Well, we know which one Salon Mary Elizabeth Williams would save first if her house was burning down. If you think that the article reads more like seething, unspoken envy of a beautiful starlet that seems to have it all, you’re not alone. The entire piece has a Sweet Valley High mean girl aesthetic, in which a beta-wanna-be-alpha female projects her insecurities onto the popular girl by way of criticism over the most inane things.

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The tagline: “In her acceptance speech, the “Black Swan” star suggests that pregnancy trumps a career. She’s wrong.”

Did you hear that, Natlie Portman? What’s-her-face at Salon thinks you’re wrong. No! Williams couldn’t let Portman have her moment in the sun without seizing upon her big, round, potential-laden belly.

thanking her fellow nominees, her parents, the directors who’ve guided her career, and then at last “my beautiful love,” dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied, for giving her “the most important role of my life.” That’d be when he impregnated her, I’d wager.

At the time, the comment jarred me, as it does every time anyone refers to motherhood as the most important thing a woman can possibly do. But the reason why didn’t hit until I saw the ever razor sharp Lizzie Skurnick comment on Twitter today that, “Like, my garbageman could give you your greatest role in life, too, lady.”

Yes, because turning bathroom stall wall-level writing into an article for Salon is exponentially more important than creating and fostering life and raising it for the next eighteen years. (Natalie Portman is a/n [insert pejorative here]!)

But is motherhood really a greater role than being secretary of state or a justice on the Supreme Court? Is reproduction automatically the greatest thing Natalie Portman will do with her life?

Williams’ presuppositions are based on humanism which downgrades the divine and places greater emphasis on man’s desires. Williams misses that her examples of secretary of state or the Supreme Court were created by man, and that man had to be born in order for those positions to be created. She argues that the things created by humans, who required birth for their establishment, are greater than the that which created their originator.

This is indicative of what’s wrong with progressivism. The logic is insipid.

If Williams can point to me an example of a job created by an individual who existed without birth, I’ll be glad to discuss her argument on those terms.

(more…)

After all of the talk and the countless award ceremonies that have preceded it, the Oscars ceremony will finally take place tomorrow evening. The 83rd Academy Awards are bound to be exciting with ten best picture nominees and several tight races that could surprise some viewers. I’m hoping for a few surprises and a few well-deserved victories tonight. Here are my predictions as to who will win and who should be taking home Oscar gold in the major categories.

Best Actress:

Will Win: Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”

Should Win: Annette Bening, “The Kids are All Right”

This is the category where I am hoping for the biggest upset. Portman has the momentum but I found both her performance and the film to be disappointing. The plot of “Black Swan” was over-the-top and over-dramatic and the film doesn’t deserve the recognition that it’s been receiving. On the other hand, Annette Bening was in complete control of her character in “The Kids are All Right” and played the part of a woman trying to hold her family together wonderfully. Let’s hope that the Academy agrees and hands Bening her first Oscar. (more…)

Remove from this little family drama the gratuitous girl-on-girl sex, the guy-on-girl sex, and the ridiculously unnecessary and explicit images from a guy-on-guy gay porn film that no amount of hypnotism or bleach could ever erase from my mind, and what you have here is essentially a Lifetime Movie Channel melodrama with above average performances, especially from Annette Bening.  The film is pleasant enough but nothing here feels like cinema. You need something smarter than nudity and edgier than profanity to elevate a production into something bigger than a rote movie of the week.

Nic (Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a lesbian couple in a long-term, loving and committed relationship that from the outside looks perfectly idyllic. The two women live in a nice home in a nice Los Angeles neighborhood and are raising two teenagers of their own. The kids, college-bound Joni and the younger and the somewhat lost Laser, are products of a sperm donor but both kids love their moms and seem as well-adjusted as Wally and Theodore Cleaver.

