The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that major industry figures are planning a Ronald Reagan biopic, which is slated to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million.  The figures involved are Mark Joseph, Ralph Winter, and Jonas McCord.  Joseph optioned the wonderful Paul Kengor books The Crusader and God and Ronald Reagan; he’s is a marketing and development exec who worked on Ray, Holes, and The Passion of the Christ.  Winter, produced the four X-Men movies, two “Fantastic Four” movies, and the remake of Planet of the Apes.  McCord wrote Malice and The Body. 

Joseph and Winter clearly lean right politically; Joseph commented, quite rightly:

“Only in Hollywood could you make an insulting, condescending movie about a much-loved historical figure, hire an actor who loathes the man, watch it flop and then somehow conclude that Americans don’t want to see a movie about him.  I watched Americans line up and wait for 10 hours for the simple privilege of passing by his closed casket. They love this man.”  

I was one of the Americans who lined up to pass by his closed casket.  I am an unabashed fan of Ronald Wilson Reagan.  And I couldn’t be more excited about this movie. 

The movie is supposedly going to cover Reagan’s life from birth to the assassination attempt on him by John Hinckley, Jr., which was a transformative moment in the Reagan presidency.  Presumably there will be some coverage of Reagan’s impact on winning the Cold War and creating the largest peacetime economic boom in American history.   (more…)

Tomorrow night, WHYY, an affiliate of PBS in Philadelphia, is slated to show a 35-minute original documentary entitled “The Surge: The Untold Story,” about the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. They were scheduled to run a live panel discussion with Liz Cheney afterwards. They cancelled it after one of the major donors to WHYY promised that if they showed the documentary, he’d stop giving them money and instead cut them out of his will ($200,000). Then he sent an email to the WHYY donors blabbing about a “Republican Takeover of WHYY.”

Why the hubbub? Because the film is produced by the Stevens and Schriefer Group and Red October Productions, two conservative film companies that have produced film for the Republican Party.

Sin of sins!

PBS is famously liberal. They feature leftist documentary after leftist documentary — but even a semblance of balance, and the left goes crazy. This is how they maintain their dominance in the film industry: through sheer and unrelenting whining and blacklisting.

(more…)

***UPDATE: Perez Hilton disputes the photo was of a nude Miley Cyrus.

It is hard to find a media personality more widely despised than Perez Hilton.  From Will.i.am to Demi Moore, celebs across the spectrum think Hilton is a pimple on the butt of Hollywood.  And they’re basically correct. 

As of Sunday, he’s not just an annoyance – he’s a child pornographer.  On that fateful day, Hilton, whose standards of good taste include using Photoshop to paint semen on the faces of stars and starlets and helpfully labeling body parts like “ass” and “boobs”, hit a new low.  He linked via his Twitter account to a picture of rising Madonna wannabe Miley Cyrus climbing out of a car in a short skirt and no underwear.  In the picture, which has been removed, Cyrus’ genitals are allegedly clearly visible.  

According to Salon.com, Jeffrey Douglas, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, said that Hilton had subjected himself to “extraordinary and intense” liability and that it was “suicidal for him to do this.”  Douglas continued, “We’re not talking about a misdemeanor.  You don’t have to know what the definition of the law is; all you have to do is knowingly distribute the photograph.”   (more…)

Being the fan of musicals that I am (and yes, I’m straight), whenever I review movies, one line from Damn Yankees always runs through my head: “You’ve gotta have heart!  All you really need is heart!”  Unfortunately, too many of today’s films are utterly lacking in heart.  From medieval epics with hearts of stone (Robin Hood) to cold examinations of unlikeable people (Up in the Air), an increasing number of our movies are now focusing on stylistics rather than people.  

A welcome exception is Robert Davi’s debut directorial effort, The Dukes (available at Amazon).  Davi’s film is like a good Italian meal: light, tangy, flavorful.  It’s also wonderfully directed.  It’s a low-budget film that doesn’t make you think low-budget, which is a welcome relief – it demonstrates true talent in a director when he tells the story instead of making you think, “Wonder how much he spent on that shot?” 

The plot centers on Davi’s character, Danny, the leader of a one-hit wonder doo-wop group, the Dukes.  Danny is divorced and trying to find the money to pay for his kid’s braces without having to sink to allowing his ex-wife to ask her new boyfriend for help.  His cousin, George, played beautifully by Chazz Palminteri, is another member of the band with a penchant for plus-sized women.  Three friends round out the social circle: Lou (well-cast Peter Bogdanovich), their incompetent agent; Murph (a hilarious Elya Baskin), an electrician with an unfortunate proclivity for hallucinogenic drugs; and Armond (Frank D’Amico), a gentle giant with diabetes and lapsing health insurance.  Put them together, and you’ve got a group of desperate past-their-prime men all in need of some cash.  (more…)

After the Supreme Court decided against his favored position in 1832, Andrew Jackson supposedly explained, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”  The idea was that the judiciary had the power to make pronouncements, but only the executive branch had the power to carry them out. 

