.
The Hollywood Reporter said: "Commercial prospects are negligible unless the Republican Party gets into the film distribution racket."
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