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Beneath the surface, however, cracks are forming in the family’s foundation. Nic is the breadwinner, a physician who drinks too much and likes control over her environment and all those who inhabit it. Jules might be in her forties but she’s still looking for her place in the world, which is a nice way of saying she has trouble holding down a job. These pressures have taken the steam out of the couple’s sex life and undermined their emotional intimacy, and the person who will introduce the element that splits these cracks wide open is Laser. Now that they’re older, both kids are naturally curious as to who their real father is. Especially Laser,  who’s at an age where he’s missing and could use an actual father figure.

Because she’s eighteen, Joni is able to get the information on their donor daddy, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the shaggy, hippy dippy owner of a organic food restaurant who’s something of a lothario (pretty much the same performance he gave in the vastly superior “You Can Count on Me“).  With his easygoing manner, Paul is a nice relief from the uptight Nic and the neurotic Jules, so the kids understandably take a shine to him and turn a blind eye to his self-centeredness. Though obviously jealous, Nic and Jules do their best to encourage the burgeoning relationship and to make Paul a part of their family. This ends up taking an ugly turn when a sexually frustrated Jules, who’s tired of feeling inferior to the much more successful and centered Nic, engages in heated sexual affair with Paul. (more…)

It’s okay, I wouldn’t remember me either.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty” opens high above a beautiful American suburb as though the idea is to watch the first-time director pick from at random any perfect-looking American family living in any perfect-looking American home located on any perfect-looking American street in order to make the case that the price of buying into the stifling, conformist American Dream is dysfunction, desperation, and depression.

Furthermore, the only sin in this story is hypocrisy and we know this because it’s only hypocrites who suffer and who are unhappy; those fools who bought into the lie that hard work, sexual restraint, military duty, love of country, status, money, and manicured lawns mean something. On the other hand, it’s those who openly flaunt the norms of society who have been granted the reward of inner peace. This includes Jim and Jim, the openly gay couple who live down the block and Ricky Fitts, the dope-smoking, drug dealing, emo vegetarian able to see through all the suburban phoniness and experience the real beauty available to anyone with the courage to remove the blinders; the elegance of a plastic bag blowing in the wind or the smile of contentment on the face of a man who’s just had his brains blown out.

Because the American Dream is — like the Matrix — the enemy and antagonist of our story, a hero is required to show the rest of us the way out, a Neo who will bravely struggle against all the Agent Smiths dispatched from the Matrix (moral standards, corporate America, status-driven wives, and ultimately guns owned by the insecure) to break free from its insidious hold. Enter Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a husband, father and cubicle drone who lives in nothing less than a red, white and blue McMansion and, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, has no idea when he finally surrendered to The Depression or became the kind of man whose day is all downhill after his morning masturbatory session.

But something’s happening to Lester, something dangerous to the Matrix American Dream.

Lester is becoming self aware. (more…)

The Kids Are All Right, an indy film starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, examines the difficulties faced by two lesbians trying to raise children when a man enters the mix. But the man, played by Mark Ruffalo, is not just any man; he’s the donor whose sperm  helped create the two ‘kids’ of the title. 

You see, the son, Laser, wants to find out who the father is, but can’t because he’s only 15. So, he pleads with his 18-year old sister, Joni (named after Joni Mitchell; more on that later), to help him out. She resists at first, but eventually relents. Without spoiling anything, I’ll only say that the remainder of the movie involves all the twists and turns that any good movie uses to build the tension which eventually leads to a climax that leaves the audience breathless and the characters stocked up with new insights that ensure they will live richer and more honest lives.  Whew! In other words, your basic, garden variety Hollywood relationship movie;  well written, acted, and, photographed.

But, as Wilson Pickett once said: “Don’t let the green grass fool ya!” This is a smartly made and subtle contribution to the debate raging throughout the country that concerns gay marriage, civil unions, and gay rights in general. The director,  Lisa Cholodenko, is no rookie when making movies about same-sex relationships, and it shows in Kids. Given the chance at making a film with Hollywood heavies like Moore and Bening, most directors would wield a two-by-four instead of  Cholodenko’s scalpel. First and foremost, she shows when most would merely tell. (more…)

Among Hollywood’s many mind benders is the fact that a book and a movie can have the same title but not be the same story, while two or more movies can also have the same title and tell the same story — or not. I mention that because the new film, “The Kids are All Right” is not the same story as the book of the same title and neither have anything to do with 1979’s rock group in the raw documentary film about The Who, “The Kids Are Alright.”

