Kurt Schlichter is a former stand-up comic and comedy writer. He is also a civilian trial lawyer and partner at Schlichter & Shonack, LLP, in Manhattan Beach, California, where his work has included entertainment issues. He spent over 20 years in the Army on active duty and in the National Guard, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel and commanding the elite 1st Squadron, 18th Cavalry. He also served in both Desert Storm and in Operation Enduring Freedom in Kosovo, as well as in several civilian support missions from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the San Diego fires of 2007.
The views he expresses are solely his own and not that of any government organization.
He can occasionally be followed at @KASchlicht on Twitter, whatever the hell that is.
E-Mail: kas@sandsattorneys.com
Kurt Schlichter
Eight Great Movies ‘For’ Thanksgiving
by Kurt SchlichterThanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday. Sure, Canada and a couple other nations have adopted their own weird versions of it too, but the notion of a nation setting aside a day to give thanks for its blessings could only arise in a nation that has been so abundantly blessed. In its land, its people and its animating spirit, America has much to be thankful for even in a time of war, economic blight, and a government that too often seems to see its blessings as curses and its greatest strengths as flaws.
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But America’s abundance does not apply to movies about Thanksgiving. Certainly some exist, but if you review a list of movies about Thanksgiving, the sad fact is that there are very few good ones. Many are PC retellings of the original Thanksgiving story – one guess as to who the villains are (Hint: It’s the dudes with buckles on their hats). Others are tiresome melodramas about “quirky” families that reaffirm their bonds over plates of turkey, with “quirky” — meaning “annoying.” (more…)
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Semper Films: The Top Ten Marine Corps Movies
by Kurt SchlichterThe men and women who earn the right to wear eagle, globe and anchor of the United States Marine Corps are a special breed. To those outside the Corps, they talk funny. They look funny. They are extremely impressed with themselves – and they have every right to be.
My beloved United States Army is a blunt instrument, a magnificent club that has pummels our nation’s enemies into submission. But the Marines are America’s rapier, a razor sharp weapon of war that has never been bested and never will be. For over two centuries, the United States Marine Corps has been fighting our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea. They don’t give up. They don’t quit. There’s no word for retreat in a Marine’s vocabulary. And they are making history even today in the mountains of Afghanistan and elsewhere.
November 10th is the Corps’ 234th birthday. With the indulgence of my Devil Dog brethren, here is this Army veteran’s countdown of the Top Ten Marine Corp movies: (more…)
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Movies We Like: ‘Godzilla, King of the Monsters’ (1956)
by Kurt SchlichterSo, when it came time for our little girl to watch her first grown-up movie, I was torn between Saving Private Ryan and a film I have loved since I was a kid, Godzilla, King of the Monsters. Now, Private Ryan teaches important, practical lessons that every American should learn, like how to maneuver your infantry company across a beachhead under fire to wipe out a Nazi crew-served weapons bunker. On the other hand, Godzilla has a hideous dragon with radioactive breath. Tough call, but we decided to save Private Ryan for when she’s six – better late than never.
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What is the enduring fascination with a 55-year old flick that stars a fake Japanese reptile stomping Toyko into matchsticks? The first thing is that Godzilla is a truly entertaining movie. Actually, it’s two movies. The version most Americans have seen on TV is the 1956 re-cut version of the 98-minute original Japanese movie, Gojira. Some American producers decided it could make them a bundle, but it needed a bit of familiarization before the American audience would accept it. They hired a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr to film some awkward footage as American reporter “Steve Martin,” cut out a lot of draggy filler, and shipped the slimmed down 80-minute final product to drive-ins all over the fruited plain. (more…)
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The Worst Song of All Time: ‘Imagine’
by Kurt SchlichterIn a world of Starland Vocal Bands, Lady GaGas, Bon Jovis, Snoop Doggs and 1910 Fruitgum Companies, it takes real talent to write a song so unbelievably horrible that it transcends mere awfulness and crosses the frontier into a whole new realm of sheer crappiness. An artistic, musical and philosophical failure of staggering proportions, John Lennon’s “Imagine” is the worst song of all time.
