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Here’s a link to Cherry Tree Media.

Politico:

A few weeks ago Big Hollywood posted “‘Watchmen’ Creator Joins Occupy Comics,” noting how Deadline.com reported on Alan Moore joined other comic creators in planning a series of comic books in support of the Occupy Wall Street insurgency. In response to that story, I propose that conservatives launch a story and art project with our own perspective on #OWS.

Here is what I mean.

Alan Moore and other comic artists joining together to support #OWS is no surprise, since the comic industry is as left as the rest of the entertainment world. The comic industry previously slammed the Tea Party (although the company and writer of this particular incident later apologized; you be the judge of whether they were sincere), attacked George. W. Bush, presented the U.S. and U.S. military as evil, made an entire celebrated series out of blaspheming God and Christianity (this review of said series is actually quite good even if I don’t entirely agree with it), and has generally churned out leftist propaganda.

I no longer am scandalized at what the comic industry is doing. I expect the behavior, and I don’t envision creators apologizing for it—just as I wouldn’t have expected either Alan Colmes or Eugene Robinson to apologize to Rick Santorum for what they said about the politician’s dead child.

Leftists have made no secret about who they are, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t simply wipe the dust of their town from our feet and stop throwing pearls to them in worthless attempts to change them.

Instead, I propose we fight back.

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Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games,” which will soon see the release of a major film adaptation, is captivating the minds of teenagers and adults around the world. Collins’ unique style has made for an excellent series, appropriate and entertaining for all ages. But after reading and loving all three books, I have to wonder, are the books simply creative fiction, or are they a prediction for the future?

“The Hunger Games” trilogy is based in a country named Panem, which is located on the ruins of North America. Within the country of Panem there are two types of societies, the tyrannical Capitol and the twelve districts.

The Capitol of Panem is the perfect exhibition of power and sheltered opulence. The citizens are rich, well fed, and stocked with everything nice. But while the Capitol is throwing their big parties and buying expensive goods, the districts surrounding them are working hard to fulfill the Capitol’s every need, leaving them with next to nothing.

The twelve districts of Panem are full of misery, poverty, and food shortages. Each of the districts has an assigned duty by the Capitol, from agriculture to coal mining; they work hard and suffer to provide their designated good. The citizens of the districts live within the tyrannical laws of the Capitol, and if they ever decide to break the law, they are sure to pay. The Capitol strives every day to remind the people of the districts that their reign is supreme, and one of their favorite torture devices is the annual Hunger Games.

Every year the Capitol goes around to each of the districts to select two teenagers to fight ’til the death. With 24 in the beginning, only one will win–well, usually, that is.

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Smack in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, just a few miles south of where the 405 freeway abuts Interstate 5, stands a sixty-year-old Budweiser brewery.

In the shadow of the landmark’s hundred foot exhaust stacks is my daughter’s dance school. Since she was three, she’s been attending classes four to five days a week. So often is the commute that I’ve joked that I’m bolstering my economic bottom line by having my little girl work the Bud plant’s swing shift as an apprentice bottler.

Kidding aside, I often take my work with me. Laptop. iPad. Scripts that require reading. But sometimes, if the timing works out, I can catch a movie at a nearby movieplex. The closest theater is a five-minute drive. Not the safest zip code. But I figure, once the lights dim, who can tell the difference?

I don’t recall the picture I’d chosen. Something Hollywood and banal. The trailers were already playing when I settled into my seat, balancing a Diet Coke and a popcorn. This is when the film broke. The lights automatically dialed back to full. I heard groans from the some of my fellow movie patrons. About twenty by my count. Hispanic mostly. A few were couples. Some moms and their children. Then there was the pair of dangerous young men seated two rows in front of me. The kind of fellahs local LAPD might identify as “male usuals.” Gang colors. Tats up to their necks. Body language saying “I don’t give a shit” and homophobically spaced with an empty chair between them. Practically everything about the duo was a transmission that they were bad ass, soul-jacking motherfuckers.

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As is apparent from perusing Big Hollywood for any given amount of time that the current crop of Prime Time Television shows leave quite a bit to be desired. There is also nothing new under the sun, plots are rehashed, and even series’ are being recycled. Occasionally, though, an old dog can be taught new tricks. So it is with the BBC’s Sherlock.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation has been a regular in all known forms of media. From the Strand magazine where Holmes got his start, through radio and television and on to the big screen, the great detective has spanned the generations. He is considered the most played character in all of media, with at least 75 different actors taking on the role.

