Bill Whittle of PJTV.com interviews Charles Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of defense for Detainee Affairs, now with the Heritage Foundation. They’ll be discussing Attorney General Eric
Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in New York City.
Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Motion Picture Academy member Lionel Chetwynd make sense of the byzantine process of how a film gets nominated for an Academy Award.
Glenn Reynolds interviews the members of the Smart Set, on how the Internet is changing how music is distributed and opening new opportunities for entrepreneurial musicians.
John Boot and Christian Toto note that the new movie version of The Blind Side, the enjoyable recent football book by Michael Lewis of Liar’s Poker fame, contains a classic Hollywood sucker punch. As Christian writes:
Here’s the scene: Bullock’s character is waiting in line to speak to someone about her new son Michael’s legal status.
Fed up, she cuts to the front of the line to ask a question:
“We have been sitting around here for over an hour and when I look around all I see are people shooting the bull and drinking coffee … who’s in charge here?”
The bemused woman behind the desk points to the wall, where a picture of Bush is hanging.
We’ve all been in long lines before, be it at the DMV or other governmental offices. And it doesn’t matter which party – or person – is occupying the White House at the moment.
So the joke makes no sense. All it does is deflate a feel-good movie for no good reason. Maybe the filmmakers realized with Bush out of office time is running out to throw spitballs at Hollywood’s favorite target.
Hollywood is high school and if you want to sit at the cool kids’ table (i.e. work) you better fit in, and if you’ve been involved in the writing, directing or producing of a film sympathetic towards the most hated demographic (yes, even more hated than terrorists — again, watch the product) in the 9-0 zip code, you had better inoculate yourself.
And that’s what the gratuitous, unnecessary, jarring, take-you-out-of-the-movie shot at Bush is: an inoculation. The filmmakers want to work again; they want to be invited to all the right parties. But if you’re remembered as the perso involved in bringing to life a movie only Glenn Beck could love, no matter how big of a hit, that’s not a good thing on the ole’ resume’.
There are notable exceptions, but working in Hollywood — an industry built on social interaction — means getting along with Leftists, and Leftists are religious, regional and ideological bigots of the worst order. The smart people involved in the making of “The Blind Side” knew the Bush shot was bad storytelling — was what what John Boot described as ”a non-sequitur nonpareil” — they just felt, for whatever reason (their own bigotry or career survival), that it was worth it.
Hollywood is not money or profit-driven. This is an industry engaged in an ideological war with traditional conservative America that doesn’t mind making a profit, but never will at the expense of the cause. Everyone involved in the making of “Blind Side” knew an unnecessary partisan shot at Bush would turn people off. They all knew they were insulting the very audience the film was marketed at for no reason other than to insult them. But there was absolutely no way in hell this thing was going to see the light of day without something for the Hollywood bigots to snicker over.
As John writes, “This is their sandbox, and there’s a ring to kiss if you want to play.”
Gene Siskel has gone off to the great cinema in the sky, and Roger Ebert was nowhere to be found, so Jimmie Bise of the Sundries Shack and I cut a podcast last night discussing each of our top five movies, and why. Tune in here to listen!
I’ll say one thing about the Hollywood studio system of the 1940s and ’50s: every actor and actress had the occasional bomb, but you rarely heard Cary Grant, John Wayne, Bogie or Bacall blaming the customers when their picture tanked:
Another day, another nugget of awesomeness from Megan Fox.
The actress tells The New York Times that her movie “Jennifer’s Body” tanked because “the movie is about a man-eating, cannibalistic lesbian cheerleader, and that pretty much eliminates middle America.”
Which sounds like a repeat of the blame-the-booboisie quote uttered by the screenwriter of the craptacular sequel to Basic Instinct when it bombed, as City Journal’s Stefan Kanfer wrote in 2006:
Paul Verhoeven, director of the first Basic Instinct, made in 1992, avers that politics in the U.S. of A. have taken the fun out of eros. Indeed, insists the Dutch native, “anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States. Look at the people at the top. We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values.” Scenarist Nicholas Meyer (Fatal Attraction; The Human Stain) agrees. “We’re in a big puritanical mode. Now it’s like the McCarthy era, except it’s not ‘Are you a communist?’ but have you ever put sex in a movie?”
