The first season of the Showtime series “Homeland” mercifully came to an end last night. I say “mercifully” because, while I will never get the hours I invested in the series back, I will not be subjecting myself to season two.

To recap so far, the series follows CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) tracking recovered U.S. Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who she suspects of being a sleeper terrorist who was turned by his captor, al Qaeda commander Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban).

The CIA is also tracking Brody’s former sniper team partner Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), who is also suspected of working for Nazir. Agent Mathison has been placed on administrative leave for removing classified documents from Langley and because her superiors learned she suffers from bipolar disorder, which precludes her from having security clearance.

The episode opens with Brody filming his martyr video, in which he explains why he is about to take such drastic action. In previous episodes we learned that while Brody was being held captive he became close to Abu Nazir’s youngest son, Issa, who was subsequently killed by a U.S. drone strike that hit his school.

In the video, Brody states “As a Marine, I swore an oath to defend the United States of America against enemies, both foreign and domestic. My action today is against such domestic enemies. The Vice President and members of his national security team, who I know to be liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never held accountable for. This is about justice for 82 children whose deaths were never acknowledged and whose murder is a stain on the soul of this nation.”

Agent Mathison’s superior Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) has decided to continue her work in her absence and discovers a redacted document about the drone strike, the only document that can be linked to such an event since the Vice President thought he had destroyed the paper trail. Saul brings the document first to the attention of CIA Deputy Director David Estes (David Harewood), who tells him to do his job and not worry about it. Saul is supposed to be working an event with Vice President William Walden (Jamey Sheridan) at the State Department.

Brody is preparing to carry out his attack at this event while meeting with Vice President Walden and various security officials, where it is to be announced he is running for Congress and Walden is running for President. The plan is for Brody to detonate an explosive vest that will kill the Vice President and all others present after being whisked into a secure bunker when Brody’s former partner, Walker, attempts to assassinate Walden. Walker purposely misses Walden.

The assassination attempt is simply a distraction to help get Brody and his vest past the metal detectors and into the bunker in the frenzy that follows. First, Brody’s vest malfunctions. After fixing the vest in the restroom, Brody receives a phone call from his daughter and is unable to complete his mission, apparently chickening out.

The next day, Saul brings the drone strike document to the attention of Vice President Walden, who is not interested in talking about it and tells Saul to “let it lie.” Instead, Saul decides to blackmail Walden using interrogation tapes that were supposedly destroyed. Saul describes what is on the tapes as “Coercion. Cruelty. Outright torture. Makes for unhappy viewing. You gave the orders, William. You gave the orders.”

We then see Estes showing Saul a videotape of the briefing room the day of the drone strike. In the video we see Estes tell Walden “That’s a school, sir.” Walden coldly replies “Don’t cloud the issue. If Abu Nazir is taking refuge among children, he’s putting them at risk, not us. It’s our joint opinion the potential collateral damage falls within current matrix parameters.” Saul is appalled, states “Somebody actually came up with that language?” and closes his eyes in disgust.

Saul and Estes get into a discussion about why the video was kept secret. When Saul threatens to contact the New York Times, Estes tells him “No you’re not. You know why? Because telling the world we killed 82 kids on purpose would endanger every one of your case operatives in the field. Not to mention every American soldier on the ground. You would, essentially, be handing the enemy the biggest recruitment tool since Abu Ghraib.”

Brody decides to meet with Walker, who wants to kill Brody for panicking and not completing the mission. Brody tells Walker, who has Abu Nazir on speakerphone, that he decided it was best not to complete the mission because now he is in the unique position of being close to the next President of the United States and “At the very least, I’d be able to influence policy at the highest levels” as a member of Congress. Nazir is on board with the idea, stating “Why kill a man when you can kill an idea?” Nazir then has Brody kill Walker as a demonstration of his commitment.

The final scene shows former agent Mathison undergoing electro-convulsive therapy to help treat her psychosis. Saul had tried to talk her out of the treatment due to the side effects, which includes memory loss. As Carrie is being put under anesthesia, she remembers Brody screaming the name of Nazir’s son in his sleep. She puts the pieces together, stating “Issa, Nazir’s son. Brody knew him,” right before falling asleep and undergoing the procedure.

