For this video, I wanted to do something that Conservatives had never done before. I wanted to create a stand-alone, kick-butt music single that also happened to be coming from Conservatives.
So I headed on down to Shock City Studios in Saint Louis, owned by Chris Loesch, with nothing more than a concept. The idea; what if the founding fathers rose from the dead only to see how badly we’ve screwed things up? What you now see is the fruit of hard working professionals as well as the inability to pay our rap-video sirens in anything more than sandwiches.
Note: No women were actually objectified during the making of this video. Not while they were looking.
Last week was a box office nail biter that went down to the wire. In the end, “Chronicle” prevailed over “Woman In Black,” and Sensei extended his streak to 12 straight weeks. Phew! Other prediction sites? Not so lucky.
This week, even the great George Lucas has his hands full with a Valentine’s Day timed release. This weekend’s predictions and revenue results go as follows:
1. The Vow ($37 Million) – There are forces at work that can even beat “Star Wars” sometimes. A romantic drama on the weekend before Valentine’s Day will be one of those. The timing on this film really couldn’t be better.
2. Safe House ($32 Million) – Denzel Washington is also such a force at the box office. Big Hollywood’s own John Nolte had some great comments on this in one of his Daily Call Sheets this week. This will be yet another action film of Mr. Washington’s to beat projections. Liam Neeson showed how reliable this audience is right now with “The Grey”’s success. Look for even better results here. (more…)
Judicial Watch and the producers of the Sarah Palin documentary “The Undefeated” have a new film designed to make members of both political parties a mite nervous.
The new film’s trailer will debut tonight at the annual CPAC convention in Washington. The clip will show Judicial Watch’s battle versus bipartisan corruption as well as corrupt elements within the Obama administration.
Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon and produced in association with Constant Motion Entertainment, the Judicial Watch film will be released in the summer of 2012. The film will chronicle Judicial Watch’s heroic battles to clean up government corruption in Washington, DC, focusing most comprehensively on its efforts to counter the unprecedented corruption and secrecy of the permanent political class and, currently, the Obama Administration. The film will comprehensively expose the Beltway’s current scandals, including: “Fast and Furious”; Solyndra and “Green Energy”; federal bailouts and earmarks; the New Black Panthers; ACORN and voter fraud; stealth amnesty; threats to the integrity of the 2012 elections; and new attacks on government transparency and accountability.
The film is a companion piece to the upcoming book, “The Corruption Chronicles, Obama’s Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government,” by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. The Judicial Watch book is scheduled for release in July 2012, from Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions.
Singer/actor Will.i.am rallied Obama Nation in 2008 with his original song “Yes We Can.”
Turns out the performer actually meant to sing “You Better You Bet.”
Will.i.am spoke about his support for Obama during a fundraising event this week as well as why he created his own foundation to support education.
The Black Eyed Peas leader said he was inspired by the 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” about U.S. public education. He said that “Superman is not coming to save no neighborhood or no education system.”
Please take a moment to digest, or better yet, diagram that sentence. Let’s move on.
Will.i.am also talked politics: He said President Barack Obama is not a “magic man,” and that people shouldn’t expect him to solve the country’s problems with “some freakin’ plan.”
Has the culture war made its way to our children’s iPads?
Allan Covert is putting out digital children’s books through Cherry Tree Media that a publicist describes as being “filled with patriotic, American values story themes.” But Covert insists that the books, which are available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, are not some political hot potato.
“I don’t feel that pride in America is conservative or liberal,” Covert told POLITICO.
Still, he’s in town this week alongside his business partner Dan Kessler to promote the products through some powerful, conservative channels: Andrew Breitbart hosted Covert and Kessler at his home on Wednesday for a party celebrating the new products and Covert has been hitting up Radio and Bloggers Row at CPAC to get the word out.
Today’s screenwriters often have little use for white and black hats.
The modern hero is less than perfect, to put it mildly. Think Showtime’s “Dexter,” or films like the “Bourne” franchise where shades of gray are the order of the day.
The era of John Wayne-style heroes is no more.
Enter “Safe House,” the new Denzel Washington thriller about a rogue CIA agent who possesses a file so important people are lining up to kill him. Washington’s character, Tobin Frost, is a prime example of the modern anti-hero. He’s a mastermind who went off the grid a decade ago against the will of his government.
At least that’s what we’re told.
The film keeps us guessing about Tobin’s true nature, and that’s part of the story’s appeal. But “Safe House’s” impressive nuance ends abruptly when it’s time to give us a typical Hollywood finale. (Major Spoilers Ahead)
Sometimes, The Material Girl is the sexually charged songstress posing nude for a coffee table book or dry humping one of her tour dancers. Next, she’s the primly dressed children’s book author trying to be a good role model for her own kids.
