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Anyone watched The Sound of Freedom? I did yesterday, it's very good, very gripping, and very disturbing. I'm not one to usually have tears in my eyes during a movie, but especially a parent with kids, this one definitely got me. It's based on the true story of a former FBI agent Tim Ballard, and his work in Columbia with Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit group that works to rescue children from sex trafficking. It stars Jim Caviezel (likely most well known for portraying Jesus in Passion of the Christ, though I much preferred his work on the tv show Person of Interest) as Ballard.
The media (including one segment I saw on CNN which was clutching its pearls over the movie), however, seems to be losing their minds at the movie (Which had a pretty successful opening week), declaring it 'paranoid', 'Q-Anon tinged', 'Q-Anon adjacent', etc.... because apparently child sex trafficking doesn't actually happen and is all a conspiracy theory by Q-Anon. Sounds to me like something hit a little close to home.
Here's the rant that Rolling Stone offered:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movi...ie-1234783837/
All that ranting over a movie that dares to show the reality of child human trafficking in the world. Makes me wonder what we'd see if we looked at the author's hard drive.
Then there is this shot and chaser of The Guardian and their take on Columbian child sex trafficking, versus their take on a movie literally about a true story about said sex trafficking in said country.
358388554_758573112731861_6857537829683836095_n.jpg
Meanwhile, this was how both those publications covered the pedophilic movie Cuties which actually sexually exploited real young girls:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movi...eview-1056197/
"‘Cuties’ Review: A Coming-of-Age Movie Caught in the Culture Wars
Thanks to a major marketing mistake, this award-winning French movie has been accused of sexualizing girls. It's actually a sensitive portrait of growing pains that deserves to be seen"
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...-misunderstood
"Cuties review – Netflix's controversial child exploitation film is bold, flawed - and misunderstood"
The media (including one segment I saw on CNN which was clutching its pearls over the movie), however, seems to be losing their minds at the movie (Which had a pretty successful opening week), declaring it 'paranoid', 'Q-Anon tinged', 'Q-Anon adjacent', etc.... because apparently child sex trafficking doesn't actually happen and is all a conspiracy theory by Q-Anon. Sounds to me like something hit a little close to home.
Here's the rant that Rolling Stone offered:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movi...ie-1234783837/
‘Sound Of Freedom’ Is a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms
The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer
“Based on a true story,” I heard from somewhere across the theater.
The familiar words had appeared on screen, and an elderly man had taken it upon himself to read them aloud, to the rest of a sizable audience seated for a matinee showing of the anti-child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel. For the seasoned moviegoer, this phrase is a joke — we know that cinema will stretch almost any “truth” to the breaking point — and the rank insincerity of such a pronouncement is the foundation of the prankish opening titles of Fargo. But this crowd, I could tell, would view the events depicted over the next two-plus hours as entirely literal.
Caviezel, best known for being tortured to death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has become a prominent figure on the conspiracist right, giving speeches and interviews in which he hints at an underground holy war between patriots and a sinister legion of evildoers who are harvesting the blood of children. It’s straight-up QAnon stuff, right down to his use of catchphrases like “The storm is upon us.” Here, he gets to act out some of that drama by playing a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, head of the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), in a feature film that casts the operator as a Batman-style savior for kids sold into the sex trade.
Ballard himself has dabbled in Q-adjacent conspiracy theories, such as the Wayfair trafficking hoax, while his organization has far-right affinities and a long record of distorting its botched “raids,” which rely on bizarre tactics like asking psychics where to find victims for rescue. Ballard, Caviezel, and others of their ilk had primed the public to accept Sound of Freedom as a documentary rather than delusion by fomenting moral panic for years over this grossly exaggerated “epidemic” of child sex-trafficking, much of it funneling people into conspiracist rabbit holes and QAnon communities. In short, I was at the movies with people who were there to see their worst fears confirmed.
Sound of Freedomembellishes and misrepresents their international “missions,” according to a Vice News investigation of the group.
Then you have Caviezel, bleached blond to match Ballard’s buff, clean-cut Mormon profile. Performance-wise, he’s stuck on a note of world-historical grief, either crying or staring with bloodshot eyes as he attempts to convey the scale and weight of the tragedy before him. The unambiguous hero of the piece, Ballard invokes parenthood as his motivation or an argument to get the cooperation he wants — “What if it was your daughter?” is practically his catchphrase — yet aside from a dialogue-free breakfast scene, he never interacts with his offspring. And if Mira Sorvino, who plays his wife Katherine, spent more than a day on set, you’d never know it: she’s there for all of two minutes, offering brief words of encouragement while Ballard spends weeks undercover as a louche sex tourist in Central America. She, too, evidently had a personal stake in joining this film, telling the Washington Examiner this week that she has “met so many child survivors and my heart burns for them.”