Will she remember? Will it matter, since she’s essentially no longer a CIA agent? Will Brody be elected to congress and bring America down from within? I guess someone will have to let me know, since I won’t be watching. I have no interest in continuing to watch a show that paints Islamic terrorists as the good guys and the Vice President and CIA as the bad guys. A show that claims our CIA commits “outright torture.” A show that says we kill kids on purpose. A show in which the only person who understands the terrorist’s plans is literally psychotic.

I knew I risked disappointment when the series began. I know I wasn’t alone in hoping the outcome would be different this time. Looking back, I think the biggest clue to a potential letdown was the fact that lefty critics liked the show. Still, I held out hope that a plot twist would turn things around. It never happened.

Even bringing “24″ executive producer Joel Surnow into the mix wouldn’t bring me back for season two.

Sigh:

Speaking mostly in French at a press conference in Algiers yesterday, Stone said he was shocked by the global financial crisis and “to see how money was venerated by America”.

Its middle class “is the biggest victim” said the US director, though nothing could be done to change a system that he called “undemocratic, even after the arrival of Obama”, he added.

But the 65-year-old had little sympathy for his compatriots.

“Americans are not really interested in problems abroad,” he said. “They have no empathy.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement would do better to move to “Washington and not New York, to have more impact”, said Stone[.]

[...]

There are different ways to write and make movies. Very few are made from the heart; many more are formula based. There are movies inspired by dishwasher manuals and a great number derived from Marxist textbooks. And there is a special category of movies: those written and made by self-righteous hypocrites.

—–

“The Whistleblower” is a drama based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac (played by Rachel Weisz), a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and exposed the U.N. for covering up a sex scandal involving peacekeepers and an international ring of sex traffickers. The cast also includes Monica Belluci, Vanessa ‘best friend of Israel after Obama’ Redgrave and David Strathairn among others.

As Kathryn investigates the exploitation of young and underage girls, she discovers that “sex lords” are bribing the UN officials to run the illegal prostitution clubs that spring up like mushrooms across the war-ridden and apocalyptic Balkan terrain. Moreover, not only are the UN officials are being bribed to close their eyes on sex slavery but, in fact, the clubs are really operating to serve the UN peacekeeping force. The story also flashes back to how an underage Ukrainian girl is tricked into sex slavery by her own relatives.

After nominally showing other UN peacekeepers abusing underage slave girls, the story turns into a full-fledged attack on a military contractor’s (“Dyncorp”) cover up of its employees whom Kathryn Bolkovac threatens to expose. So Dyncorp becomes the main villain, and it is mentioned in the same breath as “Halliburton.” That magic word that is honey to a leftist’s ear. Mentioning Halliburton in the popular culture is like having a plague sign nailed to a medieval city wall. Whatever comes into contact with it is automatically doomed as rotten. I mean, you can discredit the Dalai Lama by attaching him to Halliburton. You can even discredit Deepak Chopra by attaching him to Halliburton . . . though you can also do that just by reading his books.

So, the real culprit of the story is Dyncorp, who covers up its employees’ abuse and, of course, and you knew, this was coming . . . the State Department that covers up for Dyncorp. The plotline gets rapidly obsessed with the military contractors and the State Department as if they are the ones who invented sex slavery and prostitution.

And, of course, the State Department and Dyncorp are now hell-bent on killing Kathy, just like they were hell-bent on killing Valerie Plame, right?

The assassination plot device is precious . . . and as substantiated as Mayor Bloomberg fearing that Time Square car may have been rigged to blow by an American disenchanted by a health care bill. Again, not to defend Dyncorp’s alleged attempt to get rid of a whistleblower by firing her, but there is a fine line between firing someone and firing a bullet into someone’s head.

With all their sophistication and monitoring every move of their own operative, the Dyncorp/State Department assassination plot, of course, fails.