Jules and Paul can't resist each other

In this “The Kids are All Right,” Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a Hollywood stereotype lesbian married couple with two teenage children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) who are basically getting along just fine until their kids contact Paul (Mark Ruffalo), their biological father, whose anonymously donated sperm impregnated each of their parents. As the children bond with Paul and his influence grows, Nic, the “husband” in the union takes offense: “I need your advice about child rearing about as much as I need a stiff dick up my ass!” Jules, the “wife,” does need something, however, and Ruffalo and Moore are soon engaged in very sweaty hetero screen sex.

I won’t spoil the ending. (more…)

[Part one of this two-part series can be found here.]

Sixteen of the top 20 box office earners have either a G or PG rating which should be a clue that R rated films ( “Titanic” being the exception) don’t do as well yet studios continue to add gratuitous irrelevant sex scenes that ruin the film. Why? It certainly can’t be artistic license because the principal reaction to them is usually-‘Ew!!! Why did they do that?” 

Movie-going statistics have dropped significantly among older adults and that’s understandable since most fare today cater to hormonal adolescents without a clue as to the true appeal of sensual art. Yet senior citizens today are former film buffs who would relish worthy theatrical offerings but their treks back to the wide screen lonely leave them disappointed. 

A few years ago I went with an elderly friend to see, “Love Actually,” because we’re both great fans of Alan Rickman. The film has various vignettes of romantic couples and their curious experiences pursuing the love game. One of these couples happens to be two individuals acting in a porn movie and although the intent was to inject irony in the sex scenes showing the relative naïveté of the participants as they try to hook up, it failed miserably. My friend later said that particular graphic display spoiled the otherwise charming film which she no longer would add to her DVD collection when it came out.  (more…)

Sheda Vasseghi in today’s World Tribune:

“The mainstream Hollywood crowd, an apologist group that enjoys traveling to Taliban-run countries such as Iran spreading their holier-than-thou “cultural understanding” of rogue regimes, has been effectively censored by Moslem clerics. Filmmaker Roland Emmerich chose not to blow up the Kaaba at Mecca in his film 2012 for fear of a fatwa (death sentence issued by Moslem clerics) being placed on his head.

“Yet, in 2005, actor Sean Penn went to cover a so-called Islamic Republic “election” wanting Americans to visit Iran and become familiar with its culture. In March 2009, director Phil Alden Robinson found that Iranians were not very different; and actress Annette Bening (surely with a headscarf given Iran’s brutal enforcement of hijab) hoped her trip to Iran would jump start a bridge between the U.S. and the mullahs in Tehran. (more…)

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Returning once again to the land beneath the Big Hollywood sign for a most important poll question. “The Stoning of Soraya M.” has received powerful rave reviews across the political spectrum. The buzz is hot. From the leftie pundits at HuffPo (who only seem to be discovering the true human rights horrorshow nature of that regime now, most curious) to the Righties at Big Hollywood and elsewhere, SORAYA M. is a must-see movie that will linger with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Strangely enough, Amnesty lnternational’s Elise Auerbach doesn’t like it. Because stonings in Iran are so rare, don’t you know. No suspension of disbelief for Ms. Elsie. I’m sorry, what’s her job again? Oh yeah, Iran Specialist for Amnesty International. Go figure. Personally, I happen to think one stoning is one too many. And it wasn’t the only one, not by a country mile! But that’s just me. I’m not an Iran specialist for AI. Like, say, Ms. Auerbach. Nice work if you can get it, huh, Ms. Elsie? (more…)

The crime is complete. Judgment has been passed. The killing stones are in hand. As per the harsh stoning penal code of Iran’s Islamist thugocracy (for however long that lasts) where the crime took place, my stones are not so big as to kill right away, not so small you can’t call them stones. And I’m winding up like Nolan Ryan. Feel free to pick up a stone of your own. But wait for it!