On which planet do these gentlemen live? It is difficult to determine from their remarks. In an epoch when XXX rated videos are available at the local DVD store, when the Internet contains countless pornographic sites, when surveys show that more Americans hear suggestive language than ever before, when celebrities promote oral sex for teenagers, when nudity and semi-nudity are a part of prime time programming, it is impossible to reconcile the opinions of Messrs. Verhoeven and Meyer with the facts of life.
Still, we must congratulate them for their originality. It used to be fashionable to hold the Jews responsible for everything that went wrong. Blaming Christianity is a new one.
Heh. So why didn’t you take your low expectations for what Americans will accept at the box office into account before you made the movie?
The other day I listened to some of an interview with Anita Dunn. I loved this bit of Q&A from the audience:
QUESTION: Hi. Yes, I’m Mark Kaiser, and I work for the Freedom Forum here. I just had a question about – back to the FOX issue. I think it’s pretty safe to say that there’s, you know, opinions, strong opinions on both sides at the networks.
My specific question would be if it was helpful to the overall discussion to say that FOX was not a legitimate news organization. Granted, they’re in opposition to a lot of Obama’s policies, and there’s a lot to be said about that, but, I mean, was it helpful to identify them so strongly?
DUNN: You know, it’s - I recommend everybody, if you get a chance to go on YouTube, Jon Stewart actually did one of the most amazing pieces of journalism last week or a couple of weeks ago in which he actually looked at the way FOX, on their opinion shows, raises some, you know, some – some issue that then gets reported on by their news division as, quote, “a controversy,” and then they go find someone to comment.
It wasn’t the only time she plugged the Daily Show’s journalistic genius. I don’t object to criticism of Fox from the left any more than I object to criticism of MSNBC from the right (even if I might disagree on the substance of the criticism). But when the communications director wants to justify an effort to delegitimize a major news organization simply because it is critical of the president, she might want to avoid holding up a comedy show as an exemplar of legitimate journalism.
From their weekly “Poliwood” series on PJTV.com, Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd give their take on Woody Allen’s new film, Whatever Works, and how the Woodman has “evolved” over his decades in show biz.
At Big Hollywood, S.T. Karnick notes that, as he calls it, Robert Zemeckis’s “motion-capture-animation version of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol” had a disappointing opening weekend. It came in first at the box office, but at 31 million dollars in ticket sales, about $14 million short of analysts’ expectations. And that’s put Jim Carrey, the film’s star, in a rather humbug (sorry) mood:
Jim Carrey’s noisiness appears to be wearing quite thin, and a film that features him as not only the protagonist but also three other characters sounds like far too much of a no longer good thing. Carrey would do well to follow the path of the equally obnoxious Robin Williams and move on to more serious film roles, even if it kills his career. Yes, I’m well aware that Carrey’s occasional serious performances have been pretty awful, but he’s dead either way, and it would be best to die with honor instead of ignominy.
Carrey is following in Williams’s footsteps in one way, however: the making of idiotic political pronouncements. Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:
“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed.. . .
Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:
“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge.
“Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”
Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.
Zemeckis, for his part, avoided making any big political claims about the film. That’s the wise course, and given the already annoying qualities suggested by the commercials and trailers for the film, the last thing his version of A Christmas Carol needs is for its star to blunder around the media with claims that this energetic fantasy is any kind of brief for socialism.
Carrey rails against “personal greed and ambition” and “capitalism without regulation” — but few have been blessed more by its benefits. Or as Jim Treacher quips, “Guess who hates capitalism now? The first guy to make $20 million for saying words & making faces in front of a camera.”