This week, the latter piped up to chastise singer M.I.A. for flipping the audience the bird during Madonna’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Madonna has taken to the airwaves to express her disappointment with M.I.A.’s decision to flip the bird at cameras during the halftime show, calling the move a “teenager … irrelevant thing to do.” Madge was chatting with Ryan Seacrest about her performance when he brought up the incident.
To the pop star, the middle finger was simply “out of place” at a show characterized by “such a feeling of love and good energy and positivity.
M.I.A. would have better served the event by making out with another woman, apparently.
According to Michael Moore’s tweet (and everyone on MSNBC and CNN), President Barack Obama is correct to force the Catholic Church to offer insurance that provides free birth control, sterilization, and the Morning After abortion pill — because “the law is clear” about “equal access to birth control for all women no matter where they work.”
Really? There’s a right to free birth control through your employer? Liar.
But what Moore is doing here is what Obama and his media minions are doing. They’re turning a government mandate that violates the First Amendment into a “rights” issue.
What Obama is attempting to do to the Catholic Church is no different than creating a federal mandate that would require every Islamic-run business to provide pork rinds in their vending machines — because people have a right to equal access to fat free foods.
Who you gunna believe? George Lucas or your lying eyes?
Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
Granted, Lucas has every right to change his films, every right to make them worse. That is his property. But this absurd stance of dismissing criticism after he alters (dramatically, in some cases) something that was so universally beloved, is truly remarkable. If it’s “just a movie” why the non-stop tweaking?
And the real problem isn’t the tweaks. Lucas is right that films get tweaked all the time. No question. The problem is that he practically forces us to purchase his inferior recuts, and only after we’ve all been stupid enough to do that, does he release the untouched originals. This is exactly what he did with the DVD release.
If, in this latest Blu-ray release, Lucas would’ve had the decency to include the original cuts of the films, I doubt very much the backlash would be as big as it is.
There’s nothing wrong with being a profiteer. Just don’t pretend you’re something else.
Typically when you see Dwayne Johnson, otherwise known as ‘The Rock’, in a trailer of a movie, it’s almost a guarantee that the film is packed with crazed stunts, an overacted plot and those huge pecs bursting through a skin-tight shirt.
I like The Rock because he always manages to steal every scene he’s in with that huge on-screen presence; you can’t deny him that. However, some of his films are goofy and tired; d0es anyone remember “The Tooth Fairy?” I hope not. With that said, I walked into this film not expecting much at all and thought the 3D effects were going to be non-existent. I walked out pleasantly surprised and with a smile on my face.
We were first introduced to Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson) four years ago in “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” based on the classic Jules Verne tale. Now, Sean has matured into a handsome, determined teenager whose hormones are raging as he eagerly awaits another exciting adventure.
“In Darkness,” Poland’s submission for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, is a movie that drives home the abomination of the Holocaust in a freshly chilling way.
The story, based on true events as recalled by survivors in a 1991 book, begins in a Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lvov in 1943, where occupying German soldiers and their Ukrainian allies are slaughtering men, women, and children in the streets with the casual barbarity that was a hallmark of Nazi derangement.
Polish director Agnieszka Holland presents some of this depravity (in one scene, a Ukrainian officer takes a break from shooting Jews to exchange greetings with a friend, then happily returns to his hideous work) in an almost offhand way, as part of the day-to-day scenery in that awful time and place. This slight distancing serves to deepen our horror.
The central character is a sewer worker named Socha (Robert Wieckjewicz), a Polish Catholic who moonlights as a burglar in order to sustain his small family. Like many of his neighbors, Socha has idly concluded that the Lvov Jews must somehow deserve their fate; he has other worries of his own. Then, one night, he and a fellow burglar glimpse a group of naked and terrified Jewish women being herded through the forest by soldiers. After they disappear from view, the two men move on—and before long come upon those women again, now shot dead and clumped in piles among the trees. Later, at home with his family, Socha listens as his wife (Kinga Preis) expresses a Christian empathy for the Jews of Lvov, and is surprised to learn from her that Jesus, too, was a Jew. We feel a small light begin to kindle in Socha’s mind.
Do you promise to love your wife, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, while she suffers through grievous memory loss, as long as you both shall live?
That’s the dilemma facing Leo (Channing Tatum) after his wife Paige (Rachel McAdams) recovers from a serious brain trauma wiping out all memories of their marriage in “The Vow.”