Every time I see a noble human rights warrior targeted for assassination by an evil American State Department or corporation, I am staggered by the inefficacy of the latter in dispatching their intended target. I mean, how hard could it really be? And yet, the State Department (or whoever) never ever succeeds and the heroes end up freely exposing whatever they are determined to expose.

What makes me personally disappointed in movies like The Whistleblower is the wasted potential and its outright hypocrisy. Although it is fair to criticize, and especially to fight, those who went to protect and ended up having sex with under age girls, the screenplay of The Whistleblower fails to explore the tragedy as a result of fraudulent human nature and the overall UN corruption, but rather as a self-serving singling-out of the military contractors…the American military contractors.

If it chose, on the other hand, to document the story of abuse particular to post-war Bosnia, then it is blatantly one-sided because the peacekeepers, especially the American ones, are depicted as sex maniacs whose sole purpose is to have sex in Bosnia.  Forget about putting their ass in the middle of two fratricidal maniacs and trying to calm down a millennium-long-brewed genetic animosity, the peacekeepers are here solely to abuse the young girls whom they came to protect. That’s the impression one gets from the script, and the impression is usually the result of intention.

And by shifting the focus of the movie to “America is the worst and the American military in all its forms is the darkest force since Darth Vader,” the plot of The Whistleblower loses its importance and passion because of the failure to address the cause of sex slavery and its real culprits and turns into a comic feminist rendition of Matt Damon’s wet dream fantasy Bourne movies.

In the attempt to quench a leftist thirst for putting down the military, The Whistleblower like its ilk of naïve but dangerous political movies, sacrifices the real issue of sex trafficking like a virgin to a persistent dragon of propaganda.

On a more tragic note, the creators of The Whistleblower indirectly (or, perhaps, directly) abuse children by using them for their political purposes. Letting the real culprits off the hook and chasing the American military contractors instead, proves that the creators are not really concerned about sex slavery as much as they think they are but simply use the rape of children as a platform to denigrate American military. Otherwise they would deal with real statistics that shows the American peacekeeping force as the least involved in the debauchery and abuse of all the UN peacekeeping nations worldwide.

A simple research such as the one contacted by William Norman Grigg in his article “Beasts in Blue Berets’ (published in The New American with some references to similar expositions in the Village Voice) will reveal shocking abuses, for example, of Belgian UN peacekeepers in Somalia who fried a young boy for stealing food and a Belgian Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper rewarded with a bomb threat (in Belgium) for breaking the undesired news.

The research will also reveal disturbing accounts of Italian troops torturing and abusing Somalis and a 46-page report documenting that “the criminal events were not just the result of ‘rotten apples’ that you may find in any structure, but were rather the consequence of a stretched line of command and amused compliance toward such high jinks by some junior officers.”

Then, there are 47 Canadian UN troops who served in Bosnia, yes in Bosnia, and were accused of “drunkenness, sex, black marketeering and patient abuse at a mental hospital they were guarding.”  The Whistleblower is a German-Canadian co-production so where is the Canadian self criticism of this outrageous case? All you get about other UN troop abuses in the screenplay of The Whistleblower is a throwaway line that ends with the protatgonist telling the audience Americans aren’t legally accounable for anything they do.

No, Kathy, they are accountable and interestingly they proportionally commit less abuse than any other participant country as evidence after evidence will show if you only bother looking at it, instead of listening to your boyfriend!

Many international humanitarian observers and Pentagon officials note that such problems (prostitution, sex trafficking, narco-business) are predictable, given that “the international police task force [in Bosnia] is a compendium of people from diverse countries with different degrees of professionalism and training and different backgrounds in operations and ethics”.  This sounds like the real problem, doesn’t it?

Now, why the creators of The Whistleblower chose to go after the least guilty and by doing so let the real culprit slip away? Isn’t this against any investigative logic? Isn’t this truly despicable, that in an attempt to score cheap political points, which is the only real reason this movie is being made in the first place, they would go as low as to use sex slavery of underage girls? How different they are from physical abusers or those who sell these girls into slavery?

