Ed Pearce of the Lexington Herald-Leader, August 16, 1998, voices a different complaint:We viewed the movie "Saving Private Ryan" as a family last weekend. As usual, Steven Spielberg aptly depicts a message of morality with his themes of the vast brutality and the lasting impact of war. However another sub-message tarnishes his pedestal of morality.
The "ugly woman in the barn" story and the "double E cup breast size" story propagate the myth that women are valued solely on breast size and beauty.
Single lines with such messages can be heard in just about every Hollywood movie. Thoughtless lines in films, thrown at us under the guise of hilarity, reach deep into the psyches of our girls and remain as unhealing abuses.
When will the constant stream of subtle, mean messages about women end? When will our society start treating women better?
How dare these people now prate that guns don't kill people? How dare they demean the sacrifice of the men who fell to the guns that day so that they might have the right to stand now and spout the indecency that guns do not kill people?What was killing our men that day there on the beach, tearing them apart, ending their lives, their hopes and dreams, blasting away their futures? Do they not deserve the truth of how they died?
It was guns...
[Ed.: Esquire had a different take on the film, declaring that it deserves "the Leni Riefenstahl Award for Rabid Nationalism." "Reverent of authority, contemptuous of dissent," it's "the kind of film the Germans would've made if they'd won the war."]
