Yawn--another day, another Alec Baldwin meltdown--although give him credit; at least this time it's merely in print, and he's not doing his Christian Bale impersonation (or is it the other way around?) while screaming at his daughter:

To John McCain. You need to keep quiet, John McCain. You lost and more importantly you are to blame for your loss. You ran a lousy campaign. In terms of message, logistics, ideas. Now you can't seem to shut up about the stimulus package. Another rich Republican market shill who can only deal with spending bills that stimulate the Dow. You gotta shut up, John McCain. We can never go back to the Stone Age ideas that the likes of you and Paulson and Cheney (re: fighting terrorism) have tried to force down our throats.

Of course, Alec has a few Stone Age ideas of his own that he'd be happy to force down the throat of anyone who he disagrees with.

Update: Welcome Big Hollywood readers! Please look around the whole blog, or at least scroll through the archive category named after an earlier Breitbartian Tinseltown expose: Hollywood, Interrupted.

Despite self-serving doomsday prognostications by President Obama, and a skewed unemployment chart produced by Nancy Pelosi and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, reminds us that "It's A Recession Not A 'Catastrophe'".

In the interim however, Brett Joshpe has a modest proposal for Big Hollywood:

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge "to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other." (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV's in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State's $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries' total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

What say you, Ashton and Demi?

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for a troika of interviews with best-selling authors:

• Roger L. Simon, the CEO of Pajamas Media.com and PJTV.com, on his new book, which looks at forty years inside Hollywood, Blacklisting Myself.


• Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, now with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, and a frequent commentator on Fox News, for his look at A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.


• And veteran talk radio host Hugh Hewitt provides a sneak preview of GOP 5.0.

Tune in here to listen! Incidentally, the interview with Roger L. Simon is available online separately, here.

Back in 2005, I linked to a typically great article titled "California Screaming" by the now sadly deceased Cathy Seipp:

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type -- the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance -- could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: "Get outta here!"

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: "What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?" This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, "If it's 'You're fired,' then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck."

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn't contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping "Un-ACC-EPT-able!" is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out "DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!"

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone's assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office -- possibly even on the wrong floor. "Well, if you see her," he yelled before stomping out, "tell her what I said!"

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. "I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest," the screamer fumed. "I just want to be a good actor."

"Well, you've failed at being a good actor," Moore replied reasonably. "Why not try for the popularity contest?"

Christian Bale is certainly a good actor, but he makes Paul Anka's infamous meltdown sound positively genteel with this must-hear rant.

He's not bad; his thetans are merely drawn that way.

Reuters reports that "New York City fears return to 1970s."

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

Andrew Breitbart spots a "sexist, misogynist, homophobic, racist, speciesist and self-hating host" who must be "maimed, lynched and/or killed"--or at least "boycotted or taken off the air."

"If not, someone might be offended..."

(Well, you can't be too careful when it comes to customers at Borders these days.)

An ABC morning show host in 2007: American morale is at an all time low because 9/11 couldn't have happened without massive government help.

An ABC morning show host in 2009: "Consumer confidence has to rebound, which won't happen without massive government help."

Then: "Dissent is Patriotic."

Now: "Arguably treasonous."

Or as James Lileks wrote on election night:

I'm off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their "Question Authority" bumper stickers. Just remember: Dissent is still the highest form of patriotism. Except now it will be practiced by the lowest form of people.

Including those who buy airtime by the gallon.

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

Back in July you'll recall that John McCain's campaign ran a YouTube video that dubbed Barack Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" and compared the candidate (still in the middle of his first term in the Senate) to Paris Hilton.

You know you're over the target when you start receiving Good Morning America, and they and the rest of the enraptured legacy media were collectively infuriated by this ad:

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!"

And for a time it was. In mid-September, when McCain was still leading in some polls, Rich Lowry wrote:

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. In a column excoriating Republicans for historically launching successful attacks against Democratic presidential candidates in August, Time columnist Joe Klein excepted Bob Dole -- not mentioning that Dole had been eviscerated by Clinton negative ads before August ever arrived.

The press turned on McCain with a vengeance as soon as he mocked Barack Obama as a celebrity. Its mood grew still more foul when the McCain campaign took offense at Obama's "lipstick on a pig" jab. "The media are getting mad," according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. "Stop the madness," urged Time's Mark Halperin, exhorting his fellow journalists to fight back against the McCain campaign's manufactured outrage.

One of the reasons why the "Celebrity" ad so angered the MSM was that it spoke to the heart of Obama's appeal--it's not ideas and policy oriented, it's "largely aesthetic and personality-based", as Peter Wehner writes in an excellent article at Commentary. Read the whole thing, but the main thesis is here:

Obama's appeal, while widespread, is largely aesthetic and personality-based. This explains why a somewhat unsettling cult of personality has arisen around Obama. His appeal is not rooted in ideas or political philosophy or governing achievements; indeed, it is not grounded in any acts of governance. Yet some people already speak of him as a Lincolnian and Messiah-like figure.

But precisely because this appeal is largely aesthetic rather than substantive, because it is not grounded in things deep or permanent, its durability is limited. Reality will intrude. A million watt smile, fashionable sunglasses, and a nice jump shot are fine - I wish I possessed each of them - but one can confidently assume that Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah, and Hugo Chavez are immune to their charms. Inflation, deflation, and unemployment will not be determined by the eloquence of Obama's rhetoric, the dinners he attends, or the columnists and reporters he seduces.

My point is really a rather simple one: Obama will be judged by the outcome of events. The other things are fine -- but in the end, they are far less important, and in some cases they are evanescent. People magazine and the Style section of the Washington Post are fun, but they are not serious.

Right now Barack Obama, having been President for all of three days, appears to be sitting on top of the world. He is a bright, talented, and able man. But the world is an untidy and unpredictable place. Pakistan may convulse. Iran may well go nuclear on Obama's watch; if so, Saudi Arabia and Egypt might soon follow, and the most unstable region in the world would be home to several nuclear powers.

Hard decisions need to be made, often based on incomplete information and rapidly changing events. Inter-agency clashes will occur. People and agencies thought to be competent will prove to be unreliable. Intelligence agencies will not be able to tell the President all that he wishes. A massive federal bureaucracy, an emboldened Congress, and other nations will begin to assert themselves. The law of economics will not be suspended. Entitlement programs remain unreformed and therefore unsustainable. Wasteful programs will refuse to die. The deficit is exploding. People's expectations are soaring, and soon enough they will insist on results.

Barack Obama may or may not succeed as president; but whether he does or not, the things people are taken up with now will not be determinative. And if things get worse rather than better, if Obama appears overmatched by events, then what are viewed as strengths now will be seen as weaknesses later. The day's vanity will become the night's remorse.

Barack Obama is President of the United States, not a crown prince on a white horse. Fairy tales are fine; but fairy tales are childish things.

Which is my Michael Novak is speculating on "The Coming Fall"--when it will occur, and what might cause it.

Victor Davis Hanson has "An Uneasy Feeling"--and who can blame him?

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States. (Had we not had the financial meltdown in mid-September, and had Obama stayed three points back in the polls, would millions have stayed soured on America and now in sullen silence licked their wounds?).

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again? (This reminds of elementary school, when our third-grade split up into two sides, as the teacher quizzed us on geography-and the losers of the contest cried and said unfair and how they didn't like school or Mrs. Wilson, and then when they won the next day, how suddenly third grade became glorious, and Mrs. Wilson and her games were once again wonderful).

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not--given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the "I am now proud of America" rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

Don't miss VDH's "More Modest Proposals in the Age of Obama" aimed at The One's more beatific supporters. Such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whom you can hear at 3:54 in the latest Hollywood Obaworshiping video stating, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind."

All of which is summed by this observation by Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot (via one of his commenters) on the yin and yang of the last eight years:

Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred. They love the one without knowing what he stands for and loath the other while mispresenting his record.

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

Tony Woodlief:

It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers.

It was a concert, to be sure, and one can hardly expect, in today's entertainment-focused America, a crowd of onlookers to prefer Dana Goia to Jack Black's goofball-turned-briefly-serious speechifying. Who needs some stuffy poet, after all, when you have available the artistic genius behind Shallow Hal? Sure, John Irving wrote a couple of books good enough to become movies, but we've got the star of Snakes on a Plane, for crying out loud! Besides, reading is for elitists.

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy--if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

As Woodlief writes, "It's a gentler kind of reflection we seek these days, not an inward look at what is good and evil within this country, within each of us, but instead a reflection that is all glitter and shine, delivered by beautiful people who have distinguished themselves by an ability to show us what we want to see."

At "Big Hollywood", James Hudnall has "10 Cinematic Cliches That Must Die!"

Selwyn Duke has a lengthy post on the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, in a lengthy post at The New American.

As for the recent movie version of those events starring Tom Cruise, I posted my initial thoughts on the surprisingly watchable film here.

Allahpundit links to the video below, featuring, as he puts it, "Celebrities moved by new spiritual leader to become better people":

Via the Standard. If ever you doubted that Obamamania is fundamentally a religious movement, at least among nitwits like this, watch and note how few of their pledges are tied to Obama's policy agenda. It's mostly personal pap about smiling more and being a better parent, forms of self-improvement which, it seems, simply couldn't be undertaken until the GOP was out of the White House.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


Andrew Breitbart asks, "Where Were You Celebrities After 9/11?":

God bless, President Obama. You have my best wishes and all of my best efforts. Even though I didn't vote for you, and disagree with much of your agenda.

But that doesn't mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism and petty complaining from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. See "Hollywood, Interrupted" -- my book co-written with Mark Ebner -- which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren't found. The public behavior from Hollywood was uniformly deplorable. It's a convenient lie they peddle that they were with us during Afghanistan. They weren't.

The decadence during this period was world class. The clubs raged. The boutique hotels flourished. The parties never stopped. And a precious few stepped up to support the American troops who have been valiantly fighting for your right to do lines off of each other's buttocks at your Hollywood Hills $10 million mansions.

This video is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama -- you will not honor this pledge like the rest of us will forget about our New Year's resolutions. This video is a relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush.

It is a sickening sign that you want fast and easy absolution for having comported yourself like ill behaved children for the last eight years. Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.

OK, that's not entirely fair--I know of at least one celebrity who pledged her loyalty to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--and her calm demeanor in the years since was an inspiration to us all.

In early November, I wrote:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Allahpundit notes the ranks of the Establishment have suddenly swelled:

One of the amusements of the Obama years will be watching the counterculture transition from inveighing against The Man to trying to get The Man reelected.

Too bad though that there doesn't appear to be an opposition party whose leaders have enough brains to capitalize on this.

Andrew Breitbart writes, "it's understandable that Republicans are green with envy and scratching their heads wondering why the Internet works for Democrats but doesn't work for them. The simple answer:"

There is no technology that can help overcome the left's current online dominance.

There is no wizard in Silicon Valley who can make things better.

There is no Joe Trippi who can take an obscure Republican and push him to victory using online tools past, present and future.

Facebook won't do it. Twitter won't do it. Countering Soros and MoveOn .org won't do it. And mimicking Kos and Arianna won't do it.

Sorry, Republicans, there is no magic Internet button.

The Democratic Party resonates on the Internet because it resonates in pop culture. The Democratic Party resonates in pop culture because it has been committed to dominating it for over a generation.

Read the whole thing--and for my interview with Andrew discussing the left and pop culture, and "Big Hollywood", his new online salon, click here.

Newsbusters spots "Celebs Giddy for Obama's 'Magic Moment' After 'Hell' of Bush Years". Here's but one of them:

Actress Gloria Reuben (IMDb page), now in TNT's Raising the Bar and formerly on NBC's ER, will be on hand Tuesday "to watch the magic moment happen" since she yearns for an end to the "hell" of the Bush years. (Screen capture is from Reuben on ABC's This Week in 2006 when she was promoting a play in which she played Condoleezza Rice):

It's a once-in-a-lifetime situation. The last eight years have been such hell. We're all so excited about the hope of things to come. I really think that's part of it. People are so ready to rejoice and celebrate what is hopefully the return of the foundation of the United States.

She looks fantastic. She's spent 13 years on a top-rated TV series making a high six figure if not seven figure annual salary. And "The last eight years have been such hell"? Why, lights on the set too bright? Wolfgang Puck didn't give you the first table at Spago? No, evidently, it's because the man in Washington who in the scope of things will be seen as governing in much the same fashion as his predecessor had an R after his name and not a D.

And yet, somehow, in the photo of Reuben from 2006, she's smiling--good stiff upper lip and all that whilst trapped in Bushitler Hell. That's more than other celebrities can say about their decade in purgatory--Maura Tierney, another traumatized victim of ER is quoted as saying, "I'm calm for the first time in eight years."

On the other hand, Tierney's IMDB profile notes this:

Wrote an article in the spring 2001 issue of Flaunt titled, "'Rudy Giuliani': A Fascist? You Be The Judge."

Ahh--now it all makes sense. Obviously a Buchananite crushed by his third party defeat in 2000 who's never recovered...

Related: Hollywood East.

ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson is not happy that his audience, like Spinal Tap's, is becoming more selective:

ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson says his network needs to continue taking programming risks despite the economic downturn and plans a robust development slate for the fall.

McPherson told critics at the winter press tour that he plans to shoot 10 comedy and drama pilots for next season.

"We have to take swings at the plate, and we still have to be bold," he says, noting the shows that have worked best for the network such as "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" creatively broke new ground. "We want to grow our brand and built off the success we have. ... I don't want to do a total departure and do CBS-like shows."

The entertainment president also criticized Nielsen, saying the ratings measurement company contracted by networks doesn't take into account enough forms of audience viewing.

"We're talking about a different world now," says McPherson, whose network, like most broadcasters this season, has lost viewers.

The article is titled, "McPherson Plans Robust Fall, Criticizes Nielsen." I swear at first glance, I read it as "McPherson Plans Robust Fail."

Elsewhere in old media, "Scribes Guild Mourns Death of Elegant Calligraphy."

Update: Epic fail, new media style: "Hulu CEO: 'We screwed up royally.'"

Behold the delicately filigreed philosophical wisdom of "Courtney Love, Anti-Semitic Trainwreck."

(Via a mellow enharshened Kathy Shaidle: "I finally have to start hating Courtney Love.")

The Blogfather writes:

Remember, it's only McCarthyism if you disagree with the politics.

Just ask Tom Hanks.

Headline on Contact Music.com: "Benicio Del Toro--'Che Guevara Was A Warrior, Like Batman.'"

Which fits nicely alongside the riff Oliver Stone went off on immediately after 9/11 that terrorists are like Einstein. Both quotes speak volumes of the moral inversion that is modern (and by modern, I mean insanely regressive) Hollywood.

(Found via "Big Hollywood", appropriately enough.)

The mere existence of this headline--"CBS says ratings success proves network TV viable"--is proof that the clock is ticking on the model, at least in its current form. Imagine such a headline running 10, 20, 40 or 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, Galley Slaves notes that the clock may be ticking slightly faster for one of CBS' competitors.

Of course, the viable lifespan of the original big three is likely to exceed a far older component of the legacy media.

The Cordobakhan!

Two words--two simple, but powerful words that flow like the soft Corinthian leather on the bucket seats of a '75 Cordoba:

Ricardo Montalban.

The star of Fantasy Island and Star Trek II ("Khaaaan!") was 88.

Patrick McGhoohan, the star of the awesome (at least at its best) 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner died at age 80. Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune notes:

I thought I'd also mention that all 17 episodes of "The Prisoner" are now available for free at the AMC Web site. That cable network is remaking the series with Jim Cavaziel and Ian McKellan for a 2009 release. More information about that version of "The Prisoner" is here.

If you've never seen the series, picture a 1960s TV spy as conceived by a collaboration of Ian Fleming, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. Here are the opening titles, which feature (I believe) Vick Flick on electric 12-string guitar, the same man who played the machine gun bass guitar riff on Monty Norman and John Barry's 007 theme.




As for the show itself, James Lileks once wrote:

I'd stayed up late watching, of all things, the last episode of the Prisoner. VH-1 ran it as part of an Austin Powers 60s spy marathon. In my second year of college I was devoted to the Prisoner, and watched it with religious rapture on Sunday nights, convinced that McGoohan had crafted a perfect show - a paranoid spy drama with Large Looming Themes about the individual and society. But even then in my hemp-addled state I saw the last episode for what it was: an inedible stew of sophmoric allegory that ruined everything that had gone before. So last night I watched it again to see if it was truly as bad as I remembered, and yes, it was. Interesting concepts, but tritely executed. Even so, I'll give him credit for one thing: having spent 13 episodes defending the rights of the individual to be an individual, he turned the idea on its head at the end, and suggested that absolute individuality corrupts absolutely, that it corrupts society. I didn't understand that in 1977; I didn't see that point.

Interesting point, but when it's being made by 30 robed guys in black-and-white masks pounding a table, you have to roll your eyes and say wow, man, heavy.

That said, the Prisoner was still a good show. What was American TV doing at the time? I Dream of Jeanie.

And The Jackie Gleason Show, in whose timeslot The Prisoner ran on American TV as a 1968 summer replacement.

Update: Frank Martin quotes a remarkably prescient moment from the show.

A time capsule from an era when Hollywood fought the man with the mustache, rather than backing him.

Ten years ago, the late Paul Weyrich wrote:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

In his latest column, Jay Nordlinger looks at the state of the overculture and similarly concludes, "It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively":

What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person's image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin's name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman -- more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be -- was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose -- no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Donkey?

For a longform video look at the above topic, tune into John Ziegler (he of the upcoming How Obama Got Elected documentary) talking with the hosts of Breitbart.TV's B-Cast program yesterday. (Which concluded with my recent look at our incoming gaffe-o-matic president and vice president, after a brief mime-is-money silent interlude from the hosts and their failed soundboard.)

In the mail today are the galleys for Roger L. Simon's new book, Blacklisting Myself. Here's an excerpt of an excerpt from (appropriately enough) "Big Hollywood":

In some ways, this new, less overt list is worse, because there is nothing concrete to rebel against, no hearings, no committees, no protest groups pro or con, no secret databases. There don't need to be. There is no there there, in Gertrude Stein's immortal words--only the grey haze of this mindless received liberalism, the world as last week's New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform, as if it were the permanent religious text of some strange new orthodoxy.

You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor's office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the executive keeping you waiting. They are definitely not in surgery. The intention is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I have personal knowledge of an instance when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours--I assume he didn't realize they'd come to pitch him Prizzi's Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy or vengeance.)

Once inside the executive's office, the pecking order of talent and management thus confirmed, it's instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water--originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what's important. It usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (depending on the year), and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. (What will they do without him?) Fucking Bush did this or that ... Did you hear the stupid thing Chimpy the Idiot said? You didn't even have to hear Bush referred to specifically-- the word "idiot" sufficed. You knew. The subtext was that we were all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don't.

If you didn't agree with this particular Weltanschauung, if you dissented from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you had but three choices: One, you could argue, in which case you would be almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger, or a right-wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have had little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you could shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you felt like a coward and experienced (as I have) a dose of nausea straight out of Sartre. Three, you could stop going to the meetings altogether--you could, in effect, blacklist yourself.

While this is (to the best of my knowledge) Roger's first non-fiction book, he's long been an exceptional fiction and comedy writer, and as we've long been documenting here, reality is always far stranger than satire. And as Hollywood's politically correct purges (see post below) continue and the level of dissent even less acceptable in a town that prides itself as being full of "free thinkers", many more people may well be blacklisting themselves as well in the years to come.

I had planned to post a link to this item by Mark Hemingway in the Corner...

Here's a handy map Prop 8 opponents have put together showing you where donors to prop 8 live. You have to love the "Jump to San Francisco, Salt Lake City , or Orange County" feature. If someone put together a map showing where all the gay people in the neighborhood live that would properly be called an implicit threat, but this is altogether different, right?

....But this article titled "The Revival Of The Blacklist" at The American Vision puts a number of related pieces together, along with a note of another fear of cold war tactics in a hot election battle far from Los Angeles:

The Franken-Coleman election in Minnesota is testimony to the fact that conservatives fear liberal blacklisting. A lot of liberal money came in to support of Franken by noted liberals like Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, David Letterman, Mike Myers, Dan Aykroyd, and Steve Martin. Because the FCC data base is open to the media, those who donate are available to the Hollywood left. A conservative who donated to Coleman would be "outed" in periodicals like Variety and Politico and might find it difficult getting steady work in the entertainment industry (see interview here).

A similar tactic is being used to punish those who supported Proposition 8. A Los Angeles Times article reports that many "in liberal Hollywood who fought to defeat the initiative banning same-sex marriage and are now reeling with recrimination and dismay. Meanwhile, activists continue to comb donor lists and employ the Internet to expose those who donated money to support the ban. Already out is Scott Eckern, director of the nonprofit California Musical Theatre in Sacramento, who resigned after a flurry of complaints from prominent theater artists, including 'Hairspray' composer Marc Shaiman, when word of his contribution to the Yes on [Prop] 8 campaign surfaced."

A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle who supported Prop 8 was intimidated when Internet search engines were used "to find the letter writer's small business, his Web site (which included the names of his children and dog), his phone number and his clients. And they posted that information in the 'Comments' section of SFGate.com--urging, in ugly language, retribution against the author's business and its identified clients."

Now, is this to say that conservatives can't work in Hollywood today? Not at all. Is there a fear factor that keeps conservatives from speaking out? I don't doubt it. Those who are touted as conservatives usually have no stated public opinion on abortion and homosexuality. Patricia Heaton and Angie Harmon are notable exceptions. Kurt Russell is listed as a conservative, actually, a libertarian, which might explain why he's living with Goldie Hawn and not married to her, although I must say that he's stayed with her longer than Brad Pitt did with Jennifer Aniston. Many (most?) are economic conservatives like Kelsey Grammar and Drew Carey. And there are more who are being encouraged to make their conservative beliefs public.

Like so much of liberalism, liberals are hypocritical. They decry the blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s but don't seem to mind if the right people are being blacklisted today who defy their pet causes.

Thus rendering the well over 40 year old Annual Blacklist Movie (scroll to about 1:15 into this edition of Silicon Graffiti from July for a montage of clips from numerous examples of this Tinseltown perennial) as even more hypocritical than it already was:

Related thoughts here.

Ed Morrissey links to Andrew Malcolm in the L.A. Times and his take on the Golden Globe Awards last night, which sounded more like outtakes from the The Sopranos than a black-tie event. Malcolm writes:

This year's Golden Globe Awards by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. had acceptance speeches that were full of words like $%&*(=^ and f!$*&-+. Also, balls, suck and suck it. So if you were among a majority of Americans who didn't watch it, you might have missed something.

Apparently, some were surprised by the profanity production of the culture crowd.

But clearly the actors have been studying Illinois Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was caught on FBI wiretaps and not quoted publicly by that bleeping federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. This was after Blago's December arrest for, among other things, allegedly auctioning off his "<<&*%$# golden" nomination to fill the vacant Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama, who'll be inaugurated in just 8 days.

Ed Morrissey adds:

Mickey Rourke attained the evening's height of wit by discussing "balls" in detail, and having his friend, director Darren Arenofsky, flip him the bird while on camera. Tina Fey told three of her critics on the Internet to "suck it". And those were the printable quotes from Hollywood last night.

Ed concludes:

Here's a handy hint: If you have to wear your tuxedo or formal evening gown -- or if you have to spend more than $100 to get dressed for an event -- keep your balls in your pants and keep the suck in your vacuum cleaner.

Besides, cursing like a sailor on national TV has been done to death. If you really want to epater le bourgeois--particularly our puritanical legacy media--try this approach.

My interview last week with Andrew Breitbart, discussing his new "Big Hollywood" group blog for Saturday's edition of PJM Political unfortunately needed to be edited to fit into the rest of the show's weekly 55-minute running time on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. However, the complete 15-minute interview is now online; click here to listen!

Nina and I caught up with Tom Cruise's Valkyrie last night--for very much the reasons that this blogger suggested:

People are whining about the plot. People are whining about the lead actor. People are whining about how it's kinda hard to make a suspenseful thriller when everyone already knows the ending.

Me? As far as I'm concerned, enough machine guns and dead Nazis will cover for nearly any movie-making sin. I can't think of a single movie, from It's A Wonderful Life to Mary Poppins, that wouldn't be improved by a whole bunch of machine guns and dead Nazis.

Assuaged somewhat by the decent reviews the movie has been getting (after a notoriously rough shoot and apparently a ton of editing) I had very low expectations for the film, and other than one or two misfires (more on those in a bit), I thought the film itself worked pretty well, at least on the level of the sort of programmer that Hollywood used to routinely crank out in the '60s and '70s. (The Night of the Generals, Is Paris Burning?, The Eagle Has Landed, etc.) Of course, as Kyle Smith wrote last month:

In the '70s, a movie like this would have been wall-to-wall with alcoholics like Richard Burton and Robert Shaw. Cruise is still both too pretty and too American to play the kind of warrior who, after losing seven fingers and an eye in a bombing raid, goes back to work without complaint.

Kyle is right on one level, but Cruise's limited acting range and the tons of Xenu-stamped baggage that Cruise brings to any project are very much muted by two factors. Valkyrie has terrific production design, which makes the film feel big without ever seeming like the CGI is phony, and a great cast of supporting actors. It also helped that a big chunk of the cast were solid British and German character actors who had appeared in two far better movies about Nazi Germany--Conspiracy and Downfall.

Critics always seem to snark at movies in foreign locales where the actors speak English without some sort of regional accent, and yet some of the best films ever made didn't encumber their actors with having to put on phony accents: Paths of Glory (Kirk Douglas with a French accent would have likely sounded akin to Inspector Clouseau) and Dr. Zhivago with its international cast both come immediately to mind, and there are countless other examples, particularly before Hollywood turned to Spielberg and Lucas to revive its sagging fortunes after the lights went out in the 1970s.

But given what was written about the film before its release, Valkyrie suffered an immediate setback in believability with its clunky first title card, which read something like this:

NORTH AFRICA, 1943: THE GERMAN NINTH PANZER CORPS

As opposed to what--the New Jersey Panzer Corps? And during a later scene, in which Cruise's character gets the inspiration for his plot to assassinate Hitler while Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyrie" plays during an air raid, I half-expected a shot of Huey helicopters flying over Berlin, with Robert Duvall bellowing, "HITLER DON'T SURF!"

But once Cruise's plot to kill Hitler begins to be implemented, the film begins to fall into place a first class thriller. And as Chuck DeVore writes at "Big Hollywood", consider what the real-life Claus von Stauffenberg was up against:

Stauffenberg got himself appointed to a key position in Berlin. He sized up his target, meeting Hitler more than once. Stauffenberg then flew from Berlin to Prussia on the morning of July 20, 1944 with his briefcase bomb. He got into the heavily guarded command post and excused himself to arm the bomb. He armed the bomb with one mangled hand on which he had a thumb and two fingers, coordinating his progress through his one eye. He was interrupted by a guard telling him to hurry as the briefing with Hitler was about to begin. He placed the briefcase bomb under the briefing table and was called out of the room by a "phone call." He waited in a nearby shelter to observe the blast, then walked away with his aide-de-camp. Stauffenberg then bluffed his way out of a command post crawling with heavily armed men just after a mysterious explosion.

And that sequence and its denouement is a textbook example of Hitchcockian technqiue, as Hitchcock himself explained four decades ago to Francois Truffaut:

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Since Valkyrie is a film with two huge bummers at the end, as surely is known by virtually everyone in the audience--the conspirators are shot and Hitler lives--suspense is what makes it tick. After a false start or two, and even with its somewhat miscast lead, it certainly delivers on that account.

Well, this could be interesting:

The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has defended a controversial storyline in the comedy cartoon which sees Homer Simpson accuse his Muslim neighbours of terrorism.

In a forthcoming episode of the long-running show, dad Homer Simpson convinces friends that a Middle Eastern family are plotting to blow up a shopping mall but is proved wrong when it turns out the family's father, Amid, works in demolition.

When the Simpson family have their Muslim neighbours over for dinner, Homer shows his ignorance of the Muslim faith calling Allah "Oliver" and holy book The Koran "The Corona".

A spokesperson for Britain's The Islamic Cultural Centre + The London Central Mosque has commented on the episode, telling U.K. newspaper the Daily Star, "I hope Muslims take no notice of the show."

But Groening has come out in defence of the plot, saying, "Cartoons deal in stereotypes. We try to be sensitive."

You do? Well, perhaps when there's the possibility that one of your targets might actually fight back.

Back in 2005, I wrote up my thoughts on the dreadful mid-'70s Robert Redford/Mia Farrow version of F. Scott's Fitzgerald's epochal novel thusly:

I think Tom Wolfe (piqued at the unauthorized usurpation of his trademark white suit by Redford's Gatsby) once dismissed the movie as "Fitzgerald as interpreted by the Garment District", and while the film did put Ralph Lauren on the map, most of the duds the actors are wearing, with their fat ties and wide lapels, seem much more 1970s than 1920s.

But that's the least of Gatsby's problems. I can't quite figure out if Mia Farrow works or not, but Redford, who's far too cinematically pretty to play the self-made Gatsby, and who sort of sleepwalks through his role, seems wildly miscast. As does Bruce Dern, who can't escape his Roger Corman-era psycho biker roles (his Freeman Lowell in Silent Running was merely an interstellar variation on that persona).

But what really sinks Gatsby is a self-conscious pacing that makes Stanley Kubrick's stately Barry Lyndon seem like an MTV video in comparison. That's also the same problem that plagues 1976's The Last Tycoon, Elia Kazan's last movie, with a young Robert DeNiro in a thinly disguised portrayal as doomed Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg.

So will there ever be a decent cinematic Fitzgerald? This article on the various cinematic portrayals of Gatsby says don't bet on it.

And as the made for TV version of Gatsby a few years ago demonstrated, attempting to film Fitzgerald these days presents an additional problem.

But much like Obama reliving ancient failed history with the New New Deal, that's not going to prevent Hollywood from trying again, Tom Shillue writes over at Big Hollywood.

No sign of Jay Sherman or Bart Simpson (though I think we know where Homer stands), but Debbie Schlussel spots one of the world's biggest cartoon heroes in the tank for the world's biggest celebrity. No word yet on whether they'll be teaming up for a sequel to this Very Special Issue of Spider-Man.

Back in 2004, Power Line's John Hinderaker wrote that comic books were "a medium in which the liberals will have a hard time competing", but the left's Long March Through The Institutions beginning in the 1960s and '70s also included a stop there, alas.

One of the (many) reasons why Hollywood has largely slept through this decade is the fecklessness of its writing. Technically, the craft of Hollywood has never been more sophisticated: watch The Dark Knight or the Matrix movies or any one of a dozen summer popcorn flicks for all-enveloping production design, cinematography and sound. But for reasons of political correctness, commercialism, or seemingly just out of spite, the committees that produce most films today can take a story that begins as a solid piece of fiction and make utter hash of it.

There's a new post at Big Hollywood by John Ridley ("When I write for the Huffington Post I'm often considered the resident Righty. When I write for NPR I'm the flaming Liberal."), who wrote the story that became George Clooney's 1998 film Three Kings. (The movie where Clooney blamed President George H.W. Bush for not finishing the job in Iraq. Clooney and the rest of Hollywood would of course spend the next decade blaming President George W. Bush for finishing the job in Iraq.)

But Ridley originally wrote his story with a black solider as the lead protagonist:

When I wrote the story for Three Kings, it wasn't meant to be particularly conservative or liberal. It was a black empowerment piece. The lead character of the story was a disillusioned black man who figures if the government is going to go to war over oil, then he is entitled to grab something for himself if he can. Gold. But when he sees that America is going to once again basically turn a blind eye to the plight of the oppressed, that's when he decides he has to step in and help his "dark skinned" brothers and sisters. The ascendancy of a man of color who sees wrong, and does right despite his circumstances.

What ended up on the screen from all that was Ice Cube in the sidekick role.

And right around the same time, Hollywood was doing the reverse to Andrew Klavan's True Crime novel, when it became a vehicle for Clint Eastwood:

The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters' heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan's True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn't racially biased. "The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.," Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan's novel.

Of course, to really witness political correctness, poor casting, and screenwriting by committee ruin a killer novel, compare the ridiculous movie version of The Bonfire of the Vanities to Tom Wolfe's epochal book. Or spare yourself two hours of hell and just read Julie Salamon's The Devil's Candy instead--it's a much more entertaining look at how Hollywood's million dollar chefs can ruin even the most foolproof of recipes.

Hollywood is an multi-million dollar industry known throughout the world in creating remarkably realistic but totally imaginary worlds--and so is "Pallywood", the Palestinian propaganda factory that has manufactured plenty of consent, particularly from Big Media. Both imaginary worlds come together in this post in the news section of the Internet Movie Database, which often goes off the rails when it's not reporting on box office takes, awards shows, and other news that's directly related to Tinseltown:

The trade publication Editor & Publisher has editorially chastised the U.S. news media for providing "largely one-sided coverage" of the conflict in Gaza and "little editorializing or commentary." Only CNN and MSNBC, the editorial said, had "provided some helpful balance" in their coverage, but the broadcast news networks' Sunday morning programs, it observed, featured Democratic leaders who "said little, or nothing, critical of Israel." Such imbalanced coverage, E&P said, comes in the face of condemnation of the "disproportionate" Israeli attacks by Amnesty International and equally strong editorial criticism in the Israeli daily Haaretz and outrage by its columnists.

Meanwhile, if you're finding the dinosaur media's "largely one-sided coverage" as tilting in a different direction than the picture painted by their house organ (which knows a thing or two about media manipulation themselves), Roger L. Simon writes:

If your only information about the current Middle East crisis came from CNN, you'd think it boiled down to a bunch of high-tech Israeli bullies running around Gaza torturing Palestinian women and children, while tossing smart bombs on hospitals and blowing up UN schools with Merkava tanks. Almost no context is given. That Israel had done virtually nothing for the three years since voluntarily withdrawing from Gaza but grin and bare it, as missiles after missile, many courtesy of Iran, flew willy-nilly into the Southern part of their country - a fusillade no nation on Earth, civilized or uncivilized, would begin to tolerate - is barely mentioned or mumbled into a half-audible mike while the video plays bloodied Palestinian infants screaming for mama.

The New York Times may be worse. Bending over backwards in a morass of cultural relativist obfuscation, the paper seems to have imbued moral equivalence with a religious fervor usually found at Lourdes.

Of course, the Israelis have the media ticked off. Remembering well the media's role in the second Lebanon War when some, notably AP and Reuters, went so far as to try to palm off Photoshopped Hezbollah pictures as authentic photos from the front when the forgeries were so obvious bloggers caught them in minutes, this time the IDF has the media cordoned off miles from the action. This time they don't have the chance to lens endless photos of the same "green man" popping up at one scene of "Israeli brutality" after the other. Who could blame the Israel government for having had enough of the propaganda wiles of the MSM? I had to laugh when I heard CNN's Ben Wedeman complaining last night that the network had to rely on their Palestinian stringers inside Gaza, but assuring us they were excellent and reliable. We're supposed to take that seriously from the network whose former executive director finally admitted after several years that they had covered up (effectively lied about) Saddam's atrocities in order to get access inside Iraq? Have these people no shame? Well, I guess not.