Many feel this ballad is a touching hymn that gives voice to man’s yearning for a better world. They are wrong. “Imagine” is a cloying, boggy, sonic swamp of numb-skulled sentiments that sound like they were recycled from a bong-fueled, 2 a.m. bull session between a couple of pampered, credulous UC Berkeley lit majors. It’s the national anthem of the hopey/changey crowd — all at once pretentious, smug, tiresome and intellectually bankrupt. (more…)
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Balloon Boy: The Right of Every American To Be a TV Star
by Kurt SchlichterPeople have it all wrong about Richard Heene. He’s not the perpetrator of a poorly-executed hoax, but a victim, a victim of America’s callous disregard for those who suffer from the silent plague that is Media Absence Disorder (MAD).
Sadly, the dead white males who imposed the Constitution on America enumerated only negative rights that limit the power of the government over its citizens. But if you squint your eyes and look beyond obstacles like the plain text, lurking in there somewhere behind the penumbras and emanations is the positive right of every American to be a TV star. Those with MAD are not cretins to be shunned but civil rights visionaries at the edge of a new frontier of governmental largess and probably a lot of profitable litigation.
It’s obvious that American society has failed the Heene family. After he and his brood’s triumphant appearances on Wife Swap, Heene was left media-deficient and was forced to feed his addiction with crude YouTube videos. In one, he speculated that Hilary Clinton is a shape-shifting space reptile, which would be totally cool if true. In another, he claimed that he spoke to aliens at a local fast food restaurant, which is actually pretty typical, at least at Southern California fast food joints.
This sad state of affairs was a direct result of the deep, black emptiness in Heene’s life that could never be filled by superficial things like work, religion or family. Like all MAD-men, he craves, needs, must have the validation that only comes from having his mug flashing across America’s television screens. He not only wants his MTV, he has to have it. And we owe it to him. (more…)
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I Want My NEA Grant!
by Kurt SchlichterChairman Rocco Landesman
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Washington, D.C.
Dear Chairman Landesman:
With all this fuss on Big Hollywood.com, Big Government.com and elsewhere over the NEA’s government-funded forays into partisan political propaganda, I thought maybe we could help each other out.
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Right now, you probably want to support some art that addresses vital current issues from a right-wing perspective in order to demonstrate your impartiality (ha ha!), and I just want to cash in your organization’s evident willingness to spend good tax money on any kind of nonsense that can be passed-off as “art” (ca-ching!)
Well, I am uniquely suited to provide you with just what you’re looking for! As a college student, I got a “B” in my Visual Arts 1 class for dressing up a juniper bush in one of my Hawaiian shirts to draw attention to man’s essential oneness with nature while providing a stinging critique of America’s consumerist culture. Sure, my black-clad, Bauhaus-loving classmates protested that I was a fraud who was more concerned with collecting four easy credits than internalizing our professor’s commie insights about how expressionism equals imperialism, but hey – aren’t all great artists rebels? Or, at least, weren’t they before last January 20th? (more…)
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Levi Johnston and the Middle-American Minstrel Show
by Kurt SchlichterLevi Johnston’s shameless exploitation by the liberal media is more than just a convenient cudgel for bashing Sarah Palin. It’s a modern minstrel show, with “Middle American” substituted for “African-American” as Levi capers for his condescending media “friends” wearing figurative blackface. And just as the minstrel shows of the past were tools to reinforce prejudice, the Levi Johnston show is meant to reinforce the prejudices and smug sense of superiority of its elitist liberal audience.
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Levi is the Kevin Federline of American politics, a good-looking, not-too-bright guy catching a break by impregnating a rising star, or at least one’s daughter, then basking in the reflected glow. When things went south with Bristol Palin, he found, in a mainstream media eager for anything that might derail the Sarah Palin express, an opportunity to go farther than he ever thought he could. Movies, modeling, memoirs – anything was possible, they assured him. Just tell us what we want to hear, Levi – the good stuff, the juicy stuff, the stuff too good to fact check. Oh, and hand over your dignity while you’re at it. (more…)
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Enabling Celebrity Dysfunction (I Blame Oprah)
by Kurt SchlichterJust when it looks like Roman Polanski has re-set the bar for personal behavior so low that it’s practically subterranean, the late John Phillips comes along and somehow finds a way to slink underneath it. Maybe. Maybe, because his accuser is his own daughter Mackenzie Phillips, a drug addict since the mid-70s who is currently peddling her sordid tale of incest, heroin and general dysfunction to anyone with a lens and a microphone.
