Tag: Angelina Jolie

FROM THE PAGES OF AYN RAND: Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie and the great Sergio Leone

The first time I was on television was on a commercial for the restaurant I worked for when I was only 16 years old.  I was a part of the filming and of setting up some of the shots and it gave me the opportunity to work with a crew from Channel 19.  The commercial just happened to air that week during “Tough Guy Week” where nightly they played movies from the toughest characters in Hollywood, people like Steve McQueen, Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and best of all, Clint Eastwood.  I had been familiar with Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns before, but on the night that my commercial aired it was the same night that For A Few Dollars More played on television, so I ended up watching the entire film so that I could see how the commercial turned out.

The “Man With No Name” character in the Sergio Leone westerns—the trilogy A Fist Full of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, Bad, and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood was a benchmark in tough guy films.  There had never been another character like the one that Eastwood played in those westerns in all of human history—including stage plays from the Renaissance.  Eastwood’s character was a brand new concept that few understood at the time—but loved.  That love continues 50 years later and has had an impact on cinema that has only escalated.

Eastwood would continue to work this personification of a male Übermensch conceived by Leone for several more films—particularly High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Sudden Impact.    To a smaller degree Eastwood played the same role in the contemporary comedy Every Which Way But Loose as a bare knuckle fighter.  Eastwood’s characters were so popular that they spilled over into other films like Star Wars where the characters of Han Solo and Boba Fett were direct embodiments of the Leone westerns that were only 10 years old at the time.  Kevin Costner would take on a similar Übermensch role in The Bodyguard which was the romance drama of 1992 that women swooned over.  Arnold Schwarzenegger would adopt Eastwood’s screen presence in films like The Terminator, Commando, and Conan the Barbarian, and following Eastwood’s movie production pattern at Warner Brothers did a comedy with Danny DeVitto called Twins—where his  Übermensch character could be played off the hapless antics of a much smaller man.

Progressives in Hollywood of course hated all this attention on these tough guy films and the actors who played them.  In 1989 Tim Burton tried to make a common everyday guy into a tough guy with his Micheal Keaton Batman film which attempted to stop the trend of these superhuman character films that were out of reach for the common man.  Progressives did not want these Übermensch types to steer the American public away from their social messages of interconnected reliance on each other, feminist causes, and sexual experimentation in gender roles–so they tried to get the situation under control.  The most obvious attempt was in the Batman films by Warner Brothers.  While the first film was visually stimulating, the sequel fell apart leading Val Kilmer to play in the 1995 version of a Batman reboot.  The movie was good, but Kilmer wanted nothing further to do with the role—likely from internal pressure within the Hollywood community to stop making Übermensch films.  The next Batman film was with the progressive George Clooney playing the caped crusader, which bombed and was a terrible film filmed with progressive slanted messages—which the public rejected.  This would cause Hollywood to return grudgingly back to the Übermensch concept by plucking the older material directly from comic books.  There was some experimentation with Spiderman to take the Übermensch concept and make him more altruistic which fell apart after Spiderman 3 in 2007 completely imploded on itself as Hollywood had lost the formula.  Christopher Nolan would dig deep into the roots of the Übermensch and get it right which has launched the current superhero parade of films from Ironman, The Avengers, The Hulk, Superman and all the good stuff that’s coming.

Meanwhile James Bond went from an obvious Übermensch in the late seventies and early eighties to a much more “progressive” and less secure secret agent in the 90s which nearly destroyed the character when Timothy Dalton took control after Roger Moore and showed that Bond wasn’t always so sure of himself—which audiences didn’t like.  The Bond franchise is still struggling to find itself as fans still love the old Roger Moore, Sean Connery version of James Bond over the newer—less sure of themselves—James Bonds.  Personally I find the new Bond films by Daniel Craig to be nearly unwatchable.  I enjoy them for the stunts, but the Übermensch Bond is not there.  Progressives love the new Bond and promote it actively—but it just doesn’t take to the American consciousness.

