Bobby (Peter Facinelli) is living the high life in the new drama “Loosies.” He works on Wall Street, dates beautiful women and has a great boss (Vincent Gallo).

Well, that’s what it seems like on the outside to those closest to him (which would basically just consist of his mother). Dig a little deeper, and you find out that Bobby’s actual profession is that of a pickpocket, and his boss is a man who his late father owed $500,000 in gambling debt. Now, Bobby is slowly paying it off by working for him as an elusive street thief.

Oh, and the beautiful women? Well, one of them is three months pregnant and runs into Bobby. That becomes the central conflict of this hidden gem, available now via Video on Demand. Well, and the fact that Lt. Sullivan (Michael Madsen) is doing everything in his power to catch Bobby on account of the fact that Bobby got a little too greedy and pick pocketed his badge.

“Loosies” works mostly due to a strong and very likable script (which Facinelli wrote). The film gives us real characters with real reasons to dislike them, but what drives the film is how the actors and script show show us small details about each character that are positive. We want everything to be OK.

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The broader strokes of the internecine conflict on AMC’s “The Walking Dead” have already been covered on Big Hollywood, but plenty of room has been left for detail.

Sunday’s episode of TWD left me with a bad taste in my mouth. For one, it took the band of survivors (henceforth, “the Gang”) for a stroll down a series of pulse-deadening subplots that I imagine did things like “develop characters” and “heighten drama” and “purge the crap out of some emotions” without involving any, you know, actual zombies. Nary a flesh feast to be seen in 45 minutes.

And while the conspicuous dearth of shotguns being primed for battle disappointed a blood-and-guts zombie aficionado like myself, it was something else that frustrated me most about the episode.

It shouldn’t be news to Big Hollywood readers that television writers are people of the left. If it is news to you, then you’ve got some catching up to do, Rip.

The writers of TWD are no different, and they have been quick to let us know that throughout the show via this season’s suicidal gun policy and the overriding caricaturing of conservatives (on a side note, this caricaturing extends even to the show’s “webisode” mini-series, as seen here and here).

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Brent Bozell:

In an interview on the Catholic cable channel EWTN, Estevez joked about the horror of making the pitch for this movie about a pilgrimage – no massive special effects, no parade of gore or bedroom scenes with nudity. It’s just an old man hiking across Spain with three people he meets along the way. It’s a small movie, made on a small budget. It’s about our humanity and our spirituality. It’s so easy to imagine Tinseltown’s eyes glazing over.

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But what Estevez said in that interview was still striking. “Hollywood is a very difficult place to be earnest and be heartfelt. And I am not interested in making films that are anything but. There’s a lot of vulgarity in films. There’s a lot of violence, casual sex – things that make me uncomfortable watching – and I’m not interested in perpetuating that message.”  …

Here’s how “The Way” unfolds. Sheen’s character, California ophthalmologist Tom Avery, is a widower who’s been angry at his son’s decision to forego a graduate degree to wander the world. While Avery’s out on the golf course, a French policeman calls to tell him his son has died in a storm in the Pyrenees. When Avery arrives to identify the body, the policeman tells him about the “camino,” and he resolves to travel the route with his son’s cremated remains. On this very long walk, he finds companionship with a burly Dutchman who wants to lose weight, an Irish writer with writer’s block, and a bitter Canadian woman trying to quit smoking – and ultimately rediscovers his lost faith.

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With the President’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 8, I expect a mildly new turn on an old Progressive tune: “America’s not going anywhere without Karl Marx & Friends!”

America’s increasingly far Left academia has always been “nudging” its way into power. The first great, 20^th Century landmark for these “enlightened despots”, as Voltaire described them, came when a professor of the ordinarily Left-leaning Harvard University, Dr. Henry Kissinger, found his way into the Oval Office of Republican President Richard Nixon.

The not-so-good-doctor seemed to have literally crawled inside the soul of this undeniably insecure but ingeniously manipulative politician, also known as Tricky Dick. Their administration, as we know, came to a rather disgraceful end.