The only noble soldier with real lines is Kathy’s boyfriend, the aforementioned Dutch peacekeeper Jan, who hates the concept of his friends raping girls, but occasionally gives them a ride from the sex club when they are pissed drunk. Again, it is a matter of choice and probably based on a true boyfriend . . . but why Dutch? Were there no good American peacekeepers to fall in love with? Or may it be that real Kathy (or at least the way she is portrayed in the script) had some issues of her own, because as much as she tries to save girls from drunk peacekeepers, she just cannot stop spewing talking points on how what is considered brave for a man in America is considered bad for a woman.  This is so old and so Berkeley that no serious American man can take it anymore, which explains the Dutch boyfriend.

Remember, Amsterdam is liberals’ El Dorado. Every disenchanted liberal threatens to leave oppressive America for Amsterdam the city where you can smoke pot, have abortions, enjoy tulips, neo-Calvinism, and euthanasia. Not to mention your pick of prostitutes, sitting on display in windows, many of them sex slaves themselves.

So when Kathy fears for her life, threatened by Dyncorp and the State Department, the Dutch boyfriend calls her and says, “It’s time to come home.”

Yes, Kathy welcome to Amsterdam, the safest city in the world! Make sure you visit those colorful tulip fields, the Van Gogh’s museum and, of course, Linnaeusstraat street where in the early morning of November 2, 2004, an Islamist thug barbarically murdered, by shooting, stabbing and attempting to decapitate, Van Gogh’s grandson, Theo—a real whistleblower who made a movie about women’s abuse by real villains who really kill, even in such places as Amsterdam.

Hopefully, to refute doubting loudmouths like me, the creators of The Whistleblower will make a movie one day that exposes sex trafficking and child abuse that is happening in their immediate neighborhood- the hills of Los Angeles. Thus, finally, making the point that it is not just girls from impoverished countries who are victims of sex abuse and it is not just military men who abuse them, but also young, underage or ‘barely legal’ actresses and models who are raped and abused by pacifist directors and producers right here in Hollywood.

I know that bringing up Polanski on a conservative-leaning blog is like exposing Nosferatu to the light, and being one of the most famous cases, Polanski’s sin, compared to what is really going in this town, can be considered mild. Yet, it is this connection to Polanski, as well,  that moves The Whistleblower from the category of  “evil Halliburton movies” to the category of “movies made by self righteous hypocrites,” like Monica Belluci, whose name you will see in the main credits of the movie as well as under the “Release child-rapist Roman Polanski” petition.

With all your love and respect for the military, not unlike Belluci’s love and respect for Polanski, I don’t think, liberal or conservative, you should be going out of your way to justify child abuse because of the peacekeepers’ combat fatigue or tough terrain filled with mines, and that’s exactly what you should expect from the people who make movies as well. When it comes to the gut-wrenching issue of using a child as a sex toy, we really should level the damn field.

“The Whistleblow” hits theatres August 5th.

—–

Tuesday morning Nikki Finke posted Andrew Klavan’s online interview (above) with CNSNews where the successful novelist and screenwriter (and my pal) – who just had his Homelander series optioned by Summit – discussed, among other things, the difficulties conservatives face working or looking to work in a very liberal Tinseltown. Finke’s opening comment pretty much confirm Klavan’s:

Sure, this has long been the complaint from Hollywood Republicans. But I’ve witnessed the atmosphere out here becoming far less toxic for politically conservative or religious right or other non-liberal Industry types.

“Less toxic.” What a relief.  Tolerant, open-minded Hollywood sure has come a long way.

Of course, Finke then goes out of her way to contribute to this admitted toxicity, closing her piece with the spreading of  the provably false claim that Klavan “characterizes his liberal biz counterparts as ‘Anti-American’.”

That’s a helluva charge to make against Klavan. But…

Watch the video. Not only will it make you smarter but Klavan says no such thing. Not even close. The closest he comes is when describing one of those awful meetings filled with Hollywood Lefties who weren’t raised by parents who taught them the concept of mixed company:

“[Liberals] can speak very openly, even in business meetings. So that it makes it very hard, so that when you go into sell something — if I sit down to sell something to you, you can start making remarks; anti-American remarks, anti-military, anti-religious remarks. I’m the kind of guy who’s gonna say, ‘No, I disagree.’ But that’s pretty much the end of my sale.”

