May 22 2007
Unfortunate
I think this whole thing is unfortunate. I used to have great respect and admiration for Danny Glover. His politics was generally much more to the Left than my own, but I didn’t begrudge him that. But this story coming out of the Guardian is just… Well, what can you say to it. The picture just about says it all, doesn’t it?
Venezuela is to give the American actor Danny Glover almost $18m (£9m) to make a film about a slave uprising in Haiti, with President Hugo Chávez hoping the historical epic will sprinkle Hollywood stardust on his effort to mobilise world public opinion against imperialism and western oppression.
The Venezuelan congress said it would use the proceeds from a recent bond sale with Argentina to finance Glover’s biopic of Toussaint Louverture, an iconic figure in the Caribbean who led an 18th-century revolt in Haiti.
It will also give seed money for a film version of The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez’s novel about the last days of Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of South America from Spanish colonialism.
Glover, 60, who starred with Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon series, and more recently with Eddie Murphy in the film DreamGirls, is a civil rights activist and supporter of Mr Chávez’s radical leftwing policies.
A document from the congress’s finance commission said the culture ministry would be a partner with Glover and give $17.8m for “scripts, production costs, wardrobe, lighting, transport, makeup and the creation of the whole creative and administrative platform”.
The project could mark a breakthrough for Villa del Cine, a new government-funded studio outside the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, which is part of Mr Chávez’s effort to combat what he sees as American cultural hegemony.
You can read the rest here.
hmmm, the devil is always in the details as Danny may soon learn. “A document from the congress’s finance commission said the culture ministry would be a partner with Glover and give $17.8m for “scripts, production costs, wardrobe, lighting, transport, makeup AND THE CREATION OF THE WHOLE CREATIVE AND ADMINISTRATIVE PLATFORM”.”
Will Mr. Glover appreciate it when his creative process becomes the victim in a Spanish bull run with El Presidente? How do you say, “Death to America and their capitalist dogs!” in Spanish?
I don’t think Danny will have a problem with that. Neither am I suprised. Just more crap from the left. We can now official add Glover to the kool-aid category.
Danny Glover has been listed in the kool-aid category for quite some time but unfortunately embracing and collaborating with Chavez puts him in the quisling category, and that’s a whole other level, or one might say a deeper circle of Dante’s real estate. Chavez brew of nationalism and socialism, and his eradication of democratic institutions and conversion of private property to the state, brings to mind another similar amalgam that brought ruin to Europe a few decades ago.
zhombre,
my thoughts exactly. I just don’t think Danny realizes how far into the Peter Principle he has sunk. If he thinks he will have any artistic control (artists always screech about that) he is sadly mistaken. It’s a whole new level of self-destruction in the Dante video game as vag points out.
I have a feeling Chavez and Glover will be on the same page. They both suffer from BDS after all. Maybe Danny should just move there if it’s so much better than the USA…
BDS may subside when Bush leaves office, but the destruction of Venezuelan liberty, property and economy will continue unabated as long as Chavez holds power and that country will become a Latin American Zimbabwe. The neo-fascism of petty caudillos like Chavez, abetted and even celebrated by useful idiots like Glover, is going to pile up a lot of corpses.