So that brings us to Pajamas TV. We have decided to help right this imbalance in our small way by emphasizing coverage from Israel as long as this crisis is going on. We have a live camera in Jerusalem and we are going to feature the following talent there, among others: Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, our own Middle East Editor Allison Kaplan Sommer (a Tel Aviv resident), Richard Landes of Boston University and a part-time Jerusalem resident and Nitsana Leitner of the Israeli Law Center. We admit we are biased in favor of Israel, in favor of the side we view as the good guys in a moral struggle. So bear that in mind when you tune in, but tune in every day for our Gaza Update.

Tune in here.

Related: The reasoning seems smart merely on the surface, but Mike McNally delves further into "Why Israel is Smart Keeping the Media Out of Gaza". And on the flipside, Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard "intriguingly leaves open the possibility that Hamas is operating with a different form of rationality."

In addition to Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte's new Big Hollywood, John Hawkins has just added Right Wing Video to make a troika of Websites he's running. The new site is your one-stop-shop for libertarian and conservative clips--err, like mine!

Eric Trager of Commentary is pretty cool with CNN's chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta being tapped as Obama's surgeon general, if only because it will chap Michael Moore's considerable hide.

Mark Steyn explores the default position of popular culture:

Liberalism is the default mode of the culture -- to the point where the left-of-center position is so pervasive it's no longer a position at all, but rather something uncontentious, received wisdom, part of the air we breathe. In several of the examples Jay cites, I'll bet the musicians involved would be stunned to find that there was anyone in the room who would find the message remotely disagreeable.

In these conversations, one should distinguish between the activist types -- the Sean Penns and whatnot -- and the far bigger number of actors and musicians who don't think about politics terribly much and for whom a passive allegiance to the only recognized party of the entertainment state is just the easy option. Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a one-party state, and I'm slightly taken aback by the number of bigtime Hollywood stars who've said to me sotto voce in the last two years how much they agree with my book but please don't mention it to anyone. But Andrew Breitbart gets to what's really at stake:

If conservatives don't figure out popular culture soon, the movement will die a deserving death.

I think that's right. If the non-political sphere is permanently left-of-center -- the movies, the pop songs, the plays, the sitcoms, the newspapers plus the churches, schools and much else -- it's simply unreasonable to expect people to walk into a polling booth every other November and vote conservative. The culture is where the issues get framed and the boundaries set.

In a column in a recent edition of National Review "On Dead Tree" (subscription required), Steyn wrote that President Bush missed an enormous opportunity to reset the overculture that pop culture operates within, during the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

It is already the dreariest of tropes in this transition period to compare President-elect Obama to Franklin Roosevelt: FDR had the Depression, BHO has the, er, collapse of Lehman Bros, etc. But the real FDR moment -- the seismic event that a canny politician seizes as a pretext for transformative change -- was surely 9/11. A few weeks after the attacks, Bush had the highest approval ratings of any president in history. But he didn't do anything with them. And the greatest mistake of all was his disinclination to take on the broader culture that, in the wake of 9/11, looked briefly vulnerable -- in that moment when Americans opted for "Let's roll!" over the desiccated Oprahfied chants of "healing" and "closure" and the rest of the awful lifeless language of emotional narcissism.

Bush had a rare opportunity to reverse the most poisonous tide in the Western world: He could have argued that Western self-loathing is a psychosis we can no longer afford. He could have told the teachers' unions there was more to the Second World War than the internment of Japanese Americans and it's time they started mentioning it to our children. You can't hold the 90 percent approval ratings forever, but, while he had them, George W. Bush could have used them for a "teaching moment": If ever there's a time for not being mired in civilizational self-abasement, wartime is it. Yet the president figured he could fight a long existential struggle against America's enemies in a culture that teaches its children there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.

So, by the 2004 campaign season, he was the 50 percent president again, relying on a get-out-the-vote operation in selected corners of purpling red states to put him over the top against a weak, tone-deaf, elitist buffoon who voted for the war before he voted against it. It shouldn't have been like that.

With the overculture thus still firmly in control of Old Media and Old Academia, Andrew Breitbart's new Big Holywood site is an attempt to begin to reset the dominant mode of one of the chief purveyors of pop culture.

With posts from Orson Bean, Andrew Klavan (the author of the book that was the basis of Clint Eastwood's True Crime), Power Line's Scott Johnson, and numerous others, and editing by John Nolte, the film maker best known in the Blogosphere as the irrepressible "Dirty Harry", that's all the more reason to stop by today.

Robert Stacy McCain: "We can't fast-forward to find out how the saga ends. For now, we can only watch as Hamas learns the timeless lesson: Don't mess with Sonny Corleone's sister."

John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

If you seriously believe that the Earth is threatened with destruction by global warming, then the current global economic slowdown is providential. Reduced economic activity equals less energy consumption equals less carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Environmentalists have been telling us we need to reduce our energy consumption, and live more modestly, for years. Now we're doing it. So where's the celebration of the world's sharp turn Greenward?

For that, we turn to the renowned economist, Jamie Lee Curtis...

Betsy Newmark reminds readers of the other side of Che Guevara:

Like the useful idiots who used to proudly wear their Mao jackets, now we have uncounted millions buying the Che T Shirts, putting up the poster, getting a Che tattoo, and buying tickets to see movies that portray Guevara as simply an idealistic revolutionary out to help the underclass. Actor Benicio del Toro who portrays him in the current film compares Che to Jesus except without that whole turn-the-other-cheek nonsense. It's a depressing commentary on the delusions of idealism that have led so many to idolize this guy and turn their own cheek to the reality of history.

Of course, as Mark Gladdblatt reminds us with a round-up of some of Che's more infamous quotes, the real Che was just a tad less sentimental than his modern disciples:

"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Which of course sounds like something your average university Decon 101 professor would say to his freshman class. No wonder radical college professors like Bill Ayers (who emulated Che's actions) and Ward Churchill (who nostalgically emulates Che's poses) think he's Che chic.

If you missed it yesterday on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, Saturday's PJM Political is now online; tune in here to listen.

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for his take on President-Elect Obama's cabinet choices, and the Pythonic implications of the "shoe toss" incident that bedeviled President Bush in Iraq.

Plus, from PJTV:

• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon debates Frost/Nixon with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd.
  
• Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin talk with Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, now looking to helm the Republican National Committee, followed by their conversation with the surprise celebrity from the last month of the presidential election, Joe Wurzelbacher, aka...Joe The Plumber.
  

If you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives. And tune in to Pajamas Media's PJTV channel for video coverage throughout the week.

Really, "what can one man do to save the world?" (Click over if only for the terrific Photoshop.)

(Via the Binkmeister.)

The accelerating pace of change is impacting television as well. As Jonathan Last notes, NBC's plugging Jay Leno into their primetime lineup keeps their talk star happy (and things were looking shaky in that department this past summer), and keeps costs down, by reducing the amount of scripted programs the network airs:

I wonder if this is a recessionary move:

Though Mr. Leno will command an enormous salary, probably more than $30 million a year, the cost of his show will be a fraction of what a network pays for dramas at 10 p.m. Those average about $3 million an episode. That adds up to $15 million a week to fill the 10 p.m. hour. Mr. Leno's show is expected to cost less than $2 million a week.

In addition, NBC will get more weeks of original programming. Network dramas typically make 22 to 24 episodes a year. Under this deal, the executives involved in the discussions said, Mr. Leno will perform 46 weeks a year.

So Leno will give them so much bang for their buck that NBC should be able to accept pretty meager ratings with his show and still be able to justify it on a cost-per-viewer basis.

But the biggest impact of putting Leno in prime-time is that it drastically reduces the available space for scripted prime-time shows. A network only has 15 hours of prime-time a week; this move devotes 33 percent of that space to one show leaving only 10 hours to run existing programs and try out new pick-ups. I don't know how much time reality programming takes up on NBC each week--I think it's four hours--and suddenly you have very little space to work in scripted programming.

If you look at the NBC program list, I can't see how you fit those shows (minus the coming cancellations, even) into the remaining six hours. I suspect that this may mean that NBC will look to run new programming year-round, instead of just during sweeps. It's the only way I can see them getting it all out with the addition of Leno's show.

In other television news, I can't see this move booting the anemically-rated Academy Awards broadcast.

Or, Day By The Day The Earth Stood Still: Cartoonist Chris Muir has some fun with the latest pointless Hollywood remake.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has some surprisingly kind words about a new film based on one of his early employers.

Finally, a lesson in tolerance and acceptance of diversity from actress Kate Beckinsale. Wonder if she's a Linda Ronstadt fan?

John Nolte and Christian Toto watch Keanu Reeves's pointless remake of the classic 1951 sci-fi gem, The Day The Earth Stood Still so you don't have to. (Incidentally, when Hollywood makes yet another global warming movie and even the leftwing critics don't like it, you know the celluloid deserves to be cut up into guitar picks.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds notes that the producers chose to digitally beam the film into space. If there's life on other planets, how will they respond?

Probably with two messages:

1. Make better movies. Which is what aliens told Woody Allen in his self-indulgent, surrealistic Stardust Memories from 1980.

2. Send more Chuck Berry! To borrow the punchline of an early Saturday Night Live sketch when a Voyager probe from 1977 sent an LP into space that included the classic "Johnny Be Goode" amongst its recordings.

Update: Get a load of the screenshot that accompanies "Klaatu barada crappo" at Protein Wisdom.

As Christian Toto writes, while Roger Ebert has always been a man of the left, his BDS seems to be getting the better of him these days. In his otherwise appropriately middling review of the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, Ebert opines:

The message of the 2008 version is that we should have voted for Al Gore. This didn't require Klaatu and Gort. That's what I'm here for.

To which Christian replies:

Really? I thought you were here to help the public decide the best way to spend their hard-earned money at their local theater. Maybe that whole "thumb" thing was just a distraction.

Exactly. But Ebert really lets his 1960s-minted BDS flag fly in his review of Frost/Nixon:

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he now seems, compared to the occupant of the office from 2001 to 2009.

That's not strange, that's what the media does to every Republican president when he leaves office when comparing him to a successor from his same party. Why should Nixon be the exception?

More Ebert:

Nixon was thought to have been destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews. But wouldn't you trade him in a second for Bush?

Nahh, I'm not a wage and price controls kind of guy. But that's the great irony of Nixon's presidency, as Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote in his 1991 biography of Nixon. If the left could have gotten past their hatred of the man, they would found, particularly in his statist warmed over Great Society domestic policies, he really was one of them, to paraphrase Wicker's title--or at least he certainly governed like it.

While Ebert naturally gives the movie four stars, John Nolte provides a bit of much-needed perspective:

Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon's resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn't been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. The film holds your attention and reeks of competence from beginning to end.

All that's missing is a point.

* * *

Frost/Nixon rates as an impressive television movie, but as a feature it lacks a point, any kind of real intellectual curiosity, and, most of all, an ambition to do more than win awards. There's a great Nixon film to be made about this corrupt but fascinating man, but a couple of terrific lead performances won't help anyone remember this one for very long.

Even Ebert circuitously admits that the film is a show about a show about nothing:

[Nixon] admitted what everyone already knew, and that freed him to get on with things, to end his limbo in San Clemente, Calif., to give other interviews, to write books, to be consulted as an elder statesman. Indeed, to show his face in public.

Wait--didn't you start your article by saying that Nixon was "interred by the Frost interviews"? So the interview that interred Nixon freed him to get on with things?

In actuality, the interview was hardly the heavyweight slugfest the movie and its hagiographic critics make it out to be. At National Review, Fred Schwarz goes back to the newspaper reviews of Frosts' interviews with Nixon to see how they played at the time with a media still giddy over their recent victory:

To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault." Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time.

The show's producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of "leak": transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.

After the airing of the first interview -- the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material -- there was far less hoopla. The Post's Bob Woodward, Nixon's erstwhile tormentor, called it "a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal."

Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson's analysis dripped with disappointment: "[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken -- or shattered -- or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance." Johnson continued: "Last night's program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he's swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match."

The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned "Week in Review" item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: "The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview."

* * *

How did this one-day story suddenly become the most important event since the Civil War? Well, if there's anything the media loves more than overhyping an anti-Republican story, it's overhyping its own importance, so when they have a chance to do both at once, it's no surprise that they get a little too excited.

As I wrote here last year, Frost/Nixon is an attempt to use history, assisted by plenty of dramatic license, to retrospectively turn a loss into a win. By all accounts, Frost/Nixon does a fine job of dramatizing the negotiations and preparation that led up to the interviews. And it's hard to imagine Frank Langella, who plays a Brezhnev-looking Nixon, giving a bad performance. Still, the movie's fundamental premise is just plain wrong.

The trailer says: "In 1974 President Nixon resigned to hide the truth. But one man had a few questions." In fact, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; "the truth" was contained in congressional transcripts, court papers, and Oval Office tapes, and the great bulk of it came out before Frost and Nixon sat down for their "historic" clash. Some questions did remain unanswered: Why would anyone bug the DNC? Why didn't Nixon burn the tapes? Where did the 18-1/2 minute gap come from? But Frost never brought these up.

All that his much-vaunted interviews "revealed" was the unsurprising truth that, even in retirement, Richard Nixon was the same Tricky Dick he had always been.

As Orrin Judd concludes in his review of Wicker's biography:

It is perhaps the perfect punishment that Nixon has no one left to defend him now except for the same liberals who were his lifelong enemies. One imagines Richard Nixon spinning in his grave at the very thought of a NY Times columnist penning a 700 page apologia for his life and works, and one smiles.

And as John Nolte writes:

Since 1976's All The President's Men Nixon's become a genre all his own. Take a look.

My personal favorite is Robert Altman's Secret Honor, starring Philip Baker Hall and a half gallon bottle of Chivas Regal, and its Blagojevichian conclusion. (Language warning, but the video clip's here.)

Nixon was still very much alive when the 1984 film was made; while I don't know his response, I'd like think that deep down inside, he very much enjoyed, even a decade after he left office, still being able to cause that embittered a reaction amongst the left.

(And as for Nixon's interviewer? Much like Dan Rather's banishment to the cable purgatory of HD-Net, Frost has also been exiled to his own video Siberia.)

If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, here's a sample:

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

From Wired magazine, "Rare Sci-Fi Movie Props Hit Auction Block."

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

Jonathan Last notes that the Gray Lady isn't exactly helping herself win converts with its latest ad campaign. And in news regarding another medium, AP spots "broadcasters having bad year":

Broadcast TV's fall season is going so poorly that four out of five returning programs have a smaller audience than they had in 2007.

Say, this trend deserves a name, don't you think?

Related: I can certainly sympathize with the image Photoshopped by Doug Ross that accompanies this post: "Newspaper CEOs rearrange deck chairs in closed-door 'Crisis Summit." This chart helps to explain that image.

(Found via Free Canuckistan.)

Found on Terry Teachout's About Last Night blog:

"I have never thought about what I was doing in terms of art, or 'this is great,' or 'world-shaking,' or anything like that. To me, it was always a job of work--which I enjoyed immensely--and that's it."

--John Ford, 1966

With Hollywood beginning to sweat the economy, The Onion suggests a remake they just can't refuse.

(Via Yeah Right, a blog "for those of us who love pop culture but loathe the Left.")

PBS's Sesame Street music used to break terrorist wills in Gitmo!

Isn't interdepartmental cooperation nice to see? Sure, government is ever-expanding, but it's great when two very different, and often highly competitive agencies are working together to keep us safe.

And tunes from other PBS shows are being used as well:

Bob Singleton, whose song "I Love You" is beloved by legions of preschool Barney fans, wrote in a newspaper opinion column that any music can become unbearable if played loudly for long stretches.

"It's absolutely ludicrous," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point?"

He said with a deep and abiding understanding of the irony of the situation, knowing full well that he's driven millions of parents to the emotional breaking point having to listen to his music over and over and over and over again.

(H/T: CG)

While Rod Blagojevich's pay to play scandal involving Obama's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat in Illinois has just broken, Ross Douthat does a nifty demolition job on the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus' case for Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary's New York Senate Seat:

I don't know about Jesse Ventura, but I find Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono's pre-political careers as self-made showbiz entrepreneurs - to say nothing of Jon Corzine's career in finance - much more impressive than anything Caroline Kennedy has ever done. Her life has been dedicated to worthy pursuits, by and large, but most of her accomplishments (fundraising for New York public schools, editing essay collections in honor of her father, etc.) are classic "born on third base" endeavors - laudable enough without being terribly impressive. And all of the names on Marcus's list actually submitted themselves to the democratic process on their way to the Senate, the House, and the California's Governor's Mansion; for an appointment to fill a vacant seat (especially a safe vacant seat), the bar ought to be set a bit higher than "she's more qualified than Sonny Bono."

But Caroline's case is easily made with the just four simple words: She's not Fran Dresher.

"Frontrunner for best star memoir cover art EVER."

(Via Terry Teachout, who notes--and he's right--"the title's not too shabby either.")

Jennifer Rubin compares Al Franken to Humphrey Bogart---um, sort of.

If you missed it today on Sirius XM, the latest edition of PJM Political is now online, featuring Roger L. Simon's interview on the changing role of gender in Hollywood with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd. And recorded on the recent National Review cruise, my interview with former Cheers executive producer Rob Long. Plus an excellent discussion on President Elect Barack Obama's impact on black America with PJTV co-host Joe Hicks and John McWhorter, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute.

Hosted by the best-known bartender since Sam Malone, produced by your friend and humble narrator--click here to listen!

Roger L. Simon and Lionel Chetwynd on the decline of 007, from Kennedy-era Cold War icon to the moral equivalence of the Bourne and Munich-era.

That's the New York Times' take on Rosie O'Donnell's variety show yesterday--and if Rosie bombed with the Gray Lady, Rosie bombed.

Of course, Hollywood's enemies list seems to be an ever-growing phenomenon, rendering the annual Hollywood blacklist movie even more hypocritical than it already was.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here at WKRP Ed Driscoll.com:

Related: Jules Crittenden has a reassuring list of "Things To Be Thankful For In A Troubled World", and Jennifer Rubin proffers "Ten Reasons for Conservatives to Be Thankful."

For decades, America's leading cultural anthropologists pondered the question: were we as a nation doomed to believe that nothing could be as dreadful, as craptacular in that Sid and Marty Krofft 1970s polystyrene primary colors video look as the Star Wars Holiday Special?

No. There is another. And its name is The Donny And Marie Star Wars Special.

If that doesn't sound frightening enough, because it truly is from the 1970s, there's the inevitable appearance by...but of course!...Paul Lynde!

When Harrison Ford shouted that he'd see you in Hell in The Empire Strikes Back, this is truly what he was referring to.

The celebratory party surrounding the annual anemically rated Oscar awards must go on, even in these trying economic times:

Vanity Fair will hold its annual Oscar Night party at the Sunset Tower Hotel on February 22, 2009, it was announced today by editor Graydon Carter.

"The party will be a much more intimate affair than in years past; we're going to scale back the guest list considerably," Carter says. "We'll celebrate Hollywood's big night the way we did when we first threw the party 15 years ago--it will be a cozier, more understated event. And one with familiar decor--given the current economy, and our dedication to the green movement, we will be recycling many of the elements of years past.

Wardrobe recycling certainly appears to be in vogue with these two ultra-glamorous Hollywood superstars; meanwhile, a veteran television actress is forced to wear what appears to be a Hefty recycling bin liner at her recent photo-op.

Update: I shouldn't be too hard on Judith Light--she attended the same prep school I did, though a few years before me--and the Swedish Chef.

Man, when Orson Welles said that a film studio was the biggest electric train set a boy could own, he never saw this!

(Via Megan McCardle and the Blogfather, who have some thoughts on Christmas shopping. That's the next holiday the left gets the vapors over, once they've recovered from Thanksgiving.)

Patterico's Pontifications applies Seinfeldian theory to the incoming Obama administration: "Revisiting George Costanza's 'Worlds Collide' Theory -- What Will Happen When The Obama Administration Doesn't Function Like the Obama Campaign?"

A Barack divided against itself cannot stand!

Matt Drudge links to this New York Times article and notes, "REPORT: TIME INC. in 'contractual promise' with Angelina Jolie for 'positive coverage'...". The Times piece begins:

When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt negotiated with People and other celebrity magazines this summer for photos of their newborn twins and an interview, the stars were seeking more than the estimated $14 million they received from the deal. They also wanted a hefty slice of journalistic input -- a promise that the winning magazine's coverage would be positive, not merely in that instance but into the future.

According to the deal offered by Ms. Jolie, the winning magazine was obliged to offer coverage that would not reflect negatively on her or her family, according to two people with knowledge of the bidding who were granted anonymity because the talks were confidential. The deal also asked for an "editorial plan" providing a road map of the layout, these people say.

Hey, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place." Can't fault Brangelina for asking for the print version of what Chris Matthews has promised Barack.

AP reports that "Al-Qaida No. 2 insults Obama with racial epithet", Rush reminds us that it's deja vu all over again.

As a one critic wrote in 2002:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

Again, the simple test here is the following: If a conservative had used these expressions, would it have been denounced by liberals? The answer, obviously, is yes. Imagine if George Will had called Colin Powell a "house slave." Imagine if Pat Buchanan had called Barney Frank a "nasty faggot." Imagine if Trent Lott had called Hillary Clinton a whore. Do you think they'd be invited on "Larry King Live" to further elaborate on their comments?

Of course, that was a few Andrew Sullivans ago.

I'm not sure if it looks more like the Death Star, or one of the EVA pods from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but this is one surprising looking treehouse.

(Via John Derbyshire.)

As Mark Steyn noted in his "Happy Warrior" column on the back page of the recent edition of National Review, when choosing between an actual combat veteran and a fellow celebrity to play James Bond, for actor Daniel Craig, the choice is an easy one:

Before we close the book on this election season, let me quote one of the most dispiriting asides on the subject. Daniel Craig, the star of the new James Bond movie The Audacity Of Solace - no, wait, A Quantum Of Hope - was being interviewed by Kevin Sessums for Parade (that supplement thingie that's free in all the local newspapers), and as a final question was asked which of the two candidates would make the better 007:

Craig doesn't hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because--if he's true to his word--he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'

Oh, great. John McCain has survived plane crashes, just like Roger Moore in Octopussy. He has escaped death in shipboard infernos, just like Sean Connery in Thunderball. He has endured torture day after day, month after month, without end, just like Pierce Brosnan in the title sequence of Die Another Day. He has done everything 007 has done except get lowered into a shark tank and (as far as we know) bed Britt Ekland and Jill St John.

And yet Daniel Craig gives him the desk job.

On the other hand, Tim Blair notes that that the media's standard for heroism these days is one heck of a lot lower than it used to be.

It's a tough job, but--in theory at least--somebody's got to do it; eventually.

Maybe.

So who will be the first comedian to knock The One down a few pegs?

(H/T: 5'F)

I actually meant to post something along similar lines earlier today, but Incoherant Ramblings beat me to it--and the quote is surrounded by lots of great looking photos of its hostess instead of our usual blue Trilby and minimalism:

I wouldn't really mind the outcome of all this under normal circumstances really. If gay marriage became a reality in all 50 states, I would have gone on with my life. But I hope the backlash felt from all of these inane boycotts hits these protesters bad. Somebody needs to point out that there is a better way, and this will eventually wear thin on the voting populace who looks at these people as sore losers.

What's next? "Hey, here's a brilliant idea. Let's Boycott Sundance! Because it's in the state of Utah, LDS headquarters are in Utah, so it will affect those EVIL Mormons!"

Meanwhile, a lot of Utah Mormons are thinking "they're boycotting Sundance? Sweet! Maybe Robert Redford will take it somewhere else from now on."

I'd like to think I'm not the only person who flashed back to the reaction of numerous airline customers when the "flying Imams" threatened not to patronize US Airways when reading this latest call for a boycott.

Basil Exposition: The Cold War's over.
Austin Powers: Ah, finally those capitalist pigs will pay for their crimes, eh? Eh, comrades? Eh?
Basil Exposition: Austin, we won.

I've always made it a point to never respond to Internet chain letters and the like, but I'm willing to make an exception to this one. "Dirty Harry" lists his favorite movies from A to Z:

Glenn Kenny at Some Came Running invites me to my first meme. To be honest, I didn't even know what a meme was until now. Actually, I still don't know, but any chance to willy-nilly list a bunch of movies is not something I have the discipline to turn down. In turn, I'm supposed to tag five movie bloggers and ask them to do the same. And if I'm able to think of five movie bloggers who won't respond with a "F**K OFF RIGHT WING FASCIST!! -- I'll do just that.

So here, off the top of my head, are my a to z's with a short explanation.

* * *

I'm tagging: Kyle Smith- Christian Toto - Robert Avrech - Ed Driscoll - Movie Bob - Sorry guys.

Apology accepted, Captain Needa...

Annie Hall: Woody's finest moment, with a lot of help from his collaborators, including Diane Keaton (of course) Tony Roberts, co-screenwriter Marshall Brickman and editor Ralph Rosenblum.

Apocalypse Now Redux: One of the greatest war movies ever made, and a triumph for Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. (And don't miss Hearts of Darkness, which explains how utterly insane the film shoot was.)

Barry Lyndon: Rightfully considered since its debut one of the most beautifully photographed movies ever made, it's also worth studying for its structure and use of narration.

Blade Runner: Breakthrough all-enveloping production design and special effects; without which, this would be just another Charlton Heston mid-1970s eco-doomsday movie.

Blow-Up: Antonioni transplants Hitchcock to Swinging London for a film that's been endlessly referenced, from Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool to Mike Myers' Austin Powers movies.

Casablanca/Citizen Kane: The classic studio system pictures of the first half of the 1940s; both relied on great directors getting the most from their respective studio craftsmen.

Dr. Strangelove: Beneath the great sets, blackout comedy, and Swiftian satire, is an incredibly tightly written and structured script.

Read More »

Found via Christian Toto, a bootleg version of the newest Star Trek movie's trailer is online. And while the above headline is lifted from another long-running science fiction saga, I can't say I'm getting major whoaaaaa vibes from this latest attempt to jump start the House That Gene Built by boldly going "Where No Metrosexual Has Gone Before", as John Nolte writes.

John Nolte writes on the New Hollywood Blacklist:

At least once a year we get a new narrative or documentary about the infamous Hollywood blacklist that forced a number of screenwriters out of the business or underground with the use of a pseudonym.

I included clips from a whole bunch of those annual Hollywood perennials in a Silicon Graffiti video back in July, which makes for a great double-feature with John's post. Speaking of which, here's more from John:

Most of these movies hit me as wish fulfillment fantasies with the filmmakers and their stars (George Clooney, Frank Darabont, Irwin Winkler, and on and on and on...) puffing out their chests to stridently declare that if they had been alive then that! never would've happened. Oh, no, they would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line to fight the good fight for the right to hold unpopular political beliefs without fear of retribution.

Well - here - we - are.

And where are you?

As John writes, they're too busy yelling, "Him, over there, He's Spartacus!"

Umberto Eco wrote a few years ago that "We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity." And as the recently, sadly deceased Michael Crichton noted just this past May, "The truth is, we live in an age of astonishing conformity":

I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It's truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons--often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There's plenty of zealotry to go around. And it's hardly new in human history.

The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one's life turns out to be wrong. But it's a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don't really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn't tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn't matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what "everyone" believes. Who values such a news source?

A rapidly dwindling number, hence the legacy media's well known financial woes. Meanwhile, Andrew Ian Dodge notes that the outcome of the presidential election may help to thin the ranks of another media group whose lockstep conformity is only barely disguised by its veneer of individuality--the liberal comedian.

(Fortunately though, It'll Be All Right on the Night. At least for now.)

Slate has a little fun with CNN's latest technological gimcrack:

Exit question: Did David Bowie's "TVC-15" single from the mid-1970s predict this latest video development?

Update: Welcome InstaReaders! Meanwhile, Hot Air's Allahpundit enharshens CNN's mellow: "Heart-ache: CNN holograms not really holograms."

Before reading this AP story, I had no idea how dedicated Keir Dullea fans truly are!

While I making the expected post-election inspection tour of NRO's Corner, I spotted this sad news from Ian Murray:

Michael Crichton has died "unexpectedly," with reports suggesting a private struggle against cancer. may he rest in peace. He was one of the few people publicly interested in science with the courage to speak out against the direction environmental politics had pushed it. All who want to honor his memory should read his Caltech speech, Aliens cause global warming.

In addition to having the courage to dissent against the near-monolithic global warming orthodoxy, he also managed to do a pretty good job of predicting the future of the legacy media in 1993. As Jack Shafer wrote back in May in Slate:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *
As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Call it, "The End of Journalism." That's what Victor Davis Hanson did recently, whom I interviewed on today's edition of PJM Political on XM, about his latest essay, in which he wrote, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

All of which were the themes of a June edition of Silicon Graffiti:, which paired my thoughts on Crichton with another pair of futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler:

Welcome Mark Steyn and Brothers Judd readers.

I knocked this one together pretty quickly last night; I thought the speech by David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow certainly takes on some interesting nuances when combined with the stories his self-styled successors chose to ignore or downplay in an election year. And what mediation on the thoughts of Morrow wouldn't be complete without a cameo from longtime Reebok spokesbacker, Terry Tate?

(Bumped to top--welcome Brothers Judd and Dirty Harry's Place fans.)

Oh wait--that's a football cliche. In "Resist these election-time myths", Anne Applebaum pops a number of election day cliches held by those on both sides of the blue light, tectonic plate shift.

Found via Maggie's Farm, watching this Onion parody video on how Top Research Scientists clone and harvest Disney's annual crop of new teenage stars, I'm pretty convinced that this how Pajamas Laboratories™ will be creating the next generation of bloggers:

(And you thought Uncle Walt going into cryogenic suspension was something...)

In addition to providing sound advice before tomorrow's insanity, Jim Treacher writes, "They've finally given me a good reason to hate Joe the Plumber":

No, not because his first name is Sam. No, not because he owes some taxes he didn't know about until Obama's oppo researchers went after him. No, not because of any of the other stuff they've thrown at him to try to distract from The One's publicly avowed socialist beliefs.

I think I hate him now because he might have become close friends with this SNL cast member:

Don't miss the photo, or Ace's note that apparently canoodling was involved.

As Michael Wade notes, "On this day in 1938, Martians landed in New Jersey", courtesy of Orson Welles' radio program and H.G. Wells' novel. Sadly, I suspect the latter would probably be pretty cool with what the writer of the latest movie version of his book used them to metaphorically stand-in for.

Meanwhile, James Lileks squares the circle, and John Nolte has additional Halloween movie selections. Though for us veteran connoisseurs of Philadelphia TV of our boomer youth, it's just not the same without Dr. Shock or Stella, "that Maneater from Manayunk" introducing them.

Update: And speaking of Philadelphia, congrats to the Phillies!

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

Roger L. Simon looks at two very different, but sadly both fairly mediocre political movies: Oliver Stone's W and David Zucker's An American Carol and describes want sunk both movies: "It's the Quality, Stupid"--or the lack thereof:

I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no "conservative" films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known. But I think it is important that negative "inside" opinions be known; because if there is one thing that is bad for conservative filmmaking in general, it is to make bad films. Because of the bias, they have to be better than the liberal ones.

Want really sinks both movies is the desire to produce agitprop, to tell an overtly political story. I hope that there are many more conservative movies--both to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and to reduce the near-monopoly that the left currently has on moviemaking. But I'd like to see them evolve to the point where their politics are subordinate to a good story, instead of vice-versa, as An American Carol seemed to me when I watched it in rough cut form at the Republican National Convention in late August. I had hoped that some of the flaws that were evident in this pre-release version would have been reduced in the final tweaking before the film hit the theaters, but it appears that that didn't occur. (You can hear the segment featuring Roger, Glenn Reynolds and myself interviewing those associated with the movie from an early September edition of PJM Political.)

Budding filmmakers on the right could learn much from the lefties of the 1950s, who were forced, because of the Hays office, to bury the more subversive elements of their films. Which worked in their favor--it produced infinitely more enjoyable movies than say, the World War II-era Mission To Moscow, arguably the most extreme example of leftwing agitprop to emerge from the Golden Era of Hollywood. As I wrote last year:

In the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, it was possible to sneak all sorts of leftwing ideas into films by burying them deep into the subtext of the shooting script. Did you think that The Hustler was merely a film about a down-on-his-luck pool bum brilliantly played by Paul Newman? So did I--until I listened to the audio commentary on the DVD, and discovered that it was a film about the Blacklist. (Hey, if you say so, guys.) Similarly, on one level, it's possible to argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a leftwing fantasy concerning the assassination of Joseph McCarthy, but the film's incredible pacing, plot twists, and eye-popping cinematography help to soft-sell that it's yet another anti-McCarthy movie. And from the same era, while Dr. Strangelove is obviously an anti-military/anti-Cold War film, its Swiftian absurdity and brilliant screenwriting, and pox-on-both-sides message makes it all go down remarkably smooth.

There was less need for this once the G/PG/R/X rating system replaced the Hays Office. (Which had a variety of unforeseen consequences.) But the craftsmanship built up over several decades of moviemaking still showed through in numerous films in the post-Hays, post-Bonnie & Clyde, pre-Star Wars late 1960s and 1970s.

And speaking of the latter, it's a textbook example of a filmmaker employing exactly the methods I describe above to produce what turned out to be a staggeringly commercially successful movie.

As I said, budding conservative filmmakers could learn much from this period.

As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn't pro-America?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

And no doubt, was trashed (likely for good reason) by Mr. Blackwell, who died today at age 86.

This just in to the Tinseltown trade paper: "Republicans in biz feel stifled, bullied."

Who knew?

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Over at the newly spiffed-up Power Line site, John Hinderaker writes that Sarah Palin apearing on Saturday Night is "a mistake, I'm afraid":

It's not that I lack confidence in Governor Palin; I don't. But I think it's almost always a mistake to visit an enemy's home turf without a clear understanding that you are among enemies.

The Saturday Night Live people are Democrats. That's all there is to it, and they will never give Sarah Palin, or any other Republican, a fair shake. Palin is, of course, more than a match for them in a fair fight. But for a fight to be fair, it must first be acknowledged that it's a fight. That won't happen tonight, and it will be almost a miracle if Palin gains from the exposure.

I'm old enough to remember when President Gerald Ford appeared on Saturday Night Live. That night, he was ridiculed as a klutz, in keeping with the image he had among liberals. It was grotesquely unfair: Ford, an all-America football player at Michigan, was undoubtedly the most athletic President of modern times. But reality won't intrude when your enemy is the editor.

