Accusing a film studio of exploiting our military and their heroism for partisan political purposes is a pretty serious accusation. Accusing the White House of cooperating with this kind of propaganda is also a serious accusation.  But that’s exactly what New York Times’ Leftist Maureen Dowd said is happening.

What do you think?

Funny how this cynical new ABC series (produced and starring the rich, no doubt) assumes average Americans are more interested in taking revenge on the rich instead of becoming rich themselves. It’s also also interesting that the show is set in the Hamptons as  opposed to, say… Hollywood?

Revenge, which ABC entertainment Group Paul Lee called one of “our internal favorites” earlier in the day, is billed as a contemporary reimagining of The Count of Monte Cristo. The drama centers on a mysterious young woman, played by Emily VanCamp, who is welcomed into a rich Hamptons community filled with people who don’t know she’s there to exact revenge on the people who had destroyed her family.

“We’re dealing in a particular time right now in American history where I think the average American is going to want to see a takedown of the rich,” says star Madeleine Stowe.

Added creator/executive producer Mike Kelley, “Revenge is such a great story engine. It’s really a jumping off point.”

Is everyone on the show working for minimum wage? Gee, I hope so. Otherwise, that would be hypocritical.

How about this pitch for a new ABC series…

Title: “OPERATION: MATT DAMON”

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Ed. Note: This is the second part of two of excerpts. You can read part one here.

 During his Navy service, Dan Martin bought gold coins to be his life savings, and while working under the table in Sacramento for Developer and fellow gold bug, Bill Murphy, he was paid in more gold coins, but IRS gunsels (Tweedledum and Tweedledee) visit and put pressure on Dan to inform on his boss; thus, he soliloquizes about his situation.

It’s funny, sometimes I’ll read about a politician giving a speech at a Memorial Day event honoring the extraordinary combat heroism of some man, and he’ll often conclude by asking, “where do we get such men?”

He means men like me. A swab jockey who just might, in the right time and place, act bravely, and do something great.

I haven’t done something great, of course, but he means that guy who decided to up and join the armed forces from Podunkville, USA, and ended up with a Congressional Medal of Honor.

“Where do we get such men?” Indeed.

Because I’m also wondering where do we get such men as just left my house? Men who are drawn to authority, to policing, to hunting and punishing fellow citizens. Men who adopt an attitude, a personality, a culture of contempt for everyone outside their circle, who find it easy to abuse reason, common sense, common decency, common rights, and common morals.

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Via our friends at Power Line:

The Power Line Prize jury met via conference call yesterday afternoon and selected the winners of the Power Line Prize contest. Readers who don’t remember may want to refresh themselves: at the beginning of the summer we offered to give away $100,000 to the Power Line reader who best dramatizes the national debt. Boy did you come through. It wasn’t easy, as we had far more excellent entries than there were prizes to be awarded. Over the next few days, we will publicize the winners, along with a number of other entries that we thought were very good. …

My request to you is: steal these videos! Email them to your friends; post them on Facebook; tweet them; if you have a web site, put them up. The idea of the Power Line Prize contest was to stimulate the creation of a lot of new ways to educate people about the debt crisis, not just a few. So the more people who see these videos, hear the songs, and view the other media, the better.

Here is runner up #10, “Talking Babies”:

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This year things were really looking up for the world’s most famous Latino husband and wife team. First, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony were invited to Barack Obama’s intimate Super Bowl Party, and then Jennifer joined Randy ‘Big Dawg’ Jackson as one of two new American Idol judges, the other of whom was Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.

In April Jennifer talked to People magazine about her beauty regimen and used the occasion to effusively gush that she is the “happiest” when she’s “home with husband Marc Anthony and their 3-year-old twins, Max and Emme.”

On the American Idol finale, Marc Anthony, who played Hector LaVoe, and JLo, who played Puchi in the movie “El Cantante” treated the public to a steamy exhibition of marital affection. Marc, accompanied by Shelia E, performed the vocals and music from the lively “Aguanile.” As an added attraction, Mrs. Anthony emerged in a fringed Dancing with the Stars outfit and proceeded to do a bootylicious salsa.