This March, the Federal Elections Commission under President Obama began channeling Jackson.  We had hints that this would happen after the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC that restrictions on corporate funding of independent political broadcasts were prohibited by the First Amendment; that ruling also held that nonprofit groups like Citizens United could freely produce and distribute their documentaries. 

Obama quickly responded by targeting the Supreme Court itself, boldly (and wrongly) proclaiming in his State of the Union Address, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.”  Members of the Supreme Court were sitting directly in front of him at the time (one, Justice Samuel Alito, had the unmitigated temerity to shake his head softly when Obama lied about the ruling).  (more…)

I had high expectations for the series finale of LOST.  That’s because I’m an addict – I’ve seen every episode (yes, including Season 6’s brutal What Kate Did) several times; I’m a subscriber to LOST magazine; I read Doc Jensen at EW and Doc Arzt at DocArzt.com; I had to keep myself from looking at LOST spoilers on a regular basis over at DarkUFO. 

[SPOILERS COMING] 

Immediately after watching the series finale, I came away angry.  I wasn’t angry for all the reasons most people were.  I understood that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof couldn’t answer all the questions they had posed in the series, and that to do so would actually take away the mystery of the show.  I wasn’t angry because Jack ended up with Kate, though I admit that I would have liked to see Kate plunge from a cliff in a ball of flame a la Denethor from The Return of the King (Good Lord, woman, it took you six years to make up your mind?!).  

I was angry because I felt that the end of the show embodied a rather depressing underlying philosophy.  At the end of the show, we find out that the alternate reality of Season 6 has in large part been a ruse.  It wasn’t a different timeline created by Juliet’s nuke at the end of Season 5; it was a purgatory state created jointly by many of the Oceanic 815 survivors where they could find each other and remember their lives before passing to the next stage, presumably heaven.   (more…)

While doing research for my upcoming book, tentatively titled Programming America (Harper Collins, due 2011), the inside story of the politically-motivated evolution of television from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Sex and the City and the very real bias of the industry against conservative content and creators, I interviewed Doug Herzog, President of MTV Networks Entertainment Group.  He oversees Comedy Central, and he was kind enough to grant me some time and consent to taping our conversation on June 22, 2009.

During the course of that conversation, I asked Mr. Herzog about the network’s decision to censor South Park in April 2006 – in particular, the network shut down a segment that featured a cartoon image of Mohammed.

Here’s the audio:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

SHAPIRO: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the controversy that surrounded the South Park/Mohammed controversy.  How did that come about and what was the real story there?

HERZOG: The real story was the story you know, which is that the guys wanted to depict Mohammed and the network wouldn’t let them.  And that was the whole story.  And while I think if we had to do it all over again we would do it differently, that was the decision we made at the time.  And I regret it somewhat but I’ve made worse decisions in my life. (more…)

You can tell a corporation is in trouble when they begin threatening legal action against smaller companies without any evidence.  You can tell they’re in serious trouble when they won’t even tell their targets what they’ve done wrong.

Apparently, Variety is in serious trouble.  On March 24, 2010, the sinking publication filed a lawsuit against the punk rock band The Vandals [Ed. note: Vandals' bassist Joe Escalante is a BH contributor]  for allegedly using their trademark in an album cover some years back.  There’s only one problem – that issue had already been settled back in 2005, with The Vandals agreeing not to use anything similar to the trademark.  Since then, The Vandals haven’t used the trademark in any way, shape or form. 
 
So what’s a struggling publication to do?  How about finding random websites in different places, then accusing The Vandals of having posted the old trademarked material there and leaving it up purposefully, without any evidence to back up such claims?

(more…)

Yesterday, Howard Kurtz wrote a sad-sack column about the death of the legitimate entertainment critic.  “It can be revealing to find out what people like you, uncredentialed as they may be, think about the new Meryl Streep movie, Philip Roth novel or noodle joint down the street.  But why does that supplant the need for full-time reviewers?”  

Kurtz’s column follows hot on the heels of a smiley-weepy piece by A.O. Scott in the New York Times, entitled “A Critic’s Place, Thumbs And All.”  His conclusion is that arts criticism will always be around, since “The future of criticism is the same as it ever was.  Miserable, and full of possibility.  The world is always falling down.  The news is always very sad.  The time is always late.  But the fruit is always ripe.” 