Obviously, all Klavan’s saying here is that he’s heard people make anti-American statements in business meetings. Does Finke really want to argue that over a decades-long career Klavan’s never heard such things? Regardless, no reasonable person would interpret that observation as anything near Finke’s characterization which intentionally makes it sound as though Klavan made some kind of sweeping indictment labelling all Hollywood liberals as anti-American.

Anyone who’s anyone in this town devours Finke’s site on a daily basis and unless they take time they don’t have to watch Klavan’s interview in full,  thanks to Finke’s irresponsible twist of a perfectly reasonable statement, they’re certain to walk away believing this conservative writer named Andrew Klavan is running around characterizing Hollywood liberals as “anti-American.”

So ask yourself; after reading this are Hollywood liberals more likely or less likely to hire Klavan?

And so ends today’s lesson in how the new blacklist works.

Side Note: Be sure to check out the comments that Finke’s post generated. I’m not sure which is more revealing: those who agree and/or sympathize with Klavan, or those whose snarky, seething dismissal of his claims go a long way towards proving his point.

Welcome to Inside-Inside-Inside Hollywood, where James Cameron is Doug Niedermeyer, the Big Man on Campus:

“Avatar” director James Cameron responded to right-wing critics of his blockbuster hit movie on Tuesday night, saying that “as an artist, I felt a need to say something about what I saw around me.” …

But he rejected comments by critics that the film is un-American even if it is an allegory for American military forays. 

“I’ve heard people say this film is un-American, while part of being an American is having the freedom to have dissenting ideas,” Cameron said, prompting loud applause from a capacity crowd at the ArcLight Hollywood.

“This movie reflects that we are living through war,” Cameron added. “There are boots on the ground, troops who I personally believe were sent there under false pretenses, so I hope this will be part of opening our eyes.”

Okay, let’s grant Cameron this: Everyone’s entitled to his own definition of what is and is not anti-American. You can set the bar wherever you want. Why? Because thanks to the military Cameron smeared in his blockbuster where around the world, and maybe for the first time, audiences are wildly cheering the death of American Marines (NOTE to leftist hair-splitters: former Marines), this is a  free country. As far as my personal definition of anti-Amer– wait. What? What did Cameron say…? 

What is this supposed to mean? 

“I’ve heard people say this film is un-American, while part of being an American is having the freedom to have dissenting ideas,” Cameron said, prompting loud applause from a capacity crowd at the ArcLight Hollywood.

Of course the audience applauded. Someone went after conservatives during an industry screening at the ArcLight. That’s the kind of environment where you could get a standing ovation while holding a puppy under water as long as you’re sticking it to the right. But what does this nonsense mean?

“…part of being an American is having the freedom to have dissenting ideas.”

Who asked for Cameron’s birth certificate? No one’s claiming he’s not an American. The argument is that his film is stridently anti-American and savagely anti-military. But does he answer those charges? Does he explain away his artistic decision to have genocide-happy U.S. Marines (NOTE for leftist hair-splitters: former Marines) on behalf of an American corporation (come on Cameron apologists, it’s not like “Avatar” had a rainbow coalition of evildoers. I didn’t even hear an Australian accent) commit a terrorist atrocity against innocents?

But it’s worse than that…

These Marines are in uniform and you leftist hair-splitters who excuse Cameron’s trashing of our best and brightest because one line of exposition tells us they’re former Marines, had best remember that Quaritch, the top genocide-happy psycho, is referred to throughout the film as “Colonel” — and not because he’s selling chicken.

And what does this Colonel in military uniform do? To explain his imperialistic mission statement he quotes an American President (“pre-emptive war,” etc…) and then orders all-too eager U.S. Marines to commit a terrorist attack on innocents.

And what does Cameron do? What are his deliberate “artistic” choices? He has Our Guys commit a 9/11. The falling of the Na’Vi Home Tree is deliberately filmed, staged and choreographed to look like September 11th on that fateful day. And in one thudding piece of spell-breaking exposition we’re told it’s “shock and awe.”

