It’s got everything against it:

1) It’s a silent movie 2) in black and white 3) with no-name lead actors, 4) no special effects, 5) a title that oozes pretension, 6) … and it’s French! And now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has to come along and drive the final nail in the coffin, nominating it for 10 Oscars.

Add up all these ingredients and you have the perfect recipe for the dullest, snootiest movie ever, right? That’s the trouble with selling people on “The Artist.”

Normal, non-pretentious people, that is, who don’t think sitting through a black and white movie is a badge of honor, like an artistic Purple Heart (the snob’s version of “taking one for the team”: watching a long, boring movie so you can tell your friends about it).

And that title?  It should have been called “The Comedian.” Or “The Entertainer.” Anything but “The Artist” (that’s “Artiste” in French — mon Dieu!). (more…)

Hard for me to imagine, but I am now 41. Amazing. It seems like yesterday my poofy mullet and parachute pants were all the rage, and Prince had a #1 hit on the radio. Now I’m married to the most beautiful woman, raising six children, and living the American dream. Our country has changed so much since my days of fighting with Carol and Ben on TV. America has always been known as “the land of the free” and “the home of the brave.” It’s the richest, freest nation the world has ever seen. Everyone wants to live here. But as I look around, I’m left with a sinking feeling that America is losing her way. Big time. The soul of our country is sick, and history shows me we are headed for disaster if we don’t change course now.

I’ve been looking around for answers, but all I hear is noise. Everyone is pointing fingers at the Left or the Right, blaming Hollywood or Capitol Hill. Time is flying by too quickly for petty arguments. My children’s future won’t wait. I’ve got to do something now.

Here’s my hunch: Could it be that we have simply forgotten what made us such a great nation in the first place? So many people are waiting around for our leaders to come up with a grand plan to save our nation. But is that really how America got started? What if things actually work the other way around? What if real change doesn’t start at the top but at the bottom? What if the best place to begin transforming our country is not the Oval Office but the dinner table?

For the past year and a half, I’ve been making a film called “Monumental,” and I am thrilled to announce that it’s coming to theaters on March 27. We are creating a live, one-night national event in 500 theaters where audiences can experience a monumental moment together. Then we will release the film in theaters in select cities, while providing helpful new resources to families, churches, and schools who want to go further with what they’ve experienced in the film.  (more…)

As a former liberal, I know exactly how punishing the left can be to anyone who goes off the reservation.

This is particularly true on the cultural left – the arts and creative fields. So when filmmaker Davis Guggenheim unleashed his take on the American educational system in 2010, I’m sure he had absolutely no idea what he was in for and how his film “Waiting for ‘Superman’” would lead rather directly to thousands of people protesting in Wisconsin during early 2011, as this timeline and list of links that I’ve put together pretty clearly shows that it did.

“‘Superman’” is available on Netflix streaming right now. If you care about the country’s future, you should watch it. I think the film occupies a nether region politically, because while most of the film’s message is conservative/libertarian, Guggenheim’s main claim to fame is his Al Gore climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” I think this may have caused many advocates of small government to take a pass on the film, but now that it’s out on video and Netflix, I urge you to reconsider that decision.

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Jimmy Stewart was at times morose and insecure as filming began on the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Since he went off to serve, Hollywood had found new leading men, such as Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck, who both were seven years younger than he was. Some of “Life’s” early scenes called for the now graying Stewart to be just a few years out of high school. He felt ridiculous and considered plastic surgery, then thought better of it. But Jim was helped greatly by his co-star Donna Reed (Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland, and Ginger Rogers were among several actresses considered for the role of Mary Baily).

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Before the romantic scene where George and Mary tearfully and sensuously declare their love for each other, Reed encouraged her leading man to do it in only one unrehearsed take. Capra later joked that Stewart was so nervous during the tender sequence he was forced to wrap a phone chord around the celluloid couple so Jim wouldn’t run away.

“The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” — German Philosopher Immanuel Kant

Stewart was also helped by the actor who played the film’s villain, the wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore, who reminded him that movies had the power to make people happy around the world. The old man’s pep talks helped Jim regain his confidence in his acting chops, and Capra gave the Indiana, Pennsylvania-born Stewart great latitude in playing the role of the small town resident whose big dreams would never be fulfilled. Just before filming the sequence where the Bailey’s Bedford Falls neighbors came to take their money out of the building and loan, Capra advised the future grandma on TV’s “The Waltons,” Ellen Corby, to ask Stewart for $17.50, half the amount that the script called for. The leading man responded by staying in character and impulsively kissing Corby on the cheek.