The film, loosely based on a true story, tells the standard tale of a young couple who meet, fall in love, get married to live their happily ever after until one of them falls out of love. It’s just not in the way you expect.
When Paige wakes up from a medically induced coma following a car accident, she thinks she is currently engaged to ex-boyfriend Jeremy (Scott Speedman), still in law school, and is in close contact with her estranged parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange). Paige resumes her old life, the one she lived before meeting Leo and becoming a completely different person.
So artsy Leo hardly seems her type, and her parents seize the opportunity to re-enter her life again. Can Leo win back the heart of the love of his life? (more…)
NBC’s Friday night series “Grimm” is a fantasy show, but for reasons I cannot fathom the program’s writers chose to mine that most heinous relic of Mittel-Europa: the story of the seemingly good and kind Jew who is really a demonic creature underneath for last week’s episode “Organ Grinders.”
A brief history of blood libels, courtesy of Wikipedia:
• In England in 1144, the Jews of Norwich were accused of ritual murder after a boy was found dead with stab wounds in the woods. This was followed by similar accusations elsewhere, leading to massacres in London and York. In 1190, “the Norwich Jews were butchered in their homes.”
• In France in 1171, a similar accusation against the Jewish community of Bloise led to the massacre by fire of some 40 Jews.
• In Germany, a boy’s body was found in the Lauter river. Based on “miraculous” evidence that “proved” the Jews had hung the boy by the feet and had opened every artery in his body to obtain the blood, the Jews were executed.
• In Russia in 1820, a Jew in Zverki is accused of kidnapping a six year old boy, draining his blood for nine days and dumping his body. In 1997, “Belorussian state TV showed a film alleging the story is true.”
This is the gist of the blood libel: the belief that Jews kidnap children to drain them of their blood. It didn’t die with the Nazis. It is still in currency today. You have only to turn on Syrian or Egyptian television to see. But American TV? (Spoilers Ahead)
Clint Eastwood says audiences understood exactly what his Chrysler advertisement broadcast during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast meant – “let’s work our way out of [the recession].”
Those who say otherwise are missing the point, Eastwood tells CNBC in a new interview to air tomorrow during the 6 a.m. EST edition of “Squawk Box.” The following is from a rush transcript of the interview:
I’m surprised at the people who are supposed to be intelligent have interpreted it otherwise because it’s very disappointing to see that because the average person seems to get it … there are some people who make it a political element about everything you talk about from everything to where you’re dining or what on.
Eastwood also talked about out of control government spending, throwing his weight behind the bipartisan commission created by the Obama administration to the address the issue:
I was kind of amazed that they took Simpson-Bowles and assigned them this research and they come back with a recommendation which was exactly stop spending. And that everyone said, ‘that’s enough from you guys. Go home….’”
“I don’t know why the current administration assigned them to it if they weren’t going to pay any attention to it.
The second “Transformers,” 2009’s “Revenge of the Fallen,” was without a doubt the worst movie-going experience I have ever had. I’ve lost fist fights at the movies and that experience wasn’t comparable to sitting through director Michael Bay’s dreadful, punishing, confusing, migraine-inducing piece of junk. I don’t care that “Revenge of the Fallen” mocked Obama and made his administration the arch-villain; I don’t care that it was openly pro-military and pro-American. It was still utter torture to sit through, and I would rather watch “Crash” Clockwork Orange-style than put myself through that again.
But all is now forgiven.
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is not only a terrific piece of popcorn entertainment, it’s far and away the best of the trilogy. And the best news is that Bay’s delivered another pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-military blockbuster that made somewhere around a billion dollars. We don’t get too many of these, and we should embrace and support the good ones.
The film isn’t perfect. In most cases, I still can’t tell an Autobot (the good guys) from a Decepticon (the bad guys), which makes it difficult to understand who to root for during the many action sequences, but unlike its predecessor, “Dark of the Moon” has a story that sets up and explains the stakes well enough that you don’t feel like you’re watching someone else play a video game for two hours.
Length is another problem. This is a four-act story instead of the standard three-act, but the too-long climax really is jaw-droppingly well done and on Blu-ray the only thing that surpasses the fantastic picture quality is a sound design that made my archaic 5.1 system do things I never thought possible.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi has had enough of Stephen Colbert’s political sheninagans.
Not really. The former Speaker of the House has unleashed a new faux political ad chastising the Comedy Central comic for his faux political ads. Their combined purpose? To squash the GOP’s Super PAC ads, of course, before they can take aim at President Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, Obama’s recent flip-flop on using those very same Super PAC ads goes unmentioned in Pelosi’s new video:
In a new TV ad, Nancy Pelosi takes aim at Colbert’s Super PAC, suggesting that their former friendship (note picture of her signing his wrist cast) has been ruined by the mock-conservative pundit’s refusal to disclose the complete sources of his funding….
