You've Come a Long Way, Buddy
The most expensive movie in Turkish history is Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, which depicts a military clash between Turks and Americans. The AP reports:
The latest in a new genre of Turkish popular culture that vilifies the United States, a Turkish movie shows American soldiers in Iraq crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.
They randomly machine-gun dozens of people to death, shoot the groom in the head and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison -- where a Jewish-American doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
The doctor is played by -- I am not making this up -- Gary Busey. Billy Zane appears as a bloodthirsty soldier.
Comments:
1. At last we know what the career rung below I'm with Busey looks like. Let's hope the culture warriors will greet Busey's participation in this project not with anger but with the compassion he clearly deserves.
2. If Gov. Schwarzenegger would just create more tax incentives to shoot movies at home, they could have made this in California and created jobs for hard-working American anti-Americans.
3. This might actually be better than the last Turkish movie I saw.
Oh -- and why would audiences in Turkey be so angry at America that they're receptive to this sort of yarn? Funny story, that. Seems the movie opens with a sequence based on real events:
On July 4, 2003, in northern Iraq, troops from the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade raided and ransacked a Turkish special forces office, threw hoods over the heads of 11 officers and held them for more than two days.
The Americans said they had been looking for Iraqi insurgents and unwittingly rounded up the Turks because they were not in uniform. Still, the incident damaged Turkish-U.S. relations and hurt Turkish national pride.
The film gets reviewed here. Busey courts B'nai B'rith support by declaring he loves the sound of Jewish screams here. Fan site for the real Buddy Holly here.
