Sound of freedom trounces Indiana Jones

[Wolfgang]

I know nothing about the Sound of Freedom but if it's some Christian thing, I'll probably hate it.

[HOLIDAY]

Jul 12, 2023 15:13:26 GMT -5 Wolfgang said:

I know nothing about the Sound of Freedom but if it's some Christian thing, I'll probably hate it.

It’s about the man who freed kids from sexual slavery, somehow in a bizarre warped sort of way Democrats have labeled a QAnon movie which has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself. That’s how effed up the Democrat party is. Evidently they like kids getting sold into sexual slavery.

[volleyguy]

Jul 12, 2023 15:22:39 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

Jul 12, 2023 15:13:26 GMT -5 Wolfgang said:

I know nothing about the Sound of Freedom but if it's some Christian thing, I'll probably hate it.

It’s about the man who freed kids from sexual slavery, somehow in a bizarre warped sort of way Democrats have labeled a QAnon movie which has absolutely nothing to do with the film itself. That’s how effed up the Democrat party is. Evidently they like kids getting sold into sexual slavery.

So did they film the finale in a pizza shop?

[jayj79]

there's lots of sexual slavery in the bible

[BearClause]

Jul 7, 2023 12:03:42 GMT -5 geddyleeridesagain said:

So, after taking a closer look, the business side of Sound of Freedom is interesting. The film was made 5 years ago, it was a 21st Century Fox property but didn't release it. Then Disney briefly owned it before the original producer bought back the rights and shopped it around, eventually landing a deal with Angel Studios, a small, faith-based production company. I'm guessing the movie has some religious overtones to it, which would explain Jimmy Caviezel starring in it. Angel used crowdfunding to get the movie into wide release, and came up with a twist to boost ticket sales - a "pay it forward" kind of deal where you can buy multiple tickets even if you're not going to use them and put them in a pool of sorts where another person can apply and receive a ticket for free. It definitely boosted ticket sales for the opening day.

This isn't something that would make sense for major studios, but it might be an interesting business model for independent outfits. Indiewire has a pretty good breakdown:

www.indiewire.com/news/business/sound-of-freedom-box-office-analysis-crowdfunding-pay-it-forward-1234881363/

As far as I can tell from a lot of the reporting, the movie itself is apolitical and supposedly is free from religious overtones.

But the conspiracy theories about it from its proponents is that it is some sort of pro-QAnon movie, which has been bolstered by the off-the-wall comments made by the lead actor.  As you noted, it wasn't financed by the company releasing it; they merely bought the rights.

And the guy whose story this is based on might be more of a publicity hound who goes in and then goes away without any support for the children.

slate.com/culture/2023/07/sound-of-freedom-movie-jim-caviezel-trafficking-qanon.html
Sound of Freedom, which stars Jim Caviezel as the controversy-plagued anti–child trafficking crusader Tim Ballard, was completed in 2018 and set up for release by Fox the following year, until Disney bought the studio and shelved the movie. It certainly wasn’t the only casualty of the acquisition, but the movie’s supporters have been encouraged to see something more insidious in its sidelining than a shift in corporate priorities. On its surface, the movie, directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, is a straightforward search-and-rescue thriller, in which Ballard, a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security, goes rogue to free a young girl from the clutches of a Colombian sex-trafficking ring. But it arrived in theaters surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters—conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.

The pedophiles and child traffickers in Sound of Freedom are sweaty, sharp-toothed deviants, as they’ve been depicted in movies as far back as Fritz Lang’s M nearly a century ago. But the movie darkly hints that there are more well-connected and outwardly respectable variants out there, willing to pay six figures and up for what Caviezel’s character, who poses as a businessman trying to set up a high-end members-only club for child rapists, calls “a little pedo action.” Although the movie makes no reference to QAnon or its associated conspiracy theories, which only began to leak into the mainstream the year before it was completed, Caviezel has been enthusiastically using his press tour to profess his belief in an international black market where a barrel of children’s body parts goes for a thousand times the price of oil. Ballard himself has circulated wild and unsupported figures about the extent of the sex-trafficking industry, including the claim that 10,000 children are smuggled into the U.S. for sex every year, which was picked up and used as a campaign talking point by Donald Trump. (Trump also made Ballard the co-chair of a State Department advisory council on human trafficking.)

Since leaving DHS, Ballard and his “Operation Underground Railroad” have conducted raids and sting operations like the ones shown in Sound of Freedom, often captured on video for use as promotional material. But his gung-ho methods are frowned upon by longtime anti-trafficking activists, who see them as ineffectual and even counterproductive. According to Foreign Policy, a group of Dominican girls OUR rescued in 2014 were released without rehabilitation or support a few weeks later. Meg Conley, who accompanied Ballard on that raid, wrote for Slate in 2021 about her experience and reported that “anti-trafficking work, the kind that really works, doesn’t have an immediate satisfaction. It’s slow and steady. There are no starring turns.” In 2020, Vice concluded from an extensive investigation of Ballard and OUR that the specific stories the group told of liberating children from sex traffickers were “intensely cinematic: bold, heroic, and extremely difficult to fact-check.”