Just 90 days after Jennifer’s “happiest at home” interview and two months after she whispered what appeared to be a naughty remark in her husband’s ear on the stage of the Kodak Theatre, the pair announced their seven-year marriage is over.

Between the two of them, the Anthonys have managed to rack up five official marriages, six children, and a long list of ex-lovers. Jennifer was once married to restaurateur Ojani Noa, who’s presently shopping around a steamy “home video” starring a conjugally-preoccupied Lopez and Noa. Jenny’s split-second-long second marriage was to Chris Judd, her Love Don’t Cost a Thing backup dancer.

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Rango is an animated acid-western that’s fun for the whole family, a sentence I never imagined I would write.

Johnny Depp voices the titular character, a chameleon who fancies himself an actor, using the only co-star he has at his disposal: a wind up toy goldfish. After a mishap on a desert highway that results in him falling out of his owners’ car, Rango by chance lands the role of a lifetime as the sheriff of a small desert town called Dirt. Populated by leather-skinned animals and reptiles, Dirt has a problem involving a dwindling water supply, and the townsfolk look to their new lawman to save the day, as he and the townsfolk chase naked mole-rat water-bandits, uncovering a conspiracy straight out of Chinatown.

You haven’t seen an animated movie quite like Rango, despite its familiar structure, which is the classic “hero’s journey” formula. Alfred Molina voices a mystic armadillo that acts as Rango’s herald, sending him in the direction he’s meant to go after he finds himself stranded in the desert. What makes the film so much fun is director Gore Verbinski’s southwestern visual motifs and its bizarre sense of humor. The creatures are hideous, but not unintentionally so like the Disney bomb Mars Needs Moms. Instead they go well with parched desert landscape, like the facial landscapes that populate the films of Sergio Leone. Mariachi owls act as a sort of Greek chorus, setting the tone with their music and frequently breaking the forth wall to assure us that the protagonist will surely die soon, and horribly so.  Pop in some cameos by classic movie characters (one that’s been portrayed by Depp in the past, you can’t miss it) and heatstroke desert hallucinations, and you have one of the more original animated offerings you’re likely to find this side of Pixar.  At first I thought it might be a bit of an oddball offering for kids to digest, but Christian Toto’s son seems to love it, so it’s be a good one to bring home that film buffs can enjoy with their little ones.

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Welcome to Big Hollywood’s monthly review of all things notable in the world of music.

This is Vintage Now, released a few weeks ago, is a retro music compilation that isn’t designed to cash in on nostalgia– rather, it’s a harbinger of a growing movement to revive not only the style but the values of classic culture. Featuring 10 songs from artists of all ages and nations, This is Vintage Now embodies the sound of classic jazz, rock, and pop music but doesn’t come off as pure nostalgia. Producer David Gasten, who appears on the record with his band The City Kids, explains the reason the disc doesn’t sound like a cynical ploy preying on older generations’ memories:

The Vintage Movement is a new social movement of people who are essentially trying to escape back to the 1940’s, 1950’s, and early-to mid-1960’s. Many times attempts at bringing a period back have been short-lived (e.g. the Nineties Swing Revival) because they were not rooted in a inside-out, values-based way of doing things. People come to these older styles because they want to escape. They want to visit an alternate world where class and quality are the rule, not the exception. They want to be excited about life and culture instead of slimed by the same old garbage over and over again. And they want to get along with others, have good conversations, flirt, dance, enjoy great music and movies, etc. The ladies want to be treated like ladies, and the gentlemen want to be able to be gentlemen.

Spanning a wide range of styles, from Beverley Kenney’s whimsical ’40s-era piano ballad to Big Jay McNeely’s raucous boogie-woogie to The Necro Tonz’s edgy jazz to Caro Emerald’s catchy neo-swing tune “Just One Dance” (see the YouTube Video below), This is Vintage Now is a well-paced, engaging listen, and its intent is exactly the type of culture-changing  media we need to combat the values-destroying narcissism and nihilism of the world’s currently dominant “artists.” TIVN is available from iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, and other online retailers, or you can order it directly from the compilation’s home website to get extra tracks from a special Release Party edition.

