At last a tirade

I haven't been able to have a really good tirade in a while, so here she blows. Recently, a couple of friends saw Flyboys and hated it. That's fine, war movies are not for all of us; however, these same two saw MI-III and loved it. On the surface, that seems normal; if historical war films aren't your cup of tea, maybe insane action flicks are. I liked both. But what got me was the criticisms of Flyboys: too long, so many stupid cliches, so predictable, the relationship between the rich white guy and the poor black guy was unbearable, so many times to groan...and I realized that if I were to make a critique of MI-III, all those things would be on the list. True, I was laughing wholeheartedly through my groans, and the final revelation about who the real bad guys were and what they were up to wasn't entirely expected. On the other hand, that same final revelation was so dumb that I forgot I didn't see it coming. Aha! Our government is evil and underhanded AGAIN and tries to frame poor Middle Eastern countries, selling them dirty bombs and the cleaning their clocks so that it can "do what it does best; clean up, infrastructure, democracy". Excuse me while I go throw up; I find treasonous statements unpalatable. Oh, and guess what...the white guy, is the bad guy, he was just framing that poor, righteous black man. Because he was black. Wow. See, the reason I would in most moods prefer the aforementioned war movie is because it is heroic without having to bash the mother country; there is romance without descending into gratuitous immorality (although that might have been different if they had cast Tom Cruise as the leading man...I think it's in his contract or something); and in some ways, totally new and non-cliched because it's a war movie that isn't screechingly anti-war. It chooses to celebrate heroic virtue, what are the odds. So, I liked MI-III and everything, but am sort of sad that it's more the mood the country finds itself in, instead of the other film. With that theme music, how can you resist...