And let me make this perfectly clear, even if they do say Jehovah!

Sentence must be read before being carried out. And unlike Soraya M., the board members of the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges will deserve every rock that’s thrown their way. I also believe that, in light of events in Iran today, the following commentary will stand out in much starker prominence than it did when I first started reporting on them in early March, when Team Oscar first set off for the Unfriendly Skies of Islamist Iran. (more…)

Dear Big Hollywood readers, it gives me great satisfaction to report to you that BH has been out on point not only on compelling film industry issues, which will never be covered in promo rags like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter (but then again, AMPAS and the studios aren’t buying us off), but on many controversial issues being played out in America and the greater world at large as well.

I know this to be true. Being a news junkie myself, I have found time after time as I was reading about a supposedly breaking subject, like ABC’s recent coverage of the targeted LGBT murders in Iraq, that it had already been on display for all to see in Big Hollywood posts for months.

Not to toot my own horn, but…well, okay, I’m tooting my own horn. And those of Andy Breitbart and John Nolte, who have given I, and so many other wonderful and insightful Hollywood right-wing fringe types, a magnificent bullhorn we otherwise would not have. We appear to be doing the dirty jobs our media just refuses to do. It’s a labor Hercules would completely sympathize with. (more…)

Now that ‘Roxana: A True Story’ has come to a most satisfying and happy conclusion for Roxana Saberi, her parents, myself and millions of others around the globe (a conclusion not always assured, and which looked very grim in some scenes), it is now time for Your Most Humble and Obedient Critic to give you the full skinny on ‘Roxana: A True Story.’

Or, by its Hollywood acronym, RATS. Funny. I actually found that startling contraction fitting, not for Roxana (not hardly), but for all of the major black hats and clueless morons who populated this nerve-wracking Thugocracy Studios production, which had civilized people everywhere both riveted and outraged in its most grueling and suspenseful moments.

Not to mention for Roxana and her parents. But before we get to heroes and villains, let us look at the story to date with all its dramatic twists and underpinnings, many with significant international implications. Just like a good Hitchcock drama should. And I caught ‘em all!

By pure happenstance, Your Most Humble Critic and Boy Reporter was already hot on the job covering Iran (unlike some people) and hammering AMPAS for their tea and finger-cookie soirees with these guys, when I saw what Iran was pulling with Roxana and called it for what it was: a hostage crisis. And on the same day HRW called it the same in a press release on March 13th, which I didn’t find out until the 19th thanks to our on-the-ball Vein Stream Media. (more…)

I really thought my Republican platform piece here at BH would have been my last for awhile. Plenty for readers of all stripes to chew on. And I got too many other things to do. The reason for my reluctant return is yet another critical issue the Obamamedia and our LibDem government are completely flat-lining on: the officially sanctioned exterminations of LGBTs in Iraq, and on our dime. Not to mention State’s cold and lame response. More on that later. Too much more, actually.

First, the one of the main points of this fact-based opinion piece. And I know I’m going to catch hell from the Streisand and Brolin crowd on this one! Ronald Reagan was a hero to gays, and Obama has not been to date. I know, I know. The Evil Ronald Reagan, who practically invented AIDS? Reagan, the Adolf Eichmann of the Gay World? Not true. Not by a country mile!

In fact, Ronald Reagan was a better friend to gays and lesbians in his age than Barack Obama has been to gays in his. But don’t even go by what I say. I’m a right wing extremist, and very biased to what I believe. I admit it. Who isn’t these days? The press? LOL! But here are some irrefutable facts on The One and The Gipper I thought I’d throw out there. A gay buffet for thought, if you will. With swimming pools. And movie stars. (more…)

Over the weekend, I was pondering why the low budget, standard genre pic The Haunting in Connecticut (Lionsgate) has become a nifty little box office hit. The film added almost $9.5M over the weekend for a new 10-day cume of $37M, and the only conclusion I have been able to reach is that it’s all about the poster.