Dubbing Al Gore “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man”, Newsweek has yet another of its unintentionally ironic headlines. (At least we think the irony is unintentional, although Conquest’s Third Law is always a potential factor.)
And while we won’t say a word about the inherent sexism in the headline coming from such an archliberal publication, at Newsbusters, Tim Graham writes:
Permit a late word or two on Newsweek’s thoroughly in-the-tank cover story for Al Gore. Sharon Begley oozed about Gore’s favorite quote in his book – but never seems to note that Gore’s “philosopher” expert is a Marxist. It comes near the very end of the piece:
His favorite quote in [his new book] Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
Adorno, and his colleagues in what is called the “Frankfurt School,” are Marxists. Al Gore and his liberal admirers in the press (see this Seattle Times dispatch) aspire to make it through Adorno’s impenetrable prose. British journalist Alastair McKay brightly reported that in Scotland in 2006, Gore lauded the entire school of Marxists:
“After World War Two there were a group of very thoughtful, humane, decent philosophers – Germans – who were so horrified, humiliated, shamed by what had happened in Germany that they became what is known as the Frankfurt School – Jurgen Habermas is probably the best known.
They devoted themselves over decades to exploring the question: what in the hell happened? And one of them, a philosopher named Theodore Adorno – conducted a philosophical autopsy of the Weimar and the emergence of the Third Reich. And he identified the first significant symptom of their descent into hell. He said this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’.
Gore’s entire construction of the global-warming debate is between reason (that’s the we’re-almost-roasted-marshmallows doom) and unreason, superstition, and capitalist propaganda (that’s conservatives). We face a “democracy crisis” because people have failed so far to bow to his genius. After a windy account of how the Enlightenment and the printing press allowed a new “rule of reason,” Gore launched into an attack on television for ruining democracy:
“The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect [It certainly did on Al -- he launched his own little-watched TV channel in 2005 -- Ed], and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.
“I see the internet as a source of hope. To use the Star Wars analogy, the rebellion is alive and well on the internet on some far galaxy, connected to ours, and it is growing, and I do believe that it is changing the operation of our political dialogue, democratising it, opening it up, so that questions of fact become questions of truth instead of power, so that there’s not censorship of global warming studies.”
Notice how Gore is always making conservatives into the unspeakable evil in his analogies: the Nazis, in the Frankfurt School analogy, and Darth Vader’s forces in the Star Wars analogy. Press him, and he denies the analogy is exact; but that’s how he wants his liberal allies to feel about themselves, that they are the anti-Nazi Skywalkers in this perilous ecological era, fighting “the Assault on Reason.”
Apropos of nothing, I wonder if Gore, who spent time in South Vietnam as a young U.S. Army journalist realizes that he’s rooting for George Lucas’s sci-fi stand-ins for the NVA?
And the Frankfurt School? Why does that name ring a bell? Oh yeah…
(If you’re pressed for time, scroll about six minutes into their appearance in Bill Whittle’s must-watch video from late August.)
Update: Thomas Sowell recently wrote, “My first column, more than 30 years ago, was titled ‘The Profits of Doom.’ Recent news stories about the millions of dollars that Al Gore has made out of his ‘global warming’ hysteria suggest that some things haven’t changed much in three decades.” Meanwhile, George Will wonders if there now exists a “Bad Climate for Global Worriers.”
Found via Big Hollywood, there’s a BBC article titled, “Why did Britain fall out of love with Sesame St?”, which includes this passage:
The show crossed the Atlantic 18 months after its US launch, but the BBC rejected it because of its “authoritarian aims” in trying to change children’s behaviour.
“This sounds like indoctrination, and a dangerous extension of the use of television,” said the head of children’s programmes at the time, Monica Sims.
Update: And if the Brits thought Sesame Street was trying to change children’s behavior then, they hadn’t seen anything yet:
The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” has evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of an urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.
As the New York Times notes, in a phrase loaded with unintended irony, Sesame Street is “still a messianic show.” But what religion is it proselytizing?