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“We’re out of cranberry sauce,” I might say.

Three hours later: “Whew. Sorry, guys, you wouldn’t believe it. I had to go to twelve stores to find it!”

Would they really miss me? Wife and mother of two… probably. Alas.

I am one of those boring domestic types who typically watches movies on Netflix when they are at least two years old. I see less than ten movies a year in the real cinema and almost never on opening day (don’t tell anyone at Big Hollywood; that might be a serious deal breaker).

But director Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse” has me very intrigued. I’ve viewed the trailer more times than I care to admit. I will tell you that this is because I’m using it as an example of a kick-ass movie trailer for my daughter’s Destination Imagination team, but that would not be entirely honest (and don’t worry, I didn’t use the word kick-ass with the middle schoolers).

The truth is I’ve been nurturing a hope that “War Horse” may be one of those epic films that stirs your soul and lives in your heart long after you leave the theater.

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Judge Hollywood not only by what it spits out, but also by what it chooses to avoid.

I am always surprised when I have to explain to someone who the Stasi were. In fact, as a default I use the-Stasi-East-German-secret-police as one word. Nevertheless, I should admit that it was not so long ago that I didn’t know the meaning of the word Stasi. When did I learn? When I watched the brilliant, award-winning German film, Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others). That film sparked my unhealthy obsession with the Stasi.

If someone told me they did not know what a Nazi was, I would immediately contact Starfleet to determine the possibility of an intergalactic, hostile spy network on earth. Does such a person even exist? Not unless they have been kept sheltered from all forms of media for the past sixty years.

We are blessed to have many poignant movies about the Nazis and the atrocities committed in concentration camps. As the years tick by and those who lived through those unimaginable experiences slip between the pages of history, I thank God that history has been preserved in books and film.

In contrast, I find the lack of movies about East Germany (or any country behind the Iron Curtain for that matter) rather telling. It is not for absence of living witnesses or data. It is merely a lack of will to even touch the subject. When the president of the United States snubs the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, maybe it is best to just not go there. Encouraging Americans to think about the mind-boggling amount of resources required to maintain the socialist utopia might cause them to question the entire concept of socialism. (more…)

A year ago Big Hollywood’s John Nolte expressed his “predictable heartbreak,” and I did likewise, over disappointing interview comments by Captain America: The First Avenger director Joe Johnston. They seemed desperately designed to reassure his patriotism-hating peers in Hollywood that his superhero “wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver. He’s just a good person.”

As recently as last week, the film’s star Chris Evans chimed in with more apologies about his intrinsically patriotic character. “He might wear the red, white and blue, but I don’t think this is all about America. It is what America stands for. It could be called ‘Captain Good.’” You read that right. Captain Good.

The Los Angeles Times echoed the hand-wringing that a film with “America” in the title and a protagonist swathed in red, white, and blue might not be groveling enough to suit their leftist self-loathing:

Of course, setting ‘Captain America’ in the storied past [WWII] helps avoid some of the more charged political questions that accompany releasing a patriotically themed production around the world at a time when the U.S. is perceived in certain places as somewhat less than heroic.

As I settled in my seat for a screening of Captain America (next to my esteemed Big Hollywood colleague Alex Marlow, who posted his own review yesterday), my expectations – based on all the preemptive apologies from the filmmakers and critics – was that I was about to witness Hollywood’s ruination of the most iconic of American comic book heroes. (more…)

First off, thank you to all the Big Hollywood readers who had so many nice things to say the past few months about our new documentary film, “Fear of a Black Republican.”  Your comments were so inspiring and so many folks wanted to know where they could see our film – that we took a step back to think about how (with limited means) we could get our little movie “out there.”

Our first Theater-Size (27x41) poster - "hot off the presses." (Actually - hot off Kinko's large-format printer.)

Well, in the spirit of “Colonel” Tom Parker and THE POLICE – ’78 Tour of America (in a cargo van), we have gone ahead and put together our own “Southern Tour – 2011″ for FEAR OF A BLACK REPUBLICAN.  After driving twelve hours or so, we will be having our World Premiere in Atlanta GA tomorrow at 7 PM at the Landmark Theatre – Midtown Arts Cinema.  Two days later and four hours up I-85, we’ll be screening in Charlotte NC on June 25th (Blumenthal Performing Arts Center) and then in Greensboro NC on June 26th(Carousel Cinemas at Battleground) .   These will be the first public screenings ever for our little film.  We did hope to add another city or two, but as this is our first foray into “Movie Touring”… we figured short and sweet would be smarter and safer.  