Then there is Quentin Tarantino who loved the old Leone films as much as I did and resurrected the Übermensch concept with a new spin to appease his producer Harvey Weinstein—he cast the lead as a woman and gave the origin for the special mystical power of the Übermensch to the East as a tribute to martial art films from the past.  The result was a fun romp through a bloody series of films where the heroine Uma Thurman was essentially playing Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” character from the Leone films.  It doesn’t matter in the least that Thurman’s character was a woman—what matters is that she was an Übermensch.  Angelina Jolie would take the Übermensch type of character into her portrayal of Tomb Raider where she played the video game character Lara Croft.  To this day even though critics panned the film as not very good, Jolie is known as Lara Croft even though she has made dozens of very good films.  It was her confidence—and Übermensch character in Tomb Raider that fans will always remember about her.

So what is the point of this little history of films produced by Hollywood?  Well, most of these stories lean back on the Leone films which were real breakthroughs at the time and indicated that mankind changed forever.  Human beings want their Übermensch in spite of what political or social forces wish to acknowledge.  And the first filmmaker to really get it right was Sergio Leone.  Without him, it is unlikely that any of the above would have happened—and Hollywood would be just another industry failing in America under progressive leadership.  Instead, Disney now has control of the Star Wars franchise and the world just spent a week wondering if Harrison Ford’s broken leg from the new Episode VII set would hinder his ability to resurrect his Übermensch Han Solo once again.  Disney is rumored to be planning a Boba Fett film which will essentially be a science fiction spaghetti western inspired directly from Sergio Leone—and it will make a ton of money—and progressives will be left scratching their heads wondering why.

So let me give you the secret dear reader.  Let me explain to you the reason why this trend has emerged and given birth to a comic book culture that is taking over today’s youth steering them away from the pacifism of progressivism.  When Ayn Rand spent approximately twenty years writing two books—one, The Fountainhead and two, Atlas Shrugged, she took Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and completed the work that the German philosopher was unable to due to madness.  In The Fountainhead was the first real attempt to provide an Übermensch to ever occur as a fully functioning character.  The novel published in 1943 was part of a growing trend for human beings to grapple with the Übermensch concept.  In just 1938 the first Superman comic was produced based on a 1933 fanzine trying to take the overman idea as proposed by the socialist George Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche’s direct influence of Hitler’s National Socialism and complete the destructive nature of the incomplete philosophic principle.  The Superman comic was a direct reaction to the type of sentiment which led to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal ideals in America and had a bit of a liberal spin on it.  Ayn Rand further flushed out the Übermensch concept and put them on the pages of her novel, The Fountainhead—which to me is one of the greatest novels of all time.  Rand would then further perfect the concept into Atlas Shrugged which 60 years later is still selling like French Fries at McDonald’s.  It was in these two books that the Übermensch found the right philosophic balance and emerged as a new way of thinking.  It was this concept which found itself into the Sergio Leone films thus inspiring modern Hollywood in ways that would be inconceivable otherwise.  If not for Ayn Rand, her early work as a screenwriter for Cecil B. Deville, her casual associations with Walt Disney, and John Wayne and her deep work in philosophy with the fresh eyes of an immigrant who had seen the worst that communism had to offer—the movie For A Few Dollars More would have never happened, and likely Clint Eastwood would have remained an obscure actor doing bit parts on television shows.

Without Ayn Rand’s fleshing out the concept of the Übermensch there would not have been a Star Wars, there would not have been an Arnold Schwarzenegger in film, and Kill Bill would have never even gained the ability to be made.   Without question there would be attempts, but they would have failed.  When direction was given on how Han Solo should get up out of his chair after killing Greedo in the cantina, or how Boba Fett was supposed to walk down a hall, reference was pointed back to Clint Eastwood—“do it like the characters in the Leone films.”  And it was Ayn Rand who invented the type of Übermensch who appeared for the first time in The Fountainhead so that Clint Eastwood could have some sort of reference on how such a character should behave—since one had never been seen before in the history of the world.  Ayn Rand took the speculative theory of what an Übermensch was supposed to be and fleshed it out in her novels.  Filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood then brought that Übermensch concept to Hollywood which has changed the world.

There is no going back now.  It is only a matter of time that society acknowledges their intense desire for the Übermensch.  The evidence is obvious from the intense interest in comic book films, space odysseys, and an 84-year-old Clint Eastwood who is still tougher than men a fraction of his age.  It’s not the muscle which produce the toughness, it’s in the mind—the beholding of the Übermensch concept—something that became very real to me the first time I really came to understand it watching my first television commercial on Channel 19 during “Tough Guy Week.”  The world has been forever changed for the better in a tug-of-war between the Übermensch and the progressives who despise having to even hold a rope against the strength of such characters.  They have no choice.  Their years of progressive philosophy inspired by Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx are coming to an end in failure.  What is coming are the philosophies of the Übermensch brought to man’s mind through films inspired directly from the pages of Ayn Rand.