L. L. Cool J, currently starring in NCIS: Los Angeles:
“I don’t necessarily subscribe to all her beliefs,” he says, “but I do like Ayn Rand. That’s why I made the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ comment. I think she’s interesting. I don’t do the atheist thing; I believe in God. But some of it works for me.”
“The Prometheus Device”; it’s Johnny Storm meets Peter Parker! As Jonathan Last writes, this might be the coolest — or perhaps hottest — device ever built in a garage.
Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch.
Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago, Oscar starts his own news network, GNN (Grouchy News Network). An irate viewer calls in to berate him that the news is not grouchy enough:
“I am changing the channel. From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”
Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume — nope, and the only disparaging characterization of real-world news is reserved for Fox: Fox is a POX. It is trashy. They didn’t even attempt to try “MessyNBC.”
If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch “POX News.” So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, “If you don’t like it change the channel.” There are no channels left! It’s everywhere. Just last week I had Obama’s service and volunteerism promoted on every single major network, including Disney and Nickelodeon.
…by the way, why SHOULD I change the channel? This is MY channel, I’m paying for it!
The fact that this is a re-run from an episode written during the Bush Presidency only reinforces that this is nothing new. The Left has been doing this for years now. All of us have seen it and felt powerless to mention it, because if we do, we’re ridiculed and dismissed (thank you, Mr. Alinsky).
No, this is nothing new. In Julia L. Mickenberg’s book “Learning From the Left” the history is plainly spelled out. Radicals drummed out of mainstream culture in the late 1940’s turned to children’s entertainment for opportunities not just to work, but to influence. In her introduction, she quotes folk singer Pete Seeger about those artists: “I think many of them are thinking more on the lines of, ‘If we’re going to save this world, we’re going to have to reach the kids’.”
Mark Steyn is hilarious and brilliant today, as always. He talks about Larry David’s pissing-on-Christ shtick. “Oh, those brave transgressive artists!” he says. They just love to scandalize the Christers. But what if they were “to start urinating in a more Mecca-ly direction”? Reminded me of something I wrote in Impromptus, way back in 2002 (here). This may seem like ancient history — you may have forgotten the movie — but here goes: “How much money would you pay to see the makers of The Last Temptation of Christ make a similar film about the Prophet Muhammad? How long would they be alive? An hour? An hour and fifteen minutes?”
Plus ça change, plus ça doesn’t change at all.
Kathy Shaidle notes that “Oscar-winning Hollywood movie producer Barrie Osborne (The Matrix, Lord of the Rings) is poised to spend $150-million to film a biopic of Mohammed.” Osborne promises “The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam.” But in her Examiner.com column, Kathy’s more than a little skeptical.
Roland Emmerich has admitted that he feared a fatwa would be placed on him if he filmed a scrapped scene for 2012.
The filmmaker is well known for decimating famed landmarks on movies including The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. He stated that while he decided to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro because he is “against organised religion”, he was fearful of the Islamic religious decree for a sequence that was planned but not shot.
The 53-year-old wanted to demolish the Kaaba, which is a cube-shaped building at the heart of Mecca and is the centre of prayers and the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage.
He told Sci-Fi Wire: “Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit. But my co-writer Harald said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right. We have to all in the Western world think about this.
“You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.
“So it’s just something which I kind of didn’t [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out.”
“Kind of” being Hollywood shorthand for “I cut the entire scene out, lest I get killed for making a popcorn movie.”
But symbols of Christianity? Hollywood’s is free to laugh at ‘em, pee on ‘em, blow ‘em up, and why not? It’s not like their worshipers will ever challenge us, thinks the average filmmaker.
Back around 1988, I watched Ted Danson, then at the height of his fame as the star of Cheers appear on a late-night infomercial pitch for an environmental group. He ended the half-hour advertisement with his saying that “we only have ten years to save the world’s oceans”. (That’s a paraphrase, but as close as I remember the line.)