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Perhaps this junkie, who by her own admission had a decade-long affair with her own father starting at age 19, is not the most reliable witness. On the other hand, considering the Hollywood community’s frantic defense of noted pedophile Polanski, it’s not too difficult to imagine how Mackenzie and her rock star father might have figured, “Well, we’re here, we’re high, we’re horny. What’s some shared DNA between stars?”
I blame Oprah. (more…)
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‘Law & Order’ Jumps the Shark
by Kurt SchlichterThe only surprising thing about hearing that Law & Order was going to take on the Bush administration over “torture” is the realization that Law & Order is still on the air. This car-wreck of a series has been bouncing around NBC’s schedule since the first Bush administration doing the impossible – making lawyers look even worse. Thanks, guys.
Law & Order’s mysteries are as unpredictable as where the sun will come up tomorrow morning. In a typical episode, when the cops arrest a gang member you can safely bet the climatic trial denouement will reveal the real killer to be either the wealthy corporate executive, the ambitious conservative politician or the hypocritical Christian preacher. You know, kind of like in real life. (more…)
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Movies We Like: ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ (1959)
by Kurt SchlichterThere was a time when an “adult film” meant a movie by, for and about adults, not a tawdry tale of some tatted-up, dead-eyed 19-year old with daddy issues numbly coupling in front of a video camera for the gratification of leering, backward-hatted frat boys and twitchy loners with DSL. They don’t make many truly adult films anymore – to see what you are missing, a good place to start is 50 years ago with 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder.
Let’s start with the cast: James Stewart. George C. Scott. Lee Remick. Eve Arden. Ben Gazzara. Even Big Hollywood’s own Orson Bean in a supporting part as a doctor who plays a key role in the story. If you love movies, you only needed to get to the word “George” before you were adding it to your NetFlix queue. (more…)
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Adios Hank: The Conservative World of ‘King of the Hill’
by Kurt SchlichterThe most annoying creature in the pantheon of Hollywood cliches is the “free spirit,” the heedless, hedonistic waif whose responsibility-free lifestyle shows us uptight squares just how empty and soulless our lives of meeting obligations and delaying gratification truly are. But there’s nothing free about free spirits in real life – they flit along like eternal infants while other people get to pick up the figurative and literal bill – people like you, and me and TV’s most amusing everyman Hank Hill.
Tonight Fox will run the series finale of King of the Hill, the saga of Hank and his gang of associates living in their exurb paradise of Arlen, Texas. King has a helluva a pedigree. It was created by fellow UC San Diego grad Mike Judge, who also developed the criminally under-appreciated Beavis and Butt-Head. The co-creator was Greg Daniels, who previously worked on The Simpsons and wrote the classic Lisa’s Wedding episode. Together, they made King the most subversive comedy on television. (more…)
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Deconstructing the Speech
by Kurt SchlichterA close reading of the President’s speech to schoolchildren today reveals some notable things. As a trial lawyer, it’s professionally interesting to see how he makes his case – and to see what case he is actually making. And as the father of a new kindergartner and a toddler, I’m interested in seeing how he goes about trying to influence our children – not because I’m paranoid about him influencing my kids but because I’d like to learn how to do it myself.
Let’s start with some statistics. My computer counted 36 uses of the word “I” and 15 uses of the contraction “I’m” in 2,367 words. The subject is supposed to be “school,” but that word only appears 25 times. So, the subject is the President.