While American audiences have most recently been treated to Robert Downey Jr.’s performance on the big screen, the real gem of modern mystery is the BBC’s mini-series Sherlock. Now entering its second season, it is a luscious masterpiece.

The most fantastic part of the series is that it isn’t new. Each episode works with an existing Holmes story but takes it to another level. Each episode is more of a movie, running for ninety minutes, allowing the plot to build and the characters to gain more depth.

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Chief Chris Kyle was a Navy Seal for ten years. He served four combat tours in Iraq, earned numerous medals, saved countless lives and accomplished more than most men walking around in this great country ever will. He has now retold his experiences in the new autobiography “American Sniper,” which hits book shelves today.

Chief Kyle tells his story in what must be dubbed a “no bull” manner. He has little time for political correctness or even political incorrectness. He’s certainly not a writer. But that is what makes what is written so good and his story so compelling. Chief Kyle ignores irony and trying to push either a political agenda or an emotional one. He simply writes his story. The emotions and everything else come naturally through. You can feel Chief Kyle sitting in a chair allowing us the privilege of hearing his story, his story of bravery. Bravery is too clichéd a word, though. What Chief Kyle experienced is beyond bravery. His pureness in his patriotism, his Christianity, his need for battle, his love for family breathes a freshness into the words on each page. Chief Kyle gives himself to us for 379 pages despite already giving us so much.

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Rice Krispie Treats. They are the perfect metaphor for Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, “REAMDE.” Stephenson likes to make poetic illustrations about junk food in some of his books, most famously his paean to Cap’n Crunch in the “Cryptonomicon.” This time around, it’s the aforementioned Treats, an amalgam of two fully formed foods, puffed rice cereal and marshmallows. “REAMDE” mixes the international thriller and geek gamer novels, seamlessly blending the two with only occasionally forays into obscure tech-speak.

The book, like all of Stephenson’s, is extremely character driven, flipping from one viewpoint to another, often in the same time sequence, allowing the reader to experience the action from multiple viewpoints. It revolves around a growing cast of characters, starting with former marijuana smuggler, now online pole playing game mogul, Richard “Dodge” Forthrast. He brings along his adopted niece, former Eritrean refugee — now Midwestern girl — Zula Forthrast.

The motley lot expands to include an ex-Spetsnaz security expert, a Hungarian hacker, a Hakka guide, a Chinese virus righter, a Welsh convert to Islam cum-terrorist mastermind, an MI-6 agent, and an Irish American CIA agent.

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When comic book scholars chart the moment the medium shed its one-dimensional sensibilities and veered toward adulthood, they cite Alan Moore and Frank Miller as the duo that made it possible.

A recent dust up between the two shows that making comics more adult was all they had in common.  In response to Miller’s recent characterization of the Occupy Wall Street movement as “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness,” Moore countered that the protesters represented a “completely justified howl of moral outrage” and have behaved “in a very intelligent, nonviolent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it.”

Not content with attacking Miller the citizen, Moore went on to attack his works as well.  Surveying Miller’s twenty-plus years of output, Moore stated that these comic efforts showcased, “a rather unpleasant sensibility apparent in Frank Miller’s work for quite a long time.”

The comic fan community has been shocked that these two giants are disagreeing, but they shouldn’t be.

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The documentary feature “His Way” premiered on HBO this past Spring. “His Way” is based on  the autobiography “When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead,” which highlights the life and career of the great film producer/concert promoter/manager/philanthropist/entrepreneur Jerry Weintraub over seven decades.

Weintraub first managed musical acts ranging from The Four Seasons to The Moody Blues, then promoted artists such as Led Zeppelin, John Denver, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Kiss, Aerosmith and Queen. He also promoted the “comeback” tours for Elvis Presley, then Frank Sinatra. Weintraub’s movie producing credits include “Nashville,” “Oh God!,” “Diner,” “Cruising,” “The Karate Kid,” “National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation,” “The Karate Kid” (2010), and the 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” as well as “Ocean’s 12″ and “Ocean’s 13.” He appeared in all the “Ocean” films as well as “The Firm.”

“His Way” is the first documentary feature film directed by Douglas McGrath. McGrath is an actor/writer/director whose past directing credits include “Emma,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Infamous,” and “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” In my opinion, “His Way” is pound for pound and frame for frame the most entertaining and inspirational documentary of this past year. “His Way” was shot and edited for nearly ten months and culled from approximately seventy hours of interview footage.

KW: You took an autobiography and turned it into a documentary film. That doesn’t seem like it is usually done very often.