News accounts indicated that the next morning, a shell-shocked Ford summoned his aides and asked who it was who thought it would be a good idea for him to appear on the television show that had been ridiculing him non-stop since he became President. I'm afraid a similar fate awaits Governor Palin.

It wasn't Ford appearing on Saturday Night Live that was the real problem--it was Ron Nessen, Ford's press secretary, who hosted the show. And as I noted shortly after President Ford passed away in 2006, in a very long post quoting from a history of SNL, as one of the writers said out of Nessen's earshot when he agreed to the gig, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

As John notes, it's guaranteed that similar thoughts were expressed this week as well.

Shooting in Paris, John Travolta's latest movie has a pyrotechnic run-in with the Angry Paris Street:

Local officials said, however, that they believed that four days of filming with the Hollywood actor, due to start yesterday, had been "abandoned" for good.

The movie's producer, Luc Besson, had chosen to shoot a few sequences of a spy movie, "From Paris with Love" in Les Bosquets as a gesture of solidarity with local people. Nearly 100 people had been given jobs as extras and security guards.

Ten specially equipped cars, assembled for stunt sequences in the movie, were burned by persons unknown late on Sunday night. Local people insisted yesterday that the attack must be the work of "jealous" members of youth gangs from another district. Police said that they were investigating reports of an attempt to demand "protection money" from the production company.

Most people in the Les Bosquets estate at Montfermeil, 10 miles north east of Paris, had welcomed the filming. Moussba Harb, 43, hired as an extra, said that a "childhood dream, a gift from the heavens, has gone up in smoke."

However, tempers have been running high in recent days. M. Besson's production company, Europacorps, had promised to pay 95 local people Euros 100 a day to work as extras, cooks or security guards.

Some local youths complained that, given the Euros 38m budget for the film, this was a paltry amount. The payments were increased to €200 a day.

As Orrin Judd writes, "Maclean's better not run this one", but Tim Blair has some advice for the harried (hey, what did they expect?) filmmakers:

Says a singed production spokesman:

"There's no now possibility of Mr Travolta or any of the other stars of the film operating in such a dangerous area.

"The scenes we were meant to do here will now be shot elsewhere."

Try Baghdad. It's safer.

Heh, indeed.^TM

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

(From Galley Slaves. Well, it's not actually from Galley Slaves. It's actually from a smaller blog that was purchased in a leveraged buyout...)

Oliver Stone, borrowing a few tabs of Jim Morrison's acid:

"I think in this present political state, the real George W. Bush might not approve of this movie," says Stone with a wry grin. "But this movie tries to understand George W. Bush -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

"I tried to be fair and balanced and compassionate," Stone adds. "I don't take sides. I don't take political sides. I'm a dramatist, and this is the movie I've made."

Yes--imagine the movies that Oliver Stone might have produced had he truly been a polemicist!

(As this email to Glenn Reynolds highlights, Hollywood rounding out the Bush years with yet another in an eight year series of attacks on the man--a few of which actively called for his, or a convenient surrogate's assassination--guarantees no honeymoon for Obama if he is elected in November.)

Related: "Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins."

Despite the progress the nation has made, portions of America still remain remarkably xenophobic and puritanical. When The Other appears, challenging an insular culture's accepted notions and long-held reactionary superstitions, the result is cognitive dissonance in the extreme, bringing out the very worst in our citizens, as this unfortunate sound bite demonstrates all-too-well.

Update: Charles Johnson spots yet another example of puritanical naivete.

I'll never look at Annette Bening's nude scenes in The Grifters the same way again...

Update: Rand Simberg posits:

"On the other hand, it's probably a lot easier to make Annette Bening look like Helen Thomas than vicey versy.

I'd say that's an staggeringly safe assumption.

Annie Jacobsen writes that if the Muslim world's vice squads consider Barbie to be "Jewish", wait 'til they find out the origins of their favorite cartoon and movie superheros:

When Iranian toy seller Masoumeh Rahimi thinks of Barbie and Ken dolls, she thinks of heavy artillery -- only worse. "I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Ms. Rahmi told the BBC back in 2002. In April 2008, Iran's top prosecutor and religious cleric, Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi, upped the anti-Barbie campaign by calling for a ban on the sale of all Barbie dolls from the country. "Barbie is an emissary of nudity and promotes moral corruption," wrote the hardliner newspaper Kahyan.

* * *

The anti-Semitic tirade came after the Mutaween learned that Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, was Jewish -- and that the American businesswoman, entrepreneur, and U.S. Business Hall of Famer had named the dolls after her two Jewish children, Barbie and Ken Handler.

But it appears not all religious clerics are doing their homework about which Jew created what incredibly popular icon. Last summer, Hassan Nasrallah -- the leader of the terrorist organization Hezbollah -- appeared proudly depicted as Superman in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al Ayyam. In the cartoon, Nasrallah was pictured pulling back his religious robes, a la Clark Kent, to reveal a Superman suit underneath. Superman is Lebanon's most popular superhero. Many teenagers believe him to be Lebanese because of his dark, swarthy looks. But if Barbie is "Jewish," so is Superman; he was created by two Jews named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, in 1932.

The same goes for just about every other "Jewish" superhero, many of whom are growing increasingly popular throughout the same countries in the Middle East. This summer, audiences from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flocked to see movies about Batman, Iron Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men -- all as "Jewish" as Barbie and Superman are. Each of these superheroes was created by a Jewish-American comic book writer.

All I can add (at least while still in my secret identity as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan new media firm) is, "Up, Up, And Oy Vey!"

In a brief slide show, the BBC explains which fonts are chosen for which movie posters and why.

Many fonts are chosen to perform workaday service on movie posters. But only one has gotten the offer to star in a movie of its own:

(Found via a Google search on "Helvetica Postrel", which, speaking of movies, has quite a Damon Runyon-esque ring of its own.)

Roger L. Simon makes a great observation:

The film Running on Empty was nominated for two Academy Awards for 1988 - one for its young star River Phoenix and the other for its writer Naomi Foner (she won the Golden Globe). I served with Naomi on the Writers Guild Board a couple of years later and we got to know each other pretty well. In those days, we were comrades on the left - more or less - and both "nominated" screenwriters.

Naomi's movie (an original script of hers) concerned life underground for veterans of the Weather Underground-about a couple and their son (Phoenix). Basically, to most of us, it was a fictional version of the hidden marriage of Wiliam Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. But it was more about Bernardine, really, because she was a hugely famous figure on the left for many years, talked of by some as an American version of Spain's La Pasionaria. I did not much care for what she did or said, even then. But I certainly recognized her charisma. And I knew that she was close to crazy. (Read the statements at the Bernardine link about the Tate-LaBianca murders.)

1988 was the same year that Barack Obama entered Harvard Law School. It was highly unlikely he did not know about Running on Empty. It was one of the most talked about movies of the year for serious people, like Ivy League law students. The subject of the film was clearly the ramifications of a life of violence on friends and family. And yet he choose to start his career in politics via Ayers-Dohrn (note the emphasis). And now he denies knowing who Ayers was or what he did. Well... as the saying goes... I lost it at the movies.

Running On Empty came out at the height of my film junky period, when I was subscribing to magazines such as Premiere, England's Sight & Sound and the American Film Institute's glossy monthly house organ, as I recall, each had laudatory articles about the movie, its radical chic plot, and its extremely well-known director, Sidney Lumet. Given the anarcho-authoritarian circles which the young Obama clearly aspired to at the time (one doesn't wind up spending years with Ayers, Dohrn and Wright by accident) he would likely have been infinitely more familiar with the movie than I was.

(Incidentally, the plot of movie, and the timing of the events it portrayed in docu-drama form squares remarkably well with Rick Perlstein's observations on the original radical chic movie, no?)

As he enters the fourth quarter of his life, O.J. Simpson's taking a well-deserved extended timeout at a state-sponsored training camp.

A year ago, Roger L. Simon described how the OJ trial changed his life. On Friday, he added:

History will see the original Simpson Trial as a turning point in the evolution of our culture into a media dominated spectator sport often devoid of moral compass. Will it now begin to right itself? Will OJ finally confess to the murders now that he has little to lose? What about what's left of the rest of the Dream Team? Will they confess to having participated in the distortion of justice? Will the pathetic Lance Ito surface?

Who knows?

For now: Congratulations to the Goldmans -- those who are still alive.

Indeed.^TM

The great conservative filmmaker and film blogger "Dirty Harry" reviews David Zucker's new movie on his blog. And tune in here for a recent edition of PJM Political featuring audio interviews from Glenn Reynolds, Roger L. Simon and myself with stars Jon Voight and Robert Davi, and screenwriter/executive producer Myrna Sokoloff recorded during the film's premiere at the GOP convention in Minneapolis.

As Glenn writes, "If An American Carol does well this weekend, it'll make it a lot easier for the next film of its type to be made." As someone who's enjoys--on one level or another--the starboard side of the Blogosphere, you can help ensure the film's success; check here for times and theaters near you.

Update: Much more on the film from Kathy Shaidle, at Examiner.com.

This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon's 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left", adding:

"It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys--you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was."

It certainly was strange, compared with the nation's politics at the start of the 1960s.

In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion--Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for "trash cinema." And we'll also look at Bobby Kennedy's Fascist Moment--and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan's A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.

Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and--appropriately enough--the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there's lots here we think you'll enjoy.

Andrew Breitbart has a modest proposal for Hollywood:

Just last week, the Nobel Prize-winning and Academy Award-adjacent ("An Inconvenient Truth") Mr. Gore told students, "The world has lost ground to the climate crisis," and made a dramatic call to action:

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration."

But even if those coal plants are in foreign lands like Ohio and Pennsylvania, it doesn't mean we Southern Californians must stand still and let the planet implode in front of us. That's why I'm taking Al Gore's lead and starting Code Green, a Hollywood organization whose purpose is to use civil disobedience to thwart the unnecessary use of energy in the entertainment industry.

Inspired by Jodie Evans, who started the antiwar group Code Pink, the menopausal performance artists known for interrupting public debate, Code Green will demand oversight over her group because, after all, her tidy little rage club is based in L.A.

No more trips from L.A. to Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines to protest the Republican National Convention. (I saw you wearing that tiara - in first class!) Mother Earth coughed up some smog while you chanted at the GOP, "Not one dollar, not one more, Don't you dare buy Bush's war."

You are now not free to move around the country.

From now on, Jodie and Arianna, too, will be bashing their Bushes from home, telecommuting their unrequited anger by way of solar panels and the Internet.

The days of hoarding electricity and gas are over, including by the truest believers. Carbon credits are now as worthless as Lehman stock.

There are new rules that we will all have to adhere to, whether we like it or not.

Here is the Code Green four-point "Gang Green" mandate:

1.) Directive: Stop film and television production.

This will be the first sentence of the rewrite of the Kyoto Protocol.

Each show or movie leaves a massive carbon footprint that cannot be erased even by the best CGI masters. There will be no more "Grey's Anatomy" spinoffs, nor will there be any more labored attempts to squeeze out lame sentimentality from child actors pretending to be smarter than us. They will now have to work at Pinkberry, where those little saps belong.

Tough to argue with that--since I proposed a very similar tonic for Tinseltown over a year ago.

(However, since Andrew beneficently links to your humble narrator on his mighty and sprawling Breitbart.com Website, I'm more than willing to chalk this up to a case of synchronicity and GMTA, to borrow a little of the secret lingo from the Code Green code book.)

Bad news, but not entirely unexpected, as the legendary actor had been ailing for some time.

First CityWide Change Bank believes in change:

This rapidly developing story just in to the Tiffany Network:

CBS 'Early Show' Newsflash: Okay to Be Gay in Hollywood

Now if we can only get more groups out of the closet there...

Jonah Goldberg spots the media playing the race card on Obama:

I have no doubt that the Bradley effect is real. But the Bradley effect does not reflect racism; it captures voters' fear of appearing racist. There's no reason to assume those who lie to pollsters are racists. But for Obama supporters and the media, poll results are some kind of sacred, binding covenant. If voters don't keep their promise, the media have no problem seeing racism at work.

The media's obsession with race in this election is probably fueling the Bradley effect. Repeating over and over that voting against Obama is racist only makes non-racist people embarrassed to admit that they plan to vote for McCain.

Another rich irony is that the only racists who matter in this election are the ones in the Democratic Party. News flash: Republicans aren't voting for the Democratic nominee because they're Republicans. A new AP-Yahoo News poll claims that racial prejudice is a significant factor among the independents and Democrats Obama needs to win, specifically among Hillary Clinton's primary voters. According to the pollsters' statistical modeling, support for Obama may be as much as 6 percentage points lower than it would be if there were no white racism.

I'm skeptical about those findings, as well as the overemphasis on race generally. But to the extent that race is a factor, here's the richest irony of all: Obama's problem is with precisely those voters the Democratic Party claims to fight for, working- and middle-class white folks. Of course, Democrats can't openly complain that their own vital constituency is racist.

I don't know--Nora Ephron's complaint on that topic was pretty darn out in the open during the primaries.

Update: As is this article from Monday's edition of the typically uber-liberal (if I recall the tone of the paper correctly from when I was living in the Delaware Valley until a decade ago) Philadelphia Daily News.

At Pajamas Media, Katherine Berry notes that "The media gives celebs a pass on ugly rants -- as long as they bash the right people":

The true irony behind the left's united decision to overlook [Sandra] Bernhard's racist ravings is that, by doing so, they've given up their strongest rallying point: something Slate's John Dickerson called "the politics of umbrage" back when Hillary was still in the race.

A reporter will never go wrong at a Clinton or Obama press conference by asking: "Senator, what about the latest outrage?" The question is always apt, because taking umbrage and responding to it has become the chief daily business of the Democratic campaign.

Now, however, Hollywood -- the darling of the left -- is the source of the umbrage, and the resulting silence among the liberals is deafening. The effect is much like Dorothy and crew's stunned silence in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain pulled back to reveal the "wizard" as a gnarly little old man.

Only this time what the curtain has revealed is a far more gruesome sight: the true face of Hollywood, no longer wearing Al Jolson's blackface paint, but just as racist as ever.

Read the whole thing.

With one and a half seasons behind it, and its themes better understood than some of the crabbier initial reviews anticipated, Kyle Smith weighs in on AMC's Mad Men:

When Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), a ferrety young colleague of Don's, finds out Don's secret and informs the head of the firm, he is angrily brushed off. It's Pete who comes off looking bad, just as it seems unwise for Don's wife Betty (the fetching January Jones) to talk to a shrink. Mad Men's rule is omerta in a station wagon, La Cosa Waspa.

Perhaps Don's finest hour came in Season One when his friend and boss Roger, felled by a heart attack during an office tryst, was being carried to an ambulance. Half-conscious, Roger moaned his new inamorata's name. Don grabbed him by the hair, slapped him in the chops and said, "Mona. Your wife's name is Mona." Can men ever have been this manly?

When Don meets beatniks, he spends the evening getting high with his suit jacket on. Yet it's not the fraudulent philanderer but the beardy coffeehouse revolutionaries who are ridiculous. Ironic or no, the show makes the case for repression that has seldom been heard in popular culture since Gary Cooper hung up his spurs: straighten your tie, stash your problems in the bottom drawer, pour another gimlet and carry on.

Along with Robert Morse's classic "A man is whatever room he is in" motif, the scene with the beatniks that Kyle mentions above ends on one of my favorite Mad Men moments.

Draper starts to leave in a huff. (If he waited a minute and a huff he'd be Groucho Marx of course.) But the cops are investigating a domestic disturbance in the apartment next door, and the beatniks (and Draper, if I recall correctly) have consumed a fair amount of cannabis and other substances that only way-out bebop cats like Gil Evans and Dave Brubeck would ever touch. So one of the proto-hippies tells Don that he can't leave--the cops are still outside.

"You can't", Draper tersely replies, putting on his suit jacket, buttoning the collar of his Paul Stuart shirt, straightening his narrow New Frontier tie, and donning his Lock & Co. Trilby.

For those of us who put our emphasis on the bourgeois half of David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise equation, it was a tremendous little moment.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "Whether or not Sarah Palin helps John McCain win the election, her greatest work may already be behind her. She's exposed the feminist con job":

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix ("a whip-wielding mistress") and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

It's funny. The left has been whining about having their patriotism questioned for so long it feels like they started griping in the Mesozoic era. Feminists have argued for decades that womanhood is an existential and metaphysical state of enlightenment. But they have no problem questioning whether women they hate are really women at all.

Since we know from basic science that Palin is a woman -- she's had five kids, for starters -- it's clear that these ideological thugs aren't talking about actual, you know, facts. They're doing what people of totalitarian mind-sets always do: bully heretics, demonize enemies, whip the troops into line.

Hey, somebody should write a book about that!

Of course, Palin has unhinged (hey, somebody should write a book called that!) the rest of the left as well. Roger Ebert's meltdown earlier this week is a classic of the genre:

Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don't want to know.

Remember all that stuff from the left in the late 1990s about tolerance and diversity and multiculturalism and "think different?" Pretty amazing how it all goes out the window when "The Shadow" appears.

(Ebert has apparently since broken out the Liquid Paper to whitewash his gaffe, but thanks to the Blogosphere, that genie's out of the bubble.)

Update: Orrin Judd writes, "Because they are materialists, the Left thinks elitism is an excess of material things, so they don't even realize that it is how divorced from American culture they are that has always hindered them."

Meanwhile, Tiger Hawk writes, "If John McCain is as lucky as he is smart, the lefty pundits and bloggers -- for example -- and their allies in the press will keeping hammering Saracuda all the way to Halloween."

Considering how the media exploited Katrina "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq" to "damage Bush politically for a long, long time" as Mickey Kaus wrote in September 2005, there's a fascinating sense of schadenfreude in this story. In late summer of 2005 Kanye West was first dubbed by Time magazine as "the smartest man in pop music" and two weeks later then blurted into an open microphone during a fundraiser telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina on NBC that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Today, West was arrested at LAX:

Hip-hop star Kanye West has been arrested in Los Angeles on charges of felony vandalism after a heated confrontation with photographers at the city's international airport.

West was taken into custody at LAX airport on Thursday after a photographer's camera was reportedly smashed to the ground during the struggle.

According to celebrity website TMZ.com, a still photographer was attempting to take pictures of the rapper at the American Airlines terminal when he was confronted by the star.

According to a TMZ videographer, "West rushed the (photographer) and grabbed his camera. A struggle ensued and the still guy was screaming, 'Police, help!'"

The website reports West took the camera and threw it to the ground, breaking it into pieces.

The videographer reportedly approached West with his camera rolling when the rapper's bodyguard walked up to him, demanding he hand over the camera.

West's assistant allegedly intervened, grabbing the equipment and smashing it to the ground.

West was reportedly stopped by police before reaching security checkpoints in an attempt to board his plane after the confrontation.

He was allegedly restrained by authorities during the initial police investigation, when he discovered the incident had been recorded, shouting, "Give me the f**king videotape."

West and his assistant are being held on $20,000 bail.

Video here.

Incidentally, "Give me the f**king videotape" seems to be quite a timely catchphrase at the moment.

While the new McCain ad highlighting yesterday's gaffe from Obama is pretty good, and I commend the speed with which it was crafted and uploaded to YouTube, the late-August video from Team McCain (embedded above) is just devastating. It's crafted with lurid psychedelic colors, filled with ancient 1960s peace symbols, and linking Obama with Boy George, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, the late drag queen Divine, 1970s Greenwich Village cult singer Klaus Nomi, and other international musicians and celebrities. Really potent raw red meat for conservatives. Though I imagine the left might not be too sanguine with some of th....

...Oh wait, it's not from McCain? It's a pro-Obama message? Who can tell these days?!

Hey, remember a month ago when leftwing Hollywood puritans blew a gasket over a movie using the word "retard?"

Nahh, neither can I.

Update: And neither could Christian Toto, who also heard the Tinseltown crickets chirping in response response to the latest outbreak of the R-word.

Roger L. Simon, who knows a thing or two about movies (and critics) is not happy with Ed Koch today:

As many recall, former NY Democratic mayor Ed Koch backed Bush in '04. Now he's endorsing Obama because Palin's "book banning" scares him. Never mind it's been thoroughly debunked. (Hello, Ed, the Harry Potter series was published after Palin supposedly banned it.) And never mind that McCain is far more of a centrist than Bush. We're all entitled to our opinions and I'm entitled to mine: Ed Koch is the world's worst film critic. Yes, the ex-mayor sends out endless movie reviews - which read like a refugee from the AARP lost in your high school paper - in an email barrage to anyone interested or, in my case, disinterested. I am going to exercise my right to never read another one and unsubscribe. [Didn't you block them as spam over a year ago?-ed. Shh....]

Could the Simon/Koch feud take off in much the same way as the Prager/Lileks rumble?

(Nahh, probably not--but both would make for great video fodder for PJTV.)

Albert Brooks: "Is this the new way for women to break the glass ceiling? To have their daughters throw their babies at it?"

Glenn Reynolds links to this parody of Oliver Stone, but this is still my favorite video goof on Stone, created at the apex of his Hollywood career: "Break On Through with JFK!"

Late last month, the Whiskey's Place blog wrote:

Much has been made by any number of commenters, from Steve Sailer, to John Derbyshire, to Spengler, to Mark Steyn, to in particular, Ed Driscoll, about the pathetic state of popular culture. Blogger Ed Driscoll in particular is fond of reminding us that in popular culture it's always 1968.

Well, to be fair, old media certainly does a pretty good job itself in that department. This NPR article on the Academy Awards of forty years ago has the usual boomer spin on the era, highlighted in this excerpt from Mark Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of a New Hollywood, talking about The Graduate:

The scenario: Upper-middle-class L.A.; disaffected college grad (played by Dustin Hoffman) is seduced by older woman (Anne Bancroft), falls in love with her daughter (Katharine Ross).

That's not so unusual, Harris says: The idea plays like a mid-'60s sex comedy. But what even the actors didn't realize until shooting began was that the perspective would come from Dustin Hoffman's character.

"Suddenly," says Harris, "the camera head shifted, and this was looking at the Generation Gap from the other side -- from the young side."

Young people -- an audience Hollywood undervalued at the time -- flooded theaters around the country.

"And that's who movies got made for after that," says Harris.

I'll second the emotion that The Graduate is a great picture. But if it indeed opened up the youth market, a lot of grownups decided concurrently right around that same time to check out of the theaters, as Michael Medved (whom I met at The Best Party Ever, just to shamelessly namedrop) wrote when Jack Valenti retired from his role as the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America:

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history's most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going. That same mystical power served to suppress attendance for the next 20 years, with figures on ticket sales remaining flat until they began to rise moderately in the 1990s, reflecting the construction of thousands of new movie screens at multiplex theaters. Most recent figures (from 2003) show weekly attendance today at just over 30 million. As a percentage of the nation's population, however, the numbers on movie attendance remain only slightly improved from the devastating trough of 1970 (10.3% vs. 8.6%) and still vastly lower than the robust box-office years of 1965 (44%) or 1960 (45%).

It's amazing how many movie professionals remain altogether unaware of this long-term decline in film going--or, when informed about the depressing but undeniable figures, wrongly attribute them to the advent of television. TV sets began appearing in living rooms in the late 1940s, of course, and by the time the audience for feature films started its sharpest slump in 1966, the tube had already arrived in nearly all American homes.

Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late '60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.

So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, "Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

And wouldn't return until Hollywood returned to making apolitical family-safe blockbusters a decade later; as I wrote a couple of years ago:

I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat.

How a slate of leftwing political movies such as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, The Interpreter, and Munich could be greenlighted for release last year is beyond me, unless Hollywood in mid-2004 assumed that a Kerry win was inevitable, or after he lost, decided to put the celluloid shiv into Red State audiences. Why anyone thought these films would make money is utterly astonishing. But, to build on Michael Barone's recent op-ed, the Hollywood left is currently as stuck in the 1970s as liberal politicians are.

Not to mention their favorite radio network.

(Back in CA after an incredible week--see above shameless namedropping--regular blogging to resume tomorrow.)

"I love Ronald Reagan, but after Sarah Palin's speech I miss him a little less. He's watching. He's okay with that."

--John Nolte

There is no escape even from the aura of the penumbra of the echo of the Decade From Hell:

"Mackenzie Phillips has been busted at LAX for allegedly possessing heroin and cocaine."

Disco Stu's mood ring sure turned black over that news.

This BBC article, which starts breathlessly, "Hollywood is on the verge of breaking into an entirely new virtual world", really isn't all that surprising; Arthur C. Clarke was writing about "synthetic thespians" over 20 years ago.

Though why not start with musicians first? The MTV/YouTube small-screen format has to be a lot more visually forgiving than a 40-feet movie screen, and an all digital, all synthetic singer seems like a logical progression from today's formula pop stars, as I wrote four years ago for Tech Central Station.

As Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", and that hectoring puritanism has seeped into its celebrity culture in a massive scale.

Fortunately, whenever such Hollywood hypocrisy occurs, the opportunity for satire is rife, and Cracked.com riotously pushes back with "The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green." I can't argue at all with their number one choice; I would have found a way to work this item into the list somewhere as well though.

(Found via Dirty Harry, and definitely one for Orrin Judd's "All Comedy Is Conservative" files.)

John Nolte (also known by his nom de blog, Dirty Harry), writes that "Hollywood is a town run almost entirely by liberal ideologues. But this is also an industry built on the personal relationship, and here's where things get sticky for the openly conservative":

But this is also an industry built on the personal relationship, and here's where things get sticky for the openly conservative.

Unless it's to inspire their annual cinematic treatise to all things them -- the annual film decrying the 1950s blacklist which forced a few screenwriters to use a pseudonym -- present-day liberal Hollywood doesn't much care for the word "blacklist," especially when it's them being accused of doing the blacklisting. Their defense is to hide behind the literal and claim there is no actual blacklist or organized conspiracy to keep openly conservative filmmakers from getting work.

Fine.

In 2004, before anyone had even seen The Passion of the Christ, before Mel Gibson would drunkenly reveal his darker side, leftists poured out of the entertainment, academic, and religious worlds to unleash an unholy hell on the film and its maker. Too late to stop the film (it had secured distribution), the goal was therefore two-fold: to hurt the movie financially (which obviously failed), but also to launch a pre-emptive strike against any filmmaker thinking about following Gibson's lead and scampering off the liberal Hollywood plantation. The message was clear: Stray and you will be personally destroyed. And it worked. The Passion may be the only film to make over a half-billion dollars and not create a me-too phenomenon. A more tolerant industry, or at least one driven by financial considerations, would've quickly greenlit a serious-minded sequel based on the Acts of the Apostles.

Reasonable people would call this a form of "blacklisting," but liberal Hollywood isn't reasonable and rather than have an honest discussion on the matter they instead wrap us 'round the axle of specificity when it comes to the word "blacklist. " So let's use another word: Passioning.

"Passioning" is what happens when the leftist Hollywood establishment, using whatever power available, demean, dismiss, diminish, and defame those they consider an ideological apostate. In 2004 it was Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ; today it's director David Zucker and An American Carol.

Read the rest, and don't miss the full version of my interview with Andrew Breitbart on the same topic (including a discussion of An American Carol) over at PJM Political.

It's also worth revisiting the Anchoress' thoughts from late 2005 on the damage to pop culture post-9/11, as well.

James Lileks, whom I interviewed about AMC's Mad Men series last month for Pajamas' XM show, has some thoughts about the show in yesterday's Bleat:

I thought "Mad Men" would end up more highly regarded than "The Sopranos," and it wasn't just the late night and the well, wow factor the last episode left me with. It's the same kind of show - episodic, layered, one big arc sheltering a dozen small plots - and it also deals with a Big Subject, but there are crucial differences. That means a long "Mad Men" essay follows, so if you don't care, well, farewell! See you at buzz.mn. (And Twitter.)

Nearly everyone in "Mad Men" is a likeable character in some ways despite their flaws, and nearly everyone in "Sopranos" was mostly unlikable but redeemed for the moment by plot and dialogue. I suppose that's why the latter was lauded; there's something perverse and vicariously appealing about caring for bad guys. Aren't we naughty. But even the not-so-bad people in the Sopranos were unappealing, really; the wives were all shrews content to float along on murder money, the kids were empty shells, and the mobsters - while always fun to watch and listen to - were cruel men without qualities, only tics. Did anyone care if Christopher fell off the wagon? Anyone care about anyone, except whether they would be the Whacker or the Whackee this season? When you think about it, the grand tale of modern mobsters yearning after a bygone time when they had the nabe in their hands is a little like post-Communist block captains lamenting the end of the Soviet Union. Cry yourself a river. Put on the Sinatra and deal with it.

The show gets smaller as we get away from it, and in a way you start to feel a bit abashed for having gotten sucked in. "Mad Men" inhabits a far more interesting world, has people making an honest living, dealing with art in a quintessentially American way - through commerce - and takes place at the same time as the Soprano's good old Good Old Days - except these guys aren't stealing or hurting or killing. They don't have any good old days; these are the good days.

Well, at least until the end of this season, which is set in 1963. This was the penultimate first season episode. So it stands to reason that the crew of the good ship Sterling-Cooper are slowly drifting into one heckuva Boomer-era iceberg somewhere near the conclusion of this season's story arc.

Found via Orrin Judd, Lloyd Billingsley, who previously wrote "Hollywood's Missing Movies", which featured a plot summary of Total Eclipse, the greatest film Hollywood will never make, has a review of the new hagio-documentary, Trumbo:

Capitalism is evil and America is a horrible fascist place, the argument goes, except for my lucrative studio contract, except for my fat bank account, except for my mansion, my swimming pool, my ranch, and my luxury cars. That's why there were jokes about Robert Rich, one of Trumbo's pseudonyms. Trumbo, who died in 1976, tells those stories here, along with his one-man show of accredited victimhood, in which he gets some help. Former Nation editor Victor Navasky does a lot of the explaining, and his book Naming Names, a defense of the screen Stalinists, is conveniently displayed beside him.

Here is the familiar footage of the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings on Communism in Hollywood, which foolishly focused on film content. The screen Stalinists were eager to testify but the strategy of defying the committee came straight from the CPUSA bosses. Trumbo is billed as an independent thinker and contrarian, but that didn't extend to Party bosses. When they laid down the law, they were obeyed. As John Huston later discovered, the strategy was all about protecting John Howard Lawson, the Party's straw boss in the studio talent guilds, and like Trumbo, an unpleasant fellow to those of other affiliations, even on the left.

Some studio people were friendly to the committee because the Party, in its heyday, wielded plenty of power in the studios and had made their lives miserable, doing all they could to quash their projects and ruin their careers. Trumbo provides not a hint of that background, nor why the committee came to Hollywood in the first place. It was the result of an investigation of Gerhard Eisler, a Comintern agent whose brother Hanns wrote scores for Hollywood movies. The Comintern isn't even mentioned a single time.

Footage from films such as Papillon and Spartacus shows how much Trumbo imposed the heroes-versus-informers template. He also has a brief role in Papillon as a prison commandant, which is appropriate. The Hollywood Communists maintained silence as Stalin kangaroo courted their fellow writers and artists into the gulag, or just killed them off. Nothing about that in Trumbo, nothing that would threaten his status as the icon of what, in Hollywood, passes for the Greatest Generation.

Trumbo will likely win an Oscar for best documentary, even though it's as much a fantasy as Tropic Thunder. Trumbo's back story and the tale of CPUSA overtures in Hollywood are much more dramatic and action packed, but so far no takers in the dream factories.

I know at least one Blogger who gave it a shot, however:

Kyle Smith notes that tonight is Chris Noth's last appearance as Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. While fellow original L&O vet Dann Florek soldiers on as Capt. Cragen in L&O: SVU, as I wrote back in 2002, the franchise has never been the same since Michael Moriarty bailed out on the original L&O, long, long ago.

The Onion: "Study: Watching Under Four Hours Of TV Impairs Ability To Mock Pop Culture."

Yet another boomer-era childhood memory tainted by politics:

If you thought Blues Brothers 2000 soiled the memory of one of the best films ever made, then you may not want to watch the video below. Fox is reporting that Dick Durbin and Rahm Emanuel will be performing as the Blues Brothers at the convention.

No word yet if Durbin will be dusting off his jackboots for his appearance.

It's Answered Prayers for some budding young Sith Lord! Kyle Smith writes that George Lucas may have stepped into the latest scandal for those aficionados of the industry of the world's most puritanical company town who:

A. Whose blood pressure blows sky-high if anybody looks at them cross-eyed.

B. Have far too much time on their hands, and:

C. Are bummed because they missed the chance to flip out over Tropic Thunder's use of the newest worst most eviltastic word discovered to still be in the English language.

It's....Capote The Hutt!

(Think he's kidding? Two words: Muggeridge's Law.)

But then, this is all just preseason stuff. The Complainy-American (to borrow a Tim Blair-ism) will really be out in full dudgeon this fall over this.

Update: Kyle's take on the film itself? "A Big Pile of Dukoo." Reading his review, I can't help but think of Marcia Lucas' thoughts on her ex-husband's franchise in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls:

"After Star Wars, he insisted, 'I'm never going to direct another establishment-type movie again.' I used to say, 'For someone who wants to be an experimental filmmaker, why are you spending this fortune on a facility to make Hollywood movies? We edited THX in our attic, we edited American Graffiti over Francis' garage, I just don't get it, George.' The Lucasfilm empire--the computer division, ILM, the licensing and lawyers--seemed to me to be this inverted triangle sitting on a pea, which was the Star Wars trilogy. But he wasn't going to make any more Star Wars, and the pea was going to dry up and crumble, and then he was going to be left with this huge facility with its enormous overhead. And why did he want to do that if he wasn't going to make movies? I still don't get it."

That pea has dried up, and no amount of water in all the vaporators on Tatooine is going to bring it back to life.

Which actually isn't saying all that much these days: take a look at Redacted's IMDB page. If you assume $9.00 a ticket, with its absolutely pathetic $65,087 domestic gross, that means Redacted was seen by about 7,232 people during its initial run in theaters. (As John Nolte likes to write, "Anyone care to debate how Hollywood's money driven?")

In contrast, my recent "2004: An MSM Odyssey" video was viewed by 8,507 people according to Brightcove, its Webhost.

...And I can safely guarantee that my budget was just a smidgen lower than Redacted's five million dollars.

If you've ever said to yourself--and really, who amongst us hasn't?--I wonder what happens behind the scenes when they shoot a Triumph the Insult Dog video segment, Daniel Frank, AKA "Captain Spaulding", writes:

Watch sausage being made as camcorders pick up Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at Comicon here and here.

Meanwhile, found via Kathy Shaidle, the Cake Wrecks blog documents, with copious photographic evidence, pretty much just what its title suggests.