The first two paragraphs seem innocuous, but they set the tone. There are a lot of contractions – 110 by my Dell’s count. You use those to seem comfortable and informal, sort of like Matlock would. It assures the jury – I mean the kids – that you are not so different from them, that you’re one of them. It’s a good move – I do it. I’m just not sure the President should. (more…)
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Movies We Like: ‘Zulu’
by Kurt SchlichterThe members of the ruling class of the British Isles seem to be committed to demonstrating that they are nothing but hopeless neo-socialists busy sacrificing their green and pleasant land on the altar of nanny-state multiculturalism. It seems that every day there is a report of some new Labor assault on free speech, a fresh disaster in the decaying single-payer health care system, or another craven surrender to domestic jihadism. The latest atrocity is Scotland’s politicians’ ”compassionate release” of Lockerbie mass-murderer Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, a shameful maneuver that managed to combine greed, cowardice and self-righteousness all into one gutless package. I used to emphasize that I was 25% Scot and not mention my 12.5% French ancestry. Now? Well, can you say, “Bonjour?” At least the “frogs” leadership will take their own side in a fight.
But the people of the British Isles – the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish – are a proud, tough bunch ill-served by their shabby politicians. And nowhere on screen can you see their heart and glory displayed better than in 1964’s war epic Zulu.
Understand that Zulu is a true story. In January 1879, a column of about 1500 poorly-deployed British troops was overrun at Isandhlwana by the 20,000-man Zulu army of King Catshweyo. After that slaughter – the Zulus did not bother with niceties like taking prisoners – the Zulus turned their attention to the nearby mission station at Rourke’s Drift, defended by about 100 Welsh infantrymen and their English officers. The desperate battle against overwhelming odds that followed became a legend. (more…)
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It’s Okay for Conservatives to Like Liberal Entertainers
by Kurt SchlichterIt’s time to take on the most important issue facing American conservatives today: Can a self-respecting right-winger be a fan of Alec Baldwin?
The answer is “yes.” Allow me to demonstrate why:
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Now, that clip from 30 Rock is, without a doubt, one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever seen. Bizarre, obnoxious and unbelievably politically incorrect, it’s a welcome reminder that television need not be a soul-sucking void of mindless time-killing.
Baldwin was awesomely amoral in Miami Blues. He was awesomely arrogant in Malice. He was just plain awesomely awesome in Glengarry Glen Ross. And as NBC Vice-President of Television and Microwave Cookery Jack Donaghy, he continues his track record of awesomeness and fully deserves his multiple awards and nominations. But does he deserve a conservative’s appreciation? (more…)
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Time to Fight the Power
by Kurt SchlichterOur political leaders need a quick block of instruction in the concept of the chain of command. It goes like this, in descending order of rank:
#1: Us Citizens.
#2: You elected officials.
I really prefer writing long pieces on why Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin and Johnny Rotten rule. It’s more fun to talk about how everything in popular culture that everyone else likes actually sucks, and I’m even going to provide some inspirational music selections below. But duty calls. Right now, a bunch of people whose salaries you and I pay and who work for us are telling us to shut up and do as we’re told.
That’s just not gonna happen. (more…)
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Lee Marvin: That Glorious Bastard
by Kurt SchlichterOnly a tiresome poseur like Quentin Tarantino could think that the Hollywood pretty boys he cast in his soon-to-be released opus The Inglorious Basterds are convincing movie tough guys. Where is Lee Marvin when we need him?
You’ve probably experienced the Basterds publicity blitz. Brad Pitt looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Folks I know who have been around him say he really is a pleasant and laid-back guy, and these are hardly the characteristics of a beady-eyed killer. Creepy Eli Roth, taking some time off from directing his degenerate torture movies, is just a leering clown – he looks like he should be squatting in the back of his Ford panel van offering Tootsie Rolls to passing tweens. And B.J. Novak? The guy is a hilarious writer and is really funny in The Office , but I’m not buying this cat as the scourge of the Third Reich.
In contrast, Lee Marvin’s tough guy legacy lives on despite the fact that his body rests with thousands of other heroes in Arlington National Cemetery. He earned that right when he was wounded fighting the Imperial Japanese Army in the Pacific as a Marine private. His Purple Heart is 100% USDA certified proof positive of his prime badassary. Who is the Hollywood tough guy of today who can dare step up to the Lee Marvin plate and take a swing?