As implausible as the movie is — it invents a finale where Ballard journeys deep into a jungle alone to pluck a girl from the clutches of guerrilla militants, which he accomplishes by posing as a doctor distributing cholera vaccines — one wonders if it was extreme enough for Caviezel’s liking. The actor has taken to repeating the most grotesque falsehoods of the sprawling QAnon ideology, among them that traffickers are harvesting children’s organs and extracting the chemical compound adrenochrome from their brains before murdering them.
Compared to this nonsense, Sound of Freedom is relatively grounded in our universe. But that mainstream accessibility makes it valuable as a recruitment tool, much as generic “Save the Children” campaigns proved gateways to far-right conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of evil elites conducting blood rituals. On the QAnon message board Great Awakening this week, adherents celebrated the movie’s box-office success (it quickly made back its modest budget of around $14 million and out-earned the latest Indiana Jones sequel on July 4, its premiere date, after the franchise blockbuster had been out for several days) while crowing that “demons,” including movie theater employees annoyed by the demographic it pulled in, were miserable at their victory.
“Do you see how more powerful we are than the legacy news?” wrote one board user. “We are the news now!” On a different thread, someone attempted to prove that Donald Trump‘s endorsement of the film on Truth Social on Thursday was connected to a random Q post from 2018 (because of the time stamps on each). Some discussed efforts to get “normies” who are “in need of awakening” to see Sound of Freedom, including with the assistance of a promotional program that allows customers to buy tickets for strangers. “Crimes against children will unite us all. Eyes are opening,” read one optimistic post, while another was more emphatic still: “We are witnessing true divine intervention.”
It matters, too, that Sound of Freedom almost never saw the light of day. Completed in 2018, no studio would take it for fear of losing money, according to producer Eduardo Verastegui — with Netflix and Amazon among those who passed. It finally found distribution thanks to Angel Studios, a Utah-based media company that crowdfunds original films and TV series that “amplify light.” (Although founded by Mormon brothers who originally created a content-filtering service to prevent children from seeing violence, nudity and profanity, it claims no formal church affiliation.)
Therefore, to its boosters, the movie checks many satisfying boxes at once. Caviezel, a devout Catholic allegedly blacklisted by the entertainment industry, back for a mythology-burnishing biopic of Ballard; a call to action in an imagined global war against sexual predators; a blow struck at the heart of “woke” Hollywood, the den of iniquity that snubbed it and (lest we forget) is thought to produce the wealthy deviants who serve as villains in this story.
Meaning it will surely do no good to point out Sound of Freedom‘s hackneyed white savior narrative. Or its wildly immature assumption that abused and traumatized children go right back to normal once the bad guys are in handcuffs. Or that it enforces stereotypes about trafficking that Angel Studios itself says are less than accurate. To the film’s intended viewers, these cannot be flaws — they’re the whole appeal.
There is visible suffering all around us in America. There are poor and unhoused, and people brutalized or killed by police. There are mass shootings, lack of healthcare, climate disasters. And yet, over and over, the far-right turns to these sordid fantasies about godless monsters hurting children. Now, as in the 1980s Satanic panic, they won’t even face the fact that most kids who suffer sexual abuse do so not at the hands of a shadowy cabal of strangers, but at the hands of a family member. To know thousands of adults will absorb Sound of Freedom, this vigilante fever dream, and come away thinking themselves better informed on a hidden civilizational crisis… well, it’s profoundly depressing. Worse still, they’ll want to spread the word.
The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer
“Based on a true story,” I heard from somewhere across the theater.
The familiar words had appeared on screen, and an elderly man had taken it upon himself to read them aloud, to the rest of a sizable audience seated for a matinee showing of the anti-child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel. For the seasoned moviegoer, this phrase is a joke — we know that cinema will stretch almost any “truth” to the breaking point — and the rank insincerity of such a pronouncement is the foundation of the prankish opening titles of Fargo. But this crowd, I could tell, would view the events depicted over the next two-plus hours as entirely literal.
Caviezel, best known for being tortured to death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, has become a prominent figure on the conspiracist right, giving speeches and interviews in which he hints at an underground holy war between patriots and a sinister legion of evildoers who are harvesting the blood of children. It’s straight-up QAnon stuff, right down to his use of catchphrases like “The storm is upon us.” Here, he gets to act out some of that drama by playing a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, head of the anti-sex trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), in a feature film that casts the operator as a Batman-style savior for kids sold into the sex trade.
Ballard himself has dabbled in Q-adjacent conspiracy theories, such as the Wayfair trafficking hoax, while his organization has far-right affinities and a long record of distorting its botched “raids,” which rely on bizarre tactics like asking psychics where to find victims for rescue. Ballard, Caviezel, and others of their ilk had primed the public to accept Sound of Freedom as a documentary rather than delusion by fomenting moral panic for years over this grossly exaggerated “epidemic” of child sex-trafficking, much of it funneling people into conspiracist rabbit holes and QAnon communities. In short, I was at the movies with people who were there to see their worst fears confirmed.
Sound of Freedomembellishes and misrepresents their international “missions,” according to a Vice News investigation of the group.