Early on in Barry Levinson's 1997 movie, Wag The Dog, there's a scene (mostly improvised, according to the audio commentary from Levinson on the DVD) of the team of writers, musicians and hucksters that Dustin Hoffman, playing a Robert Evans-inspired Hollywood producer assembles to fake America's war with Albania. As the team get to know each other, and understand that they'll be faking politics and history instead of selling Coca-Cola, they eventually explain why none of them bother to vote. (Denis Leary's "Fad King" character gets off the best line--explaining that the last time he voted was for the baseball Hall of Fame: "I voted for Boog Powell on first base, he didn't get it, and it just depressed me. It's futile.")

This video of Rielle Hunter begins pretty much where that scene ends--and with this quote, immediately goes into science fiction territory that even Levinson and David Mamet wouldn't dare to mine:

"Meeting John Edwards was interesting, because in person, when I met him, he was very real and authentic, from my perception."

But then, sometimes perception is not Rielle.

"Barack Obama is located nowhere near the end of the aisle--he's way far out on the left. He makes Bernie Sanders look like Curtis LeMay. So I think this time around, at least, it's much more easier to come out as a conservative or a moderate or at least pragmatic because otherwise the guy you'd have to vote for has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. And some people aren't for that right now. He's a 47-year-old nice enough guy who is reflexively liberal and wants to get Chatty Cathy with bad guys."

--Dennis Miller

Nikke Finke notes that the man who brought you the man who brought you Saturday Night Live, longtime Hollywood powerhouse Bernie Brillstein has passed away at age 77. Brillstein managed Lorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of Saturday Night Live, along with John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jim Henson, and numerous other people who brought you the 1970s and '80s.

There's a passage in Finke's obit that could be taken the wrong way though:

In 1970, Brillstein left Management 3 and moved to Los Angeles, where he decided to go it alone. He built up a list of top comedy writers, including The Bob Newhart Show's Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses and comedy writers Lorne Michaels and Alan Zweibel, and he packaged them all into new TV shows for the networks. By 1975, Brillstein was one of the hottest personal managers and TV packagers in the entertainment business. In that year alone, he sold both The Muppet Show, brainchild of puppeteer Jim Henson, and Saturday Night Live, created by Lorne Michaels. The story behind SNL is now legendary, but it bears repeating: when Michaels and Brillstein came to pitch the idea of SNL to NBC, the network executives simply stared at the men. "They said, 'Who are these Jews from California?' They absolutely hated us," Brillstein remarked.

It's a great line, and it's true that the staid management of NBC had vastly mixed feelings about Lorne Michaels until his show became a ratings hit and cultural phenomenon. (The latter happening before the former.) But it's worth noting that, just glancing at the photo section in Doug Hill and Jeff Wingrad's Saturday Night, NBC's management at the time consisted of men such as Herb Schlosser, Dave Tebet, Mike Weinblatt, and Aaron Cohen. If such a quote actually was uttered at the meeting, I doubt there was any antisemitism behind it.

John Nolte: "Hitchcock's Notorious Returns To DVD October 14th."

Lindsey Graham weighs in on McCain's new ad:

Well, one thing's for sure. If you embark upon a world tour, and you decide to make a campaign speech in a foreign country in front of 200,000 Germans, and you act like you're already president, people may notice.

And that's what this is about: that he chose to go to Germany and do something I've never known a candidate to do before. You know, he orchestrated the press conference with the French president. He said something, yesterday, basically, that he embodies everything good about America. Well, you know, it's good to have self-confidence. But you can, maybe, go too far.

The whole ad is about the idea of fame without portfolio. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. She draws a crowd for no apparent reason. Well, I think he has, you know--in Senator Obama's case, is the effort to be commander in chief and the leader of the free world about portfolio?

He is a celebrity, no question about it. Somebody asked me about Germany. I said, "There goes Germany. We're going to have to get to 270 without Germany." (LAUGHTER)

But this is a hysteria around a personality that's attractive, but when you look under the hood, there's not a whole lot there. So fame without portfolio is, sort of, fashionable. But leadership without experience is dangerous.

Indeed.^TM Meanwhile, leftwing author Rick Perlstein (H/T: OJ) stumbles into another element of Obama's stagecraft that the ad highlights. He's got the title right, though he's far from the first to notice Obama's eschatology.

Update: Ross Douthat adds:

Comparing the "Celeb" ad to stills from Leni Riefenstahl's work, Perlstein writes: "I actually wonder if the Republicans had a crew on the scene to capture just the right angles; for instance, the identical camera placement shooting the speaker over the shoulder at stage right." If he actually wonders that, I fear for his sanity. Here's a tip for liberals: If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn't the GOP's fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

A rock concert has to resemble the poster, or it risks being false advertising.

Martin Eisenstad writes, "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that the new McCain ad criticizing Obama for being a celebrity has ruffled some unintended feathers":

I, for one, quite liked the ad, but I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton's grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

It seems that the elder Hilton has donated $18,400 to the McCain campaign, and $35,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the last couple of years. (Paris's father, Rick Hilton, has given an additional $6,900 to the McCain campaign. Suffice it to say, he's none too pleased either.)

Apparently, the elder Hiltons had breathed a sigh of relief that Paris was starting to get her act together since hitting rock bottom with her stay in jail last year, when all of a sudden the McCain ad compares her unfavorably to Britney Spears and Barack Obama.

Somehow, I think all of the players will survive this moment--they can meet here for cocktails afterward!

Scott Whitlock writes, "The hosts and correspondents on Thursday's 'Good Morning America' did not hold back in expressing their displeasure over a new John McCain ad that depicts Barack Obama as a celebrity and compares him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton":

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!" In a second segment, former Clinton aide-turned journalist George Stephanopoulos claimed the commercial could be seen as "angry, cranky, too negative" and McCain himself might be viewed as "a bit of a whiner given the fact that most polls that he is behind."

At one point, Sawyer queried, "Will it read as sour grapes and boomerang?" The entire tone of the morning show's coverage seemed desperately out of touch. It seems obvious that McCain was attempting to, in a not-so subtle way, depict the Obama campaign as superficial and not ready for prime time. And since the Arizona senator must deal with a media who both fawns and defends Obama, how can such attack ads be surprising?

You know you're over the target when you start receiving flak. The local San Jose CBS station led with the story last night; their teaser ad also hyped it as if it was some sort of out-of-bounds attack. But the danger of a politician acting like a rock star is that he sets himself up to be treated like one by his opponent. Jann Wenner's wildest fantasies to the contrary, we don't elect rock stars, we just buy their records.

Related: Leave Barack Alone! And Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts that are worth reading as well:

If Obama starts sliding in the polls, he's going to be like a guy at the steering wheel of a vanload of backseat drivers, with the MSM geniuses endlessly second-guessing his every move, and the likes of Keith Olbermann and David Gregory wondering aloud what the hell is wrong with his campaign. There is nothing more beautiful to behold than the sight of Conventional Wisdom crumbling at it's first collision with reality.

Robert notes that "The grumbling from the MSM's backseat drivers has already begun."

Meanwhile, Rachel Lucas blames "beer goggles", and Confederate Yankee explores the inevitable result of too much drinking: the next day's hangover.

So can you immanentize the eschaton through the Force?

"I am the father of our Star Wars movie world--the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series," (George Lucas) says. "And I'm going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I'm the father; that's my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son--and the son does pretty much what he wants." He laughs. "Once in a while, they ask a question like 'Can we kill off Yoda?', things like that, but it's very loose.

"Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father's world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way."

Pretty biblical stuff from a guy whose original idea was to portray communist North Vietnam in a favorable light...

Nice little career you got there, Mr. Voight! Shame if something were to...happen...to it...

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus.

Andrew Breitbart's latest Washington Times column on the new Hollywood Blacklist features several quotes from his father-in-law, the great Orson Bean:

"When the blacklist hit, I saw actors walk across the street to avoid me. The doorman at 485 Madison Avenue (former CBS headquarters) turned his back as I walked by. But I never felt hated by the ring-wing blacklisters. They just felt we were terribly wrong," he said.

"These days, the left doesn't just disagree with right-wingers--they hate them."

Maybe that's why there's been historically much more of a outflow amongst intellectuals from port to starboard since the mid-1950s. As Jonah Goldberg noted in early 2001, many ex-communists followed Bean's path to the right--or at the least back to the center:

If you count normal, non-pointy headed people, millions. Generation after generation of the Left's best minds have decided they like things over here more. Many if not most of National Review's founding editors were former Communists. The very word "neoconservative" was coined as an epithet by the socialist Michael Harrington to describe all of his friends who were heading for the exits to conservatism. It's not just the older generation. Every decade we get a new wave of writers and scholars who have come in from the rain, Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Kelly, Andrew Ferguson, Charles Murray, just to name a few. Hell, I don't even act surprised anymore when I meet conservatives who say "I used to be a Communist." It's almost a cliche.

Which might also help to explain Glenn Reynolds' quote from a year later:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

We touched upon the original blacklist, and Hollywood's eternal Mobius Loop-style reminiscences of it in a recent edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog:

And even beyond that, has Jon Voight just thrown his Hollywood career under the bus in one fell swoop?

This just in: he may be Dick Cheney; he may be George W. Bush. He may simply be just another billionaire masked vigilante in a full-body black PVC suit. But the new Batman movie--now with 2/3rds more Michael Mann-esque neo-noir atmosphere!--seriously rocks.

Jason Maoz of Commentary asks, "Whatever Happened to Liberal Humor?"

Fire up the Tardis--with or without Barry behind the wheel: We answered that one two and a half years ago, three years ago--and five years ago!

(H/T: KS)

Related: "Best. Headline. Ever."

AMC's Mad Men series is filled with poke-the-viewer-in-the-ribs moments where characters in a TV series set in 1960 are smoking and drinking like, err, mad--even with their kids around, and on the way, in the case of one pregnant character who smokes like a chimney. And yet somehow, we all managed to survive such a stone knives and bearskins culture. So I have to laugh when a celebrity gossip site, full of photos of Hollywood actresses in various stages of undress and occasionally in various stages of acts that would have caused the boys in the Hayes Office to go into complete myocardial infarction in 1960, has a puritanical headline such as this: "Britney Spears in a Bikini is Smoking... In Front of Her Kids."

Gosh--I know I'm shocked.

Something else the characters in Mad Men wouldn't be the least surprised by, because they had a millennium of history and common sense to go by: "Social stigma drives some women to remove tattoos."

And as usual, the L.A. Times, where history and culture are always in the present-tense, is surprised by (a) a topic that Theodore Dalrymple was writing about nearly a decade and a half ago and (b) your grandmother understood 50 years ago.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

"Remembering Battle of the Network Stars."

Christian Toto sounds like he'll likely be tuning out the latest incarnation of what was once the Siskel & Ebert show:

Doesn't have a great ring to it, does it?

Turns out the folks behind "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper" already have a backup plan. They'll throw E!'s Ben Lyons and Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz into the balcony once occupied by Siskel & Ebert (hat tip Thompson on Hollywood).

I'm not a TCM watcher, alas. I've become an HD snob and that channel isn't broadcast in high-def on my system. And Lyons seemed affable the times I've caught him on E!, but I can't share any other pertinent thoughts about him.

This could be another Katie Couric moment, although on a less important scale. News hounds don't bother with the network's nightly newscasts anymore, but that didn't stop CBS from throwing tons of money Couric's way.

Do movie fans still wait for "At the Movies" before surfing over to Fandango?

Like the rest of the dino-media, the one-size-fits-all movie critic is going the way of the one-size-fits-all anchorman (sorry, Katie). Movie fans increasingly look for critics with similar worldviews, much the same way that news junkies have long sought out bloggers with compatible mindsets.

Update: Nikke Finke is not amused:

Ugh. The retooled Ebert & Roeper show premiering September 6th will be co-hosted by Ben & Ben -- a Generation Why duo who only got the gig due to nepotism. Ben Lyons is the nobody son of Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic world's biggest hack and quote whore with zero credibility, while Ben Mankiewicz is the slacker host on Turner Classic Movies, whose only claim to fame is that he's a watered-down member of the famous film family. Now, there's a working definition of the death of film criticism for you.

Heh.

Fun Wired article from a few years back:

They're supposed to be hellish wastelands. But some of the sinister netherworlds found in books, movies, and videogames seem pretty cool. Sex, drugs, kick-ass weapons, fly rides - where do we sign up?

Number one on the list always sounded pretty bitchin' to me, as well. I'm kind of surprised that this city isn't also on the list, though.

On the other hand, who needs fiction, when chances are, there's a real life dystopia right in your own backyard!

Karl of Protein Wisdom links to my interview on PJM Political this past week with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men series; there's an interesting debate on the show's aesthetics and writing going on under the post in the comment section.

Christian Toto, who appeared yesterday on PJM Political, reviews Trumbo for Pajamas Media, "the new crockumentary", as the Drunkablog accurately dubs it, on blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" writer Dalton Trumbo, while quoting from Ronald Radosh:

There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.

Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo--fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist--invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! . . .

That's a topic I also mention in my recent Silicon Graffiti video:






Meanwhile, on his blog, Christian writes that Glenn Beck has come up with a rather novel way to begin to break the new Hollywood blacklist.

Leftwing historian Rick Perlstein recently told Reason that "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left." It certainly foreshadowed the radical chic that runs through the liberalism of the late 1960s, from the Black Panthers sipping Martinis in Leonard Bernstein's salon to recurring parodies such Michelle Obama in camo and combat boots clutching an AK-47 on the cover of this week's New Yorker.

Speaking of the New Yorker, how much did Pauline Kael's championing of the movie impact the rest of culture? In my interview with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men for PJM Political, we discussed the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. That culture was eventually eviscerated, as anyone who turns on a TV or goes to the movies knows all too well. But how much is Pauline Kael to blame?

Her part in the process began four decades ago when she wrote an article for The New Yorker defending Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Warren Beatty film that treated two 1930s bank robbers with sympathy and raucous humour.

Most critics found Bonnie and Clyde empty and trashy. The crusty old New York Times guy, Bosley Crowther, then one of the most influential American critics, decided that Bonnie and Clyde failed to meet his narrow, simple-minded, painfully respectable standards. It was too violent, and he thought the love story of its doomed, hare-brained title characters was "sentimental claptrap."

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it."

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond "good taste," moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. "Violence is its meaning."

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and '80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

As the above article concludes, "Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, 'When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.' Who did?"

(Via Jonathan Last.)

Kyle Smith writes:

Though my brilliant colleague Billy Heller writes most of the headlines in the Post's Pulse section, including yesterday's "Grinner Takes All," I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I wrote the hed for tomorrow's review of the supergay new musical "Mamma Mia": ABBA-DABBA-DOO!

Seriously, this movie is a quantum leap forward in gay technology. It is to previous incarnations of gay what the Apollo space program was to the bicycle. Lou Lumenick predicts it will do $30 million this weekend, though there is a slightly more interesting movie opening against it. Is this a much gayer country than I previously suspected? Is "Mamma Mia" the gay Batman? The Flighty Knight?

Wouldn't that be a violation of the Wertham Act of 1954?

Back in 2006, I wrote, "Baby We Were Born To Run--From The Wall"--but Reuters has put an entirely new spin on that headline! Betsy Newmark spots everybody's favorite wire service praising Bruce Springsteen's efforts in the twilight of the Cold War, with the headline, "Did the Boss help bring down the Berlin Wall?"

Frankly, this revisionism of the Cold War by the MSM cannot stand. We were told by no less an authoritative source as the BBC that a former actor who envisioned himself going on to bigger and greater things ended the Cold War, without firing a shot in the process. As he once wistfully told a German reporter, "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie."

And so do we.

Though sometimes it's tough to tell which is which. First up, Andrew Ferguson gets "Lost in the Personasphere":

My first glimpse of the personasphere came several years ago at a county fair. It was like all county fairs, an all-American overload of colored lights and hurdy-gurdy noise and questionable smells. I'd always thought it was an experience that nobody could be bored by. Then I saw a gaggle of four teenage girls walking together along the midway. They were yacking away, as teenage girls, you might have noticed, sometimes do-but they were yacking into their cell phones. Walking four abreast, they were huddled in their personaspheres, each in her customized bubble, talking to someone who was far away instead of the friends that plan or chance had placed beside her. They were lost not only to one another but to the noise and color around them.

Since then, the appliances that furnish a personasphere have grown in number and complication. Walk down any city street and you'll see people deploying one gadget or another to construct their bubble, ignoring the nearby in favor of the faraway. Here comes a kid talking excitedly into a cell phone, followed by a businessman calling up a webpage from his iPhone, followed by an office hack scrolling through the messages on his Treo. Meanwhile, life erupts all over the place, unnoticed. If this were a just world, I'd get to see at least one of these busy people walk into a lamppost or fall through an open manhole, the way people used to do in silent movies. They never do, though, at least not while I'm around. This must not be a just world.

But it is a very distracted one-though maybe distraction isn't the fitting word. A distraction is supposed to be something that draws you away from immediate experience, pulls your attention from the matter at hand. The personasphere involves experience once removed, pressed through a piece of hardware; in the personasphere, immediate experience is the distraction, an annoyance that takes you from the now-primary business of texting, phoning, websurfing-being elsewhere. Faced with the real world, we draw our personaspheres over us like a cloak against the cold.

I'm a silver-lining guy, as my friends will tell you, always searching for the upside in any given situation, so I'll mention one nice thing about this cocooning, this withdrawal of everyone into his own personasphere: It has served to prove the techno-utopians wrong once again. From the dawn of the Internet through the coming of the Wi-Fi era, the utopians told us that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture.

We can see how mistaken they were. Consider the man lost in his personasphere, at dinner, on a bus, in an elevator, scheming into a cellphone or tapping a message on his BlackBerry. If technology has brought him closer to distant friends it has also made it easier to detach himself from those near at hand. As his world expands, it shrinks-roughly to the size of his busy, excitable, unutterably lonely self.

And the flipside? Kyle Smith of the New York Post is about to receive comment number #300 on his review of Wall-E:

As always, I am humbled by the number of people who, upon reading a lukewarm reaction to a cartoon about cute robots, managed to reach down deep and bring up some deeply crazed fury.

To be fair, some futurists, such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler in 1980's The Third Wave, didn't predict, as Ferguson wrote, "that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture." Just the opposite--it's the technology itself that's atomizing a once mass culture, as we've gone from three national TV networks in 1968 to 112,000,000 blogs in 2008. But within that atomization, there is room for shared bonds to be forged--even if it occasionally involves fending off a crazed Wall-E storm.

"At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."

--Ring Lardner Jr., at Trumbo's memorial service in 1976.

Back in 2006, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won."

You can see that dynamic--or lack thereof--at work in the new documentary Trumbo that's hitting the art house circuit this summer on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It's a look at the Blacklist and McCarthyism of the 1950s that's brave and daring--a cutting edge triumph of dissent and free speech! ...As long as you're willing to discount the dozen-plus movies on the topic that Hollywood has made since the mid-1960s.

In contrast, did Hollywood produce or distribute any anti-Soviet Union films during that same time period? Not too many, needless to say; but we'll also look at the few that qualify--if only tangentially. Along the way, we also look at the convoluted real-life history of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun novel, which as Orrin Judd described in his review, is as byzantine a story as anything Trumbo wrote for the silver screen.

Those are the topics we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog. It takes its title from an earlier article by Steyn, back when he reviewed the play that toured a few years ago starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo for the New Criterion. For our previous forays in videoblogging, tune in here.

Update: Andrew Breitbart looks at the new Hollywood blacklist: "Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall!" And Glenn Reynolds links to Total Eclipse, the greatest film you've never seen.

I can't say for certain, but I'd wager a bet that Jonathan Last is mildly pumped about the upcoming new Batman movie. I'll keep hacking the Internet until I know for certain.

Another post at Galley Slaves begs the obvious question: has Starbucks announced any store closings in Gotham City yet?

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

This one is based on a story that's four years old, though its source material dates back to at least the late 1960s. Back in 2004, Mark Steyn watched that year's Democratic presidential candidate forced to backpedal because of comments made by celebrities and one of his fundraisers and quipped:

John Kerry's raised nearly 50 million bucks from Hollywood, and, short of divorcing Teresa and the pre-nup kicking in, he's not going to find that kind of money anywhere else. So he's obliged to go along with, for example, Whoopi Goldberg comparing President Bush with her own, ah, intimate areas, as she did at a recent all-star Kerry gala. Or with Meryl Streep musing, ''I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families in Baghdad.'' The financial benefits of the celebrification of the Democratic Party are unquestionable. But the surest sign of its limited appeal in the broader sense was the Kerry campaign's refusal to release the video of the Goldberg-Streep gala. Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity.

And here we go again! Same basic plot, different actors:

Barack Obama today has distanced himself from comedian Bernie Mac after an appearance at an Obama fundraiser last night. The comic performed a profanity-laced set at the function which ended with hecklers telling him to get off the stage after a joke that some deemed particularly offensive to women. Obama joked about the fundraiser being a "family affair" when he followed Mac on stage, but the campaign got more serious about criticizing the comedian afterwards:

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of "The Bernie Mac Show" joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.

"My little nephew came to me and he said, 'Uncle, what's the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question?'" Mac said. "I said, I don't know, but I said, 'Go upstairs and ask your mother if she'd make love to the mailman for $50,000.'"

As the joke continued, the punchline evoked an angry response from at least one person in the audience, who said it was offensive to women.

How did it get more offensive? The Chicago Tribune gives a little more detail:

He promised to help Obama and ended his irreverent riff with a joke involving the women in the families and living with two "hoes."

"Hoes", eh? That Bernie Mac--he's such a rake!

Particularly, as Ed Morrissey notes, in an environment where the women who are ex-Hillary voters that Obama is trying to woo are still teed-off over establishment liberal news coverage of her that they see as "sexist", here's some real sexism shoved into their faces by a comedian in his role as an Obama surrogate.

But then, as Mark Steyn wrote four years ago, "Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity."

Last year, Mark Steyn noted that "Celebrity behavior has been pretty consistent for the last century:"

In the Twenties, Hollywood stars shagged anything that moved, did drugs, divorced routinely - but they (or, at any rate, the studios) understood that it would not be good for this stuff to get out, and on the rare occasions it did get out it was a career ender. The gulf between the celeb life and the lives of the masses was a very well-kept secret.

Obviously, that's not the case these days, illustrating huge changes in cultural mores. I'm not sure whatever happened to The Summer of George, but Michele Catalano writes that this year is "the Summer of Tabloid Divorce":

Let’s face it. We are a culture obsessed with our stars. Somewhere around the time of OJ Simpson’s fall from grace, the gossip rags went from generally fawning over lifestyles of the rich and famous to excitedly pointing out their flaws. We have made a culture of watching the unraveling of our pop culture idols. From the Star to TMZ, it’s all about pointing out the inadequacies of the elite, be it mental or physical. If it not Britney Spears’s mental breakdown, it’s Kirstie Alley’s ballooning weight. Behind every story about Angelina Jolie’s expanding brood of children, there’s a story about Brad Pitt’s supposed infidelity. We’ve created an industry devoted to gloating over the downfall of the rich and famous.

It’s not hard to see why we do it. Here’s someone with more money than we could ever imagine. While we’re struggling to make this month’s mortgage, they are spending $7,000 on a handbag. While we contemplate a vacation in our own backyard, they are jetting off to France for a weekend wine tasting.

For some people, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing their idols brought down to a more human level. Look, they cry just like us! They have feelings! Their lives can fall apart, too! It’s vindication for us that money can’t buy happiness. For others, there’s a smugness that goes with the stories. You may have millions, but at least my marriage is better than yours. At least my kids aren’t in jail.

I think there's an enormous amount of truth in that last paragraph. In the first half of the century, when society didn't know anything about Hollywood's stars, it looked up to them; these days it laughs at their ridiculous foibles. I'm not sure if Hollywood considers that a fair trade, but its not like the worst tabloid offenders do all that much to eschew such publicity in the first place.

Just arrived from Amazon is the DVD collection of the first season of AMC's Mad Men, a show about which I've written several times previously. But the package is fascinating: its four DVDs are encased in a nifty giant tin mock cigarette lighter, and inside is an ad for a pair of actual working Zippo lighters embossed with the Mad Men logo. The inserted ad recalls an earlier sponsorship of the show. They're reminders that the producers of Mad Men want to have it both ways--they want to look down upon their characters for smoking and excessive drinking (pretty rich coming from hedonistic Hollywood), but simultaneously, they're happy to use their series on the excesses of advertising to advertise the exact vices the show condemns. Now that's postmodern entertainment!

Does the hectoring subtext of the writing matter all that much? Maybe not, as I wrote last week:

While the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

On the Museum of the Moving Image's Website (found via the IMDB) is a nicely written, if slightly hyperbolic article on the strength of Mad Men's production design, though--Warning!--it does contain a pretty big spoiler for anyone coming into the show cold via the DVD package. And come to think of it, the scene in question creates a modern connection to the show that I'm absolutely sure its writers didn't intend at all:

The climax of the first season of Mad Men, set at the dawn of the 1960s at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, is actually a brilliant anticlimax—a revelation swiftly followed by a re-veiling. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a clumsy striver at Sterling Cooper, attempts to topple the resident alpha dog, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), with what looks to be a career-ending disclosure: Draper, the firm's dazzling creative director, is living under an assumed name; he's a fraud, likely a Korean War deserter, and possibly worse. Campbell blurts it all out to the avuncular overlord, Bertram Cooper [Wonderfully played by Robert Morse, who's perhaps the show's most inspired casting choice--Ed], while Draper stands by silently, poker-faced, hands steady enough to light yet another cigarette. The elder statesman Cooper considers, waits an agonizing long beat, and makes a purely utilitarian reply.

"Mr. Campbell, who cares?" Cooper asks calmly, his voice burring with pity and disdain for the youngster's naive theatrics. "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here."

"The Japanese have a saying," Cooper continues. "‘A man is whatever room he is in'—and right now, Donald Draper is in this room."

This marvelously tense scene—from the season's penultimate episode, titled "Nixon vs. Kennedy"—is Mad Men in a nutshell. (The AMC series has its second-season premiere on July 27; the complete first cycle of 13 episodes is now out on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Lionsgate.) The televised Nixon-Kennedy debates are generally acknowledged as the moment when image overtook content and began supplanting it; for the hard-drinking, impeccably tailored men and women who populate the randy, smoke-filled offices of Sterling Cooper, the self is a performance, adjusted according to the demands of The Room. Context is everything. Everyone leads at least a double life. (For the men, juggling a wife and mistress is practically a job requirement.) Denial is enormously useful. (One character was pregnant all season and didn't know it.) But it's the dashing über-WASP Don Draper—né Dick Whitman, son of a prostitute, orphan of the Depression—who most fully embodies the idea of the self as a brand that can be revamped on the whims of the market, without remorse or apology. He is what he does. (And why is Donald Draper in this room? Because he generates revenue.)

"A man is whatever room he is in"--that's a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn't it?

Related: The characters in Mad Men would be horrified by this lack of consumer choice in Obama's hometown; something tells me the producers wouldn't, though.

"Just cut to the chase and name the kid Rehab."

"Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself."

Around 1969 and '70, when The Who's Tommy was a pop culture phenomenon, Pete Townshend and his manager, Kit Lambert were culturally aware enough to know that when they booked their self-described rock "opera" into real opera houses, they were veering dangerously close to camp. It was only The Who's sledgehammer live stage show (and Townshend's often great songwriting) that saved them--at least until Ken Russell arrived on the scene to direct the movie version a few years later.

Flash-forward to nearly 40 years on, and we find two prominent cinematic auteurs also seeking to enter the rarefied world of opera. But are they self-aware enough to know that the joke will be on them if their choice of venues actually comes to pass?

What is it about octogenarian presidents of CBS that seem to assume that the power to run a television network confers immortality? In 1990, Christopher Buckley reviewed Sally Bedell Smith's biography of William S. Paley, and wrote:

"WHY do I have to die?" the aging William S. Paley repeatedly asks of a somewhat helpless friend toward the end of Sally Bedell Smith's fascinating and exhaustive biography of the man who built the Columbia Broadcasting System. At this point, having kept company with Mr. Paley's ego for more than 600 pages, no reader is likely to be surprised at the old solipsist for having posed such a bizarre question, and so unphilosophically at that. If CBS's corporate logo was its famous "eye," Mr. Paley's innermost being ("soul" seems not quite the right word) bore the indelible stamp of an "I." The friend "could give no answer except to reassure him that his mother had lived into her nineties." The reply was possibly ironic, as it was Mr. Paley's cold and unloving mother, Goldie, who by shunning her young son had forced him to turn to the larger world for constant, indeed unremitting, affirmation.

* * *

TO the end of his career, Mr. Paley remained a desperately insecure man: jealous of his wife's affection for her son from her first marriage; jealous of Frank Stanton, whom he disastrously hounded from CBS, thereby insuring the ensuing succession of catastrophes that have made the network now, as Mr. Stanton put it perfectly, "just another company with dirty carpets." Lear-like, Mr. Paley ultimately subverted and ruined CBS, the thing he loved above all else -- besides himself -- driving out Mr. Stanton's successors, undermining the company by leaking unfavorable reports about them to the press, meddling in programming even though his quondam powers had by now left him, fretting obsessively about his perks, his private jet, his helicopter, his office, unable to let go; gobbling down experimental, supposedly life-prolonging protein pills every half-hour, gorging on supposedly restorative cucumbers, unable to let go, even of life. For Bill Paley, "Why do I have to die?" was the perfectly logical question.

But as it must to all men, death came to William Samuel Paley on October 26, 1990, at age 89. But note the echos of Paley's famous existential question in this quote uttered by his latest successor, age 85:

"I DON'T want to die. I love what I'm doing. I love Viacom. I love CBS. And so I don't want to die. I have a will to live. The same will to win that I've always had. And, I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else" - Sumner Redstone on CNBC's "Business Nation."

Ask not for whom the station identification tolls for...

I can't be entirely certain, but I'd say there's a reasonable chance of a penumbra of an emanation of a rumor that these people simply are not here to make friends:

(From the friendly neighborhood Manolo himself at his terrific gossip blog, Ayyyy!)

Donald Sutherland is yet another superstar actor to whom Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect remains inviolable. As an actor, Sutherland nearly always invests his characters with charisma and charm; from the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H to the small town cop investigating crimes in the big bad city in Klute, to his wealthy proto-bobo Manhattan art collector in Six Degrees of Separation. But without a script and a director, this is the result:

As far as conspiracy theories go, the one actor Donald Sutherland posited at the Huffington Post Monday certainly doesn't rank very high.

After all, there's a long line of political pundits predicting the Clintons are conspiring to steal the Democrat presidential nomination from Barack Obama.

But, coming from Kiefer's dad, and the original "Hawkeye" Pierce from "M*A*S*H," the entertainment value is, well, delicious.

Get out the popcorn, folks...you won't be disappointed (emphasis added, h/t NBer Gary Hall):

The DNC's 'Terry McAuliffe mind-set' ruined the campaigns of Gore, Kerry and Senator Clinton and now the legions of McAuliffites who have surrounded Barack Obama are doing their damndest to undermine the possibility of his Presidency...There's a well sourced rumor of Machiavellian proportions running around that what's going to happen is that his base support will be so demoralized they won't have the vital conviction they'll need this August to withstand a McAuliffite push to persuade disenchanted delegates on the floor of the convention to make a resurgent Hillary Clinton the Party's nominee!...His heart and soul is being gutted and ours with it... This morning's news in the Washington Post is that he's revised his positions on abortion and troop withdrawal! His supporters are being sent to hell in a handbasket and it has to be stopped!

Suddenly, Sutherland sounds more like Frank Burns than Hawkeye!

Meanwhile, the otherwise regal Lauren Bacall also has a painful case of Hollywood, Interrupted:

Q: You told Larry King, “I’m a total, total, total liberal and proud of it.” Are you excited about the election?

A: I am. I’m a big Barack person. What I find really hard to take is the way the media behave. … They seem to pick on Barack much more readily than they do on McCain. They suddenly say he’s this kind of politician, he’s not what we thought, dah-dah-dah-dah. … I don’t understand why these anchors say, “We’re not supposed to take a side, we’re supposed to just give the news,” but they don’t just give the news, and they don’t tell the truth, excuse me. I only listen to Keith Olbermann. To hell with the rest of them. I’m an MSNBC type now.

Yes, if there's one thing about the legacy media, it's that they really, really despise Obama. Particularly at CNN. And the Washington Post. And The New York Times. And...

Well, lots and lots and lots of butter on her popcorn when at the movies: Robert Reich, offshore drilling (and the sad lack thereof), Antonioni's Blowup and a young Hillary Clinton's deep abiding love of hot buttered popcorn--all this--and more!--coalesces, thanks to Ann Althouse, in the Rosetta Stone of blog posts.

(H/T: IP)

We already had an Admiral Akbar reference just a few short hours ago; might as well go the whole bantha today: "This is What Happens When You Combine Boba Fett, Flashdance and Fireworks":

Mandalorian Dance
by PatrickBoivin

Pull quote from Jules Crittenden's post on the demise of Larry Harmon, the man who gave the world Bozo the Clown? “Larry’s aim in life was to Bozo-ize the world.”

A man's got to have a goal in life; I think we can safely say that Harmon has accomplished his.

Chevy Chase began his career 30-odd (very odd) years ago savaging a former GOP vice president; back then, part of the joke was that Chase looked nothing like the then-60-something Ford. But as always, God has the last laugh. It's further proof that Botox, plastic surgery and better medical technology merely cause Orwell's maxim to be pushed back a decade or two: At age 64, Chase has the face he deserves.

As Mary Katharine Ham asks, "How ticked off do you think Chevy Chase is these days when he wakes up, looks in the mirror...And sees a slightly less-handsome version of Dick Cheney before his eyes?"

I'd say very.

John Nolte, on his Dirty Harry's Place film blog, spots Roger Ebert making quite an interesting analogy in his latest review, which revisits Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Triumph of the Will:

Try to imagine another film where hundreds of thousands gathered. Where all focus was on one or a few figures on a distant stage. Where those figures were the object of adulation. The film, of course, is the rock documentary “Woodstock” (1970). But consider how Michael Wadleigh, that film’s director, approached the formal challenge of his work. He begins with the preparations for this massive concert. He shows arrivals coming by car, bus, bicycle, foot. He show the arrangements to feed them. He makes the Port-O-San Man, serving the portable toilets, into a folk hero. …

By contrast, Riefenstahl’s camera is oblivious to one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. Yes, there are overhead shots of vast fields of tents, laid out with mathematical precision. But how did the thousands eat, relieve themselves, prepare their uniforms and weapons and mass up to begin their march through town? We see overhead shots of tens of thousands of Nazis in rigid formation, not a single figure missing, not a single person walking to the sidelines. How long did they have to stand before their moment in the sun? Where did they go and what did they do after marching past Hitler? In a sense, Riefenstahl has told the least interesting part of the story.