Nobody. (more…)
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Popular Music Abandons Everyone Over Forty
by Kurt SchlichterThose damn kids today and their strange and frightening music raise an important question for me: When did I become my dad?
Back in the eighties – when popular music reached its pinnacle of achievement - I would be home from college, in my room, cranking cool tunes and my father would get home from work, peer in, scrunch up his face and ask how I could listen to that infernal racket. The answer, of course, was that I had (and still have, dammit) really awesome taste in music.
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I actually pitied my Dad for being unable to appreciate the Midwestern-inflected post-punk glory of The Replacements, or the sonic frenzy of their Minneapolis brothers-in-noise Husker Du, or the soaring, roaring guitar heroics of The Clash. I don’t know what music he actually liked. There were some LPs lying around the house – kids, you can ask your parents what those are – but they were things like the Kingston Trio and the Sound of Music soundtrack. This last one was a particular sore point for me since my mom got the idea to name me Kurt, which is the German equivalent of Melvin, from the little Von Trapp twerp who sang “Fa.” (more…)
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Cronkite’s Legacy Includes the Killing Fields of Cambodia
by Kurt SchlichterWalter Cronkite passed away a few days ago and pardon me for not joining the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the professional media mandarins. The fact is that Cronkite was an over-praised meat puppet, a doctrinaire liberal-left talking head who never once uttered a word that would have caused so much as a sigh of consternation in the Manhattan media environs he dwelled in.
Except among his loved ones, the hoopla that has accompanied his passing has nothing to do with Walter Cronkite the man and everything to do with Walter Cronkite the symbol. He symbolized a time – “The Golden Age” to hear the wistful liberals tell it – of a solid, unconquerable media monolith that passed judgment on What Is The News and defined Socially Accepted Opinion.
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Oh, those glorious days of yesteryear, when those drooling slobs without the education or breeding to live in New York and work at the Times or at one of the three networks would genuflect before their black and white TV sets every evening and await Mr. Cronkite to bestow upon them The Truth! Now (sigh), it’s chaos, with too many different media outlets and too many different opinions. It’s gotten out of (our) control!
Come back, Walter, and save us from Fox News! (more…)
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The Force is With Sarah Palin
by Kurt Schlichter
Not to go an analogy too far, but Sarah Palin seems to be taking a page from the Hollywood playbook of George Lucas. She has just completed her own introductory trilogy, and it was an astonishing success.
First, she was a fantastically successful conservative governor lurking beneath the mainstream media’s radar. Next, she was a vice-presidential candidate who, even though she lost, still did more to electrify the base than the headliner. Third, she has now drawn the curtain on her post-election career as a sitting governor, a period that saw her deftly turn the tables on mainstream haters like David Letterman. Like “Star Wars,” she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but her fans are rabid and chomping at the bit for the next installments. And as to these future installments, the question is whether the next step is going to be “The Phantom Menace” or something that doesn’t suck. (more…)
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Troopathon 2009: We Really Do Love Care Packages
by Kurt SchlichterI got a phone call yesterday from my buddy who is currently commanding a combat arms battalion in Iraq. Things are calm – at least, they were yesterday. He’ll be coming home in the next few months just as a bunch of other folks I know will be going over themselves. And I know there’s another ungodly hot and shooty place in my future too.
Just because our fighting men and women disappeared from the nightly news and off the front pages does not mean that the war is over. Far from it – there are hundreds of thousands of Americans out there right now, and that’s easy to forget when all the media is talking about are cheating governors and Perez Hilton beatdowns.
That’s why supporting Troopathon 2009 is key. Every package is a loud and clear message to our people that we remember them, we honor them, and that we will not forget them. (more…)
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Ernest Borgnine: All-American Badass
by Kurt SchlichterCompared to the generic twerps the Hollywood machine pumps out today and labels as “stars,” at 92, Ernest Borgnine remains the real deal. He is to the genetically-engineered robots like the Zac Effrons and Robert Pattinsons of the world what a shot of straight-up Jack Daniels is to a watered down cosmopolitan served with a straw. Borgnine has lived a real life, full of ups and down, and his face shows it. In contrast, today’s stars look like they were raised in protective cocoons after being genetically engineered to perfect their bone structure, dark eyebrows and pouting lips. And that’s just the guys.
