Maureen Dowd, "The Oscar for Best Fabrication": In Search of Hollywood Reality?

My wife and I rarely can agree on a film that we are both willing to see, and ordinarily my youngest son is given the task of accompanying me to the movies and elbowing me if I snore too loudly. Don't get me wrong: I love the movies and the chance to escape reality for two hours, and I have a large collection of DVDs to boot. Also, when I need a vacation day, I enjoy shutting off my cell phone and appearing in a commercial, which involves absolutely no thought on my part. However, given that I am more often than not sleep deprived, place me in the darkness of a movie theater, allow me to sink into a warm cushy seat, and I will be snoozing within minutes.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "The Oscar for Best Fabrication" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/dowd-the-oscar-for-best-fabrication.html?_r=0), Maureen Dowd writes about the historical inaccuracies of three recent history-based films which have proven big box office hits: "Argo," "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Lincoln":

"The affable and talented Ben Affleck has admitted that [the climax of 'Argo'], with Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers jumping in a jeep, chasing the plane down the runway and shooting at it, was fabricated for excitement.

. . . .

'Zero Dark Thirty,' 'based on firsthand accounts of actual events,' has been faulted for leaving the impression that torture was instrumental in the capture of Osama.

. . . .

Joe Courtney, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut, recently wrote to Steven Spielberg to complain that 'Lincoln' falsely showed two of Connecticut’s House members voting 'Nay' against the 13th Amendment for the abolition of slavery."

I didn't see "Argo." The ongoing horrors of today's Iran (the stoning to death of women for alleged adultery, the hanging of homosexuals, the brutal oppression of Kurds and Baha'is, and the list goes on) are just too real for me, and I'm just not ready for a depiction of how the CIA outfoxed the Revolutionary Guard when the mullahs, in hot pursuit of their first atomic bomb, are currently making a sap out of Obama.

"Zero Dark Thirty"? I was impressed by what I managed to see and will buy the DVD to review the scenes that I missed.

"Lincoln"? An entirely different matter. I hate to be the first to whisper "the king has no clothes," but I thought the film was a stinker. Have another look at photographs of Lincoln at the beginning and end of America's Civil War, and there is no missing the distance between Daniel Day-Lewis's generally affable depiction of the 16th president of the United States and the depression-wracked reality of the haunted human being. I couldn't buy into it.

But then, I've never sought reality from Hollywood and have only asked for a few blessed moments of escapism.

[No need to call, Tony. The mullahs already want my head.]