It is linguistic Hegelian dialectics like that A.O. Scott paragraph that tell us why “mainstream” criticism is dying: who the hell wants to read that crap?  Kurtz’s piece is whinier, but at least it has the merit of clarity.  He hates the common man, and he thinks that even though the common man may give you better advice on whether or not to see a movie, that common man is still common. There’s a refreshingly honest elitism in Kurtz’s commentary.   (more…)

It is difficult to overstate just how bad the upcoming movie with Brendan Fraser, Furry Vengeance is going to be if the trailer is any indication. 

“Welcome to Rocky Springs,” says the narrator, “home to the greenest community ever built.”  Brendan Fraser plays a construction expert who is attacked by animals bent on keeping their pristine nature home free of the grubby man-hands of the developers.  Fraser’s son sums up the movie: “Dad, you’re building on a nature preserve, and nature’s ticked off … I think the animals are out for revenge.”  

If this sounds like your type of movie, you are either a relative of the writer or Van Jones. 

Which got me to thinking – what are the five worst environmentalist movies of all time?  I’ll exclude documentaries here, since An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the worst thing ever put on film; it’s as though Satan had explosive diarrhea on camera, and then the diarrhea talked at you for two hours (and don’t get me started on Winged Migration, which was literally pictures of birds, and which moved so slowly that time actually began moving backwards – the movie was released in 2001 and after watching it, you found yourself back in 1955).  (more…)

As a columnist and blogger, I get sent a lot of books from authors who hope that I’ll write a review praising their stuff.  I try my best to read as many as possible, and I decline to review those that aren’t quite worthy of praise. 

One book I received recently was Burt Prelutsky’s hilarious take-no-prisoners compilation with intro by Bernard Goldberg, Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young.  The title pretty much says it all – Prelutsky isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, and his short book is chock full of hysterical one-liners and RPG attacks on the left.  I don’t agree with all of it, but it sure makes for fun reading.  

Prelutsky on movies: “The 60s, the decade during which I did most of my reviewing, was notable for very young, very untalented, essentially illiterate British and American directors who gave new meaning to self-indulgence.”  Whew.   (more…)

According to James Hirsen of Examiner.com, Susan Sarandon had an odd night recently:

Sarandon attended the third anniversary of The Box in New York’s Lower East Side.  A transsexual cabaret performer named Rose Wood engaged in projectile vomiting on stage and hit Sarandon with it. Standing nearby were Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber. According to Wood it was not intended as an affront to the actress and she didn’t take it that way. “Apparently [Sarandon] got a big kick out of it. She squealed with surprise and loved it when several handsome gentlemen wiped it off of her. She had a ball! I saw her assistant downstairs afterward, and he was moved by it! She was in great spirits,” Wood told the New York Press. 

Nothing says fun like vomit.  (more…)

As has been amply demonstrated by others, Howard Zinn was an anti-American secular humanist with heavily Marxist leanings.  As I have already written, teaching the Zinn Education Project in public schools likely violates the California education code.  It discriminates against particular races (namely, non-minorities) and all traditional religion (particularly with regard to its view of homosexuality).  Zinn himself called for violating the education codes wherever possible:

“Don’t obey the rules… you have to play a kind of guerrilla warfare with the establishment in which you try not to be fired… You have to depart from the curriculum… outside the lines that are set for us by the school administration, or the politicians.”

Zinn, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore, Matt Damon

 Of course, that doesn’t stop schoolteachers everywhere from teaching Zinn.  According to the Oxnard Union High School District, Zinn’s on the California Department of Education Recommended Reading List.   

He’s taught at the San Lorenzo Unified School District Re-Entry Intervention Program, which targets kids coming back to school after being expelled, students with ten or more days of suspension who are on track for expulsion, students coming back to school from Juvenile Hall – in short, the worst of the worst.  This makes perfect sense – after all, what better way is there to teach borderline-criminal kids about good citizenship than pillorying America and giving them delusions of victimhood?  (more…)

Last week, I stirred some folks up with my Top Ten Most Overrated Directors of All Time.  To recap, they were: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, David Lean, Darren Aronofsky, Mike Nichols, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock.  And by “stirred some folks up,” I mean faced down a virtual lynch mob.  Who knew that Aronofsky supporters were fans of the film Fury? 

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections: (more…)

It’s been a year since George W. Bush left office.  Do you miss him yet?  

I do.  

For all his foibles – utter inability to explain his policies to the American public, bending over backwards for bipartisanship with Democrats, foolish bailouts – Bush was a president who understood the battle between good and evil in our current war on Islamofascism, even if he wouldn’t call the war by its proper name. 