Look at his life. Borgnine was born to Italian immigrant parents in 1917, spent 10 years in the Navy, including all of World War II, then bummed around as a second string character actor for another decade before snagging an Oscar in his first major role. The closest thing to life experience one of today’s stars has is a three week stint at $5,000-a-day rehab resort getting seaweed facials and talking about how his daddy never told him he loved him during group therapy while secretly gobbling the vicodins he smuggled in inside the liner of his Louis Vuitton cosmetics case. (more…)
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Has America Gone Crazy the Last Two Weeks?
by Kurt SchlichterOn a trip that included a leg in a Blackhawk helicopter, I stepped off a KLM jet at LAX Monday after nearly a day in the air and found that apparently, during a short 9-day absence, my country had gone insane.
I was in Kosovo and largely out of touch with things happening back here in the States. I had no Internet, limited phone connectivity, and access only to CNN. This means that while I was gone I received nothing in the way of useful information. So imagine my surprise at all the news when I returned home.
Maybe you were not aware of it, but apparently the United States government now pretty much owns General Motors. I’m going to say that again, because it’s nuts – especially to those of us a certain age (44) who always saw GM as pretty much the Cadillac of American capitalism. The government owns General Motors. Let that notion roll around in your think-gourd for a few seconds.
I’m not really clear on the technical political science term for this phenomenon, since at UC San Diego my major was Coors Light with a minor in failed relationships, but that sounds an awful lot like socialism. (more…)
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Memorial Day: A Rejection of Peacenik Foolishness
by Kurt SchlichterMemorial Day puts the lie to the nonsense that violence never solves anything.
Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof. They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.
Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging…. It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.
Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius. It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing. (more…)
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‘Antichrist’: Lars von Trier Bores Me
by Kurt SchlichterAntichrist hasn’t even come out in the United States and I’m already bored.
If you haven’t heard about Antichrist yet, you will. It’s the latest movie from Danish art film director Lars von Trier, who has made a name for himself with critically-hailed movies that push the limits his audiences’ tolerance for bizarre sex, bloody violence and artistic pretension. One of his recent movies focused on an American town where slavery never ended, while another had pretty much an entire American village raping Nicole Kidman. A third film ends with the American authorities hanging Icelandic rock waif Bjork. Sensing some themes? By all accounts, Antichrist is a similarly delightful romp.
Naturally, the critics adore him, and combined with the fact that von Trier despises Americans, you would expect that he would get cut some slack by the French audience at Cannes last weekend when the festival screened Antichrist. Not so – the few cheers were apparently drowned out by a tsunami of boos when the lights went up. What happened?
Maybe, just maybe, people are starting to catch on to the fact that shocking art has become anything but. The problem for Mr. von Trier and those like him who specialize in transgressive art is that there’s really very little in the way of conventional morality left to transgress. (more…)
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News Media: Stop Digging
by Kurt Schlichter
The first rule of getting out of a hole you have dug yourself into is to stop digging. But at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, they handed out shovels at the door.
Let’s review the state of American journalism. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of collapse, with a savvy investor sooner scooping up a handful of Chrysler common stock then pumping cash into the Boston Globe. The New York Times’ stock is so toxic it can only be stored inside the Yucca Mountain repository, and I can’t drive by the Los Angeles Times building without some laid-off lifestyle columnist offering to wash my windshield for a buck. Some newspapers have gone entirely on-line, making them not even newspapers at all. (more…)
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Sergeants Rock
by Kurt SchlichterI just cannot get behind this Star Trek rebirth. The whole thing is just so unrealistic. Not the warp speed or phasers or beaming about the universe – those are at least remotely plausible. I am talking about the fact that the starship Enterprise is composed entirely of officers and yet it still seems to function. Where are the non-commissioned officers (NCO), the petty officers and sergeants who actually make any military organization run? No, I can suspend disbelief over Klingons and tribbles, and I actively support the notion of green alien hotties. But the idea of a functioning military unit without sergeants is just a wormhole too far.