Here's the article mentioned above.

Called by God
In 2014, I went on a vigilante raid to “save” kids sold for sex. What we did haunts me now.
slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/sex-trafficking-raid-operation-underground-railroad.html
But soon, Ballard’s aggressive sureness began to scare me. Anne Gallagher, whom the U.S. State Department called “the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking,” published an essay critical of OUR’s tactics. She argued its raids showed an “alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled” and called OUR’s operations “arrogant, unethical and illegal.” Ballard sent the article to me and called her a “bitch.” Then he asked me to write a rebuttal. (Ballard did not respond to detailed questions about his comments.) I had nothing of worth to say in response to a woman who’d dedicated her life to this work. How could he think I did? I didn’t write the piece.

---

Some testified, the article reported. The local organization lost track of others. All those kids in 2014 got from us was a soda and a swim—and Ballard came out ahead in the deal.

[HOLIDAY]

Jul 12, 2023 20:14:25 GMT -5 BearClause said:

Jul 7, 2023 12:03:42 GMT -5 geddyleeridesagain said:

So, after taking a closer look, the business side of Sound of Freedom is interesting. The film was made 5 years ago, it was a 21st Century Fox property but didn't release it. Then Disney briefly owned it before the original producer bought back the rights and shopped it around, eventually landing a deal with Angel Studios, a small, faith-based production company. I'm guessing the movie has some religious overtones to it, which would explain Jimmy Caviezel starring in it. Angel used crowdfunding to get the movie into wide release, and came up with a twist to boost ticket sales - a "pay it forward" kind of deal where you can buy multiple tickets even if you're not going to use them and put them in a pool of sorts where another person can apply and receive a ticket for free. It definitely boosted ticket sales for the opening day.

This isn't something that would make sense for major studios, but it might be an interesting business model for independent outfits. Indiewire has a pretty good breakdown:

www.indiewire.com/news/business/sound-of-freedom-box-office-analysis-crowdfunding-pay-it-forward-1234881363/

As far as I can tell from a lot of the reporting, the movie itself is apolitical and supposedly is free from religious overtones.

But the conspiracy theories about it from its proponents is that it is some sort of pro-QAnon movie, which has been bolstered by the off-the-wall comments made by the lead actor.  As you noted, it wasn't financed by the company releasing it; they merely bought the rights.

And the guy whose story this is based on might be more of a publicity hound who goes in and then goes away without any support for the children.

slate.com/culture/2023/07/sound-of-freedom-movie-jim-caviezel-trafficking-qanon.html
Sound of Freedom, which stars Jim Caviezel as the controversy-plagued anti–child trafficking crusader Tim Ballard, was completed in 2018 and set up for release by Fox the following year, until Disney bought the studio and shelved the movie. It certainly wasn’t the only casualty of the acquisition, but the movie’s supporters have been encouraged to see something more insidious in its sidelining than a shift in corporate priorities. On its surface, the movie, directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, is a straightforward search-and-rescue thriller, in which Ballard, a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security, goes rogue to free a young girl from the clutches of a Colombian sex-trafficking ring. But it arrived in theaters surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters—conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.

The pedophiles and child traffickers in Sound of Freedom are sweaty, sharp-toothed deviants, as they’ve been depicted in movies as far back as Fritz Lang’s M nearly a century ago. But the movie darkly hints that there are more well-connected and outwardly respectable variants out there, willing to pay six figures and up for what Caviezel’s character, who poses as a businessman trying to set up a high-end members-only club for child rapists, calls “a little pedo action.” Although the movie makes no reference to QAnon or its associated conspiracy theories, which only began to leak into the mainstream the year before it was completed, Caviezel has been enthusiastically using his press tour to profess his belief in an international black market where a barrel of children’s body parts goes for a thousand times the price of oil. Ballard himself has circulated wild and unsupported figures about the extent of the sex-trafficking industry, including the claim that 10,000 children are smuggled into the U.S. for sex every year, which was picked up and used as a campaign talking point by Donald Trump. (Trump also made Ballard the co-chair of a State Department advisory council on human trafficking.)