Wow, who knew that the famously leftwing Roger Ebert was such a fan of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism?!

But such a comparison is ultimately futile: Freddie Mercury and Queen weren't even bandmates when Woodstock occurred in 1969, and they were history's first fascist rock and roll group--just ask Rolling Stone.

Jenifer Rubin asks Hollywood to put its carbon credits where its mouth is:

There is no group more susceptible to Obama’s vision and rhetoric than the Hollywood elite. And given their exalted status in our society, their influence on others if they take up the challenge to improve our country might be profound.

So in that spirit we offer a pledge, the Pledge We Can Believe In, which Obama can present to all of his Hollywood admirers. Indeed, he might inscribe the Pledge We Can Believe In on all financial donor forms and on all requests for tickets to his campaign events. The time for idle chatter is over and the fierce urgency of now demands that those who support Obama and his vision for a new America take the Pledge We Can Believe In:

I'm sure they'll sign--the minute this prominent Oscar-winning Hollywood documentarian signs off on the first draft of the pledge.

Via TVCriticism.com, here's a sneak preview from the debut episode of the second season of AMC's Mad Men, which plays like a stone knives and bearskins version of the replicants and their obsession with collecting photographs in Blade Runner:

One of Kyle Smith's readers commenting on a recent fawning New York Times profile of the series and its producer makes a great observation of the importance of the show's production design:

Regarding the article itself, I read a few pages and I believe the show’s creator said something like the show isn’t about the look of it. He’s dead wrong: it’s entirely about the look of it. Take away the look and you don’t have much.

I think that's exactly right. Sort of similar to the observation that the Don Draper character makes in the above clip, while the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

As James Lileks would likely agree, take today's computer technology and the aesthetics of the 1950s (that staid, conservative, gray flannel reactionary era that gave the world the Les Paul and Stratocaster electric guitars, the Ford Thunderbird and Chevy Corvette, Marilyn Monroe, Miles Davis, and Chuck Berry), and you've got the best of all worlds. Or as Rondi Adamson wrote last year, contrasting the rigid formula of Mad Men's writing with the joy of its production design:

The ad-men themselves, when they aren't drinking martinis for breakfast and smoking, are groping the hapless and/or slutty secretaries and making sexist and racist comments. The homelives of the ad-men are portrayed with equal subtlety. Every housewife is miserable and repressed -- though still managing some joyful smoking even while doing the dishes -- and every husband is adulterous -- though still around enough to drunkenly put together a dollhouse for his children. Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners.

In short, it's all great fun, but what I am enjoying most of all about Mad Men is the fashion and the etiquette. Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among them looking like they were on their way to the convenience store nearest their trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

The second season of Mad Men debuts on Sunday, July 27th; in the interim, the first season is available on DVD, along with a soundtrack collection.

At least until the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century, World War II always seemed like pretty settled history to me; but it's obvious that the Second World War--particularly the conduct of the Allies--is being reframed by a surprising number of groups. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last month:

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich.

On the Left, novelist Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction title, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, builds the case that the Allied bombing of German cities was tantamount to a war crime.

Apparently there was no need to, in blanket fashion, attack German urban centers and the industry, transportation, and communications concentrated within them. From Baker’s comfortable vantage point, either the war was amoral or unnecessary — or there must have been more humane ways to stop the flow of fuel, crews, and equipment for the Waffen SS divisions that invaded Europe and Russia.

In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.

That's the theme of a new mini-series written by moderate historian Niall Ferguson, but aired on the otherwise typically liberal PBS, as Adam Buckman notes in an article whose subtitle says it all: "PBS Show To Argue Allies As Bad As Nazis":

MEMBERS of the Greatest Generation - especially those with weak hearts - might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was "tainted" and questions whether it can even be called a victory.

Moreover, the documentary, titled "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century," asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator - Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler - and by adopting the same "pitiless" and "remorseless" tactics practiced by the enemy.

The three-part documentary is a companion to the best-selling book, "The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West" by Harvard and Oxford historian Niall Ferguson. The one-hour Part One of the documentary premieres Monday night at 10 on Ch. 13. The other two parts air the following two Mondays. World War II is the focus of Part Two.

His thesis: Instead of looking at the 20th century as having been disrupted by two world wars with periods of relative peace before, between and after them, it is more appropriate to view much of the history of the century as a continuous bloody conflict that was interrupted occasionally for a few short, exhausted catnaps of relative calm.

It is an illuminating viewpoint, and Ferguson does an effective job tying all of the century's mass deportations, enslavements, ethnic cleansings and genocides together so that you can't help being won over to his view that the violence of the 20th century was virtually never-ending.

I think Austin Bay once quipped to me (and possibly wrote about the theme in a column as well) that you could make a pretty good case that the First World War didn't actually conclude until 1991, (and arguably, not even then) so that's not an unreasonable point, though as Buckman notes:

But it is Ferguson's revisionist view of the tactics applied by the Allies in World War II that is likely to raise the hackles of those who have always believed in the "necessity" of bombing German and Japanese civilians, culminating in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to end a war we did not start.

"I think it's very hard for those who have imbibed the idea of a 'great generation' that what the Allies did to defeat the Axis was in some measure to adopt totalitarian tactics," Ferguson says in a Q&A on PBS's Web site.

Sort of a Liberal Fascism, to coin a phrase originally spoken, favorably, three quarters of a century ago by the same author also who inspired the title of Ferguson's miniseries, which Dorothy Rabinowitz reviews, and in an essay titled "Forget the Good War", adds:

Russian troops had liberated Auschwitz, yes, but we're reminded that Stalin had imprisoned and murdered millions. Does this mean the liberation of Auschwitz was nothing? A good question with no answer. Mr. Ferguson is content to have delivered another in his long stream of accusatory ironies and contradictions, all in support of the claim that the morally tainted Allied armies should not be credited as liberators.

The Americans and British had adopted the totalitarian techniques of their foes, Mr. Ferguson contends in a series of arguments ranging from the strange to the simply inflated. Japanese combatants kept fighting to the very end, he explains, because they feared the cruelty of their American captors. Undoubtedly some American troops were guilty of killing Japanese prisoners. In this film's version of events, the slaughter was wholesale. By way of support Mr. Ferguson summons testimony from Charles Lindbergh -- pro-Nazi icon of American isolationists. He proceeds to reminds us that Lindbergh had complained, in the 1940s, that Americans thought nothing of killing Japanese prisoners. Noteworthy to be sure -- the first and last time, perhaps, that the world was privileged to hear Lindbergh express outrage over the commission of atrocities.

The catalog of Mr. Ferguson's stranger arguments is too long to go into, but here's a hint -- don't miss the part about Kursk, the greatest of all tank battles. Here the U.S. seems to stand accused of providing material help that made it possible for the Russians to prevail. Were the Germans supposed to win? Mr. Ferguson doesn't say, but the question hangs in the air -- for good reason.

Meanwhile, regarding Pat Buchanan's new book, at Pajamas HQ, Sheryl Longin writes:

The left is currently the home of some of the worst forms of cultural relativism, but let us not forget that the right houses its own equally dangerous revisionist historians who attempt to use their false history to influence current events. Now is not a time when America can afford to be fuzzy with the truth. Facts are facts. Ideology blinds people. We forget that at our own peril.

But in the afterward of Liberal Fascism, titled, "The Tempting Of Conservatism", which documented several examples of how the modern right is also susceptible to fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

In the 1990s liberal anger about Buchanan’s “right-wing” fascism reached a fever pitch. As Molly Ivins wrote in response to Buchanan’s 1992 Republican National Convention speech: “It probably sounded better in the original German.” The irony here is that Buchanan was actually moving to the left. For years Buchanan’s opponents called him a crypto-Nazi for his defense of Ronald Reagan and the GOP. In reality, the only thing that kept his fascist instincts in check was his loyalty to the GOP and the conservative movement. After Reagan and the Cold War, Buchanan abandoned both in a leftward search for his true principles.

Buchanan calls himself a “paleoconservative,” but in truth he’s a neo-progressive. During the 2000 election he denounced free marketeers and flat taxers, saying that they spent too much time with “the boys down at the yacht basin.” He came out in favor of capping executive pay, in support of higher unemployment benefits, and against any kind of free-market Medicare reform and backed a “Third Way” approach to government activism. Buchanan’s neo-Progressivism has even caused the onetime Reagan aide to rail against the social Darwinism of the free market.

And Buchanan's magazine, despite its American Conservative sobriquet, is pretty darn cozy with the far fringes of the American left, and it appears that World War II is yet another issue where Pat and the far left, both then and now are remarkably simpatico.

Could Hollywood beckon next?

Update: Did Pat cook the books? "Busted!... Nazi Sympathizer Pat Buchanan Accused of Plagiarism, Hacked Quotes & Wrong Dates."

It's impossible to discern for certain in these matters, but reading between the subtext and the symbolism, one comes away with the mildest of perceptions that James Lileks may have slightly enjoyed Wall-E.

Charles Johnson has a video clip of, as he says, a typically bizarre piece of Iranian antisemitic propaganda, with the usual lunatic conspiracy theories run amok, and notes:

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating.

Capt. Jack Sparrow, Tom and Jerry, and the cast of Zionist poultry from Chicken Run could not be reached for comment.

Ann Althouse quotes an interview with Uma Thurman's father, whom Ann notes is "a professor of Buddhist studies and is ordained as a Tibetan monk (though he is American)":

"As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody 'Kill Bill'?"

A question for Robert Thurman. Answer:

Quentin is kind of obsessed, he’s a wild guy. But he is very brilliant. We trust that his motive is to show people the foolishness of violence rather than to glorify it. I hope that’s true.

Think it is?

Oh, absolutely: Tarantino’s movies illustrate their director's belief in the foolishness of violence in exactly the same way that JFK demonstrates Oliver Stone's faith in Occam's Razor to discern the truth and his hatred of the utter futility of conspiracy theories...

John Nolte, the artist formerly known as Dirty Harry, notes that at least one critic is taking offense at the word "homo" being used by Will Smith's eponymous character in the upcoming summer blockbuster Hancock.

Fortunately for the net worths of all concerned in the film's making, it's an American production protected by Hollywood's armies of lawyers--because that line really won't play up north!

(H/T: 5'F.)

Pixar's new Wall-E certainly looked incredible in its trailer, but it left Kyle Smith with quite a sour aftertaste:

A more advanced flying probe-bot sent to Earth for reasons unknown has feminine curves and lovely blue eyes that leave WALL-E smitten, though except for her habit of laser-zapping any suspicious object she could be one of those white bullet-shaped trash canisters you’d see at a snack bar.

When she and WALL-E start to beep sweet nothings at each other, she has a higher-pitched tone than he does and says her name is Eva, so WALL-E is confirmed to be a heterobot. The two of them wind up at a space station that houses the remnants of the human race. At this point the film, previously dingy and dark, goes matte black.

The earthlings — or maybe Americans, as none of them have any other kind of accent — are brain-dead blobs perpetually stuffed to the gills with entertainment. They never leave their spotless flying barcaloungers — and never could, since their bones have shrunk to useless twigs inside their Shrek-like masses. They float through their troglodyte lives as unquestioning subjects of the master corporation (the same one that ruined the Earth) that houses them, distracts them and feeds them. All foods are made to be sucked down like milkshakes for maximum convenience.

It’s hard to see how a Disney-certified happy ending can result from this, and the answer is it really can’t. This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever, and an artistic gamble on the scale of Fantasia, which initially flopped despite critical acclaim. Pixar is now acting like Disney’s senior partner. Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers — WALL-E is expected to be the year’s most heavily promoted film.

The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation. And Disney paved over a few thousand acres of Florida wetlands to build Walt Disney World in the first place.

How paying customers will react to being told they’re porky slobs, or are headed in that direction (WALL-E is set 800 years in the future) will depend on how closely the people in the audience ignore the people on screen and concentrate on WALL-E and Eva.

Speaking of Disneyworld, Kyle's description of the schizophrenia of Disney's current cinematic product is of a piece their in-person entertainment. Here's James Lileks' description of his recent visit to Disney World's EPCOT Center:

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in “The Circle of Life,” a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there’s death by fire, for variety’s sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it’s wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

As I mentioned to Tammy Bruce on Tuesday when discussing the envirohectoring subtext of The Happening, Hollywood likes to think of itself as a wild and crazy Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific--an endless orgy of hedonistic abandon. But like much of the left in general, lurking just behind its hipster artifice, modern Hollywood has a surprisingly puritanical, we know what's best for you streak. And just as last year's anti-war message was piledriven into the ground by Hollywood, there's lots more eco-lectures to come!

Nobody wanted to be lectured by their parents as a kid; so how long will grown-up audiences voluntarily shell out hard-earned money to replenish the coffers of an industry that's rapidly becoming one giant digital nag?

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

On Friday, I had some thoughts on the anti-consumerism subtext of Pixar's upcoming Wall-E movie, and wrote:

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

And once you're done being lectured on the evils of consumerism by your betters in Hollywood, you can buy their merchandise!

For only $250, you can buy the remote-control Wall-E action figure – which will be available in time for Christmas. When kids aren’t busy making the world a better place, they can plop down in front of the plasma and exercise their thumbs on the Wall-E video game, available for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and 3, and Sony PSP. You can carry your Wall-E lunchbox to school and at night, sleep under a Wall-E poly-blend comforter.

And this isn’t even recounting the junk associated with the Toy Story trilogy (the third one comes out in 2010), Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and so forth.

Pixar is not in the business of going green. It’s not in their interest. So why tell little children that consumerism is bad while pushing a load of useless crap down their throats?

Hey, nobody said it was easy for Hollywood to be puritanical.

Update: Related thoughts on puritanical Hollywood here.

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

George Carlin, dead at age of 71.

From the home office in Mos Eisley spaceport, Ace of Spades brings you the Star Wars Obama crawl!

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

All that work making Steve Guttenberg a star, and this is how he repays them.

Given its horrid revues from both sides of the aisle, I don't think that Hindu chaplain Rajan Zed will have much difficulty in urging "Hindus around the world to boycott" Mike Myers' new film, The Love Guru:

Movie executives at Paramount Pictures have honoured their promise to preview Mike Myers' new film The Love Guru for concerned Hindu leaders in Los Angeles.

Hindus, led by Rajan Zed, campaigned to see the film before its release on Friday - in a bid to make sure their fears about the movie were overblown.

But the screening has only served to bolster the religious opposition to the film, which Zed and his followers insist is disrespectful to Hindus and their beliefs.

Zed has now urged Hindus around the world to boycott the movie, claiming the picture "lampoons Hinduism and Hindu concepts and uses Hindu terms frivolously".

After attending the screening on Thursday, Zed rages, "The Love Guru is even more denigrating than we earlier perceived from the information gathered from trailers, websites and other sources.

"Mike Myers' guru instigates a bar fight, repeatedly narrates penis jokes, mocks yoga - one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, wears female jewellery, mocks the concept of third eye, makes disciples drink tea passed through his nose, orders alligator soup, induces elephant copulation in front of the crowd, introduces himself as 'His Holiness', lives in a lavish ashram staffed with scantily clad maids, and whose goal in life seems to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show."

And the Hindu leader has suggested other religious groups should give the film, in which Myers plays an oddball guru called Pitka, a miss.

He adds, "Today it is Hinduism, tomorrow Hollywood might attempt to denigrate another religions.

Really? They might? Do you think! Let me check on this one and get back to you. OK--back! Unfortunately though, the producers of Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Golden Compass, and Jesus Camp could not be reached for comment.

Nor could this director of a different sort of anti-religion movie, who, curiously enough, isn't around these days to cash his royalty checks.

Related: "Admit none: 16 protested movies."

Dirty Harry reviews Pixar's Wall-E and is knocked out by the incredible CGI (as was I when I saw the trailer before the latest Indiana Jones movie), but he's rather offput by one of its themes:

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment.

On the other hand, its not the first Pixar movie that some in the starboard side of the Blogosphere thought a bit squishy. But then there's this:

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

Meanwhile, one of Harry's commenters asks:

Have they started with the anti-consumerism merchandising and advertising tie-ins yet?

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Steven Den Beste emails, "If you look at the credits, the problem becomes clear: Brad Bird didn't direct this one. He wasn't involved in it at all." It will certainly be interesting to see how handles this upcoming film, given its all-too-recent subtext.

The newly reconstituted Libertas links to an exceptional essay by Anthony Lane on the great David Lean, whose troika of epics--The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, and of course, the staggering Lawrence of Arabia made the phrase "the thinking man's blockbuster" not an oxymoron for a brief period in movie history.

Killer passage here:

Lean is talking about the crossing of the Nafud desert, the “sun’s anvil,” by Lawrence and Ali (Omar Sharif), a journey thought to be suicidal. Nonetheless, they and fifty warriors take the risk, on Lawrence’s insistence, because he knows it is the only way to reach the strategic town of Aqaba, then under Turkish control. As for the cut, Sam Spiegel, the bullish producer of “Lawrence,” wants to keep those three shots in, arguing that the audience needs to sense the slog of the night crossing, while Lean feels that any hint of tedium could be a killer. “The film has a certain something which we must be careful not to destroy,” he remarks, as if running his eye over a set of kitchen drawers that he had knocked up in the garden shed. As for a sequence near the start:

I find the map room a goodish scene in a goodish British film. I would, without a second thought, dispense with it but for the match incident. I am not absolutely convinced that the match incident is worth the footage involve

In retrospect, I think we can say it was worth it. One “match incident” leads to another: Lawrence, stuck in Cairo halfway through the First World War, and conscious of a place, not far away, where the fate of nations, not to mention his own private destiny, will be decided, holds a match up close and blows it out. We cut, without ado, to the desert at dawn, and so to the slow explosion of red gold on the horizon’s rim: God lighting the first match of the day. It was a moment that Steven Spielberg saw at the age of fifteen, and which, he says, ignited his determination to make films. If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if something inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spectacle that Lean has conjured, then you might as well give up the movies.

Just so! The cinema of the 1960s is bookended by a pair of fabulous edits: the above referenced "Match Cut" in Lawrence, and Stanley Kubrick's brilliant cut between a prehistoric hominid's tossed bone and an orbiting space weapon four million years later in 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a edit that simply had to have been inspired by Lean's earlier juxtaposition.

After that, it was all downhill in epic cinema, as Lane notes--it's a quite a chasm that separates Lean's Lawrence, Kwai and Zhivago and Kubrick's 2001 with Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. Even Alfred Hitchcock, Lean's fellow British master of the cinema wasn't immune--the man who once cast his films with the likes of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly began the decade with Frenzy, of which James Lileks wrote a few years ago:

One of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen is Hitchcock’s “Frenzy,” because you get the feeling that this is what he always wanted to do, and was finally able to do it because of the new post-60s frankness in cinema. It’s cheap and dank and smegmatic like no other Hitchcock film, and it’s depressing that he didn’t see how altogether smelly it was.

Fortunately, in 1977, George Lucas had this crazy idea to combine epic-style filmmaking with 1930s-era serials, and managed to get cinema, visually at least, off the street again, at least for a time.

As Kyle Smith notes:

The indefatigable mystery movie blogger Dirty Harry has broken with the right-leaning site Libertas, where he posted tirelessly and well, and struck out on his own. Lend him your eyeballs at his personal site, DirtyHarrysPlace.com. Good luck, DH.

Absolutely--and as Kyle notes, definitely stop by Harry's Website. It's Magnum Force! (Sorry.)

Incidentally, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, the founders of Libertas are back posting there; as several commenters have noted, no idea why the split occurred, but it could be a win-win for the Blogosphere, if both sites continue to crank out great posts.

Iranian TV explores Hidden Zionist Themes in...

wait for it...

Chicken Run.

No really! (I wonder if anybody told Mel Gibson?) It's a bit like watching the Soviets in the mid-1960s complaining how decadent the West had become because they listened to the Beatles and Herman's Hermits. And incidentally, can you say projection, boys and girls?

(Via a post at Free Mark Steyn which looks at the insanity of conspiracy theories through the ages; as you may have already seen, we recently made a quick romp through their last fifty years in video form, here.)

Kyle Smith sees dead celluloid, braving M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening--it isn't--so you don't have to.

In the old days of Hollywood, if a film bombed spectacularly, legend had it that its frames would be cut up to make thousands upon thousands of guitar picks. (Or ukulele picks, in Roger Ebert's vernacular.)

Which would be have been infinitely more humane to all concerned than this attempted method of salvaging a recent celluloid megabomb.

(Via the Vast Manolo Empire.)

England's Independent looks at the classic portrait photography of movie starlets of the 1930s by MGM staff photographer George Hurrell, a topic Virginia Postrel previously explored via a photo essay in Slate three years ago. The Independent's Hannah Duguid writes:

It's the stuff of fantasy: a photograph of Joan Crawford with liquid eyes and flawless skin, her strong bone structure casting sculptural shadows across her face. There is no context, no setting: it is simply a close-up of her perfectly beautiful face. Crawford's troubled character is not apparent in these photographs, nor is her battle with alcohol; the ravages of life are painted over with clever lighting and a thick concealer.

The photograph was taken by George Hurrell, head of portrait photography at MGM Studios in 1930. In those days, Hollywood studios employed full-time photographers who were responsible for creating a star's image. Those were the days of high glamour, when young women became sophisticated princesses, their allure heightened by their unattainability. Hurrell also moulded the images of Jean Harlow, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. He spent hours with his subjects, perfecting their look. Their public persona was a creation, a brand, an image on to which people could project their fantasies and desires. They were not meant to reflect reality, or reveal anything about the women's real character – it was all made up.

Yet, as time progressed, audiences and photographers tired of these images of idealised beauty. There was a place for pure glamour in fashion and society magazines, but now people wanted something more real, they wanted to know who their stars really were.

The modern-day implications of that last sentence bring to mind H.L. Mencken's classic line, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

The great Paul Newman, 83, apparently has terminal lung cancer:

Shawn Levy, an American film critic who has been writing a biography of the actor, said in a post on his blog Tuesday that Newman’s “next birthday is in January, and we can only hope he’ll make it. I suspect I’ll be writing an obituary before I hold a copy of my book in my hand.”

As Libertas notes, "Sadly, Newman’s not denying the story", and has turned over ownership of his Newman’s Own food products line to charity.

All newspapers redesign their mastheads from time to time, but with the Internet radically reshaping the consumption of news, the International Herald-Tribune (created when the New York Times purchased the late great NY Herald-Tribune) really knows where to focus their efforts:

“Did you see the American flag in the old logo?”

“What American flag are you talking about?” I asked her.

“The American flag that was in the old logo … do you think that without the flag the paper will be more accepted in places that hate us today?”

WHAT????

(Now is the time for you, my dear reader, to scroll to the top of this post and see the old masthead and look at the details of the old logo, because I am 100 percent sure that you never paid any attention to, yes, the American flag!).

“Look,” I said to the reporter, “This is getting worse: I didn’t realize that there was an American flag there, so one minute, let me check …”

“Oh yes, holy s***!”

“So, you are killing the logo for this reason?”

Silence.

Well, as you can see, I said readers are blind to logos …

But we are mentally sound enough to realize that your bosses are insane.

If they think that the American flag is the problem to their circulation crisis … these guys must be fired.

On the spot.

And shame on them!

Leave it to one of Pinch's papers to focus on the flag, reacting to it with the same vampire-like fashion as the City of Los Angeles airbrushing the cross out of the city seal.

In a more benign version of an unnecessary old media update, Christian Toto notes that Jay Leno's days on the Tonight Show may be numbered:

It all goes back to a rushed business decision the Peacock network made four years ago to keep Conan O’Brien in the fold. Contract talks with the red-headed comic, who seemed unlikely to last the week, let alone 14-plus years when he first replaced David Letterman, had hit a major snag.

So the network suits threw him a Hail Mary — you can take over The Tonight Show in five years if you stay with the NBC family. Heck, there’s no way Leno will still be the king of that time slot by 2009, right.

Right?

Flash forward to 2008, and Leno remains the undisputed late night champ. The Tonight Show earns more than $100 million annually for NBC, according to press reports. The program regularly trumps rival David Letterman’s The Late Show in the ratings with little sign of slipping.

The change is expected to happen mid-next year. O’Brien will assume The Tonight Show hosting duties, former Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon slips into O’Brien’s Late Night slot and Leno gets to scratch his iconic chin while considering his next move.

Whatever Jay's politics, like Carson, he's managed to craft a benign image that appeals perfectly to television's aging audience and the heartland in general. Much like the ground the TV networks lost to the Internet when the last generation of anchormen left the airwaves (Brokaw via retirement, Jennings via his untimely death, and Dan Rather via his own overarching stupidity), NBC's likely making a profound error by pushing out Leno.

Sonny Bunch of the Weekly Standard writes:

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but if you’re looking for a reason to subscribe to the New Yorker, look no further than Anthony Lane. The smartest, wittiest critic out there, Lane’s reviews drip with wit and, almost as importantly, knowledge about the film industry and the history of cinema. Truly an amazing writer. His take on Sex and the City is, needless to say, a must-read:

“When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

The headline to this post is Lane’s suggested subtitle for the movie; a better one I cannot imagine.

Geez, at least at the apogee of the 1980s, Miami Vice managed to combine glitz and conspicuous consumption with car chases, shoot-outs and a bitchin' soundtrack.

Right Wing Trash explores one of the more interesting cinematic curios from the late 1960s: Haskell Wexler's quasi-guerrila cinema classic, Medium Cool. With four decades of hindsight, Wexler's movie can be viewed as a sort of mirror image of Michael Moore's work, which begin as documentaries but invariably end up as agitprop fiction, as the late Pauline Kael perceptively first noted over 20 years ago. In contrast, Wexler's goal was to film a fictitious Hollywood drama with the background of real life swirling just behind it, in this case the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Medium Cool blended killer cinematography (Wexler's primary forte) with then-standard-issue late-60s proto-punitive folk Marxist politics, along with a dash of McLuhan for seasoning--not to mention the film's title itself. But its immediacy works against it in one sense: it seems much more locked into its era than Blowup, which was obviously once of Wexler's inspirations. Which makes it a great time capsule of the rot of the late 1960s, with Mr. Sammler just off camera.

A couple of years ago, we looked at Michael Mann's use of high definition video cameras to shoot the big screen version of Miami Vice, often hand-held in very low light. I wonder if any cameras--video or good ol' movie film--will be rolling in Denver documenting the left's latest efforts, Mobius Loop-style, to "Recreate '68."

Reading about Obama's North By Northwest gaffe, I'm afraid to ask what he thinks Roger O. Thornhill's middle initial stood for. And Roger L. Simon notes:

Anyone who doesn't know that was shot on a set is a relative cinematic idiot. In fact, Hitchcock practically always used sets quite deliberately and famously. No kudos to Obama on that one.

Exactly. If only because it's the one invariable contemporary knock against Hitch, which usually goes something like, "Awesome director, but geez, all those sets and rear projection sure looked phony."

The nadir of Hitchcock's studio-bound obsession with rear projection had to have been Marnie. It's an otherwise interesting late-period Hitchcock film, but the audience's suspension of disbelief had to have gone out the window during the scene that cuts from a location shot of a stunt woman on a horse in field, to a close-up of Tippi Hedren on the set, astride a horse so phony looking, it looks like something stuffed by Build-A-Bear.

Finally, moving beyond Hitchcock's oeuvre, Kathy Shaidle ponders "Obama's other questions about the movies".

Kyle Smith has a great piece at the New York Post on the obsessed nature of Sex And The City's most die-hard fans, which would would be instantly recognizable if the genders were reversed and the costumes changed:

Suppose there were thousands of men who, every Thursday night, dressed up as Chewbacca or Boba Fett and headed en masse to an inviting "Star Wars"-themed neighborhood where they could discuss their strange obsessions at bars like Cloud City or Jar Jar's Joint while guzzling specialty cocktails (the TatooTini, the Hothmopolitan).

That would be strange, but not quite as strange as what happens at the "Sex and the City" theme park in the Meatpacking District, which is about two years away from installing its first TGIFridays and already is to hip what Mark Hamill is to acting. Unlike the "Star Wars" nerds, who are under no illusions that they will ever actually take the Millennium Falcon out for a chance to complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, the "Sex and the City" fangirls think that they can live the life they see on TV.

So they swarm the night, staggering packs of "Sex" geeks - the hungry streets beneath them cackling, "Say hello to my leetle cobblestones, Manolo mamas!" - heedless to the fact that the ratio of them to their male equivalents is already the inverse of ComicCon and getting worse. The cougars of the movie, reviving their Jurassic snark for one more pun-dump, have digital airbrushing on their side, but in reality, bitchy 43-year-old women are not the center of attention at the clubs. Sexist? Not I. God.

Even 33-year-old women are not living in reality in this town. The multiplexes and networks and bookstores can barely accommodate all the movies and TV series and books (almost all written by men; one, I recall vaguely, written by me) about comical manboys coming to terms with the need to grow up. There is no equivalent message getting through to women.

Smith sounds like he's describing a textbook example of what Tom Wolfe once called "Information Ricochet". As Wolfe noted, there were no Hell's Angels (or if there were, they were in a pretty nascent form) before The Wild One, but once young motorcycle aficionados saw Marlon Brando projected on a fifty-foot high screen on his bike, they instantly, maybe even subconsciously assumed, "This is how we act! This is what we wear!" (The "Mutt" character in the New Indiana Jones movie is a sort of cartoon illustration of that exact phenomenon in action.) And then, when Hollywood went back to make more biker movies in the 1960s, they could then crib from the real Angels, who in turn stole ideas from those movies as Information Ricochet feeds on itself.

Of course, there were millions of single professional women living in New York prior to Sex And The City, but seeing the rules codified on TV makes for a powerful subconscious incentive to more carefully hone one's own lifestyle to the examples played out weekly on TV, and now movie screen. Or as Newsweek's Julia Baird wrote, "It revealed what they were already doing – and emboldened them to do more."

On the plus side, at least the average Sex And The City-obsessed woman is light years more aesthetically pleasing than the sort of fellow who fancies himself living in Mos Eisley.

Related: This is a riot:

Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the f*** am I to judge? But Ch***t in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?

Hey, the series didn't earn the sobriquet of "Shoes And The City" for nothing.

Chris Noth, "Mr. Big" in Sex And The City, "Thinks New York Is Too ‘Commercialized’":

The actor, who began residing in New York City in the 1970s, told Interview magazine that its appeal has greatly lowered over the years. “New York is pretty much commercialized to the point of no return,” he complained. Noth also misses the city’s creative scene, stating, “It’s very suburban. The art scene really left, except in patches. It’s all about sort of a corporate sensibility, and it’s squeezed out room for any other kind of sensibility.”

Ironically, for a guy who makes his living playing a cop on TV, it sounds like Chris longs for the nadir of Big Apple's law enforcement, proving once again the inviolability of Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect.

Libertas' Dirty Harry, who bravely suffers through all sorts of Hollywood drek so you that don't have to, has surprisingly kind words for the new Sex And The City movie.

(As does Kyle Smith of the New York Post, who's also celebrating his first anniversary in the Blogosphere.)

Well give 'em credit: at least they're threatening to recreate 2000 instead of '68. But like much of "progressivism's" rhetoric, this nostalgic cliche is starting to feel almost as old and clapped out as your local folkie playing "Imagine" and "Give Peace A Chance" on his out of tune acoustic guitar. Or, given her early role in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, another chorus of "Let's Do The Time Warp, Again!"

“I’ve got a lot of flak from feminists who feel that I should be supporting Hillary Clinton, but I thought the whole point of feminism is that you’re not supposed to be defined by gender,” she says…

Always busy, [Susan] Sarandon is about to start work on the romantic period drama The Colossus, but with the presidential election campaign being heatedly contested, she also has bigger things to consider.

“If McCain gets in, it’s going to be very, very dangerous,” she says.

“It’s a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I’ll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don’t know. We’re at an abyss.”

Yes, it's always a choice of polar opposites, isn't it? The Heaven-on-Earth of the messiah-like rookie liberal Democrat senator, or the abyss of the war hero moderate Republican senator.

And speaking of which, Allah notes:

She’s been a trooper up ’til now — 36 years of her life lived under Republican presidents and still, somehow, she hasn’t left yet. How does she stand it?

Meanwhile, Brian Faughnan has the logical response that most will have after the third consecutive go-around of this rhetoric: prove it to me, sister:

It's a valiant try by Ms. Sarandon, but the voters are unlikely to be fooled. We'll never know how many cast votes for George Bush in 2004, anticipating that Alec Baldwin, Robert Redford, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore, and many others would pack up and move to Canada. Alas, they failed to hold up their end of the deal.

Tell me Ms. Sarandon: how do I know that if I vote for John McCain, you'll keep your promise?

Canada--it's just a jump to the left!

Thomas Bartlett asks, "Did a 'dream team' of biblical scholars mislead millions?":

Marvin Meyer was eating breakfast when his cellphone buzzed. Meyer, a professor of religious studies at Chapman University, has a mostly gray beard and an athletic build left over from his basketball days. His friends call him "the Velvet Hammer" for his mild demeanor. He's a nice guy.

The voice on the other end belonged to a representative of the National Geographic Society. They were working on a project and wanted his help.

"That's very interesting," he remembers saying. "What do you have in mind?"

"We can't tell you," was the reply.

That was not the answer he expected.

"Let me see if I understand this," Meyer said. "You'd like me to agree to do a project with you, but you won't tell me what that project is. Is that right?"

"Exactly."

He would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement first — which, in the end, he agreed to do. Not long afterward, Meyer found himself locked in an office in Washington, with a desk, a pile of dictionaries and lexicons, and one of the most sought-after religious texts in recent history, the Gospel of Judas. For a week he worked almost nonstop on the 26-page text, translating the Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language written with Greek letters, into English. As he translated, a startling portrait of Judas Iscariot emerged. This was not the reviled traitor who betrayed Jesus with a kiss. This was the trusted disciple, the close confidant, the friend. This was a revelation.

When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April 2006, it made headlines around the world — with nearly all of those articles touting the new and improved Judas. "In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal," read the headline in The New York Times. The British paper The Guardian called it "a radical makeover for one of the worst reputations in history." A documentary that aired a few days later on National Geographic's cable channel also pushed the Judas-as-hero theme. The premiere attracted four million viewers, making it the second-highest-rated program in the channel's history, behind only a documentary on September 11.

* * *

One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest.

As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind — which would undercut the thesis of the National Geographic team. She turned to her husband, Wade, and said: "Oh no. Something is really wrong."

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

Then there's the number 13. The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written by a sect of Gnostics known as Sethians, for whom the number 13 would indicate a realm ruled by the demon Ialdabaoth. Calling someone a demon from the 13th realm would not be a compliment. In another passage, the National Geographic translation says that Judas "would ascend to the holy generation." But DeConick says it's clear from the transcription that a negative has been left out and that Judas will not ascend to the holy generation (this error has been corrected in the second edition). DeConick also objected to a phrase that says Judas has been "set apart for the holy generation." She argues it should be translated "set apart from the holy generation" — again, the opposite meaning.

