EMAIL OF THE DAY

“I enjoyed the item on Viggo Mortensen, who is a terrific actor. But I wonder if it ever occurs to many of these Hollywood types that there is a certain irony (if not hypocrisy) in the sheer number of them who take on roles that stress the need to fight for things like honor, loyalty, freedom and country, and their public stance that all war is evil, and the Iraq war in particular – a war that is being fought to help an oppressed citizenry take back their country from an evil and brutal dictator – is wrong and unnecessary.
In just the past few months, we’ve had Mortensen once again playing the fearless warrior Aragorn in “Lord of the Rings,” Tom Cruise as a Civil War soldier who finds himself drawn to the warrior ways of the samurai in “The Last Samurai,” Russell Crowe as a brave and charismatic ship’s captain in “Master and Commander” and even Tommy Lee Jones as an avenging grandfather who battles renegade Indians in order to save his kidnapped granddaughter. You have to wonder if actors, as they’re playing these characters, ever stop to think about the implications of the stories they’re helping to tell. Do they ever question their “war is always bad, violence is never the answer” ideology? Do they perhaps stop to think that, as these movies vividly demonstrate, evil does exist in the world and sometimes the only way to combat it is for good and honorable men (and women) to use violence to overcome it?” – more feedback on the Letters Page.