Cameron’s not having Psycho-Colonel quote Hitler or Stalin because his not-so thinly disguised allegory has nothing to do with some foreign leader. He’s not even quoting Robert E. Lee or Lyndon Johnson because “Avatar” has nothing to do with some long ago American war. Cameron had the entire universe of his imagination from which to find his terrorist evildoers, but his “artistic” choice came down to present-day America — an American company (I saw no one wearing kilts or turbans and heard only American dialects), the American  military, American foreign policy, and the quoting of an American president.

Bush Quotes = War on Terror

Home Tree = The World Trade Center

And now we know those “militia” working class mineworkers = redblooded redneck NRA supporters

And we sure as hell know that 2+2 = anti-American.

Criticizing America is not anti-American. But making up lies…

Using the most powerful propaganda device ever created, Cameron spent $500 million to tell a world — that is right now cheering the death of American soldiers (in groovy 3D!) — that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — which we are presently fighting, by the way — represent America committing a 9/11 in those countries to steal their natural resources.  

Nevermind that the same military Cameron smears sacrificed, bled, and died to liberate 50 million people they’ve never met; nevermind that We The People spent hundreds of billions to accomplish this liberation and have asked for nothing in return other than friendship. Facts mean nothing to Hollywoodists. It’s all about their unholy endgame.

And how many moons orbit the planet where making a film that trashes America qualifies you as some kind of dissenter with “dissenting ideas”?

Trashing America on film … in Hollywood is the very definition of conformity. Trashing America is also a form of penance for cliched, pedantic, predictable storytelling — a way to get absolution from sympathetic Leftist critics — a way to get your cliched, pedantic, predictable screenplay nominated as one of the five best of the year.

Drive onto the 20th Century-Fox lot in a minivan with a Sarah Palin bumper sticker and then talk to me about dissent, Niedermeyer.

One last point…

“There are boots on the ground, troops who I personally believe were sent there under false pretenses[.]“

Translation…

“There are boots on the ground, troops sent there under false pretenses so I thought I’d smear them as bloodthirsty terrorists.”

We already know how much the military appreciates Mr. Cameron’s support … because they have told us so.

Three out of five leftists agree: Avatar is anti-American….

Time’s Joe Klein:

But that wasn’t the most amazing thing about the movie: the Americans were the bad guys. They were a mercenary army working for corporate villains who wanted to strip-mine a tribe of alien, cerulean nice-guy, enviro-theists. The dialogue was awful; the characterizations were crude…and I’m sure that conservatives will dismiss this as another excretion of the Hollywood left. But still, it was something for a mainstream–indeed, a blockbuster–motion picture to have you rooting for the blue dudes flying about on birds painted like Chinese fans…and rooting against the humans, none of whom had the requisite Eastern European or Arab villain accents.

The message that big trees are good and bulldozers are evil seems rather timely. The message that God is Green is fascinating stuff to be peddling in the shopping malls of middle America (I particularly liked the moment when the mercenaries chuckled about the fact that the primitives believed in a tree god). Movies are usually overrated as agents of social or political change–I remember when The Right Stuff was going to launch John Glenn into the presidency–but the zeitgeist is a subtle thing and the impact of Avatar is bound to ripple in all sorts of lovely, little enviro-theistic ways.

Read the full piece here.

You can’t blame them, though. After years of watching helplessly as liberal films flopped at a heartwarming 100% rate while conservative-themed films such as “Rambo,” “Gran Torino,” “Taken,” ”Knowing,” “and “Dark Knight” made money, it only makes sense that to lost-in-the-desert Lefties, Cameron’s garishly colored 3D cartoon makes hamburger look like a steak dinner.

There’s little doubt Avatar will end up as the number one or two top moneymaker worldwide of all time, out-performing the conservative Dark Knight (#5) and another epic that frequently finds its way on to a number of conservative movie lists as a favorite: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (#2).

So the question is: Do politics have something to do with the an event film’s box-office success? To a point, I think so. But does the fact that the exponentially more awful but pro-military, pro-American, anti-Obama Transformers 2, which was also a monster hit this year, cancel Avatar out? For argument’s sake, let’s say not.