In order to make this tour happen, we are “four-walling” (renting out) two movie theaters and are renting and sharing space in a “black box” theater running a stage play.  Luckily, the space can project films and do stage plays in the same venue.  Pretty convenient, but if you ever want to do something like this, here are a few things to think about ahead of time:  Insurance and advertising.  In booking our theaters, we learned that you now have to have some type of “Event Insurance” to screen your film as an Independent filmmaker.  Ouch.  Enough said.

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Ed. Note: Please welcome Glen to the Big Hollywood family and encourage him to return — JN

Right Online 2011 in Minneapolis-St. Paul was the site of the first screening of filmmaker Stephen Bannon’s much anticipated new documentary on the life and career of Sarah Palin, The Undefeated. Bannon had warned the assembled attendees that we would be seeing what he styled as “the R-rated cut.” The pre-screening buzz indicated that this phrasing was in reference to the opening montage of the film where, presumably, a bit of rough language was in store. As promised, the initial three-minute sequence lived up to its billing.

It is difficult to dispute the premise that Sarah Palin is quite possibly the most viciously hated female, not only in the conservative movement, but in the United States. An assorted motley string of D-list Hollywood types/media complex sorts, from Rosie O’Donnell to Sharon Osbourne to Bill Maher, are captured on video, subjecting Palin to the most vile epithets imaginable…replete with the crudest of sexual references. We’re introduced to the “Kill Sarah Palin” Facebook group. (It seems to no longer exist. But this is still out there.) A new T-shirt makes its debut, emblazoned with the legend “Sarah Palin is a C@%T.”

On and on the bilious saga roils. One is forced to ponder the demonstrable truth that this represents a mere few moments in an endless sea of wretched acrimony. All directed at one attractive, slender, 5’5” wife and mother of four five…who also happens to be a former Mayor of Wasilla, Governor of Alaska and Vice Presidential candidate.

We observe how Palin’s formative years in a middle-class, values-oriented family in an almost frontier-like Alaska town contributed to the convictions she embraces today. We see the indelible impression the devastation of the Exxon Valdez oil spill imprinted on a young Sarah’s perspective and how the aftermath subconsciously propelled her to public service.

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I’ve written several articles skewering HBO for producing political projects destined to air immediately prior to the 2012 election, where the vast majority of the cast and crew are passionate Barack Obama supporters, and where the content is aimed at the Democrat’s two favorite Republican villains: Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. So, when I sat down to watch HBO’s Too Big to Fail, I prepared myself for the worst. What I didn’t expect was the big surprise awaiting me.

Too Big to Fail, which premieres on HBO on May 23, 2011, features a star studded cast recounting the events that led to the financial crisis and bailouts by the U.S. government in 2008. It is a mini-series packed into a 98-minute made-for-television movie where several essential characters are quickly introduced and where finance and economics are casually discussed. It may help if one has a baseline of knowledge about the crisis before watching the movie. If one doesn’t know who Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner are or what Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and AIG are, it may prove slightly difficult to follow.

Although the Director, Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, 8 Mile), was limited to telling a very long and complicated story in a very short amount of time, he was able to skillfully pull it off. Perhaps this is because the screenwriter, Peter Gould (Breaking Bad), deftly adapted Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2009 prize winning New York Times Bestseller, Too Big to Fail. (more…)

During his travels in 1831, French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed that America was an exceptional nation with a special role to play in history. Tocqueville wrote that, unlike in Europe, where social standing defined a citizen, America was a new republic where liberty, equality, individualism, and laissez-faire economics defined the “American Creed.”

Citizens United Productions will premiere a documentary film about American Exceptionalism, entitled “A City Upon A Hill,” hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich, this Friday, April 29 in Washington, D.C. “A City Upon A Hill” is written and directed by award-winning film maker, Kevin Knoblock (“Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny,” “Nine Days That Changed The World,” “America at Risk”).

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Throughout our history, the United States has risen to meet great challenges — sometimes out of necessity but often out of the determination to create a better future for the next generation. At the time of our founding, no other nation had adopted the radical ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No other nation had declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” — rights that no king or government could take away.

“A City Upon A Hill” explores the concept of American Exceptionalism from its origin to the present day. What makes our Declaration of Independence and Constitution special? Why did George Washington relinquish power? How did we climb out of the Great Depression to become the world’s greatest economic power? Why did we lead the liberation of Europe during World War II? And why was it important to be the first to land on the moon? Learn the answers to these questions and more in “A City Upon A Hill.”