As with The Da Vinci Code, It sounds like National Geographic attempted to not-so-boldly go into the same moral inversion that Kenneth Anger had already gone 30 years ago, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. As Orrin Judd writes, "When the marketing campaign comes first the translation is bound to be sketchy."

Just read that Sydney Pollack died, at age 73. I wasn't a big fan of Pollack's fairly doctrinaire punitive liberal worldview that was often on display in the films he directed. But as an actor, frequently cast in rather dark, amoral supporting roles, he managed to project a surprising amount of likability, even as the adulterous friend of Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives, and as Victor Ziegler, the sinister business tycoon in Eyes Wide Shut. (Or as Dustin Hoffman's agent in Tootsie, in a memorable scene where the above headline derives.)

Film directors rarely make good actors, and in both professions, few have careers that thrived as long as Pollack's. In an industry that increasingly allows few grown-ups behind the cameras, and even fewer in front of them, his gravitas will be missed.

Esquire's Stephen Garrett reviews Che, Steven Soderbergh's hagiographic (is there any other kind of Che movie from monolithic Hollywood?) new biopic:

Steven Soderbergh has a big fat crush on Ernesto “Che” Guevara. But don’t tell him he’s biased. “I’m an agnostic,” he told the press corps at the Cannes Film Festival, where his two-part, four-and-a-half-hour paean to the Third World’s favorite revolutionary made its world premiere on Wednesday night. “I’m not personally invested in building him up or tearing him down.”

And yet. With Che, the combined version of two Spanish-language films separately entitled The Argentine and Guerrilla (rushed to completion for Cannes, by the way, and shot and shown digitally without titles or end credits), the Oscar-winning director turns away from the box-office catnip Ocean’s Eleven franchise to pay penance at the altar of high cinema. The impulse is unimpeachably admirable; the result is heartbreakingly misguided. Why try to avoid passing judgment? Why pretend that you haven’t anyway?

Che already has a slew of biopics to his name, most recently by Brazilian underclass auteur Walter Salles, whose 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries predictably romanticized the Argentine doctor during a young-adult road trip that enlightened him to the plight of the impoverished. Soderbergh himself said that he sees his films as companion pieces to Salles’ work, forming a trilogy of Che’s life -- albeit one without the butchering death squads, homophobia, and other unsavory aspects that liberals might find a tad too distastefully indefensible. (So much for agnosticism.)

Indeed. As the blurb above the review notes:

Steven Soderbergh's nonjudgmental, four-and-a-half-hour biopic about Che Guevara never elevates the Cuban revolutionary beyond iconic T-shirt status.

Yes, young men fall all over themselves to attend film school and make the brutal climb up the Hollywood food chain to become film directors, all in search of the raw power that comes with...nonjudgmentalism!

Update: "Fortunately, No One Will Watch It". True--except for all of the college kids whose professors will force them to watch, both in first run at the theater, and--especially--in perpetuity as a classroom propaganda "teaching aid" once it's out on DVD.

Neither Kyle Smith (at Pajamas HQ) nor "Dirty Harry" of Libertas have kind words for the newest Indiana Jones movie. And Harry notes that in addition to its slack pace, this:

As far as the film’s politics, act one’s anti-anti-Communist message serves no story purpose whatsoever. Jones did not need to be fired in order to be sent off on an adventure and the story-point is never again picked up or resolved, making it a first for an Indiana Jones’ film: an awkward, ham-fisted political message shoe-horned in at the expense of story quality.

Why should we expect the maker of Saving Private Ryan and Munich to avoid postmodern solipsism?

Update: On the other hand, perhaps there's a glimmer of hope for the good doctor.

As "Dirty Harry" of Libertas writes, "Expect a lot of this":

Variety’s Todd McCarthy makes a pre-emptive move (I thought liberals didn’t believe in that?) against conservatives in his pan of Steven Soderbergh’s attempt to Lawrence-of-Arabia the mass-murderer Che Guevera:

…and presents American and Latin American authorities so exclusively as cardboard mouthpieces of imperialism and abusive dictatorships, respectively — that some conservative political commentators might work themselves into a lather over it.

You see, any rise of indignation over a $60 million, five-hour attempt to further t-shirtify a sworn enemy of the United States responsible for the murder of at least 600 innocent people (that we know of) is purely knee-jerk lathering on our part. Oh, and we should also avoid any lather over the fact that Che’s psychotic crimes failed to find a few minutes in a 300-plus minute film:

This structure very conveniently elides the period wherein Che, as effective co-head of Castro’s Cuban government, presided over mass executions, the persecution of homosexuals, the ruination of the island’s economy, the ill-fated alliance with the Soviet Union, and so on.

Sadly, I’ve yet to read any review, good or bad, that registers any frustration whatsoever over Soderbergh’s decision to skip the murderous parts of Che’s life.

Think about it: Todd McCarthy’s in more of a lather over our possible lather than Che’s actual crimes or Soderbergh’s glossing over of them.

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Pat Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Power Line looked at Hollywood's 2004 attempt to whitewash Che (Hollywood seems to alternate each year between films inflating the peccadilloes of the blacklist with films whitewashing the real horrors of Che and Castro) in a post titled the "Motorpsycho Diaries".

Homer Simpson, prototypical Darwin Award winner:

(Title via Declan MacManus.)

"I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be".

--Sean Penn on the "phenomenally inhuman" Obama. Did Joyce Kilmer teach poetry at Ridgemont High?

Death, taxes, and that France will easily surrender to any invading empire, no matter how far away they've come.

(Via Hot Air.)

Richard Brooks of the Times of London writes that Tom Cruise's Valkyrie is being pushed back a year:

The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.

The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.

“We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains.

“I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all this year.”

The film is not only a blow to Cruise as an actor but in his more recent incarnation as a movie mogul at United Artists (UA), the studio which made the film.

One critic in Hollywood has declared “Valkyrie is dead”, with another arguing that the film’s problems could also wreck the revival of UA.

Not to mention totally bumming out these fellas.

Another pleasant boomer/Gen X collective childhood memory ruined by postmodern Hollywood:

MAYBE every generation gets its own "Tron."

"Speed Racer" comes to us from the creators of "The Matrix," and as my cerebral cortex was reeling from the onslaught of its jelly-belly colors and "Lucy in the Sky" graphics, I wondered if there was some parallel universe where it might be considered an entertaining experience. Maybe Japan?

This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once.

Or to paraphrase this extremely perceptive media critic duo, this film sucks--but it sucks in ways we've never seen before. It sucks in new and unusual ways--especially once you get past its Tron-on-acid visuals.

Elsewhere, Cindy Crawford discovers her inner General Jack D. Ripper:

According to Crawford and the “Thirsty for Change” Web site, Americans use 50 billion water bottles a year.

“Fifty billion in America and only 50 percent are recycled,” Crawford said. “So that’s like 38 billion that aren’t recycled.”

The Exurban League explores the new math:

Let's see... 50 Billion x 50% = 25 Billion, subtract the loss factor, add in the safety margin, carry the missing supermodel brain cells... yep, 38 billion!

Do we know if Cindy has any thoughts on fluoridation?

(And don't even ask her about toilet paper...)

Update: Liberty Peak Lodge crosses the streams: check out the caption on the photo above this post.

Hillary as Darth Vader? Bill Clinton as the Emperor? Barack Obama as Luke Skywalker*? Did Maureen Dowd write this?

Read More »

Maureen Dowd:

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids?

So now Hillary is General Jack D. Ripper? Last week she was Michael Corleone.

Which ill-conceived boomer-nostalgic celluloid metaphor will Maureen choose next?

In my inbox was spam for something called "Pangea Day", apparently happening on May 10th. Wikipedia describes it as:

On May 10, 2008 Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked to produce a 4-hour program of films, music and speakers. The program will be broadcast live at the same time across the world. According to the festival organizers, "Pangea Day plans to use the power of film to bring the world a little closer together."

Pangea Day was created in 2006 when documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize. Jehane wished to use film to bring the world together. May 10, 2008 will be the first Pangea Day event.

Seting aside the eternal right of return to 1968, I knew that big chunks of the anti-industrial left were hellbent on returning the planet to a near unpopulated state, or some other sort of Rousseauvian primitivism, but Pangea? Set the Wayback Machine way, way back, Mr. Peabody!

Read the rest, over at Libertas.

As Libertas notes, "Yeah, this will make money":

[Filmmaker] NICK Broomfield … is under fire for his latest, “Battle for Haditha,” a probe into the 2005 Marine massacre of 24 men, women and kids in Haditha, Iraq, allegedly in retaliation for the bombing death of one jarhead. The flick, opening May 7 at Film Forum, features former enlisted Marines portraying the killers in explicit reenactments of what some call “Bush’s My Lai ,” and is being slammed as a smear job. One group, Defend Our Marines, states … Broomfield claimed he’d show the world the “unflinching truth” about Haditha, but instead had actors improvise phony, obscenity-filled dialogue as they shot innocent civilians. One scene in which an Iraqi is gunned down as he flees through a field is said to be completely fictional. Charges against five of eight Marines involved have been dropped so far.

Cue the refrains of "fake but accurate", and "emotional truth" that are sure to come.

Most of Broomfield's previous documentaries were feminist-themed movies. As an interviewer asked him, "You seem to focus a lot on strange women in your films":

PM: You know, Courtney, Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss and, uh, Margaret Thatcher. Is that more than coincidence?

NB: I think I am more interested in women than in men. But I have made twenty three films, and under slightly half of those have to do with men. For example, I did a movie about the head of the neo-nazi party in South Africa. But the more high profile films that have been shown in this country have to do with women.

However, I do find women more interesting. You know, women have been through a lot more interesting changes than men over the last twenty years. They went through the whole feminist movement, and I think the position of women has really changed in society in terms of what's expected of them and from them. And the women I choose are all moderately powerful.

Hmmm--I guess there was a dearth of "moderately powerful" women in the Middle East for Broomfield to film. Can't imagine why that is, (though maybe Ms. magazine knows) but I suppose covering that story would be a documentary too far, lest he join Theo van Gogh in the great editing bay in the sky. Best make nice, safe, perfectly reactionary boilerplate about the big bad U.S. instead.

"Strap in. You’re in for a predictable 90-minutes."

And that's the problem with virtually every Hollywood film these days, isn't it? (Except that most films are nearly twice as long. At least, to paraphrase Alvy Singer, with H&K's new flick the food here is terrible, and mercifully, such small portions, too.)

Update: Writing for Pajamas Media, Kyle Smith of the New York Post notes that "there's only one decent political joke in the entire movie"--the direction of which, unintended or not, won't surprise many on the starboard side of the Blogosphere.

Couldn't he have have simply let it keep growing naturally to demonstrate the importance of sustained old growth forestry?

Back in the April of 2004, Steve Green of VodkaPundit dubbed The Day After Tomorrow, "The Passion of the Christ for the anti-globalization crowd."

We had no idea at the time how right he was, since at least one of its special effects shots has gone full circle, finding its way into a modern-day messiah's cinematic production.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that you go into these small artisan garrets in California like Hollywood, and, like a lot of small towns on the West Coast, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to identity politics and religions such as Scientology:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

A few years ago, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a superb essay on the transformation of Hollywood actors from men to perpetual adolescents. And if you work in an industry when one of your leading screenwriters can draft an essay for general consumption that includes the phrase...

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

...your product is likely to reflect those values. Even if, as VDH notes, it costs that industry literally hundreds of millions at the domestic box office.

Speaking of movies, Glenn Reynolds links to a Popular Mechanics article that wonders when will Hollywood make another intelligent sci-fi movie. That's a topic we also discussed in this post from late 2006. In an industry that adopts to change as slowly as Hollywood (that's not really a knock--it's a titanic enterprise creating multi-million dollar budgeted movies involving armies of craftsmen and actors), most of the reasons haven't changed in the interim.

Jennifer Rubin reminds us not to taunt happy fun Democrats such as Nora Ephron:

The Left is losing it. Not the election. Just any semblance of sanity. From one Barack Obama fan we learn, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women.” And these are Democrats, mind you.

This is the religion they cling to--and it does seem to exacerbate their bitterness, eh?

No wonder their media keeps this stuff away from the general public.

Update: "Nora Ephron's Rage and Hatred".

...And the left has to be the aggressors in the culture war. Which is why I disagree with the take that Daniel Henninger makes in the above video, and here:

Remember the culture wars? This week the Democrats sued for peace.

On Friday evening, email queues lit up everywhere with people reacting to Barack Obama's thoughts on life being nasty, bitter and short in small-town America. Time was not long ago that a Democratic candidate could have said such folk cling to guns and religion and are hostile to "diversity" with nary a peep from his party. Not now. Obama was repudiated. Crushed. Media analysis suggested the damage could last til November.

Before midnight, Hillary was paddling down Whiskey River with the boys at Bronko's. Then on Sunday evening, the white flag really went up over the culture war's battlefield.

Hillary and Obama were both at an event in Grantham, Pa., in Cumberland County. That's south of Mechanicsburg and east of Boiling Springs. John Kerry took Pennsylvania by 2.5% in 2004, but Cumberland gave George Bush 64% of its vote. Hillary and Obama were appearing on a CNN event called the "Compassion Forum." They were at a place called Messiah College. Connect the dots.

Campbell Brown to Sen. Clinton: "And you have actually felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions. Share some of those occasions."

Hillary Clinton: "I have had the experiences on many, many occasions where I felt like the Holy Spirit was there with me as I made a journey . . . You know, it could be walking in the woods. It could be watching a sunset."

Hit rewind on the tape of history. It is 1992, the Republican Convention in Houston, at the Astrodome. This was the moment of arrival for the "Christian right." Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's VP nominee, spoke to a huge throng of evangelicals about "family values." Pat Buchanan delivered his "culture wars" speech. The press corps, for whom all this was alien ground, was openly hostile to the GOP.

Shelves bend beneath the weight of books analyzing the "war" between religiously oriented cultural conservatives and secular libs. "Piss Christ" and all that. Abortion. Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs banned in Cincinnati. Abortion. Gun control. Michael Moore mocking Charlton Heston. Hollywood's endless Babylon. Home schoolers. Abortion.

Though vilified, these people wouldn't go away. The exit polls for George W. Bush's victory in 2004 revealed that the No. 1 issue for most voters was "moral values." Liberal analysts furiously attacked Karl Rove for "exploiting" these sentiments.

But even Karl Rove couldn't invent God, and God and faith were everywhere in Grantham Sunday evening.

I think it was Ann Coulter who said that during a presidential election, both parties campaign as Republicans, but only one side actually is the Republicans. Whoever said it, it's certainly accurate--the culture war may temporarily go to ground during an election year (although not even then: which side released Fahrenheit 9/11, the (grossly inferior) remake of The Manchurian Candidate and the enviro-apocalyptic The Day After Tomorrow in 2004?) but that doesn't mean that it ends, as Obama's "What's The Matter With Altoona" speech in San Francisco last week so aptly demonstrates.

In all genres of show business, there's an enormous amount of snobbery. For example, the theater world often looks down on movie performers, and the movie industry is awfully snobbish towards those who work in TV. So it's always nice to see one group of professional actors honoring a fellow actor who happens to work in a different medium.

Update: More from Scott Baker and Liz Stephans on Breitbart.tv's B-Cast Internet news show, including audio and video segments of the speech that Tim Robbins asked not to be published. Proving that once again that legacy journalists and the phrase "off the record" are almost always unrelated concepts.

Burt Prelutsky looks back to the period of his youth with a gimlet eye, which is much more than Dick Cavett could ever do:

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

Cavett utters bromides from 40 years ago, from another war that the left abandoned midway through in an effort to score partisan points and gather insider power while genocide occurred thousands of miles away--and massively escalated, once the American left had their way and we abandoned our allies--and thinks it's witty?

Well, I guess it is--if you're twelve.

Update: The 1960s never end at Politico either, where two former Washington Post journalists declare the Swift Vets, who accurately reminded voters of John Kerry's 1970s radical chic past (part of which occurred very publicly on the Cavett show back then) as part of "the right-wing freak show". As John Hinderaker writes:

If there is a "freak show" on the fringes of American politics, it can be found on the Left, at fever swamps like the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground that specialize in conspiracy theories and hate. It's interesting, though, to find out how former mainstream reporters--Harris and VandeHei formerly wrote for the Washington Post--feel about those who have broken the liberal monopoly on the news.

To be fair, there was certainly a neatness to the liberal conformity of the 1960s and 1970s, when three television networks and a handful of newspapers controlled the news. Breaking up those information monopolies would seam like a freak show to a particularly nostalgic mind, just as many senior citizens pine for the simplicity of an era built around Bell Telephone, three TV networks and three primary car manufacturers.

The Internet Movie Database reports:

The current economic downturn is drying up traditional financing for many film producers -- from those turning out low-budget indies to those making big-star vehicles, the Hollywood Reporter reported today (Thursday). "Projects that would have sailed through easily a year ago are stalled in development. Movies that are practically in preproduction are falling apart at the eleventh hour," the trade publication observed. It cited a number of projects that had been in development by established producers that have fallen apart for lack of financing, including an Oliver Stone-Antoine Fuqua biopic about Colombian drugs overlord Pablo Éscobar and a Tim Robbins-directed feature called The Heretic. William Morris agent Cassian Elwes, one of the top agents among independent filmmakers, told the Reporter: "I think as we go into a tougher economy some films won't get made." He added: "And probably shouldn't get made."

Gee, you don't think Hollywood brought any of its current bad times on itself, huh? Naaaahh.

Charleton Heston has passed away at age 84; Matt Drudge links to a statement issued by his family:

To his loving friends, colleagues and fans, we appreciate your heartfelt prayers and support. Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life. He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played. Indeed, he committed himself to every role with passion, and pursued every cause with unmatched enthusiasm and integrity.

We knew him as an adoring husband, a kind and devoted father, and a gentle grandfather, with an infectious sense of humor. He served these far greater roles with tremendous faith, courage and dignity. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved.

No one could ask for a fuller life than his. No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country. In his own words, "I have lived such a wonderful life! I've lived enough for two people."

Far more than that.

More at Libertas.

In the Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch writes that Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light, his Rolling Stones concert movie, is no Last Waltz. Cold comfort for those of us who also thought the latter was more than a little overrated--or to be more charitable, hasn't been well served by the passage of time.

(Speaking of which, don't miss Bunch calling the modern sixty-something Stones "leather Muppets"! And for a great Rolling Stones concert movie, you can't go wrong with the classics.)

In the Grauniad, Oliver Stone asks, "How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

I don't know--how does anyone recover from a substance abuse problem and successfully rebuild his career in a brutally competitive industry?

STONE: I think drugs are very much a part of my generation's experience. We were not only the Cold War generation, we were the drug generation, And marijuana, with its origins in the Sixties, was good. It was a force for good. As was acid. It transformed consciousness. And in Vietnam, it certainly kept us sane.

PLAYBOY: What was your drug use like?

STONE: After the war, I took it to excess. I was using as much LSD as anybody. Even slipped it into my dad's drink once. What I did turned bad in the sense that it got heavier. My usage became heavier, but not for a purpose. It became an indulgence.

PLAYBOY: How much and what were you using?

STONE: Well, I started more acid, and grass, I suppose, in the beginning. And then I touched on some other things here and there.

PLAYBOY: Heroin? Cocaine?

STONE: Cocaine, certainly. But that was in the late Seventies. Cocaine is what took me to the edge. I finally realized that coke had beaten me and I hadn't beaten it. So in 1981, 1 went cold turkey on everything. Except an occasional drink here or there, or an occasional, you know, thing, but basically cold turkey. I moved to Paris that year and wrote Scarface, which was a farewell to cocaine.

PLAYBOY: Scarface became a cult hit. Had you quit using cocaine before or after you wrote it? .

STONE: I wrote it totally straight. But I researched it stoned, because I had to research it in South America, in various spots where I had to do it in order to talk with these people.

PLAYBOY: Before you quit, how deeply were you into it?

STONE: I would say it was an everyday thing. Hollywood in the late Seventies was-there was a kind of cocaine craze. And it lasted until later in the Eighties.

But assuming that Stone's movie hits theaters before November, it might serve as a key teachable moment for the left. It could reinforce the lesson they've been so gently trying to teach voters these past eight years, so that they won't elect another president this fall who both didn't serve in Vietnam, and who has admitted a youthful dalliance with not just alcohol, but other controlled substances as well, as ABC's Jake Tapper wrote last year:

In his 1996 memoir, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," Obama wrote candidly about his high school-era drug use: "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though."

And note that Obama may still continue to ingest what most on the left consider the most dangerous, evil, vile drug on the planet, as Tapper noted yesterday.

(HT: LGF)

Update: Related thoughts from BeldarBlog:

Recklessness is a quality that Americans voters should and do try to weed out of their presidential candidates, if you'll excuse that pun.

Even in the nanny-state America that your party is trying to move us toward, Senator, in which cigarette smoking will eventually become a criminal offense — anywhere and everywhere, even by consenting and well-informed adults who are heavily taxed for the privilege — the Nixon Rule will still prevail: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that brings down most politicians.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who quips, "Call it coffin-nailgate."

Heh, indeed.^TM

Midway through a routine 1942 programmer shot on the backlot of Warner Brothers and certain to be immeasurably improved forthwith with that certain Touch Of Esther, Humphrey Bogart bitterly sighs, "I bet they're asleep in New York. I'd bet they're asleep all over America." Well, they've certainly been asleep in Hollywood since 9/11/01. As I wrote a while back, Hollywood essentially wrote this decade off, creatively. And the repercussions for such narcolepsy are mounting.

First up, Ryan Vlastelica of Market Hubs asks, "Are curtains coming down on movie theaters?"

Hollywood is able, at the end of most Decembers, to proclaim the previous year its most successful ever. While true, at least on the surface, it masks a long-term problem: People just aren’t going to movies much anymore.

Movie attendance levels occasionally rise from the previous year, but the general trend has been downward. The biggest movie-going year was way back in 1946, when enough tickets were sold for an astonishing 90 million people to go every week. Then television came in and stole the theater’s audience, followed by competition in the form of video games, computers and a general lessening of audience amazement. Total 2007 attendance was down 8% from the year earlier, and the current year’s box office looks unlikely to top last year.

Which is why Shawn Levy's "Film Criticism Death Watch" post on the Oregonian's blog shouldn't be at all surprising. Of course, when Levy writes, "the idea of fewer platforms for varied voices depresses me", he's discounting the notion that, thanks to the Blogosphere, film criticism is actually infinitely more democratic than ever, even as he's typing his thoughts into his newspaper's blog.

He's right that there probably won't be many more Pauline Kaels, individual critics whom Hollywood actually loses sleep over (or buy off with a meaningless back-office studio gig as Warren Beatty actually did to quiet Kael), but for those who want to get some outside assistance into the decision as to whether or not to plunk down $30 to $40 for tickets and concessions for a night at the movies, there are plenty of opinions available.

Some of which actually vary from the Official, Accepted Hollywood Party Line, as hard as that is to imagine.

Further proof of Pajamas' global influence: Madonna wants to remake Casablanca, but set in Iraq. I told Roger no good could come of this, but would he listen? Nooooooo.....

Besides, another trashy wanna-be femme fatale (who's about as fatale as an after-dinner mint, as Michael York said in Cabaret) already beat her to the punch, though sadly not in the literal caged Celebrity Deathmatch sense that the phrase conjures up.

But of course, the definitive modern remake of Casablanca has already been done--and done right. How can Esther improve upon David Soul as Rick and Scatman Crothers as Sam?

Is David Mamet a canary in the coal mine for the 2008 election? That's what Daniel Henninger posits. As the above title implies, Henninger also notes that while Mamet's coming out party in the Village Voice has been widely noted in Europe, America's old media have been maintaining radio silence--at least as of when Henninger shot this segment.

(Incidentally, welcome to our 13,000th blog post as we enter into our sixth year in the land of pixels and snark, according to my blog software.)

Speaking of only human, Charlton Heston larger than life on the big screen, is apparently in bad shape these days back in the real world.

Demonized by the left since the early-to-mid 1980s, it will be interesting to see if there's a career reappraisal when he sadly passes away.

Time for Law & Order to rip a story from the headlines pipe another one in from their skulls:

On Wednesday, Law & Order served up another of those famed episodes ripped from the headlines – except the violence-preaching madrassa is Christian, not Muslim, the evil cleric brainwashing children quotes the Bible, not the Koran, and American Christians haven’t executed anybody by stoning since the Salem witch trials.

The plot for this episode is so ludicrous it hardly merits retelling, but for clarity’s sake, here’s a quick summary. The police find the body of a woman art gallery owner killed by stoning, and immediately suspect the killer had “strong religious views.” Suspicion falls first on a Muslim artist.

Time for a cheap shot at the Bush administration: the National Security Agency is wiretapping the gallery owner by mistake, revealing that she was having an affair with the artist. Suspicion shifts to her irreligious husband, who apparently didn’t mind being cuckolded. For reasons not explained, the police decide to arrest their son, Jason, a college student.

Jason turns out to be a Christian mystic who hears from God several times a day. The son is under the influence of a Bible-spouting pastor who runs the Angelgrove Camp, where he is preparing Christian children to fight a religious war.

Don't they tell this story every year?

For a look back at the show's awesome first three seasons before the rot sat in, click here.

Jonah Goldberg on the missing conversation:

Thank God for Barack Obama. Until his “More Perfect Union” speech last Tuesday, it seems it never occurred to anyone that America needed to talk about race.

“Maybe this’ll be the beginning of a conversation,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed on Meet the Press. The Chicago Tribune reported that “many voters, black and white, say they were moved by Obama’s speech ... which they see as a long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm national dialogue about race.” Newspaper editorial boards agree. In the words of the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Prodding Americans to confront their racial differences is, by itself, an accomplishment of historical proportions.”

Because so many agree on this brilliant new strategy to heal our national wounds, I can only assume that I’m the one missing something. But when one luminary after another smacks his forehead like someone who forgot to have a V8 in epiphanic awe over the genius of Obama’s call for a national conversation on race, all I can do is wonder: “What on Earth are you people talking about?”

“Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work,” the New York Times reported within 48 hours of the speech.

Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter’s pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I’d been under the impression that every major university in the country already had boatloads of courses dedicated to race in America. I’d even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. I also had some vague memory that these universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science, and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind’s eye seemed to reveal African-American studies centers, banners for Black History Month, and copies of books like Race Matters and The Future of the Race lining shelves at college bookstores.

Were all the corporate diversity consultants and racial sensitivity seminars mere apparitions in a dream? Also disappearing down the memory hole, apparently, were the debates that followed Hurricane Katrina, Trent Lott’s remarks about Strom Thurmond, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, the publication of The Bell Curve, and O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. Not to mention the ongoing national chatter about affirmative action, racial disparities in prison sentences and racial profiling by law enforcement.

And the thousands of hours of newscasts, television dramas, and movies — remember films such as 2004’s Oscar-winning Crash? — dedicated to racial issues? It’s as if they never existed.

"Because sometimes it’s easier to hold on to your own stereotypes and misconceptions"...

"What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

Andrew Stuttaford links to Reihan Salam's Arthur C. Clarke obituary in the Atlantic, in which Salam writes:

Clarke all but worshipped advanced technology, and his novels were a mash note to heroic humans who transformed the world in a spirit of fellowship and boundless curiosity.But as a later generation of science fiction novelists and philosophers are asking now, what happens when the machines we create surpass us in raw intelligence and even creativity? Clarke dreamed up HAL, the intelligent computer at the heart of 2001, without considering that HAL, in a very real sense, rendered humanity obsolete. What is humanity's purpose in a world made by HAL? What Clarke failed to understand about the supposed "mind virus" of religious belief is that it answers exactly this question — it grounds human dignity in transcendent truth. And that's nothing to sneeze at.

It's been ages since I've read The Lost Worlds Of 2001, which documents the tens of thousands of words that Clarke wrote and the dozens of blind alleys that Clarke and Kubrick went down before coming up with the final screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Salam appears to have missed the entire point of the film. (And admittedly, the novelized version of 2001 is a very different experience that Kubrick's more open-ended movie version, even though both were created concurrently.)

DANGER: PRETENTIOUS COLLEGE BULL SESSION-STYLE FILM WONKERY AHEAD! PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION!

Kubrick's 2001 is structured to be a journey up the evolutionary ladder of man's intellegence. Beginning with the appearance of the alien monolith to nudge "Moonwatcher" into something approaching sentience, including a sense of how to create and use tools (the bone he uses to defend his tribe's watering hole--and can you say "Intelligent Design"? I knew that you could), the film then moves to modern man, in the form of the passive, but secretive scientist/bureaucrat Heywood Floyd, before reaching artificial intelligence in the form of HAL 9000.

(Just as Floyd was a mid-1960s conception of a then-modern era bureaucrat, sort of along the lines of, say, Robert Mcnamara, Hal is of the same era, a prediction of what an intelligent machine would resemble. Blade Runner would later posit what neuroses artificial intelligence would have if it was encased in human form, rather than a mainframe computer.)

The third segment of 2001, which pits the Discovery's astronauts against HAL as their space craft travels to Jupiter, is a symbolic battle of man versus machine. If Hal had won and entered the Star Gate in orbit around Jupiter, and taken the film's vaunted "Ultimate Trip" to meet the alien race behind the monoliths, then clearly a very different creature would have returned to Earth than the Nietzschian "Star Child" at the film's conclusion. Maybe something like V'Ger, or the Borg on Star Trek, instead.

But in any case, it's clear from the movie that Kubrick understood full well that HAL rendered mankind, in its current form as obsolete. Which means Clarke probably did as well. Kubrick's 2001 posits that man is near obsolete anyhow, and in need of spiritual rebirth, as indicated by the banality of the language and the deliberately low-key performances, especially, in both cases, when compared to the film's predecessor, the gonzo, hellzapoppin' Dr. Strangelove.

(Incidentally, for the best guide to the structure and subtext of the film version, try to get a hold of a copy of Carolyn Geduld's 1973 Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Kubrick once read, approvingly, according to a quote from one of Kubrick's relatives in Taschen's massive tomb of Kurick-a-brac.)

"If a liberal falls in the liberal forest and no one says they heard it, can you say it didn't happen? Mr. Mamet must feel like the guy in a mob movie who knows the hit is coming but has to sweat through to the bullet."

As Glenn Reynolds once wrote, "he left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for". And woe betide the man who takes Apple's advice and actually does begin to "think different": the silence will be deafening.

James Lileks stumbles over the 1943 movie version of Titanic:

Did I get the British version? No, that’s “A Night to Remember.” I checked the TiVo info: this was “Titanic” from 1943. What? Robert Osbourne ambled up to the camera and explained:

This was the Nazi version of the tale.

I’d never heard of it. (Of course, there are ten reviews on imdb.com.) It was a fairly big-budget item for the German cinema, what with the war and all, and had two directors. The first was killed by the Gestapo midway through production. Must have been hell to arrange a competition bond in those days. Goebbels nixed its release in the end, since so many people dying was apparently a depressing thing to show war-weary audiences. They wanted music, romance, comedy. They got it, but from the clips I’ve seen they were fascinatingly soulless things – everyone seems to be smiling through sheer terror. Imagine a Busby Berkeley sequence in which every dancer has her own sniper in the wings waiting to shoot her if she fails, and you’ll get the idea.

The Nazi “Titanic” is useful evidence against those who think the National Socialists chose the second part of their name for no particular reason – it’s anti-capitalist propaganda. The movie begins not on the dock, or on board, or in a boisterous café by the quay; no, it starts off in the White Star boardroom, where the eeeevil investors are figuring out the best way to manipulate the stock. Yes, that’s correct: insider trading sunk the Titanic. The head of White Star – a tall, dashing, cynical, cunning, selfish Bruce Ismay (snort) pushes the captain to reach New York in record speed to boost the stock, which had gyrated up and down prior to departure, and had been subject to large block purchases by other characters on the ship – oh, don’t ask. The interiors looks nothing like the Titanic, but the special effects aren’t bad, and it’s impressively shot. It’s just all wrong. Every frame is just saturated with a strong dose of Wrong.

Forgot the best part: the hero is a German. He’s a fictional officer who tries to warn everyone about the ice. He’s cool, composed, devoted to duty, and scornful of the capitalists. At least the Soviets had that Russian-soulfulness thing going, so their movies would be soaked with sloppy emotion and Slavic hymns; the Nazis were tin-eared thick-thumbed boors when it came to art. God help us if they’d won; I cannot imagine their sitcoms.

Sadly, I can.

In Canada's National Post, Robert Fulford asks what to many is a fairly straightforward rhetorical question:

Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.

In the San Jose suburb of Milpitas, the large Vietnamese population is so enamored with the current communist regime that they've gone back to flying the flag of the free former South Vietnam. And they're not alone.

Via Small Dead Animals, which notes:

Ah yes, those ungrateful Vietnamese. After Hollywood cleared their path for a worker's paradise they've decided they don't like it much after all and are abandoning it. Oh well, Hollywood still has Cuba and there's always Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to embrace.

And possibly, eventually, not even the former:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news the official state media try to suppress.

Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies.

Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

"It passes from flash drive to flash drive," said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. "This is going to get out of the government's hands because the technology is moving so rapidly."

This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and Cuba has the benefit of much more modern techology, to boot.

As the Cato Institute, among many others has noted, in the 1980s:

Fax machines and photocopiers, video recorders and personal computers outside the government were no longer exotica but a sprawling, living nervous system that linked the Russian political opposition, the republican independence movements, and the burgeoning private sector. Tied informally together, this equipment constituted a network of considerable scale.

During that period, those same tools had a similar, if sadly less revolutionary impact in China. So the decision to allow possession of computers in Cuba by the new regime after Castro's six year PC blockade could have suprisingly remarkable long term consequences for that currently still-imprisoned Island.

Title by Jonah, review of Horton Hears a Who by The Conservative Mindcleaner:

It looks like I got Jonah Goldberg's attention with this one. I don't know what to make of his "Uh oh" though. Let's just say I'm not the only one who's going to make these connections. I might be the only one stupid enough, however, to say it out loud.

I wouldn't call it "stupid", as Libertas also noticed this otherwise probably innocuous film's inevitable Hollywood sucker punch moment.

Kevin D. Williamson spots a classic line in The Grauniad:

Writing about David Mamet's rejection of "brain-dead liberalism" in the Guardian (commented on yesterday in Media Blog), columnist Michael Billington offers this groaner on Glenngary Glen Ross:

Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity.

Kevin's response on the moral certainty of almost everyone on the far left is well worth your time, but Billington's comments on Glenngary Glen Ross and its "moral ambiguity" read as hilarious to me. I've only seen the movie, not the play, but the movie was one of the least morally ambiguous--and most depressing--films I've ever watched. There's a reason why the cast referred to the movie as "Death of a F***in' Salesman": it has the absolute certainly that Arthur Miller had that capitalism is evil, and selling is the most evil profession of all. At least until it's time to sell that latest movie or play.