However, Red China’s oldest American friend, Henry Kissinger, knows that his influence from deep connections with Beijing is now as strong as it ever was.

Why?

His “kind”, his “fraternity” from Harvard and the University of Chicago are back!

Above you see a decidedly self-confident, Presidential manipulator, Barack Obama, surrounded by two of his favorite academicians, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein.

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The Toothless Rottweiler

Big Hollywood has a fairly young audience so I don’t think the pluses and minuses of old age would much interest them. However, my self-appointed assignment here as Sarah Palin’s guard dog has brought me more than a few black comedy dramas as the toothless Rottweiler I am. The attack dog’s “growl” within me starts the second I hear or see anyone looking down on the former governor of Alaska.

Why?

I’m a survivor of parents who chose to have not just one but two abortions.

Learning about abortion at the age of 9 automatically enlists you in the Survivor’s Guilt Club. Toss in an ugly divorce and you have a domestic war zone with two, indelibly damaged “Survivors”, my sister and I. Add “Children of Alcoholics” and, well, we have a play by Eugene O’Neill and August Strindberg, plus Freud’s Oedipal theories running riot in a young artist farmed off at 11 years of age to Prep-School-As-A-Safe-Zone.

Further dramatic details of my upbringing are peppered through my memoir, The Haunted Heaven, available, chapter by chapter, at enterstageright.com.

I have, however, made it into my 71st year and am quite proud of the few achievements that have adorned my life and, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, I have made peace with my ten lost years as a drunk in Canada.

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Black power. Abortion. Terrorism.

These elements make up the work of the prophetically fictional movie, Gates of Hell by Molotov Mitchell and Illuminati Pictures.  I’m not going to go into much of what the movie entails. I’ll let the trailers give you an idea and here’s a link to the synopsis  

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I will tell you the movie has a hardcore approach in support of the pro-life issue — that approach being in the form of black militants that wreak havoc on abortionists. The movie is also causing a bit of a stir, but it’s not really the liberals and pro-abortionist who are attacking the project, it’s pro-life conservatives! 

Why? 

Children have been aborted in the millions, which means a lot of abortions are getting past the efforts of pro-lifers. I’m not trying to be contentious, but an effective means to promote the pro-life issue has been wanting. This film is a different tactic; hit the pop culture where they live.  It’s a volatile subject and some people aren’t interested in dealing with it. Though a lot of people see abortion as wrong, they don’t want to interfere with someone else’s choice. They would prefer to avoid the conflict and keep that opinion to themselves as they don’t want to deal with the wrath of the selfish who value their right to choose over the right to life. 

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The LA Times:

Mainstream Hollywood rarely tackles the subject of abortion, and when it does, it’s usually when a character quietly opts not to have one. But two new independently financed movies — a small-town mystery and a psychological thriller — are bringing an emphatically anti-abortion slant to the hot-button issue.

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“Doonby,” a $2-million film backed by an anonymous financier, tells the story of a mysterious drifter played by John Schneider (Bo Duke from “The Dukes of Hazzard”) who quickly makes himself indispensable to a small Texas town. The secret of Doonby’s past lies in the only person in town he doesn’t like — a gynecologist named Dr. Cyrus Reaper (Martin Sheen’s brother Joe Estevez).

Meanwhile, “The Life Zone,” a $1-million thriller written by New Jersey Republican State Senate candidate Kenneth Del Vecchio, follows three pregnant women who have been abducted from abortion clinics and are being forced to carry their babies to term by a shadowy jailer (Robert Loggia) and a barren female physician named Dr. Wise (Blanche Baker, perhaps best known as the older sister in “Sixteen Candles”).

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Both films have supernatural themes and a third-act twist that conveys an anti-abortion moral. Neither of them yet has theatrical distribution.

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Hollywood Reporter’s Paul Bond:

A subplot in an upcoming film,a psychological thriller called Doonby, involves an unmarried woman during the 1960s who seeks a doctor to end her inconvenient pregnancy — and an elderly woman who tries to talk her out of it.