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Ed. Note: Please welcome Lee Stranahan to Big Hollywood. This is actually his second piece for us, but things were a little hectic last time and things got away from me. It’s an honor to have him as part of the BH family and I very much encourage you to seek out his superb work ast the other BIG sites. –JN

No, I still haven’t seen it but the business side of Atlas Shrugged is of interest to me as a filmmaker, political writer and former Objectivist. Plus my friend Andrew Breitbart and my ex-wife Kat are both in movie – in the same scene. (Kat is wearing pink, Breitbart isn’t.)

Some people – like liberal blogger and (former?) friend Bob Cesca – want to say it’s doing very badly. This is from his subtly titled post Nobody Likes Atlas Shrugged.

Did you know there’s a movie version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?

No? Well, you’re not alone. The first part of a trilogy (!!!) based on Ayn Rand’s libertarian bible was released in limited theaters on Friday and it currently has an 8 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s really awful.

And the reviews are generally bad. Some are sort of mixed, like this one by Kyle Smith from the New York Post…

Though a bit stiff in the joints and acted by an undistinguished cast amid TV-movie trappings, this low-budget adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel nevertheless contains a fire and a fury that makes it more compelling than the average mass-produced studio item.

The low-budget / casting angle comes up in many reviews and I certainly raised them myself. But the original reviews of Atlas Shrugged were…well, awful. Really awful. And not all the data is that negative. On IMDB right now it has a kind of okay 6.8 rating. And on Box Office Mojo, it’s got a solid B with 74% giving it an A.

Criticism is all opinion, however. How did it do business wise?

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There is a film in this year’s GI Film Festival line-up for everyone.  Overall the festival schedule will show 31 film premieres with action, romance, comedy, and drama all represented.  Here are five stand-outs that you must see.

1.  They Wereth Eleven

They Wereth Eleven is an amazing film directed by award winning director Robert Child about the untold story of 11 African American soldiers who were slaughtered by the SS in WWII.

2. A Marine’s Guide to Fishing

A Marine’s Guide to Fishing , directed by Nicholas Brennan, stars Matthew Pennington, a former Marine with three combat tours under his belt.  Pennington also received the Purple Heart after loosing his leg in an IED attack.   This film beautifully portrays the struggle with reintegration following a deployment. (more…)

It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

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What does Al Gore have to do with Robbie the Robot?

Well, we started Declaration Entertainment because we believe that politics is downstream of culture; that like all cultures, we get our values and morality from our mythology – and in 20th and 21st century America, our mythology mostly comes to us through the movies. So we thought we’d start a little video segment called ”Take a Movie to Work,” where we pick apart a movie and find out some of the lessons it is trying to teach us, under the actual plot.

We started with an all-time classic: MGM’s 1956 classic, Forbidden Planet”.  You can watch the video at DeclarationEntertainment.com.

You see, if you think trillions of dollars of deficit spending is not the path to financial stability, if you think East Anglia may not have your best interests at heart when they fabricate global temperature statistics from whole cloth, if you believe that the Commerce Clause does not give the government the right to govern commerce – much less your very thoughts, then chances are you have been informed by the left that you are simply not intelligent enough to understand your own interests.  Fortunately for you, your betters in the government are happy to understand these things for you.

From priests and kings to scholars and journalists, elitists of every stripe have always believed that they knew better how to order society than society – which when free has always been perfectly capable of ordering itself.  Everywhere we look, this meme is reinforced, nowhere more so than in Hollywood.  But that has not always been the case.  There was a time when the movies championed wisdom and individualism above knowledge, good intentions, and collectivism.

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In 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien was tickled to receive a charming letter from a twelve-year-old Yankee praising The Hobbit, released seven years prior. It was, said the lad, “the most wonderful book I have ever read. It is beyond description. Gee Whiz. . . . ”

“It’s nice to find that little American boys do really say ‘Gee Whiz’,” the author joked to his son Christopher when he mentioned receiving the note. But surprisingly, his prevailing mood was somber:

I find these letters which I still occasionally get. . . make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.

Those are words, humble and true, that evoke the New Testament, conjuring an image of lost souls looking to quench an almost spiritual thirst. At the very time he wrote them, Tolkien was already deep into the agony and the ecstasy of the creation of The Lord of the Rings, and the intersection of the literary and the spiritual was on his mind. “God bless you beloved,” he told his son by way of signing off, but then tagged on a final, lingering question, one weighing heavily on his work: “Do you think the ‘Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?”