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Rich Hoffman

  www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Do You Believe in Spies: Review of the film SALT and how sleeper cells have corrupted America

A society’s mythology is absolutely essential to the sustainability of any culture. And in American culture, it is our movies that communicate the concerns of our population. Love stories tell the stories of the heart, comedies tickle the social taboos not realized in everyday life, and adventure films take us to places most of our mundane lives cannot transport us to without wrecking ourselves. Within that genre of action-adventure films comes spy stories, which are attempts by the creative community to ease the tensions we all feel when dealing with a globe of competing enemies seeking to undermine each other in the eternal quest for victory. For the free world, James Bond, the master spy set the standard for millions of men who looked to the ultimate man, who never panicked while trying to defend the free world from world domineering elites seeking to enslave the world. For me the start of Moonraker is one of the best openings of a James Bond film.

Since the golden age of Bond, at the height of the cold war in the late 70’s and early 80’s, James Bond has become softer, more progressively complex and has lost much of what made him the gem of Ian Fleming’s books. Daniel Craig’s version of Bond in the last two films presents a guy that is ultimately more realistic, but destroys much of the mythology of what the character of James Bond represents.

I have not enjoyed many spy films for about a decade, including the Borne Identity films until my wife coaxed me into watching Salt with Angelina Jolie. If there is one actor in Hollywood that my wife likes the most, it’s Angelina Jolie. So for her sake I agreed to watch it. By the end of the movie, I was glad I did.

Not only were the car crashes and action scenes fantastic, but the story was extremely compelling. It’s a topic that I had been thinking about a lot lately, since I have learned that labor unions were founded by communists, and many layers of our current government seem to be working against constitutional principles. In fact, it seems George Soros reminded me of almost every James Bond villain as I was growing up, but in real society saying such a thing is ridiculous, because in our culture, our myths tell our stories, but in politics, we put a layer of cake icing over the reality and avoid talking about the obvious. In such places the villains of our age hide in plain sight. When we see movies, we dare to ask the questions, but when the movie is over, we return back to our political reality and stop daring to ask the hard questions. However, in the film Salt, the uncomfortable question is addressed; are there sleeper cells in the United States, and are they at our highest levels of government? I think they are based on the videos I’ll show you below. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that American culture has been penetrated by many enemies from many countries since World War II when America proved to the world that beating America in a war with technology is too costly, and unpredictable. America is too good at thinking outside the box so a war with America needs to happen from within, using sleeper cells of spies to not just attempt to gain intelligence, but to undermine the foundations of emotional strength America stands upon.

Sleeper cells like the group recently busted in the United States have been operating for decades in plain sight. They hide behind issues of racism, gay rights advocates, feminism, and many other liberal positions. One good way to spot the beginning of a sleeper cell is to look for groups that advocate the “Peace” sign.

Sleeper cells from the Soviet Union hid their true intentions behind the hippie movement where KGB agents became leaders of the hippie movement and advocated communism, but hid their sinister intentions behind the sign of peace. This isn’t a new strategy. Pirates of the Caribbean (not the movie, the real pirates) used to fly the flags of whatever nations ship they were attempting to attack, and once they were close enough to fire their cannons, they’d run up the “Jolly Roger.” The Trojan Horse strategy is not a unique strategy when one attacker that is inferior in power attempts to overthrow a power of superior strength.

Just like the woman at the beginning of this article, where James Bond is making out with the woman on a plane and the woman turns out to be a spy, the mythology of that scene is one we all recognize. Women make particularly dangerous spies because even intelligent men who are masters of every part of their lives tend to be vulnerable to sex. Meet Anna Chapman, real life Russian spy every bit as active as Marta Hari was.

She is considered so dangerous that she is imprisoned under solitary confinement.

Here is Anna Chapman before she was caught; it’s interesting to hear about her impression of America. There are no opportunities for a woman like her in Russia. She admits as much. In America all she has to do is use sex and she can get next to the most powerful men in American culture.