Name this movie: An ace CIA operative, condemned as a rogue and now hunted by the Company, bashes and crashes his way through colorful foreign settings, pursued by heavily armed hit men, while back at Langley headquarters an inscrutable deputy director and one of his top lieutenants are arousing the suspicion of another officer, a woman, who’s starting to wonder why her two bosses are so intent on terminating this troublesome renegade.
Yes, it does sound like a “Bourne” movie, doesn’t it? But no, this is “Safe House,” with Denzel Washington taking over for Matt Damon, Sam Shepard replacing Scott Glenn as the steely Agency overseer, Brendan Gleeson in for Brian Cox as the dodgy controller, and Vera Farmiga stepping into the Joan Allen role as his straight-shooting subordinate.
The picture has a familiar swarming hand-held visual style, thanks to cinematographer Oliver Wood (who shot all three “Bourne” films) and editor Richard Pearson (who worked on “The Bourne Supremacy”). At one point, an agitated spook even yelps out a demand for remote surveillance with the words “I want eyes on this!”—a line previously yelped by David Strathairn’s agitated spook in “The Bourne Ultimatum.”
“Safe House” may be faux Bourne, but for those counting the moments till the release of “The Bourne Legacy” next August, it might seem better than no Bourne at all. Swedish director Daniel Espinosa has a flair for action staging—the one-on-one fight scenes, agreeably many in number and often set in confined spaces, are smashingly effective. And first-time screenwriter David Guggenheim has usefully adjusted the Bourne template. Here, Washington’s character, Tobin Frost—nominally the Jason Bourne figure—isn’t an unwitting innocent being set up by his shadowy CIA masters; he’s an actual traitor who has been selling Agency secrets for nearly a decade.
Kirk Cameron could have ended up as yet another sitcom star gone bad.
Instead, the teen heartthrob from the ’80s sitcom “Growing Pains” became a parent, headlined one of the biggest movie sleepers in recent memory (“Fireproof”) and today addressed the conservative conference CPAC about his latest project.
Cameron’s “Monumental,” hitting theaters next month, mourns a nation in decline and looks to the past for a brighter future. The actor turned activist told CPAC attendees why he made the film:
As I look around I get this sinking feeling that we’re off track, that there’s something sick in the soul of our country,” Cameron told those gathered at the conservative conference in Washington on Thursday. “I examine the fruit that’s hanging on the tree of America and I can see that it’s rotting. And that concerns me deeply.”
On February 7th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the marriage protection amendment, commonly known as Prop 8, violates the U.S. Constitution. Although it passed with the support of 52% of California voters in 2008, the court said it “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”
From where I sit, this ruling was a travesty, not only because it discarded the wishes of 7 million Californians who voted for it, but because much of the money to overturn it came from Hollywood elites who are completely out of touch with the heart and soul of America.
Honestly, watching the decision come down from the 9th Circuit was like watching Brad Pitt and Elton John stomp all ever everything that flyover country holds near and dear to its heart. I cite Pitt and John because Pitt gave at least $100,000 to “fight the proposition,” and in Jan. 2011, John played a benefit concert in Beverly Hills that raised $3,000,000 for the same cause.
Of course, these two were not alone. Steven Bing, long time Democrat Party donor and Hillary Clinton supporter, donated $500,000 to the cause, and according to Advocate magazine, Mary J. Blige and Melissa Etheridge were right there in the mix as well. Oh, and we can’t overlook old “Meathead,” Rob Reiner, who opposed Prop 8 when it was on the ballot in 2008 and who’s been “one of the biggest fundraisers behind the legal effort” to overturn it since. (more…)
Conservatives will start rolling their eyes early on in the new movie “Safe House.”
Denzel Washington stars as a rogue CIA agent who turns himself in to U.S. authorities, and before you can say “human rights abuse” his character undergoes a waterboarding treatment.
Had “Safe House” come out five years ago, the scene might have included jabs at the Bush administration, the War on Terror or both. Likely both. Instead, the scene arrives and leaves without any sermonizing to lessen the moment’s impact.
We’re supposed to learn that Washington’s character, the colorfully named Tobin Frost, is a certifiable bad-ass, and that the information he possesses is critically important to the story. And that’s it.
----- Here's a link to Cherry Tree Media. Politico: Has the culture war made its way to our children’s iPads? Allan Covert is putting out digital children’s books through Cherry Tree Media that a publicist describes as being “filled with patriotic, American values story themes.” But Covert...
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