DM: It wasn’t quite as direct as that. Graydon Carter [Managing Editor, Vanity Fair] had called me and asked if I was interested in making a film about Jerry and Jerry’s book was not out at that point. So I read Rich Cohen’s piece that he had done for Vanity Fair and said, “Boy, this guy sounds like quite a character.” (more…)

In 1895 Kentucky State Senator William Goebel shot John Sanford in broad daylight. Five years later he was being sworn in as the Governor of Kentucky while lying on his death bed with an assassin’s bullet in his chest. He remains the only sitting governor of a U.S. state to die by an assassin’s hand.

At the dawn of the twentieth century his will brought the Commonwealth of Kentucky to the edge of civil war. He was a man unafraid to turn the Bluegrass blood red in pursuit of his ideals and personal power.

Politicians don’t need guns to bully their citizens into compliance, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have one handy. In the case of Goebel and Sanford it is interesting to note that Sanford (while a fellow Democrat) was a banker, not a man of the people. As every good Occupy Wall Street student knows, bankers get what is coming to them. No need to mourn their passing.

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Early on in the excellent biography “And So it Goes – Kurt Vonnegut: A Life,” the reader can detect the Rosebud-like origins of Vonnegut’s attitude toward history.

Novelists like Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer attributed their view of an irrational world to the chaos of World War II combat. But even before Vonnegut got off the POW train at Dresden, the author had been mugged by a chaotic world.

The author of “Slaughterhouse Five’s” privileged background was undone by the Wall Street crash, recalls the sturdy new tome by Charles J. Shield. Vonnegut’s brother frustrated his chance to go to Harvard by forcibly enrolling him into a science studies curriculum at Cornell. His mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day. Dresden is merely a compressed confirmation of Vonnegut’s view of “a world gone mad.”

And the list of maddening elements was only getting started.

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Let’s be honest. Movies, today, aren’t just one step away from being left wing propaganda, they just plain suck.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

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During the Cold War, P.J. O’Rourke got a lot of mileage from his persona of ’60s radical-turned partying conservative. With drink in one hand and Groucho glasses in the other, O’Rourke lampooned the joylessness of communism. But after the Wall fell, he seemed to have lost his way. With this latest collection of essays, O’Rourke has found a new persona – bewildered, late-in-life parent.

In “Holidays in Heck,” O’Rourke warns us he’s hung up his war correspondent flak jacket for family vacation fun. He has an odd definition for this term, though. We find him hiking in 95-degree weather, landing on an aircraft carrier and reporting from Red China. He hasn’t completely abandoned making political statements out of his encounters. Seeing the dangers firsthand of F-16 piloting, he finds conservative virtues of courage and responsibility in the otherwise RINO Sen. John McCain. O’Rourke confidently predicts that the low-level capitalism he finds in Hong Kong will eventually overthrow the top-level communism.

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Actress Diane Keaton’s new memoir feels like we’re sitting beside the Oscar-winning actress on a therapist’s couch.

“Then Again” lets Keaton, best known for roles in “Annie Hall,” “The Godfather” and “Something’s Gotta Give,” open her soul for a most unconventional look at her life.

And none of it would have been possible without her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.

“Then Again” is like two memoirs in one, the tale of a gifted but insecure actress and her ma, a woman whose artistic talent lacked the outlet her daughter possessed.

Keaton rights that wrong in “Then Again,” a book that’s vigorously self-reflective without being boastful. The beguiling Keaton isn’t like many of her acting peers, and her thoughtful essays reflective that fact.

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Half a year of my life . . . wasted.

That was the first coherent thought that ran through my mind as Ali bin Ahmed Al Falah’s chest puckered into a grapefruit sized exit hole right in front of me. Scarlet and white bits rose like a cloud as he went to his knees, heart torn in half and still pumping…

What ever happened to the world of men’s fiction? In times past, there were whole magazines devoted to telling stories men wanted to read, entire shelves full of books at the local bookstore devoted to men’s fiction. Westerns, pulp adventure, post-apocalyptic survivalist fiction, war fiction, and books that combined all of the above could be found in any B. Dalton and Waldenbooks at the nearest mall.

But now in 2011, that’s all gone. The men’s adventure category has disappeared from the modern bookstore, scrapped to make room for “Twilight” and every other chick-lit paranormal-romance copycat that is glutting the market. And that’s okay. I don’t have anything against Stephenie Meyer and similar authors. More power to them. Anything that gets people away from the TV and gets their noses stuck in books is all right by me, but what about us guys? Don’t we deserve a section of our own in Barnes and Noble?