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Stewart tries to inoculate himself from charges he’s obsessed by joking about being obsessed, but, uhm, yeah.

Sarah Palin is a thorn in the flesh of leftists. Although they hurl their best invectives at her, and go through her emails, and make fun of her son Trig, and mock the fact that she went to college in flyover country, she still emerges as “The Undefeated” and they come out looking  (and sounding) like a group of embittered sorority girls.

That’s why every failed attack on her is simply followed by another more direct and more ruthless one, all of which are aimed at accomplishing what none has yet been able to accomplish: eliminating Palin as a viable political force.

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The latest attack is an anti-Palin propaganda film by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield. It’s a film that “promises to deliver the goods by FINALLY revealing the ‘truth’ about Sarah Palin.” (Broomfield’s plan to deliver “the goods” resides at least partially in the fact that former Alaska politicians and aides, who worked with and/or for Gov. Palin, are interviewed in the film.)

For example, John Bitney, Gov. Palin’s Legislative Director, shows up on camera to talk about how he spent so much time making excuses for the way Palin would sit at the table but remain “very unengaged in the conversation” with lawmakers. Said Bitney, “I would have to go around [after the meeting] and, you know, [say,] ‘there, there, she was really listening.’”

Is that it? Is that Broomfield’s dirt? People said the exact same things about President Ronald Reagan and he went on to defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War.

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Counting down my 25 favorite sitcoms that premiered prior to 2001. — JN

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Radar Online:

Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire is among more than a dozen high-profile Hollywood celebrities being sued in connection with a mega-millions illegal gambling ring that ran high-stakes underground poker games, Star magazine is reporting exclusively.

Maguire, 35, won more than $300,000 from a Beverly Hills hedge fund manager who embezzled investor funds and orchestrated a Ponzi scheme in a desperate bid to pay off his monster debt to the star and others, it’s alleged.

An FBI investigation into Brad Ruderman, the CEO of Ruderman Capital Partners, uncovered how he lost $25 million of investor money in clandestine poker games held on a twice weekly basis in suites at the luxury Beverly Hills hotel, Four Seasons, and the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard.

Tinsel town A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon also played in the no-limit Texas Hold ‘em games which had a buy-in of $100,000, multiple members of the ring told Star. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon are not being sued.

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Before knowing for sure if alcohol contributed to the awful car crash that killed “Jackass” star Ryan Dunn and two others, Roger Ebert tweeted the following yesterday afternoon:

“Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.”

The blowback was immediate.

Today, Ebert backed off and somewhat apologized:

I don’t know what happened in this case, and I was probably too quick to tweet. That was unseemly. I do know that nobody has any business driving on a public highway at 110 mph, as some estimated — or fast enough, anyway, to leave a highway and fly through 40 yards of trees before crashing. That is especially true if the driver has had three shots and three beers. Two people were killed. What if the car had crashed into another car?

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In high school I worked at a gas station, where I served as full-time clerk and part-time shrink to some of the friendless and overly talkative customers. One sticks with me. A father from a neighboring town came into the store on the anniversary of his daughter’s death. She was killed when a classmate hit her while speeding home from school one evening. I must have been the first person to ask him about his day, so he told me about it. I remember listening awkwardly, trying to empathize with a man whose loss was more terrible than anything I could really comprehend. 

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Shawn Ku, the up-and-coming writer/director of “Beautiful Boy,” deliberately thrusts that feeling on viewers. In “Beautiful Boy,” Bill (Michael Sheen with an American accent) and Kate (Maria Bello) struggle to cope with the loss of their son Sam, who went on a horrific shooting rampage on his college campus before turning the gun on himself. The tragedy amplifies the problems in their already strained relationship and forces them to address who they are as individuals and as a couple bound together by their son’s horrific actions. It’s Columbine, Virginia Tech, Columbine, from a side you never hear – a side so horrific and painful it’s almost impossible to imagine. 