The role of the older woman is pivotal, and director Peter Mackenzie wanted to cast someone with the gravitas to deliver anti-abortion dialogue without being preachy. So last year, over lunch at a restaurant in tiny Smithville, Texas, he persuaded one of the most controversial living Americans to play the role, despite the fact she had never acted before. Her name: Norma McCorvey — aka Jane Roe, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade.

“I thought she encapsulated American thinking on the issue,” says Mackenzie, a British filmmaker who also wrote Doonby. The niche title tackles abortion head-on, taking place in modern times but with significant flashbacks to an era when illegal abortions were conducted in back alleys. The filmmakers know they’ve created something controversial but maintain it is apolitical — a position that will be a tough sell beyond pro-life circles.

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“This is a loving, caring Jesus,” is how the director of a play involving abortion described a leading man to the New York Times.

The play, written by a Notre Dame grad, recently took to stage at the University of Delaware. The dialogue includes a gal asking Christ: “Did you ever say, ‘I’m Jesus, and I say that stupid girls who let guys talk them into going to the back seat of their cars have to have babies?’ Did you say that ever?”

“No,” Jesus replies.

“All you talk about is, be nice to each other!” the teenager continues. “You never said nobody’s allowed to have an abortion.”

The fictional Jesus confirms her assertion.

“So can I? Can I? Can I?” she asks.

“Honestly, I — I don’t really have an issue with it,” Jesus tells her.

Honestly?

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So, here’s the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

A lady named Lori, writing over at Feministing blog, says she just attended a panel on “transfeminism,” where one speaker says we should stop thinking of abortion as a women’s issue.

Okay!

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Let’s hear more!

Lori writes:

The thing is, it’s not just women that have abortions. Trans men have abortions. Gender queer people have abortions. Two spirit people have abortions. People who do not fit into the box of ‘woman’ have abortions. This is the reality we live in, and the more we pretend otherwise, the more dangerous it is for other people, and the more they are excluded by the movement.

This concept, she explains, will strengthen ” our reproductive justice work.”

Yep, “reproductive justice work.”

Sometimes I think they just pull random words out of the dictionary.

Sorry, vagionary.

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How ironic is this? It just so happens that spoiled, entitled, multi-millionaire celebrities who advocate the government confiscate my hard-earned money to fund their anti-human nihilism are the very people who make me think abortion might not always be wrong. 

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Via the left-wing Politico:

“A cancer that goes undetected, a sexually transmitted disease left untreated, a woman unable to get the birth control she needs to plan her family and take control of her own destiny. This is the disastrous vision of some leaders in the United States Health of Representatives,” Johansson says in a new YouTube video. “Every year, Planned Parenthood provides this essential care to millions of women, men and teens. For many people — especially those with low incomes — Planned Parenthood is their only source of health care. Let your members of Congress know where you stand.”

Translation:

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Saw The Devil’s Advocate for the third time the other night.

No one in film has so dissected and anatomized diabolical corpi with more dedication and precision than Al Pacino.

Not even the combined forces of Martin Scorcese and the chilling characters he created with Robert DeNiro can come up with the living, breathing reality of what Pacino only began to discover with his Michael Corleone of The Godfather.

Prophetically and, I imagine, presciently, I initially spelled Godfather as Todfather.

Yes. The Deathfather!

That rather says it all.

Three film titles initially leap to my mind when I think of Al Pacino’s entire body of work: The Godfather (1972), Devil’s Advocate (1997), and Insomnia (2002).

Pacino’s greatest performance to my mind can be experienced with the film Insomnia, and his portrayal of the LAPD detective, Will Dormer, an indelibly scarred soul farmed out to Alaska. He finds himself in, of all places, Alaska. A town called Nightmute.  (more…)

So here goes. The other day CBC contacted me for a response on something or other teen pop sensation Justin Bieber had said in Rolling Stone. He’d said something about health care the producer said, and had knocked America’s health care system while extolling the virtues of “free” (and broke) Canadian health care. I shrugged it off and as I was sick and had a cramped schedule that night, declined the interview. I thought how Hillarycare was headline-rampant back when I was about Bieber’s age and how I wouldn’t have wanted my developing understanding of such a complex issue under national scrutiny.