Contrast Glenngary with Oliver Stone's Wall Street, a film written by an equally hard-line leftist, (at least prior to Mamet's intellectual awakening) which nonetheless dresses its contempt for the investment world in a slick, seductive surface. There's a reason why everyone I've met when I worked in the financial industry could recite big swatches of the film's dialogue (as could I), and why Gordon Gekko's horizontal striped shirts (designed by Alan Flusser) relaunched for a time amongst Wall Street executives a style long-dead since the 1930s.

In contrast, because Glengarry was a much less ambiguous film, it appeals much more only to true believers, a trait which Oliver Stone's post-Wall Street movies increasingly suffered from. Assuming Mamet ever works again after coming out of the other celluloid closet, I'll be very curious to see if and how the tone of his work shifts.

David Mamet discovers the true power of the Dark Side of the Force. But will he have a career left?

As Anne Applebaum once wrote, "Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce."

"Sinbad takes on Hillary."

Related: Steve Green (OK, to be honest, Camille Paglia) has your Quote of the Day.

Via Orrin Judd, who notes, "The Right Has All The Fun." Heh, indeed.

A reader of the conservative Libertas film blog makes a great observation:

I want to have movies to see, to enjoy, nay, to adore. I am a movie fan. But now, every movie I watch, I wait for it. You know what I mean by it. I mean that moment which had nothing to do with the plot where the movie makers express contempt for everything I hold dear. I mean the moment when they puke on me.

No matter how much I enjoy the film, nowadays I only enjoy it with half my attention, because I am on my guard for the sucker-punch that always, always comes.

I watch my beloved movies with the attitude of a battered wife, waiting to see when the man I love will suddenly lash out and give me a black eye. The rest of the evening with him is just fine.

So you go do your study, and tell me how many other members of the audience there are who feel as I do. Am I really the only one? I doubt it.

I've long felt exactly the same way, and it's great to the see the point made so articulately. The inevitable Hollywood sucker punch is why I've found myself going to the movies less and less each year, and usually only when a film has been vetted by like-minded blog readers and critics; unlike Charlie Brown, there are only so many times I'll endure having the football yanked away at the last second before I want quit the game. And these days, between blogging, DIY video and DIY music, there's plenty of other games to play, some of which are even sucker punch free.

John Podhoretz writes that when it comes explaining the Oscars' woes, sometimes the simplest answer is best:

This year's excruciatingly boring Oscars stumbled to a conclusion with the victory of a movie that (a) nobody has seen and (b) nobody who has seen it is all that crazy about. The 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony was no country for ordinary men, or women, who go to the movies because they want to have a good time. The show's ratings have been declining for a decade, and usually the decline is attributed to the proliferation of other awards shows, the excessive political-style campaigning for the prizes, and the general withdrawal of affect from once-starry-eyed consumers of show business.

These may all have contributed to the ratings woes. But what if the cause is far simpler? What if the Oscars, in a display of perverse artistic integrity, are simply determined to garland movies in which (and performers in whom) no one but a critic or a film-industry professional has the slightest interest?

Thus taking the original intentions of the founding fathers of the movie industry and why they created their "Academy" and completing perverting their goals. But then, that's modern Hollywood in a nutshell.

Glenn Reynolds links to Howard Mortman, and notes, "Amusingly, All in the Family is older now than the square acts that Archie and Edith Bunker sang about in the theme song were when the show was new."

It's actually not all that surprising, given that the left is permanently trapped in the 1970s. But additionally, expect cultural references in general to have an increasingly nostalgic tone to them: as pop culture becomes more and more fractured, there will be less and less shared contemporaneous references available to writers that they can expect their readers will get.

Yesterday, Karl Rove wrote:

Tuesday was an exciting moment in what is already one of the most dramatic presidential primaries in decades. And with six months until the conventions and eight months until the general election, we have many exciting moments ahead in what for political junkies is a vintage year.

Not surprisingly, Obama man Tom Hanks disagrees:

“I wish the election was being held tomorrow. I’m bored!”

Because it's all about Tom.

The Libertas film blog notes a key number left out of the recent figures on Hollywood's box office trends:

The seeming important news was that the domestic marketplace (ie. the U.S. and Canada) generated $9.63 billion in sales of movie tickets during 2007.

If it wasn’t already the case, we might ooh about the unprecedented amount of money spent at multiplexes assuming audiences maintained a healthy appetite at the concession stand. The MPAA believes (along with the National Association of Theater Owners) the figure translates to a non-record of roughly 1.4 billion admissions – about 0.3% more than the prior year and 200 million fewer folk than attended back in 2002.

Which certainly helps to explain this headline as well, no? This in an era, Libertas notes, in which the US population "increased by roughly 12.5 million since 2002."

While DIY video distributed via the 'Net will become an increasingly competitive factor in the next few years, movies are one of the few remaining entertainment fields where big money and lots of people are needed for a superior product. But Hollywood seems to have forgotten this: instead of cranking out apolitical entertainment for the masses, Hollywood movies have become increasingly insular and reactionary since 9/11. To the point where a mass audience is optional, as Mark Steyn wrote a few years ago:

That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

Like I said...

A few years ago, Umberto Ecco wrote:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Hey, somebody should write a book about this topic!

Related: Victor Davis Hanson presciently notes the gloomy subtext of Obama's message, but posits that--who knows?--"Maybe America is finally ready for a black McGovern."

And to rather tenuously connect Steven Malanga's new article with VDH's, New Jersey, with its crushing taxes, bloated state government, and shortage of individual rights seems primed to vote for the next McGovern. The state happily voted for his 2004 equivalent, of course.

Jonathan Last of Galley Slaves posts "this fantastic video, a send up of what the Star Wars title credits might have looked like if done by legendary '60s designer Saul Bass":

Just to be fair, I wonder if someone is redoing the titles to North By Northwest or Spartacus with a Lucas-style crawl opening? "A Long Time Ago, In A Madison Avenue Far, Far Away..."

I'm stuck in the American Airlines Admiral's Club feeling a bit like Alex undergoing the Ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange, as the two TV sets non-consensually blare out the Academy Awards. I can't help but agree with the New York Post's Kyle Smith when he declares Hollywood part of the "Axis of Chutzpah" for having American troops present the best documentary award:

Given that the most recent statistics show that approximately 97.4 percent of all documentaries present America as a scary place and of those 97.4, most are meant to present the troops in Iraq as overmatched at best and as abusive, sadistic criminals at worst, it’s pretty cheeky of the Oscars to have troops serving overseas present the Oscar for best documentary short subject.

“Move away from the dark side and back to the light,” the director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” says. I doubt our troops agree that we are stuck in the dark side. I think they would argue that the vast majority of them abide by the law, by the rules of engagement and by their own moral compasses, yet they get little feeling of support from their country because those who work in the media are bent on presenting sordid, depraved and illegal acts committed by members of the military and intelligence services (which are of course elements in this war, as they are in every war) as the norm in order to undercut the war and defund the troops.

Believe it or not, it could be worse: Oscar's nadir is reflected here.

Libertas's Dirty Harry is also live blogging the awards--don't miss his commentary here.

People magazine headline: "George Clooney: I'm the Hillary Clinton of the Oscars".

I can see that. Neither seems to play all that well in Peoria. And both were for liberating Iraq before they were against it.

Related: A few years ago, a certain Maverick presidential candidate quipped that "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people. Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded". And Mark Steyn notes that the couple who did the most to equate politics and stardom 16 years ago are watching the tables turning on them yesterday via the same method.

Nikke Finke writes:

So, all in all, I think everyone should expect the Worst Oscars Ever In The History Of Hollywood. Really, Sunday can't come fast enough to put this beleaguered 80th Academy Awards which almost was picketed into oblivion out of its misery.

Or as Jonathan Last wrote three years ago:

A survey of the muck soon to be celebrated at the Academy Awards confirms William Goldman's sad truism: Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.

Dirty Harry of Libertas is once again taking one for the team, watching the Oscars (and blogging about it) so you don't have to.

In "What's Ailing Oscar?", Michael Medved just buries this year's Academy Awards show, but the conclusion to this passage couldn't help but stand out a bit to me:

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced its first award ceremony on May 16, 1929, none of the movie moguls behind the celebration planned to use such occasions to call attention to under-appreciated art films that had escaped public attention. Instead, the whole purpose of the Academy was to add prestige and a patina of “class” to big studio productions that already appealed to a mass audience. Classic Best Picture winners managed to combine lavish budgets, epic ambition, and crowd-pleasing spectacle, like “Gone With the Wind” (1939), “Ben-Hur” (1959), “The Sound of Music” (1965), or “The Godfather” (1972) . Only recently did the Academy begin making a habit of selecting Best Picture winners that clearly aimed at more limited, selective, sophisticated audiences, as did “The English Patient” (1996), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “A Beautiful Mind” (2000), “Million Dollar Baby” (2004) and “Crash” (2005).

Medved adds, "In a sense, this alteration in emphasis reflected the changed status of movie-going from a wildly popular form of entertainment with universal appeal to a specialized interest appealing primarily to niche audiences (particularly young singles)."

Niche audiences? Now there's a phrase I've heard before!

Carter, Reagan, Bush #41, Baker, Clinton, Albright, Bush #43, Rumsfeld and Condi couldn't get the job done, but finally, Sharon Stone is now on the case.

Take that, Babs!

Nikke Finke writes, "I'm hearing that the Los Angeles Times' managing editor for features, culture and entertainment John Montorio could be headed for the chopping block":

Montorio spent 15 years at The New York Times and helped launch many of the NYT signature features sections, including The City and Sunday Styles, before joining the LAT in 2001 at the behest of Dean Baquet. Montorio tried to make several clones of those NYT feature sections at the LAT but wasn't anywhere as successful: those that died demonstrated that the LAT can't draw the necessary advertising. He oversaw an overhaul of the LAT magazine that also flopped. Most recently, Montorio launched Image, a fashion and style section. But it's generally considered that the LAT movie and TV news coverage has suffered greatly over Montorio's oversight, and the paper was consistently beat on nearly every development in the recent writers strike. Worse, his departments' articles are just bland and dull.

How hard do you have to work to make coverage of your town's biggest and craziest industry dull as dishwater?

This hard!

Update: To be fair, give the L.A. Times credit for running this.

Mark Halperin of Time magazine calls Barack Obama a p****. Jane Fonda uses an even more vulgar four-letter description of the same anatomical area on the Today show.

And I'll never look at New Orleans the same way again!

The star of Jaws, All That Jazz and 2010 was 75.

Compare. Contrast. Weep.

(Via the vast Manolo empire.)

Andrea Harris writes that although she's never watched 24 (truth be told, neither have I), "I just think it’s a shame that yet another apparently hard-hitting and gritty show is going to be shoved into the Very Special Lesson cesspool — as well as months of having to endure television commercials on how we should teach our kids not to hate anyone — really, including, say, pedophiles who rape and kill children?"

But it’s always been like this. Dealing with what our so-called entertainment media sees fit to serve up to us here in the US of A has always been an exercise in torment for anyone who thinks that art should not take a back seat to teaching five-year-olds how to share their toys. Unfortunately to get into power in this country (and probably others, but I know my own country the best so I’ll just focus on America right now) you have to be the sort of person who really believes that the rest of the nation is comprised of toddlers clutching their dollies stubbornly to their chests. I don’t think I have to give any examples, do I? Just think of the upcoming election, or look at the night’s television schedule. The media, of course, is part of the powers that run this country. Back when I was young the problem was an entertainment industry hamstrung by the need to be “proper” according to the standards of no later than twenty years previous. In the Sixties and Seventies that meant the Forties and Fifties was the touchstone of progress, and Depression-era decorum was the norm, which meant only women on TV wore white gloves and hats when they went outdoors. Today, in the supposedly progressive first decade of the 21st century, our Baby Boomer-run media empire has stalled in those halcyon days when women considered themselves “emancipated” if they were living with bearded stoners, being called “my old lady,” and serving mushroom tea instead of coffee to all the bearded stoner’s bearded stoner pals. There have been a few attempts to crawl at least into the Reagan era, but for the most part we’re stuck in the commune, and the natives are no more tolerant of “different” viewpoints than the squares of Eld were.

Maybe a big reason why television executives feel the urge to make their programming as childlike and condescending as possible is that they base their assumptions regarding America as a whole from daily observations of a remarkably dysfunctional talent pool.

A.O. Scott of the New York Times explores territory long since mapped in depth here at Ed Driscoll.com:

With a few exceptions, though — “Juno” being the current and somewhat controversial example — the rituals of heterosexual courtship no longer provide as flexible or adaptable a framework as they once did. The sexual revolution, of course, had something to do with this, since it dented the symbolic prestige of marriage and thus challenged the realism of plots that ended with wedding bells. (The quintessential romantic comedy of the revolutionary era was probably “The Graduate,” a movie that ends with the disruption of a marriage ceremony and an ambiguous escape from the altar.) And movies, after the 1960s, were able to deal more candidly with matters that had previously been addressed through indirection and innuendo.

That’s one theory, at any rate. But the movies made under the old taboos of the Production Code are far more sophisticated, and far less timid, than what we see today.

Indeed--as I wrote almost a year ago:

The need to bury these themes to get them past the censors in the Hays Office made for brilliant writing and great moviemaking. As did the need to use innuendo rather than overt sexuality (see: Hitchcock, Alfred). That period ended when--talk about unintended consequences--the demise of the Hays office depressed Hollywood’s box office by removing restrictions upon its writers and directors.

More Scott:

And yet, while the romantic comedy has almost always trafficked in happy endings, that happiness is rarely accompanied by a sense of risk or exhilaration. When you think of, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — or even Doris Day and Rock Hudson — you recall the emotional combat of two strong-willed, independent individuals ending in mutual conquest. Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment. It required movie stars whose physical appeal was matched by verbal dexterity and a vital sense of idiosyncrasy. They were not real of course: Who ever met anyone like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord, the central pair in “The Philadelphia Story?” They were better.

That's because unlike today's stars, they were grown-ups, a species that's virtually extinct in today's Hollywood, where Jack Nicholson is 70 going on 18, and Leonardo DiCaprio is 33 going on 12.

But then, that's a topic that Frederica Mathewes-Green explored brilliantly two and a half years ago.

The New York Times: Where the news is almost as old as our readers!

In City Journal, Andrew Klavan, whose novel True Crime was adapted for the big screen by Clint Eastwood, writes:

During World War II, Hollywood stars like James Stewart and directors like Frank Capra enlisted in the military to combat dictators as willingly as Sean Penn and Michael Moore now tootle down to Venezuela and Cuba to embrace them. More to the point, yesteryear’s studio heads—many of them conservative Republicans—worked in cooperation with a Democratic administration to produce top-notch entertainment supporting the war effort. The result was not only rousing combat tales like 1943’s Sahara, Bataan, and Action in the North Atlantic—all still watchable today—but also some of the finest motion pictures ever made: 1942’s Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver, for instance, and the terrific yet all-but-forgotten They Were Expendable (1945). It was one of the film industry’s finest hours.

Much has changed in Hollywood since then. The fall of the business-driven studio system has freed creative types to make more personal films, just as the internationalization of markets and multiple methods of distribution protect them from the financial consequences of alienating the nation’s mainstream. If their anti-American labor of love bombs in Peoria, their investors will probably still make their money back in Europe and on the DVDs.

Beyond that, however, the movie business merely provides the most glamorous example of a greater change throughout our creative and intellectual communities: a decades-long drift toward an idiot radicalism. Movie artists—like all artists except the most original—are the products of the atmosphere of fashionable opinion that surrounds and sustains them. They may play at being heroes who speak truth to power, but the real powers in their lives are the elites who feed them praise, awards, and jobs. To them, the filmmakers speak nothing but slavish agreement.

Because of this, Hollywood war films past and present reflect the political philosophy not just of a small lotusland enclave, but of a large segment of our culture-making classes. The changing ways that these films portray the internal experience of the warrior, along with the change in their overall depiction of the nation and its guardians, are signs of deeper developments with unnerving ramifications.

Indeed they are; read the whole thing.

I first met Mary Katharine Ham when I covered a special Senate briefing for bloggers for the second day of Pajamas Media's existence, back in November of 2005. She seemed so fresh-faced and innocent back then. Who knew that just a couple of years later, she would be destined to become.... The Worst Person In The World.

Personally, I blame this tragic denouement on the all-corrosive effects of Las Vegas.

If someone in Hollywood has been itching to do a distaff postmodern remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, your perfect source material has just presented itself.

(Via Hot Air, which wryly dubs the story "Tabloid nirvana attained.")

While this is a perfectly acceptable Tom Cruise parody video, I'd say that Mickey Kaus has Tom's shtick down.

KSW, all you spectators, KSW!

Breaking, as Matt Drudge would say:

NEW YORK -- Oscar-nominated actor Heath Ledger has been found dead at a downtown Manhattan residence, police said Tuesday, in what might be a drug-related death.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Ledger had an appointment for a massage at the SoHo apartment that is believed to be his home. A housekeeper went to let Ledger know the masseuse was there, and found him dead at 3:26 p.m, Browne said.

Ledger was found with a bottle of pills next to him, according to an NYPD spokesman.

The Brokeback Mountain star was 28; his next role was scheduled to be as the Joker in the next Batman movie, where presumably (and somewhat reminiscent of Brandon Lee in The Crow), principle photography had already concluded before his death.

Wow, Robert Redford just can't catch a break these days. First his movie tanks ($35 mil budget, $14 mil domestic gross), and now this:

PARK CITY, Utah – The Sundance Film Festival has plenty of star power, but Friday night it ran out of the electric kind.

Park City’s Main St. went dark about 10:30 p.m. because of what officials said was an overuse of electricity. They blamed the blackout on the clubs and lounges that pop up during the movie festival and host parties for the flicks.

Chaos ensued when the lights went out at Harry-O's nightclub, where more than 1,000 guests were hearing Maroon Five play. People ran for the doors.

Main St. became packed with confused festival goers.

But at the Sky 360 Delta Lounge down the street, party planners lit candles and kept the bar open despite the blackout.

Authorities worked feverishly to restore power, and 40 minutes later the lights were back on Main St.

Why didn't Sundance simply follow the lead of their fellow leftwingers at NBC, and claim they were intentionally making an important enviro-political statement?

Update: Tim Blair spots a belated Gore Effect at Sundance.

Tremendous passage from the late Michael Kelly, found via Cold Fury:

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the '50s and '60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age's essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn't get mad; it got even. Cool didn't go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool's philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

One of the observations that Diana West made in The Death of the Grown-Up is how much of the heavy lifting in the birth of modern culture--with all its pluses and minuses--occurred in the 1950s, though the 1960s gets all the credit.

But while Sinatra was indeed a harbinger of things to come, he was also very much a man of his times. In Gay Talese's epochal 1966 "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" article for Esquire, you can actually see the cool style of Sinatra’s highpoint ebb into the sunset, and the aesthetic of the late sixties being born, when Sinatra encounters legendarily cranky sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison.

And as Mark Steyn wrote recently, by the following decade dispatches between the two cultures--the post-war showbiz culture and the anti-war culture of mud--were even chillier:

One reason why the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared to the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side.

Which means, through the paradigm of The Manchurian Candidate and even programmers like Von Ryan's Express, plus his support of JFK and RWR, we can look back at Sinatra as a remarkably patriotic, all-American guy, in spite of himself, his myriad excesses, and nihilistic cool.

Maybe it was simply that while Sinatra was indeed cool, he never succumbed to its successor pose: irony. Which, in retrospect, may have saved him from himself, unlike those who followed in his wake.

Update: Welcome Libertas and Jules Crittenden readers!

Five years ago over at Tech Central Station, I described, using the terms that Virginia Postrel created in The Future and its Enemies the ongoing civil war in California, between the dynamists of Silicon Valley up north, and the stasists in Hollywood down south. The computer industry creates software that empowers individuals to blog and produce their own music, video, and other multimedia applications. Hollywood, in the form of both the movie and music industry, wants to keep content in their control as much as possible.

Roger L. Simon writes that just as with the original Civil War, the south isn't likely to win this one, either.

England's First Post e-zine writes that "Veteran directors are showing their younger peers how to tell stories." But it unintentionally illustrates why movies have increasingly lost the ability to do just that--tell stories. Or as I wrote in January of 2006:

Over four years ago, on the weekend before 9/11, John Podhoretz explained a big reason why modern movies by and large stank: it's the writing, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville. During Hollywood's golden era, moviemakers knew that while they could craft iconic images, they weren't the best source of original narratives:

Since the movies are a visual medium, most of the energy and enthusiasm of moviemakers derives from a command of the camera and an ability to manipulate images. What they don't know very well - what they've never known very well — is why one given story is better than another given story.

So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material — to books and theater, primarily, and to the kind of stories they told. Novels and plays derive their power entirely from character and plot. Add a strong visual storytelling sense to a strong narrative line, and you have something wonderful and new.

But something happened around 1950. Movies increasingly began to draw their inspiration from other movies. The young French directors of the famous late '50s "new wave" were inspired by hack Hollywood filmmakers, not by Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens. In the 1960s, their American stepchildren burst forth: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

These men could do things with a camera nobody had ever been able to do. They had seen every movie ever made and had broken those movies down frame by frame, turning themselves into the Noam Chomskys of film — the world's foremost experts on the grammar of visual storytelling.

They brought a new snap and dazzle to film. When that was combined with both a new freedom in subject matter and new technological developments, the medium became exciting again, in the late '60s and early '70s — in a way it hadn't since the advent of television. And the movies they turned out earned more money than anyone had ever dreamt possible.

The problem was that all these brilliant moviemakers knew was the movies. They weren't well-read — most of them didn't attend college, or if they did, they studied only film — and they didn't seem to feel at all humbled by their own ignorance. As a result, they understood classical storytelling only through the bastardized versions offered by Hollywood. It was like fourth-generation xeroxing. Stories and characters grew weaker as their original sources grew increasingly distant and hazy.

And as that First Post article highlights, those original sources are still diminishing in the rear view mirror.

Douglas MacKinnon ponders what David Letterman will do in January of 2009, when he doesn't have fellow boomer George Bush to attack nightly:

In now a famous “You Tube” moment, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, went on Letterman to be the recipient of the host’s rude and sophomoric antics. As the segment shifted into high gear, O’Reilly asked Letterman a pointed and direct question: “Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?”

To the surprise of no one but his sycophants, Letterman could not or would not answer the question. When pressed by O’Reilly to answer, the best he could do was to play to his mostly left-leaning audience for cheap debating points and say, “It’s not easy for me because I’m thoughtful.”

How thoughtful do you need to be? it's an A or B question: do you want the US to win, or Al Qaeda, the Baathists, and Iran? Letterman, who, 20 years ago, was once the master of postmodern irony, became its unintentional victim as he unwittingly echoed Jack Benny's classic gag when he retorted to a fictional mugger shouting “Your money or life, pal!” on his old radio show: "I'm thinking it over!"

But then, as Bill Kristol writes in today's New York Times, much to its ombudsman's chagrin, "It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq."

Update: Related thoughts from James Bowman:

Just look at the campaign on behalf of Darfur. "It’s not a political issue," says superstar heart-throb George Clooney. "There is only right and wrong."

Following the Letterman thesis, that's not very thoughtful at all, George.

Flashing back to the mid-century when Alfred Hitchcock helped to make Hollywood great, William Katz explains what the Master of Suspense could teach us about the 2008 election.

Tatiana Siegel of Variety writes:

Longtime Hollywood publicist Julian Myers will turn 90 soon. And he worries the end may be near ... for Hollywood.

Myers frets that the WGA stalemate -- with all of its acrimony, vitriol and job losses -- is a harbinger of ill things for the industry.

"The strike impasse is speeding the end of Hollywood filmmaking and television production," says Myers, who has been working in the biz since 1939 and is still an IATSE member. "There are more union contracts coming up for renewal, and already unionists are crossing union lines. IATSE is urging its members to go right on through. Insults are being exchanged, faces will be bashed and fatalities are a possibility."

Myers, of course, remembers when such confrontations were more common. He recalls participating in a 1946 strike in which 900 unionists were arrested in front of Warner Bros. Studios and bussed off to a Burbank jail.

Now, with tensions again running high, Myers worries that the town might be consumed.

"Does a dying Hollywood need a civil war today to hasten its erosion?" he asks.

If the strike doesn't kill it, its current product is certainly hastening its demise.

Update: "Hollywood doing without the Golden Globes? Why, it’s just like the Fall of Saigon!"

Robert Novak looks at "Women Versus Oprah":

The absence of Oprah Winfrey from the frantic four last days of the New Hampshire primary campaign after her heavy schedule in Iowa backing Sen. Barack Obama may be traced to heavy, unaccustomed post-Iowa abuse of the popular entertainment superstar by women.

Winfrey did not publicize it, but her Website was swamped with complaints after she went to Iowa. The principal complaint was that she betrayed women by not supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton. The criticism was described as personal.

Several of these critics identified themselves as African-Americans, indicating that gender is more important than race for many people.

Not surprising, given their employer, the hosts of NBC's Tonight Show have had political views that have uniformly fallen somewhere on the left, from Steve Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno. But as I mentioned to Tammy Bruce when she appeared on PJM Political last month to discuss Oprah's endorsement of Obama, I don't recall reading that any of them deigned to officially endorse a presidential candidate. By injecting herself into the presidential race, Oprah knew she'd alienate at least half her audience--and doesn't seem to mind.

As I've written before, there was a time when Woody Allen's self-deprecating shtick was endearing. These days, one's infinitely more likely to agree with his low assessment of himself:

New York filmmaker Woody Allen has confessed he does not understand why so many of his films are revered and he has been labeled an influential director.

The "Manhattan" director said he rarely understands why one of his films is met with great success and industry kudos, while another appears to fall on deaf ears, the New York Daily News reported Sunday.

"It's hard for me to know. I'll think, 'I really brought off my ideas, it's great,' and no one sparks to it," Allen told the newspaper. "And then other times I'll finish a film and think, 'I really screwed this one up,' and for some reason, the public and the press embrace it."

Which movie would that be? Manhattan in 1979?

Sure John McCain may have picked up this key Hollywood celebrity endorsement, but how can he top the sheer animal power of this?

How Jeri Ryan of Star Trek: Voyager fame inadvertently changed history.

(Worth clicking for the photo alone...)

Update: High traffic to the above link has temporarily blown out the WPRI.org server. The post (and photo) is also available here.

Libertas reviews The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and directed by (uh-oh) Rob Reiner:

Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a multi-millionaire who specilaizes in the hostile takeovers of public hospitals in financial trouble which he in turn privatizes. He’s a bit of a shark whose mantra is two to a room, a mantra that comes back to haunt him after he falls ill. To avoid a public outcry of hypocrisy Edward is wheeled in next to auto mechanic Carter Chambers (Freeman), a man just diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Over the course of the first act the two men bond through their mutual misery brought on by chemotherapy which in the end does both little good. Handed a death sentence, Edward offers to fund all of Carter’s dreams if in exchange Carter will share his, and off they go to leap from airplanes, race cars, ride motorcyles over the Great Wall of China, and enjoy anyplace else the all-too obvious inserted CGI backgrounds will take them.

There’s just one problem. Carter’s a married man with three grown children and yet with less than a year to live he bids his loving and faithful wife goodbye to fulfill all the dreams his familial responsibilities kept him from realizing. The script works hard to rationalize this but in the end it was impossible for me to accept Carter’s choice as anything other than a terribly selfish one, making The Bucket List another piece of damning evidence that those who make the movies today are so hopelessly out of touch with the rest of us it’s no longer funny. The trial to prove this correct would be a short one: “Your Honor, I found a dying Morgan Freeman unsympathetic.” Case closed.

Back at the start of the often appropriately named “naughts”, Thomas Hibbs explored in his book Shows About Nothing that Hollywood's love of nihilism can appear in the strangest places--not just the expected (exploitive horror films such as Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear) but in product such as the long-running and much beloved TV sitcom from whence Hibbs' title derives, war movies, and films such as this one, and seems so ingrained into the L.A. culture, no one even notices it anymore:

The desks a script must pass over before receiving a greenlight are numerous and that not one rational mind saw this as the outrageous wish fulfillment fantasy for narcissists it is, is beyond comprehension. Not only was it impossible for me to sympathize with Carter, I was disgusted with every smile on his face because it was at the expense of a woman forced to deal with the death of her husband of forty-five years alone, and worse, rejected.

And, no, this isn’t a movie where Carter comes to realize his priorities. This is a movie about living life to the fullest … at the expense of whomever. It’s a reverse character arc where the good and dutiful family man looks into the abyss and learns his priorities have been out of order. Work? Family? Kids? Grandkids? Screw that, I’m going to Hong Kong with my new millionaire buddy!

As Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes:

With this his fifth dud in a row, maybe Hollywood will finally figure out what to do with director Meathead, and that’s to put him in a room with Barry Levinson and Lawrence Kasdan, two other directors way past their prime, and use them as script readers: anything they choose to direct goes in the trash thus saving the studios hundreds of millions.

Don't bet on it.

This Houston Chronicle article really takes Alvin Turing's test to new heights:

If you're younger than 35, you'll probably live long enough to put David Levy's prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we'll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we'll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.

Hey, somebody should make a movie about that!

Something tells me that this could double as B-Roll footage for the politicians stumping in the Iowa cold this week:

(Via Blue Crab Boulevard.)

In Mark Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column in the latest edition of National Review On Dead Tree (subscription required to read online, but likely soon reprinted on Mark's Website, he compares Hollywood's recent string of anti-war duds with the plot of Mel Brooks' classic romp, The Producers:

Why have these films tanked? Roger L. Simon, a screenwriter himself, made the point that these films are “essentially inauthentic.” “The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts,” he writes. “This feels to me like a cinema of ‘received wisdom,’ not based on personal experience or ‘emotional knowledge’ of any kind.”

That sounds right. One reason the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared with the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side. I don’t believe Brian De Palma can tell you why he opposes the Iraq War. In fact, I doubt he thinks about it all that much. And when he does, he thinks about it through the prism of Vietnam. And you can’t make that template fit.

In a way, there’s something heartening about the inability of so many Hollywood A-listers to make a decent anti-war film. For a start, they’re all about the wickedness of the troops or Dick Cheney or some shadowy agency deep inside the administration. The actual “enemy” are largely absent. They fulfill the same role the natives do in old-school British Empire yarns: an exotic distant backdrop for conflicts played out between two different groups of white man. These days, there are “bad” Americans (the Pentagon, CIA, Halliburton) and a “good” American (usually a lawyer, journalist, or stonewalled spouse) who blows the whistle. But the glamorous guerrilla of yore is hard to transplant to the new conflict: To convey one of the chaps wreaking havoc in the Sunni Triangle or the Hindu Kush with any honesty, he’d have to be shown as theocratic, misogynist, and homophobic. You might as well make him a Republican congressman.

Which sounds like a very different reason than why filmmakers of 1970s and '80s rarely showed the North Vietnamese in full action. (With one noticeable and iconoclastic exception, whose director probably isn't too surprised by Hollywood's current string of anti-war bombs.

Blade Runner junkies may enjoy my review of the final final cut (we hope!) of the film, over at Pajamas Media.

Back in early 2006, Fred Siegel dubbed H.L. Mencken the seemingly contradictory descriptive of "Anarcho-Authoritarian":

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

Reading Roger L. Simon's profile of Vanessa Redgrave, it seems safe to say that she'd qualify as an Anarcho-Authoritarian as well:

Vanessa has another side as a (sometimes Trotskyist) political activist. This week we learn she has been helping Guantanamo suspects, including one Jamil el-Banna accused of “producing extremist propaganda for Osama bin Laden,” putting up half of a 50,000 pound bail surety for el-Banna and a Libyan named Omar Deghayes who has links to the same al-Qaeda cell. The actress commented, “It is a profound honour and I am glad to be alive to be able to do this… Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. It is a disgrace that these men have been kept there all these years.”

Concentration camp? Well I imagine it’s not a very comfortable place. It’s a prison for enemy combatants. But “concentration camp” is an explosive term, evoking images of Auschwitz or the Gulag where tens of millions died, many gassed or starved to death, assuming they weren’t first lined up against the wall, shot and tossed into pits.

No one, to my knowledge, has been murdered in Guantanamo. Difficult jurisdictional questions have arisen with legitimate human rights questions asked. There have been a few reported suicides, though I am not sure how well documented. But starvation has not been a problem. According to many reports, the detainees have never eaten so well (four meals a day) and obesity might be more of an issue. Of course, there was that report in Newsweek a couple of years back that, to punish an unruly inmate, a US military guard had flushed a Koran down the toilet. Only it was then discovered that there weren’t flush toilets, only chemical toilets, at Guantanamo, so such an act was physically impossible.

Vanessa probably missed the retraction in Newsweek. It didn’t exactly appear on the front page. Nevertheless, I doubt the fine points mean that much to her. The actress is of the school that anything done by the West, particularly the capitalist West, is suspect. She is able to overlook the ideology of al-Qaeda in this regard, which is a particularly rigorous gymnastic considering the misogyny and homophobia of the al-Qaeda worldview. No doubt the Islamist group would ban many of the films in which Redgrave appeared, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which she performed basically deshabille, and Wilde, in which she portrayed the homosexual playwright’s mother. In fact, it’s likely they would ban all her films, except perhaps a documentary she made with some Palestinian activists, and about that I’m not sure, given the internecine rivalries between various Fatah and Hamas factions. (It gets, excuse the phrase, Talmudic.)

But no matter. What’s important is how Vanessa appears – to herself and the public. It’s a kind of narcissism mixed with epater le bourgeoisie, masquerading as defense of the downtrodden, although these particular downtrodden are locked in an ideology that ensures their own continued misfortune. And the more the West is blamed for that misfortune, the longer it continues. Vanessa is in essence part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Yet again this does not bother her or even penetrate her radar screen. We should all be grateful, however, for her acting, just as we should all be grateful for the acting of the similarly unconscious Sean Penn (perhaps not entirely coincidentally also from an eminent theatrical family).

What intrigues me in all this is the relationship, if any, between talent and ideological blindness or rigidity. It’s not as simple as it seems. It could be the development of these false separate selves, these mini-me’s, that take the extreme positions, such as a Redgrave or Penn or Sarandon or, to a lesser extent, Streisand, have done, enhances the illusion of empathy that creates their art. It is generative artistically while being toxic politically. The Sean Penn who embraces Hugo Chavez is the same Sean Penn who gave us Jeff Spicoli. It would be great if we could have one without the other, but maybe, in some cases, we can’t.

Sadly no--but it's not all that new a development, for what it's worth.

"Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure."

Well, it's good to see that there are limits to his otherwise omnipotent Chucktacular powers!