It’s a reminder that, with the exception of Hollywood’s greatest Greatest Generation-era stars (Cary Grant, Bogie, The Duke, Coop), Bill Whittle’s Lou Grant Effect is inviolable. Having a beer in Sam Malone’s bar while he recounts his glory days with the Sox sounds like infinitely more fun than listening to the doomsday prognostications of someone paid to recite lines written by others, with his performance calibrated by someone else.
Update: And speaking of Beck: “Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck” in a botched parody at the Onion.
Update:Big Hollywood notes, “Longtime Limbaugh listeners know where Danson’s anger comes from.” Read on for Danson having to eat his 1988 “ten years to save the oceans” prognostication when called on it during a 2007 CNBC interview.
Back in 2007 and 2008, actor Kevin Spacey mentioned the importance of successful actors helping out those still struggling to make it in that industry. This quote from Interview magazine sums up the riff Spacey frequently used:
I was 14 when I was taken to a seminar and a production of the play Juno and the Paycock in Los Angeles with Walter Matthau, Maureen Stapleton, and Jack Lemmon. And I can tell you, as a budding actor, having Jack Lemmon put his hand on my shoulder and say, [impersonating Lemmon] “That was terrific, kid; you oughta do this professionally,” was a big deal for me. Jack became an extraordinary mentor, and he always said that if you’ve been fortunate enough to be successful in the business that you wanted to be in, then it is your obligation to send the elevator back down. I’m trying to do for a lot of younger people what was done for me, and I hope that if I do it, I’ll encourage others to do it.
In Blacklisting Myself, Roger L. Simon noted that many Hollywood actors create a hyper-cheerful and uber-politically correct “Mini-Me” persona to present to their interviewers. But in the real world, Spacey isn’t afraid to slam the metaphoric elevator doors in a working man’s face from time to time:
“Mr. Spacey, you got me fired from my job!” In an exclusive interview with RadarOnline.com, waiter Peter Turner said that’s what happened when he told Kevin Spacey he wasn’t allowed to smoke in a restaurant.
“You’re an aggressive prick,” Turner said the Oscar winning actor Kevin Spacey told him after he asked him to stop smoking three times in the high-end restaurant Clarke Cooke House in Newport, Rhode Island in late June. When Spacey’s dinner companions lit up their cigarettes Turner was instructed by his boss to tell the group to stop smoking, since it was a violation of state law… He said he made a joke to the smokers, saying: “You’re not allowed to smoke in here unless you’re on fire,” but the actor’s anger exploded. “I need you to get the f*** away from my table,” Spacey snarled to the waiter.
As Deceiver.com notes, “Doesn’t he know that laws are only for people he hasn’t seen in the movies?”
Update: Speaking of which, welcome readers of the aforementioned Deceiver.com!
Well, Mad Men had the moment yesterday that the entire season, set in 1963, was leading up to. WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! DON’T READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW YET!
Barack Obama, the wunderkind who came out of nowhere to win the presidency, was supposed to push America out of the ditch and into a glittering future. But modernity is elusive when you’re in a time machine to the 14th century called Afghanistan. The tableau of Obama at Dover evoked the last line of “The Great Gatsby:” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
As Orrin notes, “‘Jay Gatsby’, who invented an identity for himself to abet his social climbing, cuts mighty close to the bone.”
Or to use the language that excuses a mid-century social climbing figure, a sort of Gatsby-as-everyman, “The Japanese have a saying: ‘A man is whatever room he is in.’”
From the latest segment of PJTV.com’s National Security Review, Bill Whittle talks with Cliff May, President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Austin Bay, co-author of A Quick & Dirty Guide To War, about claims by Gerald Posner in The Daily Beast.com that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are using heroin as a weapon in Afghanistan.
Back after after his exclusive three week tour of Europe, Scandinavia and the subcontinent, James Lileks (seen on the PJM Political page in his Halloween guise of Minimus Lilekus) returns for another round of Five Questions With James Lileks!