And Bush’s clarity had a measurable impact on our film culture.  Leaving aside the obvious mirror images (the success of 24 or Taken, e.g.), the Bush Administration saw a rash of huge blockbusters dealing with the dichotomy between good and evil, and the necessity of fighting evil with every resource at our disposal.  

The single top earner of the Bush Administration was The Dark Knight, a very thinly veiled defense of Bush tactics in the war on terror.  No better speech on the motivation for terror can be found in movies than Michael Caine’s assertion as Alfred that “some people just want to watch the world burn.”   (more…)

Ever since the advent of the modern motion picture industry, critics have praised directors as the key to great film.  The auteur theory of cinema is idiotic, since writing is truly the key – no director could make a masterpiece out of “The Ugly Truth.”  It is one of the great travesties of artistic justice that no one remembers the writers of great movies – nobody knows Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, for example, but everyone remembers Frank Capra.  Together, those three wrote It’s a Wonderful Life.  (Together, Goodrich and Hackett also worked on The Diary of Anne Frank, The Thin Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Father of the Bride.) 

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras.  (more…)

Where’s the ACLU when you need them? 

On Sunday, the New York Post reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art “quietly pulled images of the Prophet Mohammed from its Islamic collection and may not include them in a renovated exhibition area slated to open in 2011.”  The justification for the removal?  “The museum said the controversial images – objected to by conservative Muslims who say their religion forbids images of their holy founder – were ‘under review.’” 

So here’s the bottom line: the Met decided it didn’t want to face the kind of murderous rage the global Muslim community often demonstrates when pictures of Mohammed are posted publicly (see: Danish cartoons).  

Aside from the obvious cowardice of the artistic community when it comes to images of Islam, there’s another problem: there’s a strong case to be made that removal of these images in order to “protect” Muslim sensibilities violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause under current Supreme Court precedent.  (more…)

I’ve criticized the show House in this space before.  House is a main character who is beginning to cross the line from likable to crotchety, despite Hugh Laurie’s greatness.  His sidekick, Wilson, is far more interesting dramatically.  And the show itself is amazingly predictable: somebody has a seizure; opening credits; wrong diagnosis; commercial; wrong diagnosis; commercial; wrong diagnosis; commercial; correct diagnosis indicated by oblique reference in the B story; conclusion; end credits. 

But at least House is well-written. It’s also a relatively balanced show, even though House himself is an open atheist.  For example, Season Three of House featured two abortion episodes: “Fetal Position,” which was so pro-life that it included a mockup of the famous image of a baby’s hand holding an operating doctor’s; and “One Day, One Room,” an episode in which House convinces a raped patient to have an abortion.  Despite the show’s overall liberal tilt (see Wilde, Olivia), there is at least an attempt to be evenhanded. (more…)

All instructional materials approved by school boards and used in California schools must comply with the Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Content (2000).  It’s an idiotic set of standards, radically liberal in orientation.  It states that materials must “instill in each child a sense of pride in his or her heritage …”  One wonders whether it is a good idea to instill in the grandson of a Nazi brownshirt “pride in his heritage.”

At the same time, the standards do have their strong points.  On religion, all students are supposed to “become aware and accepting of religious diversity while being allowed to remain secure in any religious beliefs they may already have.”

The California Education Code includes similar provisions regarding the use of particular materials in the classroom.  Section 60044 requires that no instructional materials be adopted by any governing board which contains “Any matter reflecting adversely upon persons because of their race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, handicap, or occupation.”  The statute does not exclude whites or Americans. (more…)

It’s hard to say this, but say it I must: one of the reasons that so many current conservative films don’t get distribution or gain success is that they stink.  You heard that right.  Many of them simply suck.

Yes, political bias is the main reason conservative films don’t get distribution; there are a ton of crappy liberal films that get distribution.  But that doesn’t change the fact that some of the most highly publicized conservative modern entrees into the field of film have been total artistic and popular bombs.

Filmmaker Michael Pack

When a conservative film gets made that is actually high quality, it’s a surprise.  So when I saw new documentary, The Last 600 Meters, I was shocked.  It’s gripping, engrossing, enthralling.  It’s a movie every American should see.

The Last 600 Meters tells the story of the two deadliest battles of the Iraq war — the Battles of Fallujah and Najaf — from the perspective of the soldiers who fought in them.  We see through their eyes – the footage and stills were taken during the actual battle.  We meet the strong, resilient, sensitive and brave men and women of the armed services who do the fighting and the killing and the dying that we won’t do. (more…)