The next day I began seeing headlines like this one in my RSS reader and I felt a pang of regret, a missed opportunity to stand up for someone. His quotes?

On abortion: “I really don’t believe in abortion. I think [an embryo] is a human. It’s like killing a baby.”

On abortion in cases of rape: “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.”

This kid, I thought, is going to be devoured.

Here Is the Abortion Conversation Justin Bieber Will Be Apologizing for Tomorrow

Craft your own publicist-approved clarification and apology in the comments!

Why exactly would he feel the need to apologize for this tomorrow? Is the concept of having the balls to stand up for what you believe such a foreign concept to Hollywood that they feel the need to expect a PR-crafted spin on the truth the moment it’s uttered? Why the hell is Rolling Stone grilling him about policy that they themselves don’t even understand? He’s a teenager. Touring the world and selling boatloads of albums, but a teenager, nonetheless. Sure, many would disagree with his remarks (which seeemed facetiously made) on health care – though to his credit, he himself admits that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, more than the poseurs scripting the article will admit, the same folks who will try to ensnare him with his own remarks the following day.

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[Editor's Note: This list is arranged in no particular order. Read Part I here.]

6.  “Being exploited is different from being empowered ” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Often too-easily dismissed as a raunchy teen sex comedy, Fast Time was a tremendously influential and important mirror on young America in the early 1980s.  The fact that it is gut-bustlingly funny – Sean Penn’s turn as surfer/stoner Jeff Spicoli remains his only role where he doesn’t annoy me – seems to overshadow the serious undercurrents, as does the ample nudity culminating in the unforgettable swimming pool scene starring the glorious Phoebe Cates.

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However, there is a very, very dark undercurrent to this movie that provides a serious lesson to young people.  Jennifer Jason-Leigh’s Stacy is a pretty but not-so-bright 15/16 year old who does not understand the difference between love and sex.  In a world of absolutely no parents (not a single one is ever seen), she tries to find love (or at least attention) by basically trying to have tacky sex with every guy she meets – and it’s heartbreaking.  She’s not “empowered” – she’s used.  The ugly scene where she loses her virginity to a guy in his 20s in a Little League dug-out staring at graffiti reading “Surf Nazis Must Die” is a better repudiation of the “hook-up” culture than a hundred lectures.

After scaring off the one guy who actually likes her for herself by trying to bed him too, she seeks comfort underneath his skanky pal.  A grim, humiliating encounter in a pool house leaves her pregnant and she immediately seeks an abortion.  Regardless of one’s stand on the life issue, one cannot be anything other than horrified at how the fact she sees herself as literally nothing but a mere receptacle leads her to feel nothing at all about her decision. (more…)

We conservatives spend a lot of time criticizing Hollywood’s failings, calling out its errors and pointing to its hypocrisies – and this is entirely appropriate since so much of the crap spewing out of the Tinseltown cookie cutter is borderline commie nitwittery masquerading as profundity.  But if nothing good ever came out of Hollywood – if everything it produced hewed to the same lame party-line pinkoism rejected everywhere except in Westside L.A., university faculty lounges, and Washington, D.C. – we all would have stopped paying attention long ago.

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And many conservatives have.  Many of us have thrown our hands in the air and opted out of popular culture completely, exhausted from enduring liberal sucker punches buried within crummy flicks about magic robots battling Dick Cheney vampire clones that we pay $12.50 to see in theaters maintained at the hygiene level of your average bus station men’s room.  You can hardly blame them for giving up.

But as tempting as it is to withdraw from the battlefield, to dig in and hope it somehow changes, surrender was never an option.  This is our culture, not theirs.  And they don’t get to control it. 