Yeah, we used to be exiled to the sci-fi and fantasy section, but the ladies are starting to love those genres as much as we do, thanks to Meyer and J. K. Rowling. Those of us nerds who used to hide out in the sci-fi section, silently browsing the shelves and never looking each other in the eye, suddenly find ourselves being overrun with noisy tween fangirls and their fangirl grandmothers scouring our sacred shelves for the next Edward and Bella to get obsessed with. It’s maddening, I say. There’s nowhere left for us to turn. No more really good Westerns. No More pulp. No more War section. Nada. This is an unacceptable turn of events.

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Is it really important for our next President to be against Iran developing nuclear weapons? Or is the scientific development of other countries none of our business ? Author Joel C. Rosenberg’s latest series, which began with “The Twelfth Imam” and continues through the new novel “The Tehran Initiative,” give us the answer to that question with a glimpse into a future with a nuclear Iran.

In “The Twelfth Imam,” David Shirazi is an undercover CIA operative whose assignment is to investigate and confirm the extent of Iran’s nuclear program. The American son of Iranian immigrants, he was a teenager when 9/11 took the life of the mother of the girl he loved. Thanks to his background, he is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Iran’s government and report to Washington regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Meanwhile, in Iran, a man is traveling across the nation, performing miracles and calling followers, among them the leaders of Iran’s government and the Ayatollah. He is believed to be Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali – the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam, the Islamic Messiah. Iran’s leadership vows to follow wherever he leads, including nuclear weapon capability and war. Only one of Iran’s nuclear physicists sees any danger on the horizon, and tries to defect to the United States.

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Back in August of  2010 I posted an article on Big Hollywood discussing the release of my World War II novel, “Hummel’s Cross.”  It is a fictional account, as told from the introspective first person narrative of an old man, of the events in the life Erich Hummel, a German youth who ends up flying fighter planes for the Luftwaffe during the war and is so skilled as to be decorated by Hitler himself.

And yet he will eventually turn traitor to the Nazi regime by first helping to hide and then eventually spirit a family of German Jews out of the country during the height of the air war over Western Europe.

What made the book’s release an interesting story in and of itself is that I decided to forgo—perhaps ‘bypass’ is a better word—the traditional route of many submissions to literary agents and then, should I be lucky enough to land representation, eventual publication under an existing publishing house. Instead I took a chance and published the book myself, through my own company that I formed called OCM Paperbacks (a division of my money management firm Occam Capital). There were several reasons for going down this road.

Why Did I Self-Publish?

First of all, it is very difficult for even the finest of fiction pieces to find an agent, let alone get published.  This is a sign of the times, and I do not fault the houses for this.  Like all businesses, they have limited resources and must, in the end, make a profit more than a literary statement.  If given the choice between an unknown author offering up a fiction title or either the next batch of Stephen King manuscripts or a renowned (or infamous) figure in the news coming out with a tell-all memoir, of course they must go for the sure thing.  So the odds are my manuscript, like the vast majority of  submissions, would have died in the “reject” pile. (more…)

Any novel that opens with crazy jihadists killing jolly old Saint Nick on the first page can’t be too bad.

“Soft Target,” in bookstores Dec 6th, manages to be more than just not bad; it’s a modern Western on amphetamines; it’s Tom Clancy if Clancy were a better weaver of the old fashioned good vs. evil yarn; it’s… well, it’s Stephen Hunter all the way. Semper fi and all that.

Those who are familiar with the author will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence. Those two ingredients are enough to carry the novel through a harsh and very quick 254 pages. You will not want to put this one down.

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This February marks the 200th birthday of the man whom some have called the greatest novelist who ever lived. All kinds of tributes are in the works for Charles Dickens’ bicentennial, including biographies, festivals and three new adaptations (one feature film and two miniseries) of his novels.

Turner Classic Movies is getting an early start on the celebration. The cable channel will be showing classic Dickens films every Monday night throughout the month of December. The lineup is a stellar one, including such well-loved movies as David Lean’s “Great Expectations” (1946), and both the 1938 and 1951 versions of “A Christmas Carol.”

Also noteworthy are the 1935 “A Tale of Two Cities,” featuring a justly celebrated star turn from Ronald Colman, and the 1958 “A Tale of Two Cities,” with a performance by Dirk Bogarde that is less revered but, to my mind, even better than Colman’s.

But if, by some misfortune, you had time for only one of these movies, I’d recommend you make it “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” (1935), which is having its TCM premiere at 8 p.m. EST tonight. The film has never had a DVD release; in recent years, the only way to see it has been to snag an out-of-print VHS copy from a vendor on Amazon or eBay. It’s a case of criminal neglect, if you ask me, for “Edwin Drood” is a film that deserves to be much better known than it is.

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