Since leaving DHS, Ballard and his “Operation Underground Railroad” have conducted raids and sting operations like the ones shown in Sound of Freedom, often captured on video for use as promotional material. But his gung-ho methods are frowned upon by longtime anti-trafficking activists, who see them as ineffectual and even counterproductive. According to Foreign Policy, a group of Dominican girls OUR rescued in 2014 were released without rehabilitation or support a few weeks later. Meg Conley, who accompanied Ballard on that raid, wrote for Slate in 2021 about her experience and reported that “anti-trafficking work, the kind that really works, doesn’t have an immediate satisfaction. It’s slow and steady. There are no starring turns.” In 2020, Vice concluded from an extensive investigation of Ballard and OUR that the specific stories the group told of liberating children from sex traffickers were “intensely cinematic: bold, heroic, and extremely difficult to fact-check.”

Here's the article mentioned above.

Called by God
In 2014, I went on a vigilante raid to “save” kids sold for sex. What we did haunts me now.
slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/sex-trafficking-raid-operation-underground-railroad.html
But soon, Ballard’s aggressive sureness began to scare me. Anne Gallagher, whom the U.S. State Department called “the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking,” published an essay critical of OUR’s tactics. She argued its raids showed an “alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled” and called OUR’s operations “arrogant, unethical and illegal.” Ballard sent the article to me and called her a “bitch.” Then he asked me to write a rebuttal. (Ballard did not respond to detailed questions about his comments.) I had nothing of worth to say in response to a woman who’d dedicated her life to this work. How could he think I did? I didn’t write the piece.

---

Some testified, the article reported. The local organization lost track of others. All those kids in 2014 got from us was a soda and a swim—and Ballard came out ahead in the deal.

L O L, from Slate?? Well there you go then.

[jsquare]

Jul 12, 2023 20:29:08 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

Jul 12, 2023 20:14:25 GMT -5 BearClause said:

As far as I can tell from a lot of the reporting, the movie itself is apolitical and supposedly is free from religious overtones.

But the conspiracy theories about it from its proponents is that it is some sort of pro-QAnon movie, which has been bolstered by the off-the-wall comments made by the lead actor.  As you noted, it wasn't financed by the company releasing it; they merely bought the rights.

And the guy whose story this is based on might be more of a publicity hound who goes in and then goes away without any support for the children.

Here's the article mentioned above.

L O L, from Slate?? Well there you go then.

Whats wrong with Slate?

[HOLIDAY]

Jul 12, 2023 21:45:56 GMT -5 jsquare said:

Jul 12, 2023 20:29:08 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

L O L, from Slate?? Well there you go then.

Whats wrong with Slate?

Sort of like saying it’s from the Atlantic.

[BearClause]

Jul 12, 2023 21:45:56 GMT -5 jsquare said:

Jul 12, 2023 20:29:08 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

L O L, from Slate?? Well there you go then.

Whats wrong with Slate?

There shouldn’t be. Their reporting is top notch. And the second article is by someone who was actually invited by Ballard to accompany his team. She saw kinship as he was an fellow Mormon, but then saw he was more a publicity hound than a savior.

[jsquare]

Jul 12, 2023 21:49:36 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

Jul 12, 2023 21:45:56 GMT -5 jsquare said:

Whats wrong with Slate?

Sort of like saying it’s from the Atlantic.

OK.

[HOLIDAY]

www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/16/surprise-hit-sound-of-freedom-moves-up-in-box-office-rankings-grossing-85-million-despite-controversy/amp/

Local theaters are extending this movie because it’s so incredibly popular. Imagine making a movie that actually helps children. Why in the world with Hollywood criticize that?. Congratulations To the cast and crew.

[mikegarrison]

Jul 16, 2023 22:22:23 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/16/surprise-hit-sound-of-freedom-moves-up-in-box-office-rankings-grossing-85-million-despite-controversy/amp/

Local theaters are extending this movie because it’s so incredibly popular. Imagine making a movie that actually helps children. Why in the world with Hollywood criticize that?. Congratulations To the cast and crew.

How does this movie "help children"?

[HOLIDAY]

Jul 16, 2023 22:23:21 GMT -5 mikegarrison said:

Jul 16, 2023 22:22:23 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

www.forbes.com/sites/anafaguy/2023/07/16/surprise-hit-sound-of-freedom-moves-up-in-box-office-rankings-grossing-85-million-despite-controversy/amp/

Local theaters are extending this movie because it’s so incredibly popular. Imagine making a movie that actually helps children. Why in the world with Hollywood criticize that?. Congratulations To the cast and crew.

How does this movie "help children"?

Brings awareness to sexual slavery. Did you seriously just ask that question

[jsquare]

Jul 16, 2023 22:25:37 GMT -5 HOLIDAY said:

Jul 16, 2023 22:23:21 GMT -5 mikegarrison said:

How does this movie "help children"?

Brings awareness to sexual slavery. Did you seriously just ask that question

So this is a movie for children?

[mikegarrison]

That's like saying "Cocaine Bear" helps bring awareness of wildlife conservation.