The fact is that among the detritus of American popular culture, there are voices of sanity.  Sure, they are nearly drowned out by over-praised hacks like Aaron Sorkin and over-indulged clowns like Oliver Stone.  Yet, occasionally, Hollywood has allowed positive, conservative messages to slip through. (more…)

In July of this year, leftist Feminists were openly, and proudly, rooting for an abortion to be portrayed on prime-time television. And in April of this year, leftist Feminists like Jessica Valenti of Feministing were grossly bemoaning the fact that Mtv’s show, 16 and Pregnant, did not portray any teenage girls having abortions. They wanted sixteen year old girls to have abortions. On television. Way to be pro-woman and For The Children ™, faux feminists! By For The Children, I of course mean totally not at all for the children – unless they can be used and exploited to further an agenda, natch. You see, it’s never actually about women nor children to them; it’s always about an agenda and an ideology that treats motherhood as a yoke around a woman’s neck. Motherhood is so old school and oppressive and stuff! What with those pesky children wanting to be nurtured and loved, while providing a joy that fills one’s heart so full that it cannot be adequately put into words. Well, and wanting to, you know, live. Who do they think they are?

On Tuesday night, they got their wish. Mtv ran a special called “No Easy Decision”, in which Markai, a girl who had previously appeared on 16 and Pregnant, learned that she was pregnant again.

And she terminated the pregnancy baby’s life.

I watched the “special”, even though I didn’t think that I needed to do so in order to point out how wrong such a show is on so many levels. But, unlike Ana Marie Cox, I don’t like to talk about things that I have neither read nor watched, nor do I like to do things half-assedly. And, it turns out, the show was even worse than I suspected it would be. It was infuriating and horrifying, almost beyond words. It was also heartbreaking beyond belief. My heart aches for Markai, and for the other girls (Natalia and Katie) who appeared in the discussion portion of the show.

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So MTV had a big year, ratings-wise. And they did it with aspirational programming – the kind that shines a light on positive achievements by young adults everywhere.

Nah, they just filled the ranks with skanks.

MTV General Manager Stephen Friedman explains:

“…We continue to rally the organization around a new brand filter that is clearly gaining traction with the millennial audience.. .”

Meaning, they filled the ranks with skanks.

Fact is, MTV kicked butt thanks to Jersey Shore - a show sponsored by Chlamydia; and Teen Mom – a show that puts unwed motherhood in a snow globe.

Coming back from the airport, I saw one teen mom on the cover of a gossip rag – a nice incentive for girls aleady giving it up to guys with sports logos shaved in their heads. If you’re gunna get poked by a dope, might as well get famous for it.

Now I’m old enough to remember when MTV was just music – before it decided to be the social arbiter for the morally inept. Now that everything to them is a valued lifestyle choice (with the exception of being responsible), MTV has become the “who’s to say?” network. Meaning, who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong – we’ll shoot it with strobe and back lights. (more…)

The full episode is embedded below.

Entertainment Weekly:

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Markai said early on. Host Dr. Drew Pinsky said she and her boyfriend James considered three options: “Parenting, adoption, or abortion.” Markai phoned a women’s clinic counselor and received information about the differences between a medical and a surgical abortion. Markai’s voice broke as she asked her questions; she was in tears before the call was over.

“I never thought [abortion] would be an option for me,” she said.

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Both Markai and James talked about struggles with providing a family with money and support. Economic factors played a big part in her decision. “We can’t take care of another baby. Abortion is the best choice for us.” The procedure was performed when Markai was six weeks pregnant.

She said that at the clinic it was suggested that she “think of it as a little ball of cells.” But afterward, she became angry — at James, and at herself — and racked with remorse. “Nothing but a bunch of cells can turn out to be her,” she said to James, pointing to their child Za’karia. No Easy Decision, in the space of a half hour, did a striking job of showing viewers a full range of thoughts and emotions, without a trace of MTV flash or, at the other extreme, timid solemnity. (more…)