Then you have Caviezel, bleached blond to match Ballard’s buff, clean-cut Mormon profile. Performance-wise, he’s stuck on a note of world-historical grief, either crying or staring with bloodshot eyes as he attempts to convey the scale and weight of the tragedy before him. The unambiguous hero of the piece, Ballard invokes parenthood as his motivation or an argument to get the cooperation he wants — “What if it was your daughter?” is practically his catchphrase — yet aside from a dialogue-free breakfast scene, he never interacts with his offspring. And if Mira Sorvino, who plays his wife Katherine, spent more than a day on set, you’d never know it: she’s there for all of two minutes, offering brief words of encouragement while Ballard spends weeks undercover as a louche sex tourist in Central America. She, too, evidently had a personal stake in joining this film, telling the Washington Examiner this week that she has “met so many child survivors and my heart burns for them.”
As implausible as the movie is — it invents a finale where Ballard journeys deep into a jungle alone to pluck a girl from the clutches of guerrilla militants, which he accomplishes by posing as a doctor distributing cholera vaccines — one wonders if it was extreme enough for Caviezel’s liking. The actor has taken to repeating the most grotesque falsehoods of the sprawling QAnon ideology, among them that traffickers are harvesting children’s organs and extracting the chemical compound adrenochrome from their brains before murdering them.
Compared to this nonsense, Sound of Freedom is relatively grounded in our universe. But that mainstream accessibility makes it valuable as a recruitment tool, much as generic “Save the Children” campaigns proved gateways to far-right conspiracy theories about a secret cabal of evil elites conducting blood rituals. On the QAnon message board Great Awakening this week, adherents celebrated the movie’s box-office success (it quickly made back its modest budget of around $14 million and out-earned the latest Indiana Jones sequel on July 4, its premiere date, after the franchise blockbuster had been out for several days) while crowing that “demons,” including movie theater employees annoyed by the demographic it pulled in, were miserable at their victory.
“Do you see how more powerful we are than the legacy news?” wrote one board user. “We are the news now!” On a different thread, someone attempted to prove that Donald Trump‘s endorsement of the film on Truth Social on Thursday was connected to a random Q post from 2018 (because of the time stamps on each). Some discussed efforts to get “normies” who are “in need of awakening” to see Sound of Freedom, including with the assistance of a promotional program that allows customers to buy tickets for strangers. “Crimes against children will unite us all. Eyes are opening,” read one optimistic post, while another was more emphatic still: “We are witnessing true divine intervention.”
It matters, too, that Sound of Freedom almost never saw the light of day. Completed in 2018, no studio would take it for fear of losing money, according to producer Eduardo Verastegui — with Netflix and Amazon among those who passed. It finally found distribution thanks to Angel Studios, a Utah-based media company that crowdfunds original films and TV series that “amplify light.” (Although founded by Mormon brothers who originally created a content-filtering service to prevent children from seeing violence, nudity and profanity, it claims no formal church affiliation.)
Therefore, to its boosters, the movie checks many satisfying boxes at once. Caviezel, a devout Catholic allegedly blacklisted by the entertainment industry, back for a mythology-burnishing biopic of Ballard; a call to action in an imagined global war against sexual predators; a blow struck at the heart of “woke” Hollywood, the den of iniquity that snubbed it and (lest we forget) is thought to produce the wealthy deviants who serve as villains in this story.
Meaning it will surely do no good to point out Sound of Freedom‘s hackneyed white savior narrative. Or its wildly immature assumption that abused and traumatized children go right back to normal once the bad guys are in handcuffs. Or that it enforces stereotypes about trafficking that Angel Studios itself says are less than accurate. To the film’s intended viewers, these cannot be flaws — they’re the whole appeal.
There is visible suffering all around us in America. There are poor and unhoused, and people brutalized or killed by police. There are mass shootings, lack of healthcare, climate disasters. And yet, over and over, the far-right turns to these sordid fantasies about godless monsters hurting children. Now, as in the 1980s Satanic panic, they won’t even face the fact that most kids who suffer sexual abuse do so not at the hands of a shadowy cabal of strangers, but at the hands of a family member. To know thousands of adults will absorb Sound of Freedom, this vigilante fever dream, and come away thinking themselves better informed on a hidden civilizational crisis… well, it’s profoundly depressing. Worse still, they’ll want to spread the word.
Then there is this shot and chaser of The Guardian and their take on Columbian child sex trafficking, versus their take on a movie literally about a true story about said sex trafficking in said country.
358388554_758573112731861_6857537829683836095_n.jpg
Meanwhile, this was how both those publications covered the pedophilic movie Cuties which actually sexually exploited real young girls:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movi...eview-1056197/
"‘Cuties’ Review: A Coming-of-Age Movie Caught in the Culture Wars
Thanks to a major marketing mistake, this award-winning French movie has been accused of sexualizing girls. It's actually a sensitive portrait of growing pains that deserves to be seen"
https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...-misunderstood
"Cuties review – Netflix's controversial child exploitation film is bold, flawed - and misunderstood"
, then I win.
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