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Hollywood movies often focus on the commanders, the captains and colonels, but they have also managed to highlight some great sergeants as well. When you are picking out DVDs for next weekend, remember that May 16th is Armed Forces Day and consider a few selections that show the sergeant in all his gruff and grumbling glory.
If you have never experienced the joy of going through basic training and do not plan to, your first stop should be Full Metal Jacket, with R. Lee Ermey’s legendary portrayal of a Marine drill instructor who must have missed out on the block of instruction on sensitivity. I saw this in the theater about a week before I reported to Basic. That was a poor idea. (more…)
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The Elizabeth Edwards Pity Party
by Kurt SchlichterElizabeth Edwards has hit the chat show circuit to hawk her new memoir “Resilience.” Her interview with Oprah airs Thursday. Elizabeth has some important lessons to teach the young women of today. The most important of these lessons is to be nothing like her, though I’m pretty sure that’s not the message she is trying to send.
Typically, when someone whines about his or her circumstances, I take a common sense approach and start by blaming the victim. The fact is that bad things tend to happen to people who make bad, or at least dumb, decisions. No money? You’re probably not working hard enough. Dead end job? You probably didn’t get an education. Creepy husband who cheats with a trampy party girl and humiliates you in front of the entire nation? You probably chose to marry and stick with a creepy husband who would cheat with a trampy party girl and humiliate you in front of the entire nation. (more…)
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Hollywood’s Default Villain: Your Employer
by Kurt SchlichterWatching “24″ this week, I realized that our number one threat is multi-national corporations with battalions of hired killers on the payroll. Similarly, “Michael Clayton,” “The International,” the new “State of Play” and many others have taught me that big companies assassinate their rivals, whistleblowers, policemen and random passersby with astonishing regularity.
I wish. But then, I’m a trial lawyer and I could use a new house.
Sadly, the real world is much more esoteric than the portrait Hollywood paints, and the real threat is not quite so picturesque. Instead of corporate death squads composed of hardboiled mercenaries with high tech assault rifles, the real killers are boring jihadi doofuses with dusty AKs, booby-trapped Fiats and the occasional boxcutter.
Let’s stop and check the numbers. Real terrorists, counting the victims of 9/11 and American losses in Iraq and Afghanistan: Over 7900 murdered. Victims of corporate murder: Zero. Nada. Zip. I would add in the number of Iraqis and Afghanis murdered by these folks, except that toll is beyond counting. And to many liberals, their lives don’t seem to count anyway. (more…)
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The Most Conservative Show On Television
by Kurt SchlichterAmerica is facing a self-esteem crisis. There’s too damn much of it.
In a nation where failure is rewarded with bailouts, the successful are public enemy number one and society’s nannies spread the lie that everyone is a winner, a simple TV singing contest provides the loudest voice of bedrock conservative values like hard work and personal achievement. And that voice has an English accent.
For the three folks who don’t know because they have been living in a cavern next to Osama bin Laden since 2002, “American Idol” has wannabe crooners appear before a panel of four judges and warble some song for about sixty seconds. The viewers vote (by paying a buck to the phone company) on who stays in the contest and who gets tossed off, but before the voting the singers get feedback. This is when the fun begins. (more…)
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Memo to Hollywood: There’s Money Sitting On the Table
by Kurt SchlichterThat the SEALs solved the pirate problem with three shots/three kills last weekend was no surprise; what was should have been really interesting to those of you in the Industry was the American public’s reaction. The public was thrilled. The good guys won, the bad guys lost – decisively. There is a lesson there for you.
Here’s another lesson. During an unpopular war, a popular star risked everything to bring a bestselling book to the screen about American fighting men battling a cruel and vicious enemy. In 1968, you might think an unabashedly pro-war movie where the Americans were the heroes and the enemy the villains would have been soundly rejected, and it was – by the liberal elite.
Roger Ebert, who never saw a film trashing the American fighting man he didn’t praise, still lists John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” as one of his most hated films forty years later. But the public welcomed it, a film that could tell good from evil, and turned it into a hit. It even spawned a hit song. Where is the next war movie that outrages Roger Ebert while lining audiences up around the block? (more…)
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