OUTRAGE – AT 10:31 A.M. ET:  What's left of the film industry is about to come out with a movie that insults and distorts the life of Margaret Thatcher, one of Britain's great prime ministers and a third of the triumvirate of Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II who changed the world in the 1980s.   From London's Daily Mail:

Friends of Margaret Thatcher last night expressed their revulsion at a new film that shows her having nightmares about the miners’ strike and the Falklands War, while her late husband Denis appears as a ghost in a pink turban raging at her -‘insufferable’ selfishness.

Viewers invited to an early screening of the film, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as the former Prime Minister and Jim Broadbent as Sir Denis, were aghast at the way that it mocks her frail condition in recent years.
One called it ‘insulting’. Another said: ‘I didn’t come here to see a film about granny going mad.’

And...

Conservative MP Conor Burns, one of her closest confidants, said last night: ‘Any portrayal of Margaret Thatcher that does not show her as one of the titans of British politics in the 20th Century will be a travesty.
‘The idea that Denis would ever have been cruel to her is twisted and untrue. They were devoted.’

COMMENT:  Some years ago the fashionable crowd in Hollywood made a film about the Reagans that was so bad, and biased, that CBS refused to show it.  You'd think Hollywood would have learned.

However, the main objective of many in what passes for the film industry is to be on the A-party list.  To be part of the political in-crowd.  To have Bill Clinton put his arm on your shoulder.  The invitation is, today, the stuff of Hollywood dreams.  True history is distorted, and "artistic freedom" will be the defense.  The "filmmakers" will be feted on the left, and they'll have their 15 minutesa of fame.

Some movie makers still can make fine historical films, as "The King's Speech," last year's Oscar winner for best picture, showed.  It's too bad the makers of the Thatcher film chose to go downscale.

August 21, 2011