Liberals are as enamored with Avatar and as willing to forgive its obvious flaws as conservatives are with films that appeal to us such as Red Dawn. Like I said in my review, Avatar is the Left’s Death Wish 5. A bad movie but one with the kind of story Leftists find appealing. Trashing the military and our way of life is so fulfilling that Cameron’s ham-fisted story flaws wash over them in a sea of anti-American bloodlust. Avatar is a far cry from the dozen-or-so poorly lit, overwrought anti-war dramas no one bothered to see – this is a big-budget action epic where America gets its butt kicked. “Yee-haw!”

Just as conservatives revile street thugs and Communists, Leftists barely conceal their contempt for our military and country. Sure, plenty of fanboys are purchasing tickets again and again and are completely immune to the film’s propaganda, but Leftists who wouldn’t normally give a sci-fi spectacular their repeat business are surely returning again and again to get their HateAmerica on.

If Hollywood learns anything from Avatar it could be that James Cameron might have finally figured out a way to further leftist causes on film and make a profit while doing so. Rather than become another victim of the 100% failure rate enjoyed by pretentious, melodramatic, preachy, adult dramas designed to trash our military and undermine America — they now know they have to make pretentious, melodramatic, preachy $500 million, 3D, sci-fi event films that trash our military and undermine America.

How hard can that be, right? And it’s really the only way. Because unless they’re Avatar, big stars or not, liberal-themed films have a nasty habit of failing. This is just from this year and these are worldwide numbers:

Duplicity $78 million; State of Play $87 million;The Informant! $35 million; Men Who Stare at Goats $32 million; Brothers $27 million; The International $60 million.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but some non-event conservative films did do a whole lot better. Taken $226 million; The Blind Side will probably hit $250; pro-American Inglourious Basterds $312 million; pro-Christian Knowing $183 million; Gran Torino $269 million…

But I remain sure that Avatar represents a cultural sea change, not lightening in a bottle. So, Hollywood, please do drop another half-billion into another America-trasher.

However, there is one thing about the movie that really upsets me.  It is blatant anti-military and less blatant anti-American.  Without giving away too much of the plot, the bad guys in the movie are the United States Marines.  Apparently, in the future, the world has become one big country that seems to be controlled by the United States.  The United States Marines are sent to the planet of Pandora to destroy the opposition to the New World Order’s acquisition of its substitute for oil which just happens to be located on Pandora.

There are scientists assigned by the New World Order to Pandora to negotiate a peaceful solution, but they are overruled by the military and the business interests at every turn.  Eventually, the military solution is the final solution.  The military then attacks with pure hatred and determination the locals on the planet.  They do not care for the sanctity of the alien life, whether it be women or children.  And, they attack with sophisticated weapons against the bows and arrows of the natives.

The glee with which the American Marines participate in this massacre is appalling and does not show the true feelings and concerns of the real United States Military.  James Cameron should apologize to the American Military and should make a statement that he does not truly feel this way about them.  He should also apologize to the American public for painting our young men and women that defend this country as cold-blooded killers.

However, I am sure the Mr. Cameron will not do this as the movie is obviously a political comment on Iraq and Afghanistan.

On another issue, all of my regular readers know that I am a firm believer in Free Speech.  I believe that this aspect of the Bill of Rights is absolute.  Neither the left nor the right should have any say in limiting it.  I agree with the United States Supreme Court on the few limitations on Free Speech they have declared as there is an obvious reason for those few and rare limitations.

In the past few years, many department stores such as Target have decided that the use of the word Christmas should not be permitted in their stores.  The new corporate policy is that it is the holiday season and these are holiday sales.  My brother wrote an article a few weeks ago dealing with this very issue.  I agree with my brother’s concerns.

However, it has just come to my attention that Starwood’s Hotels has now adopted the same policy.  I have been informed that all of their employees have been told that they are not permitted to say Merry Christmas or to type Merry Christmas in e-mails.  To me this is a clear violation of both Free Speech and Freedom of Religion.  If a person wants to wish another person a Merry Christmas, they should be able to do so freely.