These are modern spies, but this game has been going on for a long time. Here is a former KGB agent who gives an interview in 1983 about ideological subversion and how it was installed in public schools. This is an actual KGB agent from the 60’s and 70’s who defected from the Soviet Union in favor of the freedom offered in America and the conclusion that the Soviet Union would fall under its own power. Meet Yuri Bezmenov:

Here Yuri Bezmenov teaches a class how the process of subversion is implemented to undermine America. What’s important to understand is that our local government, our school boards, councilmember’s, trustees, etc are not KGB spies. But what they often are the plants that spring from the seeds that were planted in the college courses they studied, thus the strategy is revealed. Yuri will explain the process.

Yet when such an accusation is brought up by someone like me, those in positions of authority will scorn such a statement because they will say, “that’s crazy, I was not trained by a Soviet spy! I was taught by my professors in college.” What Yuri explains is that the way to reach a majority of America’s population was to get them in school, where their parents were not around to protect the children.

Subversion of a culture is far less expensive to fight than open warfare. It’s less costly than nuclear war for sure. So, under the sign of peace, of avoiding nuclear disaster, agents penetrated American culture to eliminate the threat in a long-term strategy designed to eliminate the will to fight in the future. The Soviet Union was planning on keeping military pace with America until the generations they had infiltrated in public school had grown up and lost the will to fight. That was their goal. What they didn’t count on was that Reagan would force them to go bankrupt well before their plan could be fully realized. Yet the “Peace” sign is the direct result of Soviet sleeper agents operating in the United States and using college campuses as their pawns in the great chess game.

The Peace Sign is one of the most widely known symbols in the world, in Britain it is recognized as standing for nuclear disarmament —and in particular as the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In the United States and much of the rest of the world it is known more broadly as the peace symbol. It was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist and a graduate of the Royal College of Arts. He showed his preliminary sketches to a small group of people in the Peace News office in North London and to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, one of several smaller organizations that came together to set up CND.

Source article
http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/PeaceSymbolArticle.html

In the film Salt it is a great movie that explores the role of sleeper agents in America and does it in an entertaining way. The character of Salt is very contemporary because she is not necessarily loyal to the United States or the Soviet Union. In the end she stands for what is right, which is very, very difficult to see in a world of espionage, corruption, power grabs, and normal politics. I found the story very intriguing. I thought it was one of Jolie’s boldest performances. The film left me thinking for days after I saw it.

This next video shows that Russian spies wanted to work for the CIA. It’s the plot of SALT, but for real. The goal of spies is most often not just to uncover secrets but to undermine a culture from within.

Now, in this article I’ve focused on Russian spies because that was the plot of the film Salt. But consider that America has many enemies, all every bit as dangerous as Russia. China has spies; Iran has spies, in fact just think of how many radical Muslim elements are already functioning from within our country. That’s how 911 happened. Every major country is doing the same thing to each other, and the United Nations is absolutely unable to do anything about it, and they never will. This is because treachery is part of the human race. War will always be a part of our existence. There will always be a threat to the security of a peaceful people. Greed cannot be socially engineered out of mankind.

Gaining an advantage over an opponent is part of the human makeup. Look at what Bill Bilichick did for his team the New England Patriots when he was caught cheating to win football games, the NFL couldn’t protect other teams from a head coach looking for a competitive edge. The United Nations will never be able to stop this activity. The only protection anybody has is mutual respect, and a document like the Constitution that limits the power and reach of a government, because man is prone to corruption and subversion. And the more complicated something is, the more opportunities for spies to attempt to subvert one culture so their culture can thrive.

As for James Bond, I miss the old Bond. The new Bond is too weak, and emotional. The old Bond portrayed by Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and even at times by Pierce Bronson were welcome fantasies in a world gone mad were we could go see a movie and believe that such characters could fight the forces we feel are working against us, and be successful. Movies like the old Bond films are worth more than box office results, because they at least make people ask questions about the world around them, and even if the fictional circumstances seem far-fetched in reality, at least the skepticism is healthily exercised in the mind of the viewer. Because in reality, there is more truth than fiction and society needs to understand the possibilities expressed in popular mythology.

So if you haven’t seen Angelina Jolie’s film Salt, treat yourself to the film and enjoy yourself and the ideas it springs up. Because that is what mythology is tasked to do, is make us think. Think of even the improbable, and painful, and help it go down with a good healthy dose of action.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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