This headline in the London Times is a scream:

Rupert Everett: acting in Hollywood is like living in Afghanistan

Uh-huh.

On the other hand, Everett claims:

“Hollywood is a place that pretends it’s very liberal but it’s not remotely,” he told The Times. “It’s like Al-Qaeda.”

Nahh. They may hate America as much, and crank-out movies that Osama bin Laden admires, but there's just a slight amount of difference between breast implants and amputation machines.

(This Hollywood procedure, on the other hand...)

Chuck Norris "has called Huck a dark horse who turned into a ‘shining stallion.’ He once praised Huck for having the ‘big package.’ (The ‘whole package,’ he corrected himself.)"

Word on the street is that his carbon footprint is awfully tiny, though...

The Washington Post reviews Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration by Thomas Doherty:

"JR in 3D," the ad read in its entirety. This was in 1954, when I was starting to venture beyond the comics section of my hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That minimalist text made no sense at first, but finally I caught on: "JR" stood for the voluptuous Jane Russell, and "3D" was three-dimensional moviemaking. Hollywood had released 3-D flicks in which tomahawks flew at us and jungle cats leapt at us. Now, it seemed, Jane Russell's bust would be coming our way. Sure enough, her new movie, "The French Line," had its world premiere in St. Louis the following week. The producer, Howard Hughes, had defied orders from Hollywood's Production Code office to tone down Russell's lascivious dancing and cover up her provocative flesh. Opening the film in out-of-the-way St. Louis rather than Los Angeles or New York was Hughes's way of thumbing his nose at the establishment.

The Code flouted by Hughes dated from the Prohibition era, and the two movements shared a basic premise: A high-toned protectorate must enforce moral standards by dictating what the rest of us get to consume. But while the impetus for Prohibition had come from fundamentalist Protestants, for the Code we have Catholics to thank. True, Will Hays, who headed the Production Code Administration, was a Presbyterian. But the Code's co-authors were a Catholic layman and a Jesuit priest, and its chief enforcer was Joseph I. Breen -- not just a Catholic but, as Thomas Doherty puts it, one who "embodied the restraint, repression, and rigidity of a personality type known as the Victorian Irish." The never-in-doubt Breen stands at the center of Doherty's knowledgeable, entertaining history of the Code during its heyday from 1934 to the mid-1950s.

The Code actually dates from 1930, but the first four years of its existence were a washout -- so much so that today film buffs treasure movies from that interregnum for their grit and candor. The studios had agreed to abide by the Code so as to defang state and city censorship boards, which applied harsh and inconsistent standards. But the procedure for ensuring Code compliance was squishy -- studios could appeal adverse decisions to a board composed of movie producers, who naturally were loath to order costly re-shoots of offending scenes. Bawdy vehicles for Mae West, sexually frank films such as "Baby Face," and crime-celebrating films such as "Scarface" were slipping past the naysayers. Scandalized Catholics fought back by founding the Legion of Decency, which asked the faithful to pledge not to attend objectionable films, and Hollywood moguls took hits at the box office. The Code, they agreed, must grow stronger teeth. From now on, appeals boards would consist of hard-nosed New York studio execs, not compliant Hollywood types. Unapproved films wouldn't get a seal of approval and thus would have limited, if any, distribution. And perhaps most important, Breen and his staff would vet scripts and head off problems before they developed.

The revamped Code worked all too well: A climate of timidity descended upon Hollywood and stayed for two decades.

It's some "climate of timidity", when during it flowed such wonderful films as:

Gone With The Wind

The Maltese Falcon

Citizen Kane

Casablanca

Shadow of a Doubt

Notorious

Rope

The Third Man

The Stranger

Singing In The Rain

And all of the rest of the golden era of Hollywood. What happened when the Production Code was replaced in the mid-1960s with today's ratings system? As Michael Medved once rhetorically asked Jack Valenti upon Valenti's retirement as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, "What happened, Jack, to all those missing moviegoers?

Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late '60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.

So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, " Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

Jack Valenti, a devoted family man and a true war hero (he flew 51 combat missions as a dashing World War II pilot), hardly qualifies as a cultural revolutionary. He played no role in producing the darker, edgier fare that alienated most of the movie audience, but he did launch the ratings system that made such alienation possible. He's also continued to defend that system and to resist important changes to make it more functional (like renaming the deceptive "PG-13" designation as "R-13" and restricting pre-teen audiences from attending such films). Mr. Valenti and other industry leaders also hide Hollywood's deepest problems with a relentless focus on "box-office gross"--the misleading numbers that always indicate record-breaking success, but reflect rising ticket prices (largely fueled by inflation) and mask decreased patronage.

It will never happen of course, but ironically, nobody could use a return to the Production Code more than modern Hollywood. Today, the annual low box office returns of the vast majority of Best Picture-nominated movies signify that Hollywood is merely one entertainment niche market competing with many others for our dollars, a trend which we noted a year and a half ago.

(Via Orrin Judd, who dubs Breen "The Alchemist.")

In the middle of the decade 30 years ago, when Hollywood created a production that featured a disturbed vet returning home from a war that the creative class loathed like the plague, at least he got to star in this, rather than this.

(Note the network that will be carrying the series in question, incidentally.)

In his latest Bleat, James Lileks writes:

The other night I was watching “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” and thought: there are three stages to a man’s life. 1. He laughs at Clark Griswold. 2. He sympathizes deeply with Clark Griswold. 3. He laughs at Clark Griswold.

Note: Mrs. Griswold, Beverly D’Angelo is slated to appear as the “Brothel Mistress” in “Harold & Kumer Escape from Guantanomo Bay,” due next year. Mark your calendars!

Naturally, I assumed that the bard of Minneapolis was having a jape. Alas, I should have known better.

Malcolm Muggeridge's thesis: it's not just a good idea--it's the law.

Personally, I think the superstar in the left photo pulls the look off far more successfully than the one on the right.

(Warning for parents: both stars have appeared in programs designated adults-only in today's increasingly puritanical society...)

Nikke Finke presents The Striking Hollywood Writer's Martini:

2 oz vodka "to fortify against the cold Strike Winter"
2 oz cranberry juice "as the writers are seeing red"
1 oz sweet and sour mix "they’re grateful for solidarity in this bitter struggle"
4 drops vanilla (or use vanilla vodka) "to symbolize the 4 cent raise they asked for"
"There’s no cherry in this drink, as writers aren’t getting a piece of the pie. Garnish with a half a redvine, as they hope to be back on the set soon."

Gad--if that's an acceptable drink out there these days, no wonder their films stink. As my dad was apt to say when presented with such a noxious concoction, "That's a dose."

Since the decline--and potential fall--of Western Civilization can be traced in its Martini recipes, why not stick with the classics?

Roger L. Simon watches Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah so you don't have to:

I came to this movie – the tale of a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) in search of the murderers of his son, who had gone AWOL on return from Iraq - expecting to be put off by its antiwar message. But I was even more put off by the ineptitude of the film itself, especially the screenplay. Simply as a mystery, it’s worse than a mediocre episode of the Rockford Files. Much of the movie is taken up with a red herring about drug dealing so obvious (and so out of an old TV show) that they might as well have had flashing neon of a red fish on the screen. The rest mostly shows Jones moaning and groaning about his dead son with Susan Sarandon and a ‘de-glammed’ Charlize Theron. The acting is good enough, I suppose, but not nearly sufficient to overcome the banal plot.

The whole enterprise was soporific and my mind kept wandering, only to be pulled back intermittently by intense antiwar screeds given, completely out of context, by various characters, as if we were suddenly plunged into a clumsy agitprop flick produced by the cultural ministry of some former communist country (Albania?). The writer-director apparently did not trust his own story to make his point, although, at the end, it is no more than the old chestnut “War is Hell” with a special (and entirely predictable) anti-American military fillip. And, for those still awake… and with IQs under triple digits… who could possibly miss the import of this fillip, Haggis hammers it home with a metaphor more ham-handed than any I can remember in recent cinema. He has the formerly patriotic Jones solemnly raise the American flag upside down over his hometown – the last image of the movie.

Although this puerile melodramatic gesture has been commented on in many reviews, few have actually seen it in the theatres. Like the rest of the current crop of antiwar films, the audience stayed away in droves.

But what fascinates me in this is not the audience disinterest in these turgid antiwar flicks. That was as predictable as the message of the films themselves. What interests me is what happened to the talented Haggis. Where did his skill go? Why did he make – let’s be honest – such an atrocious film out of this material (originally a ‘true story’ article in Playboy which he, apparently loosely, adapted)?

From Riefenstahl to Chaplin to Trumbo to Haggis, it's not far left agitprop unless the viewer is bludgeoned over the head.

Bill Hunt reviews the DVD version of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and likes what he sees. He also explores the extensive bonus material and earlier versions of the movie itself, available in the special five-DVD set due out next week.

The Redacted/Plan Nine From Outer Space connection revealed here.

Hollywood writer Rob Long (Cheers, NPR), who appears, not coincidentally, on the right-hand side of the screen with Mickey Kaus in the latest segment of Bloggingheads.TV, has the perfect metaphor for the striking entertainment industry.

(And Hollywood during the pre-Lucas/Spielberg seventies was just about as shaky as GM during that period as well. They just produced an occasionally better product in between lots of Chevettes and Vegas of their own.)

In a foregone conclusion, the coveted Sean Penn presidential endorsement goes to Dennis Kucinich.

Stu Nahan could not be reached for comment.

Coming this summer to a multiplex near you, to satisfy the inner five year old in all of us....Speed Racer: The Motion Picture!

But isn't there a disconnect in Hollywood promoting The New Holocaust yet again?

(HT: SG)

This past weekend, I had an interesting email exchange with "Dirty Harry" of Libertas, which amplifies my quick review post of Blade Runner: The Final Cut last weekend. You can read the details here.

People magazine finds Hoovervilles ascendant in beautiful downtown Burbank:

One thing’s certain about the Writers Guild of America strike, it follows no script.

Despite assurances of job security from Jay Leno himself, on Friday the staff of the Tonight Show learned they were all out of jobs—and they were not guaranteed to be rehired once the talk show returns, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

By Saturday, sources close to Jay Leno confirmed to PEOPLE that starting Monday, when workers face their first day off the NBC payroll, the talk show host will begin paying crew and band and other employees out of his own pocket.

This comes on the heels of NBC’s announcement that the network “regretfully informed the people who work on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O’Brien that their services are not needed at this time due to our inability to continue production of the shows.”

What can you expect from such a money-grubbing strike-busting Red State veteran of the conservative media?

The great thing about Hollywood is that there's not much that separates this list from this one. But then, that's not an entirely new development.

Nina and I caught Blade Runner: The Final Cut in Campbell last night--it says something when a movie originally shot 25 years ago, with only a handful of new subtle, cleaned-up CGI shots, is infinitely better in scope and ambition than anything playing in theaters today. (And attracted a pretty good--if fairly middle aged--crowd as well.) You could probably say the same thing about the movies in 1982, (cue the William Goldman quote) but Hollywood at least was coming off a decade of great movies in the 1970s. I doubt that even the most hardcore of Hollywood fans would compare the quality of the films of the "naughts" with the films of the period of 1970-1983.

Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits has an extensive review of the latest--and maybe even final!--version of Blade Runner and the shots that were replaced and cleaned-up. These changes definitely help the film's continuity, which was its weakest element: I can understand why Leonard Maltin trashed the film in his popular guide; beyond the killer production design and music score, the film really does have the feel of a movie where the director was trying to clean things up at the last minute in the editing room. Check out how much expository information is dubbed in, particularly in the early scenes in the police station with Harrison Ford's Deckard and his boss, Capt. Bryant, played by veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh. Much of it comes when Walsh's character is speaking is off the screen during a reaction shot of Ford, or a cutaway to a computer monitor. The new version smoothes a lot of this out, but it's clear that there was probably too much information flying around for early audiences to process, and the editors tried their damndest to fix this at the last minute--and didn't entirely succeed.

But so what? Like 2001: A Space Odyssey 14 years prior, Blade Runner is an awe-inspiring collection of great images and sounds, and should be viewed on the big screen--at least before watching it this way.

Force Majeure Farm performs some simple arithmetic:

When I was in second grade, I played the part of one of the innkeepers in St. Catherine's School nativity play. I was a great innkeeper and delivered my line (line, not lines) so memorably, with such expressive gesture (gesture, not gestures), that my parents still like to tell the story each year over Christmas dinner. "There is NO room at the INN!"

There were at least 100 friends and relatives packed into the room to see our little production, all smiling and wishing us well. Sister Marita stood in the wings, script clutched to her chest, exuding confidence in us.

Last weekend, Brian DePalma's movie Redacted opened in 15 theaters. 3,000 people showed up. 3,000 -- I had to look at the article twice -- not 30, 000, not 300,00 -- 3,000. That works out to 200 people per theater and about $26,000 in gross profit.

This amazes me, because I would have figured the school play effect would have been much larger. By this I mean that, no matter how boring the play, no matter how bad the actors, you can always count on your mother or best friend to attend and tell you it was wonderful. By adding in a famous director, a professional cast and crew, and expensive marketing campaigns, one could reasonably expect the school play effect to be magnified -- conservatively, let's say 10 family and friends per cast/crew member who will see the movie out of die-hard loyalty.

IMDb lists approximately 85 people as the official cast and crew for Redacted, who therefore account for nearly a third of the audience according to "school play" math. Since I've never heard of any of the cast members (admittedly, I don't follow Hollywood that closely), I'll give DePalma credit for drawing in the remaining audience: 2,150.

Wow. Who told DePalma and his backers that this is a movie people want to see? Where was his big cheering section when it counted, literally counted, in ticket sales? It's enough to suspect a Hollywood fragging.

He should have hired Sister Marita.

I have no idea if insurance companies still do this, but for years, wannabe insurance men had to go through a sort of rookie hazing the agencies typically called "Project 21". Which was a fancy way of saying that they had to write down the list of 21 names of their friends and families and give them the hard sell for a life insurance or auto policy. Maybe DePalma should have had each member of his crew make a Project 21 list in return for employment.

Fed-up with Hollywood's anti-war movies? Why not another round of Catholic bashing, then!

Roger Simon makes a great point about Hollywood's current crop of anti-war/anti-American movies. Their lack of passion and paint-by-numbers formula are killing them at the domestic box office almost as much as their politics:

Now that Brian De Palma’s Redacted is such a bomb you almost feel sorry for the director (the film opened nationally to a total audience of three thousand souls – you could do better with your grandmother’s home movies… or maybe even a blank screen), I would like to go further with my analysis of why the Hollywood antiwar movies are failing.

In his interview with Pajamas Media, actor/politician Fred Thompson said they flopped because they were probably “bad movies.” Undoubtedly so, but there is a reason for why this particular “badness” occurred and it is not simply their seemingly anti-American viewpoint. The movies are essentially inauthentic. The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts.

How do I know that? Part of this is admittedly a gut feeling on my part. This feels to me like a cinema of “received wisdom,” not based on personal experience or “emotional knowledge” of any kind. No matter how you stand or stood on the Vietnam War, compare these recent ventures (Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Redacted, The Valley of Elah) with, to pick one example, Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The director’s passion is literally splattered all over the screen. Ditto for his Born on the Fourth of July. And, not surprisingly, the audience went.

No passion, no conviction of this sort, is evident in the current movies. And that is lethal. Art without genuine conviction is boring and worthless. What else does the artist (filmmaker) have to give to the audience but his or her passion? It’s no surprise the audience is disinterested without it.

And since beneficent deed goes unpunished, since American audiences have had the good taste to say, ala Sam Goldwyn, "Include me out" of the current crop of Hollywood's Ike Turner-style patriotism, expect lots more of these films:

Seven of the seven anti-war films haven’t just flopped, they’ve been humiliated. So, what does Hollywood do? They greenlight a half-dozen more of them.

Like I said, expect a glut in the guitar picks market by the end of next year.

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey and Investors' Business Daily.

"The Wonderful Politics of Lawrence Of Arabia"--which like almost all classic movies, would be a disaster if made by today's filmmakers.

Hollywood's blue-on-blue suicide bombings continue.

This New York Times article on the upcoming DVD version of the first season of Sesame Street is on the one hand a hoot, and on the other rather depressing in terms of how badly the nanny state has made inroads into American society since 1969. Back then, it merely wanted to educate your kids about reading, writing and 'rithmetic (in the form of taxpayer-funded shows like Sesame Street). These days it wants to go much, much further than that:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

Like a modern-day Sinclair Lewis, in his quest for tenureship, James Lileks blows the lid off the squeezably soft bonded cellulose underbelly of mid-20th century consumer culture.

As the Professor is wont to say: They told me that if George Bush was elected, there would be a new blacklist in Hollywood--and they were right!

How long can Hollywood's reactionary anti-Americanism continue? That's the topic of Mark Steyn's latest Maclean's column. We're name-checked about halfway through it in regards to this post, but don't let that stop you from reading it.

It starts off with rather nuanced language, and by the time it's done, I'm still not entirely certain, but I get an emanation of a penumbra of a feeling that Michael Medved was slightly--just slightly--disquieted by Brian DePalma and Mark Cuban's Redacted:

Meanwhile, Libertas notes that it's not exactly filling theaters, in even in bluest of the blue states, either.

A year ago, when I wrote "The Era of Big Cinema Is Over" for Tech Central Station, I was inspired by a comment that George Lucas made to Variety that Hollywood should produce lots of low-to-medium budget movies, rather than big zillion dollar blockbusters, like Star Wars (just to pick an ultra-successful cinematic franchise entirely at random). And this is the result: Hollywood is now producing relatively inexpensive movies for itself far more than pleasing audiences and selling tickets. But how long can this game go on?

Related: Ross Douthat writes that concurrent Hollywood misfire Lions for Lambs is "like watching Sean Hannity debate Jane Fonda after they both spent the whole day together sniffing glue."

(Via Small Dead Animals, which dubs Douthat's cyanoacrylate-laced bon mot the quote of the week.)

Update: Libertas's Dirty Harry takes one for the team and watches Redacted so you don't have to:

Every performance in the film is excruciatingly bad, and all because DePalma made three decisions so stupid he should have his Directors’ Guild card revoked. First, he cast people who can’t act. Second, he put in their mouths melodramatic, overwrought dialogue straight out of an Ed Wood film. Finally, because of the single camera gimmick, he’s left with bad actors spouting lame dialogue he can’t edit around. By eliminating the option to cut into his scenes he removed the most powerful tool a director has and that’s the power to edit a good performance using the best pieces of each take. In other words, DePalma stupidly painted himself into a corner of having to choose the scene that sucked the least.

In other words, Alfred Hitchock's Rope, it ain't.

Your quote of the day:

"The plain truth is that if guys like DiCaprio, Clooney and Robert Redford, were women, they’d be called bimbos."

--Burt Prelutsky, "Hypocritical Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"

Burt's article is also good place to post a link to this. First, let's set aside whatever political subtext Cruise and his writers have in mind for choosing this story when they did, and concentrate on the actor. The age is right--in fact, at 45, Tom's nearly a decade older than Claus von Stauffenberg in 1944. But will anyone buy him and his acting mannerisms, which are little changed since the days of playing callow youths in the 1980s, and his whiter-than-white perfect Hollywood dentition as an aristocratic, combat-hardened (not to mention severely wounded) WWII Prussian officer?

Allahpundit acidly sums describes Cruise's acting technique as "his smirking cocksure jackass shtick". In other words, to paraphrase the already revised lyrics from a famous Rush parody from the 2000 election, he lacks gravitas. (And how!) But then, so do virtually all American actors under 60, as Frederica Mathewes-Green pointed out in her exceptional article a few years ago.

In the New York Times-owned Boston Globe, Joanna Weiss writes, "On TV, men are the new weaker sex":

In one sense, this is gender-bending stuff as old as Shakespeare, imagining what things might be like if men were more like women, and vice versa. But on ABC, role-reversal is pursued with such vigor that it feels like a social mission: a feverish, wholly off-putting attempt to break free of the boy-meets-girl formula.

Nowhere is that clearer than on "Grey's Anatomy," ABC's wildly-popular lead-in to "Big Shots," where the character of Derek Shepherd - once known as "McDreamy" - has completed his transition from guy-the-heroine-pines-for-in-spite-of-herself to simpering McWeenie. When he was introduced in season one - a neurosurgeon seducing medical intern Meredith Grey at a bar - Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) was the classic TV bad boy. He was distant and commitment-phobic. He nursed a deep dark secret. He was "McDreamy" because he was a fantasy: attractive but unattainable.

* * *

On "Grey's," in short, empowerment has become a zero-sum game. And a show that once found creative ways to ogle men has evolved into a show that wants to see them punished or demeaned. Mark Sloan (Eric Dane), the womanizing plastic surgeon dubbed "McSteamy," is now in pursuit of Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith), a hard-charging heart surgeon who calls Sloan and Shepherd "Pretty and Prettier." And of late, the male character most successful in romance is George O'Malley, the nerdy intern who is going through a remedial year. One of the other characters nicknamed him "Bambi."

This has been a topic that Glenn Reynolds has discussed at length for years at Instapundit. It is indeed a zero-sum game--just not the one Hollywood and the networks think it is.

Update: Much more on this topic in a recent post from the Anchoress: "Stupid men, Stupid Parents, Stupid Madison Avenue."

Related: "Ideology trumps the marketplace with these networks, unfortunately", Brent Bozell notes. "They've been bleeding audiences since 1994. They've lost 50% of their audiences, and yet they continue the same way they've been going."

Ideology also trumps the marketplace when it comes to big-screen Hollywood as well, of course. Arguably, even more so.

In principle at least, it certainly sounds like a great way to end one the long-running Civil War between North & South.

(Via a Governor LePetomaine-quoting Glenn Reynolds.)

Roger L. Simon explains why "Hicks Nix Peacenik Pix":

Since there’s a strike on and I can’t get work anyway, I will let ‘er rip:

The truth is Hollywood people are massively uninformed. They live in a bubble and, outside what they read in the New York Times and hear on NPR, they know almost nothing about what is really going on in the Middle East. And very few of them are curious to find out, because they assume what they already know is true and they have no impetus to investigate further.

But there is deeper reason for this than mere convenience and received conventional wisdom. These are not curious people because they are highly self-protective. They live a hugely privileged lifestyle, often based to a great degree on luck (and they know it), and this existence could only be threatened by contradictory information. Who wants that – particularly when it would alienate your colleagues, hurt your reputation and cause work problems?

Better to produce movies that validate the orthodoxy, even if they are economic disasters. Your colleagues will be impressed and you might win a prize (De Palma did – at Venice). Most of them are low budget anyway – a piffle. And the distribution system is rigged anyway. The antiwar swill won’t lose that much money because, boring as the films may be, they will be force-fed into the global entertainment machine, grouped in packages with other movies and sold to foreign television distributors to re-emerge as late-night reruns in Albania or wherever on into 2027 and beyond. A minor loss, if any.

And there is another benefit. (Here is where I am really going to make enemies.) Making movies like these or making extreme liberal public pronouncements make you seem like a good guy to yourself, when in your private life you are a miserable, self-serving bastard.

Read the whole thing.

It's time to thaw McLean Stevenson out of cryogenic suspension--because Fred Silverman's back, and he's running NBC again. That's the only way to explain these two mind-numbingly stupid peacock network fumbles occurring back-to-back.

Well, it's not the only way, but it is the only explanation that makes some sense, isn't it?

20 years ago, Ted Danson told us that we had only ten years to save the world's oceans.

And he was right!

Update: Meanwhile, back on land, the radical cloning program on the Island of Dr. Moreau proceeds apace...

Billionaire entrepreneur and leftwing film producer Mark Cuban threatens to take on Bill O'Reilly at Blog World.

J.D. Johannes explores the "End of the War Hero", at least in nihilistic Hollywood:

In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy--the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.

And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy--Mohammedan Jihadists--are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.

This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers.

The human mind craves the same narrative--this was illustrated by Joseph Campbell...also, we all want to be the hero.

But when confronted with a real life situation--like the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and larger war on terror few will step up to be heroes.

The many who do not have the ability to step up fall into two categories--those who acknowledge their inability to be heroes and those who do not.

Being a hero is not a job for everyone, many accept this and give credit to those who are willing to take the challenge.

But there is another group for who the sting of their own cowardice is too much to bear. They are not willing to accept that they cannot be heroes.

They cannot accept that, even if they were younger or had the physical ability to confront a violent villain, they would shrink from the challenge.

To alleviate their guilt they invent a new villain--Halliburton, Cheney, neo-cons, politicians, military officers, Soldiers, Marines--in short, anyone who will not physically harm them.

Not the least of which is this imaginary terror.

More at Power Line, which references Richard Lester's Cuba, "one of Sean Connery's least-seen films", and one of a series of pro-Castro movies that Hollywood seems to alternate each year with an anti-McCarthy and/or anti-blacklist movie. (Sense a theme?)

To be fair though, Cuba at least had for eye-candy a gorgeous-looking young Brooke Adams, thus making it somewhat passable entertainment with the sound down and fast-forward button at the ready.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!

Found via Instapundit, the New York Times' spin-off paper, The International Herald Tribune notes that the "Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business":

As Hollywood digs in for a second week of a strike, the screenwriters might want to send a few angry picketers over to Will Smith's place. Or Steven Spielberg's.

And maybe the studio executives should think about joining them on the line.

As it turns out, the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.

That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.

Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something...

Robert Redford just wants to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics:

Mr. Redford may be staying out of the presidential race, but he makes some highly provocative comments about Republican Mitt Romney, based on his many years among the Mormons of Utah.

“They are very adept at not being fazed and speaking fluently and gracefully. Why? Because every single male who’s a Mormon goes on a mission for two years when they’re 19 or 20,” he says. “They learn how to deflect blows and stay on message. No wonder Utah is the place that all these Republican senators go. It’s perfect. So when you see Mitt Romney, he’s already been practicing how to deflect blows and stay on message. But it’s plastic.”

As Professor Bainbridge notes:

If Redford had said anything remotely that bigoted about a candidate who was, say, Jewish, gay, or black, Hollywood would be screaming for his head. But when you’re a liberal icon, I guess it’s okay to be a bigot, as long as you chose the right targets.

Oh, that's a given.

You can just picture the meeting in the United Artists boardroom: "Well boys, I say we write that check for $35 million to Robert Redford to direct and star in an anti-Bush, antiwar drama alongside Meryl Streep and the almost always bankable Tom Cruise. What could go wrong?"

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto, the editor of the New Individualist magazine, who asks, "How does Hollywood expect general American audiences to ratify, with their entertainment dollars, movies that essentially spit in their own faces, blaming them for being a malignant force in the world?"

That dovetails into a telling anecdote from Jonah Goldberg's USA Today essay:

The public doesn't get to decide what movies are made. As President Bush might say, Hollywood is the "decider." The public determines which movies are successful. Perhaps the studios of yesteryear knew something today's moguls don't. Maybe Americans don't like to see America and her troops run down, even during an unpopular war.

When Peter Berg tested The Kingdom on Americans, he was horrified when the audience cheered when the FBI killed the terrorists at the end. "Am I experiencing American bloodlust?" the director agonized. Berg's contemptuous reaction toward American audiences may point to a few of the reasons these movies are faring poorly at American box offices.

Or as George Clooney babbled last year at the Oscars:

"I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects."

What happens when you're an out of touch coastal artists' enclave, and you bring up a subject? Sometimes, like the director of The Kingdom, you get whiplash when your potential domestic audience out in the hinterlands is 180 degrees out of phase from your tunnelvision and freeze-dried 1960s mindset.

Just click, as it starts making the rounds, as yet another meme rises to the surface from the ground up, rather than the top down. Which is one reason why it won't be incorporated into Hollywood's product anytime soon.

Update: "As Instapundit notes, it beats the hell out of comparing it to this photo."

From his recent anti-American movie to his old man stubble and overflowing facial topiary, which combines to make him look like an elderly hippie clerking for beer money at Guitar Center, Tommy Lee Jones has definitely seen better days.

Anne Applebaum explains why actors like Sean Penn and fashion models such as Naomi Campbell get the warm and fuzzies around murderous thugs such as Hugo Chavez:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As she explains, it's the same radical chic urge that drove celebrities, intellectuals, and the original useful idiots of 90 years ago to flock to the then-new Soviet Union.

That was then, this is now, I guess: I can remember a time when the left calling someone "subversive of constitutional government" was the highest compliment imaginable.

As Orrin Judd notes, Peter Viertel, who passed away this week at age 86, had a view of life from the front row seats. Married to Deborah Kerr, associate of John Houston, Viertel was the author of White Hunter, Black Heart, his 1953 best-selling novel, which in the early 1990s, Clint Eastwood made into a pretty nifty film, with Clint playing a thinly-disguised version of John Houston and Jeff Fahey playing a character based on Viertel himself.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, even in Hollywood:

I can't say I'm losing much sleep over the Hollywood writers' strike, but Nikke Finke has wall-to-wall coverage for those who are interested. In a recent post, she notes:

I've just confirmed that Leno and Conan will be in strike-forced repeats starting tonight. Also Jimmy Kimmel. Also Dave and that foreign dude who follows him (aka Craig Ferguson). This is going to have a devastating effect on promotion for the all-important holiday movie season starting now. And if this strike lasts awhile, Oscar campaigns as well. Meanwhile, you know that report I cited earlier that Jon Stewart is paying his writers' salaries during the first two weeks of the strike out of his own pocket, for both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, according to Portfolio.com. Well, his rep has denied it. That's right, denied it.

Beyond talk show comedians, the strike is also having an impact on activist Hollywood celebrities who pine for their brain trusts: just check out this recent Huffington Post item from Nora Ephron, clearly rendered inchoate...

Update: Gates Of Vienna has a modest proposal to end this destructive conflict and bring order to the show-business galaxy. (Sorry, just recycling lines from older Hollywood productions, much like the industry itself may be doing in the coming weeks.) I've got far too many tasks in Outlook to check off this week to volunteer myself, but I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea.

More: Inchoate but inspiring!

"Hollywood Writers Announce Strike".

Like I said before, fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

Update: Much more from Roger L. Simon who's happy his day job keeps him off the picket lines.

Interesting postmodern progression as liberal politics and show business continue their increasingly seamless blending. In 1992, it was a novelty when candidate Bill Clinton appeared on Arsenio Hall's chat show with his saxophone and Wayfairers. Then five years later, real-life footage of by-then President Clinton added verisimilitude when carefully inserted into key points of the Jodie Foster sci-fi drama, Contact. On Saturday, Barack Obama willingly appeared in in a sketch on Saturday Night Live to mock Hillary:

Can an interview with himself be far behind?

(Presumably, the current staff of SNL holds both Obama and Hillary in greater esteem than their predecessors did Gerald Ford, when he made his cameo appearance introducing the show while in office.)

Update: "Kind of funny, but not very presidential."

Maybe if Jerry had brought a babka...

As Warner Todd Huston notes, despite AP's best efforts at spinning the numbers, at 25,000 visitors in its first year, the George McGovern Legacy Museum (!) had 5,000 less visitors than the annual traffic of the Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin Mustard Museum. But that's boffo business compared with the number of ticket purchasers on the opening weekend of another attempt to glorify the toothless legacy politicians of the 1970s, Jonathan Demme's blockbuster Jimmy Carter biopic.

Nikke Finke explores the ultimate form of celebrity image control, which is actually smart self-promotion to end-run the drive-by legacy media:

In a savvy bit of News Corp synergy, The Darjeeling Limited's star Owen Wilson tonight at midnight airs his first interview since his September suicide attempt on MySpace.com. This was the result of a marketing brainstorm by Darjeeling's studio Fox Searchlight, which approached fellow News Corp.-owned MySpace.com with the idea for the interview by Owen's friend and Darjeeling director Wes Anderson. It's a 5- to 10-minute pre-taped piece: Anderson and Wilson set the agenda themselves, and Anderson directed, edited and produced the whole thing. Hilariously, there's a really angry article about this on ABC News, which just happens to employ both Barbara and Diane. Headlined, "Tell All Or PR Ploy?", ABC News complains how fallen stars now have a far more appealing option than the ABC interview divas: "Cut the pesky journalist out of the mix and tell all, on their own terms, on the Internet. It's the ultimate form of image control." But ABC News defends the use of journalists for celebrity interviews, claiming the TV newsosaurs have integrity. What b.s.

I doubt Nicolas Sarkozy would argue with that.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

Lisa, if you don't watch the violence, you'll never get desensitized to it!

David Kahane is the nom de word processor of a conservative screenwriter hiding out at one of the most dangerous places in the world for anyone from Hollywood who wants to keep his job--National Review Online:

I sure hope you like C-SPAN, reruns, and reality shows, because if we the Hollywood proletariat have our way, every writer in town is going on strike, perhaps as soon as this Thursday. If you ask me, it’s not a moment too soon.

Technically, we’re striking against the producers, the studios, and the networks — the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers — who have been trying to screw us out of our fair share of VHS and DVD residuals for years, and whose initial offer was to screw us even harder. With a brave new world of iPhone technology on its way, we want to make sure we don’t get fooled again.

But everyone knows we’re really striking against you, the ungrateful, reactionary, and probably crypto-fascist audience. You’ve let us all down by not going to see our movies.

The Kingdom? A disappointment at $46 million. Rendition? A huge antiwar belly flop for Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, and the guy from Brokeback Mountain playing in 2,250 theaters that hasn’t yet managed $8 million. Elizabeth: The Golden Age? The Catholic-bashing costume party with Cate Blanchett in high dudgeon and higher drag is a flopola at $14 million. In the Valley of Elah, from scribe du jour Paul Haggis? It’ll be lucky to make $7 million. At this rate, you probably won’t even go to see Brian De Palma’s Redacted.

Frankly, we’re tired of throwing our pearls before you swine. So we’re firing you.

A couple of years ago, Mark Steyn wrote:

That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

More from "Kahane":

It’s so sad: Here we were, on a roll, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in command of Congress, the Clinton Restoration practically a fait accompli, and Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize to use as a doorstop alongside his Oscar — and this is the thanks we get.

Well, I just don’t get it. It’s not like our patriotism is questionable or anything. Like Bonosera the undertaker in The Godfather, we love U.S.-America, we believe in U.S.-America, just not U.S.-America the way she is now: a racist, sexist, homophobic bastion of white male privilege, built on the backs of Africans and Native Americans and exploited immigrants, seeking to export its murderous rage to the Middle East and beyond. And all right-thinking people — by which I mean “left-thinking” people, of course — agree with us. You certainly won’t get any argument on the west side of Los Angeles, and wherever I travel in this great land of ours — to places as diverse as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and the Upper West Side — it’s unanimous. America stinks!

Or as Ace wrote a few months ago, "Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism."

Like Tina, the audience seems a bit tired of being battered every night by this stuff.

Update: More from the Ike Turner school of patriotism in the lead item found by James Taranto today.