It should be clear now to even the dimmest of critical bulbs that Tolkien’s own craving for heroic romance was hardly unique. Millions of others, equally parched in the modern world, were in dire need of the potent drought he was brewing. After The Lord of the Rings finally appeared, it inspired fan letters from grown adults that matched the enthusiasm of the little boy writing from America decades earlier. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien we are mostly denied the original missives, but can frequently read Tolkien’s reactions to them.

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President Ronald Reagan saw America as a special place, a shining city on a hill, and a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. As 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of his birthday, celebrate the life that he led, the principles by which he lived, and the accomplishments that he achieved by purchasing Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny, hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich.

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Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny is a feature length documentary that focuses on the three pillars of the Reagan presidency: reviving the American economy, restoring America’s spirit, and challenging the oppression of the Soviet Union. Through interviews with historians, cabinet members, and world leaders, the film examines and celebrates the Great Communicator and his legacy.

Featuring exclusive interviews with former Presidents Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, along with Reagan Cabinet and staff members including James Baker, Edwin Meese, Marlin Fitzwater, Richard Perle, William Bennett, and the late Jack Kemp, Rendezvous With Destiny is President Reagan’s story as told by the people who were with him on the front lines of the Reagan Revolution.

Citizens United Productions traveled across the United States and to historic locations in Europe to capture the sights and sounds that defined Ronald Reagan’s presidency. You’ll see exclusive interviews and footage of President Reagan’s greatest speeches, from his unforgettable “Tear Down This Wall” in Berlin, to the moving “Boys of Pointe Du Hoc” in France, to his stirring farewell address from the Oval Office. Shooting on location in four countries, Rendezvous With Destiny goes to unprecedented lengths to tell the remarkable tale of Ronald Reagan’s life.

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“Oh f***, not another elf!”

Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

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The 38th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is being held this week from February 10 – 12, and I am proud to announce that Citizens United, the nation’s premier conservative filmmaker, will once again be sponsoring the CPAC Theater and Film Festival throughout the weekend.  The festival will showcase some of the best conservative films in the country from both Citizens United Productions and many other critically acclaimed filmmakers.

We have some exciting events planned for this year’s Film Festival at CPAC 2011!  Starting at 2pm on Thursday, February 10th, Newt and Callista Gingrich will introduce our film America at Risk: The War With No Name.  America at Risk, hosted by the Speaker and Mrs. Gingrich, takes an in-depth look at the war against radical Islam featuring exclusive interviews with some of the top national security experts in the world.  After the film, join us for a reception with Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich.

On Friday afternoon February 11th, we have a special event planned to honor conservative women.  Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, will be screened at 1:30pm, featuring an introduction by co-star Rep. Michele Bachmann.  After the film, conservative icon and Fire from the Heartland co-star Phyllis Schlafly will deliver remarks to the audience.  This much anticipated speech will be followed by a panel discussion on the film, co-sponsored by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. 

Be sure to stick around Friday evening for our celebration of President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday beginning at 8pm!  This event, which is co-sponsored by Young America’s Foundation, will begin with their Ronald Reagan short film, Still Point in a Turning World. This will be followed by the presentation of President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday cake, made especially for this event by Carlo’s Bake Shop from the hit television show “Cake Boss”!  Then have your cake and eat it, too, while watching our unforgettable feature film Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny. Live introductions and remarks will be made by Governor George Allen.

In addition to these fantastic events, please see the complete Film Festival schedule below or view it online at CitizensUnited.org/CPAC!  All screenings are free of charge to CPAC attendees, and will be held in the Delaware Ballroom. 

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Cleaning out some old books in preparation for an impending move, I came across some items that reminded me about how precipitous the drop in the quality of the moviegoing experience has been.

Believe it or not, there was a time when it was a regular thing to get a printed movie program whenever you went to an A-list film. These booklets would have photographs, cast and crew biographies, interviews, and information on the production, music and special effects. Not only did they act as a nifty souvenir, but they increased the appreciation the audience had for the film they were watching and for the art of cinema in general. In a way, they were a sort of analog version of the special features you typically find on DVDs these days.

Movie programs, like so much else that used to play a part in luring audiences to the theater, had largely died out by the time I reached the Age of Attendance in the mid-’70s. But luckily, I arrived at the perfect time to catch a final brief renaissance in the form of the Spielberg/Lucas blockbusters of the late ’70s and early ’80s. (more…)