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

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If you’re wondering if I was about to opine on the craft of gut-twisting horror stories, you’d only be half right. I’m actually talking about real life here. As many of you may know from my earlier posts, I first flame-throwered onto the scene here at Big Hollywood about a month ago, on the occasion of Team Oscar’s could-not-be-more-ill-advised taking off for the unfriendly skies of Islamist Iran.

I knew they were going to get punked! They were going to Punkedville! In fact, I was so sure of it, I was the one who broke the story in the US off the French wires to Drudge and Nikki Finke.  One Hollywood Jihadi PR roadside bomb detonated. War Is Hell.

Look at their trip from my POV. I remember the whole balls-to-the-wall anti-Apartheid campaign from the mid-eighties. ‘I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City,’ remember? By the way, wasn’t Little Stevie great in that video? Love him! Point being, if the racist South African apartheid regime was unworthy of cultural exchange, why was the gay-hanging, women-stoning, child-executing, blogger-killing, hostage-taking fascist regime in Iran worthy of a gold-plated Academy PR kiss? (more…)

Few books in history, if any, have left such a powerfully lingering effect with their last four words as the classic tale of a totalitarian nightmare by Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), ’Nineteen Eighty-Four’: “He Loved Big Brother.” In those four words, the utter destruction of a human being, and by extension humanity itself, was complete. The novel remains a most dark and compelling tale, and is even taught as a full course in many college classrooms.

John Hurt in Michael Radford’s ‘1984′

The essential fact, the very heart of the matter, in George Orwell’s timeless classic is “the ability to say two plus two equals four. If than can be done, all else follows.” Yet the nightmare Big Brother regime of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ must by necessity keep redoing the math, even as it keeps rewriting history. Those who do the correct math, and refuse to see the equation otherwise, are the greatest dangers to Big Brother’s existence and are doomed to suffer fates worse than death. (more…)

11pm PST – Bugsy (1991) The famed gangster running the mobs in Los Angeles tries to turn Las Vegas into a vacation paradise. Cast: Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley Dir: Barry Levinson C-136 mins, TV-MA

Warren Beatty and Annette Bening smolder like Bogie and Bacall in a superb film that only gets better with each passing year. “Bugsy” is one of those rare period pieces made over the last 20 years where the casting’s so perfect no one looks silly in a fedora. Real grown ups placed in a beautifully designed production that never breaks the spell of time and place. (more…)

If anyone wrote a script like this, no one would believe it.

But I already read the book.

That they even went to Iran in the first place was an abomination, especially given their three-hour gay rights infomercial called The Oscars just five days earlier.

And it only kept getting worse. (more…)

Inspired perhaps by President Obama’s “unclenched hand” approach to reaching out to “countries that don’t like us very much,” as his former opponent John McCain tepidly used to put it, an unofficial delegation from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (including current and former AMPAS presidents and Annette Bening, among others), has set out to visit Iran as part of a “cultural exchange.”  

Bening, Iranian actress Fatemeh Motamed Aria and Alfre Woodard in Iran

Exactly what is being exchanged is unclear.  Maybe Ms. Bening et al are lecturing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs about “the shame they will see in their grandchildren’s eyes” over their denial of equal rights to gays in Iran.  Ahmadinejad memorably told a howling audience at Columbia University in late 2007 that, “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”  That’s because they are hanged there, which certainly marks the Mormon Church as lightweights when it comes to intolerance of gays.  But for their part, Iranian cultural advisor Javad Shamaghdari laid out for the Hollywood representatives exactly what Iran wants in return: “We will believe Obama’s policy of change when we see change in Hollywood too.”  (more…)