The film is Ku’s reflection on what it’s like to be an awkward part of a family’s sorrow. Ku was the last person to see a friend of his before he died (of natural causes), and Ku thus assumed a strange role in the mourning cycle of his friend’s family. “I was the one his parents clung to for any sign that his troubles and disappointments were released before the end,” Ku said of the experience. 

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My love affair with movies began with Sergio Leone.  Sure, I watched movies before I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly in high school, but I was a changed man after I saw Leone rebuild the American western with an operatic scope.  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach seemed like nothing short of Greek gods, titans battling for treasure in the land of mortals.  Even their encounter with something as huge as the Civil War seems small when placed on the grand scale of their journey.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience showed me a power movies can possess that the stuff I was consuming on a Friday night at the multiplex not only didn’t possess, but didn’t even bother striving for.

Somehow, Once Upon a Time in the West is an even more massive experience than The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  It was Leone’s way of saying farewell to the genre, as he depicts the genre archetypes as being left behind by the changing times.  Like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, it depicts the heroes and villains of the old west finding their kind becoming obsolete as the ever-expanding railroads alter and modernize the western landscape.

The opening scene of this movie is one of my favorite scenes in a movie, ever.  Three gunmen, donning dusters (Jack Elam, Woody Strode, and Al Mulock), show up at a train station, and in that Leone fashion, they wait.  The sounds are a symphony of natural noises assembled by composer Ennio Morricone, and the face of the characters are as lived-in as the sets.  After patiently biding their time, a train finally pulls in, and a mysterious man (the great Charles Bronson) appears, playing an ominous tune on a harmonica.  A brief, ambiguous exchange occurs, guns are drawn, violence explodes, and the three duster-wearing outlaws are dead by the harmonica-players gun.  And that, ladies and gents, is how you open a movie.

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Join actress Janine Turner for her weekly radio talk show live from Dallas, TX on KLIF.  Tonight’s special guests are Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Janine’s co-star from the hit television show “Northern Exposure”, Rob Morrow.

Live stream begins at 11:00 PM ET

Video chat rooms at Ustream

From Fox News:

“It is always about the work and if you do good work, people will honor you and work with you again. It is never about your politics.”

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This is why we love having rockers on our side:

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From The Daily Caller:

First Lady Michelle Obama has scheduled a poetry evening for Wednesday, and she’s invited several poets, including a successful Chicago poet and rapper, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr., AKA “Common.” However, Lynn is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the “burn[ing]” of then-President George W. Bush.

Excerpt from “A Letter to the Law”:

Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch

Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun

I got the black strap to make the cops run

They watching me, I’m watching them

Them dick boys got a lock of cock in them

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Color of Change is a Racial Indignation Machine founded by 9/11 truther and confessed Marxist Van Jones, who’s probably most infamous for being President Obama’s Green Jobs Czar before being forced out of that position after a number of very disturbing revelations about his racially divisive, radical past were broadcast at BreitbartTV and elsewhere. Since then, his race-baiting organization has led a blacklisting crusade against Andrew Breitbart using the community organizing tactic of pressuring any outlet that offers Breitbart a platform into rescinding the invitation. And they’ve had some success. Both ABC News and the Huffington Post folded like cheap card tables and it looks as though MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan might as well have.

Graphic via Steven Clark Bradley

Overall, Color of Change is on a desperate witch hunt to pressure media outlets and sponsors into silencing speech they disapprove of, and this is usually done through the irresponsible hurling of the R-word. Today they’re targeting Donald Trump in the most cynical way imaginable — through what can only be interpreted as some sort of obscene racial loyalty test. The Hollywood Reporter:

Black Stars of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ Urged to Denounce Donald Trump

An African-American political advocacy group is targeting Celebrity Apprentice star Donald Trump in the aftermath of what many feel are racially tinged political comments made about President Obama.

On Thursday, the organization ColorOfChange launched a Twitter-based campaign to persuade black Celebrity Apprentice cast members Star Jones and Lil Jon to denounce Trump for what the group terms “race-baiting.”

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