I have many Jewish friends.  I wish them Happy Hanukkah and many of them wish me a Merry Christmas.  This is one of the Freedoms that are allowed in this country.  If someone chooses to say “Happy Holidays,” that is also their own personal choice.  But, when a company I am working for tells me that I cannot say Merry Christmas, this is going too far.

Accordingly, I am asking that all people should begin a boycott of Starwood Hotels.  Everyone that reads this column should pass this on through their e-mail lists, their Facebook account, their My Space account and their Twitter accounts.  The American public was able to force Target and other department stores into changing their policy back to the way it used to be.  Let’s see if we can get Starwood to change its policy as well.

Nobody liked this movie when it was called “Body of Lies.” 

This is the most revealing trailer yet and thankfully we’re given a heads up as to what the story might really be about. Hollywood will look for cover with the excuse that “Green Zone” is based on a true story, but we all know which “true stories” Leftist Hollywood cherry picks in order to fulfill the demands of an anti-American narrative. For example, the true story of 100,000-plus Americans risking their lives to liberate and protect from terrorists people they’ve  never met is one “true story” we’ll see in hell first.

Everything you’d expect from director Paul Greengrass and Damon is here, including that goddamn shaky-cam (it’s not saying the Lord’s name in vain if you mean it). Damon’s character is the protagonist and he’s there to do good but it’s not the terrorists who are the antagonists getting in his way … no, it’s The United States of America personified by the Greg Kinnear character.

Look fast for my favorite part of the trailer at the 1:42 mark after Kinnear appears to order Damon’s assassination. When Kinnear’s confronted in the next scene suddenly he’s sporting that old “liberal tell” identifying the bad guys in leftist films: the lapel flag!

In the comments, Hollywood’s few remaining water-carriers should please explain why an industry we’re told is more interested in making profits than making political points would green-light the umpteenth anti-Iraq movie after all umpteen that came before flopped miserably.

SIDE NOTE: Once again I want to make clear that this post violates the rule which only allows Leftist critics and film writers to speculate about an upcoming film before seeing it. I knew that before putting fingers to keyboard and am fully braced for the consequences.

Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California. 

Like so many documentary film-makers, they needed a ride.  (Unlike so many documentary film-makers, the ride was to a fairly nice hotel in Santa Monica…)  In exchange, they offered to screen an early cut of their film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” for me and a few friends.  It was a bargain I was happy to take.  “Only an environmentalist could look at thirty million dead from malaria and think that the biggest threat to the world is the pesticide that would stop it,” Ann told me on the ride over the hill.  “You really should watch our movie.”

In a world where so much of the debate (if you could argue that there is any real debate…) over climate change is focused on the science, it is the human story that most interests and appalls Phelim and Ann.  More aptly, it is an anti-human story, and they have seen it first hand.

In 2005, the couple traveled to Romania with a mission.  It was being reported in the European press that a greedy western mining corporation was invading the quaint, idyllic Romanian village of Rosia Montana to extract the regions’ gold deposits and exploit its people.  For Phelim and Ann, both experienced documentarians, this seemed like a story worth telling.  The problem, as they soon learned, was that the story was a lie.  Far from quaint and idyllic, Rosia Montana was a badly impoverished village that modernity had largely passed by. “These people weren’t making a lifestyle choice.  They were in deep, deep poverty.  They couldn’t wait for the mine to open and inject fresh money and jobs into the local economy. But stopping that were activists from Switzerland and Belgium. These rich western environmentalists didn’t care.  They were content to watch people live in misery and view it as a “culture” that needed to be preserved, but if you talked to the local people they viewed poverty as a curse that was killing their children early and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

What Phelim and Ann discovered was a far bigger story – one that would give their film, and their lives, a whole new shape.  It was the largely untold tale of western activists advancing Marxist ideology under the guise of environmental protection. “This romantic notion that starving people are ‘poor but happy’ has to stop.  Someone needs to tell these environmentalists that humans are actually part of the environment.”

In 2006, Phelim and Ann did just that, releasing their film, “Mine Your Own Business,” as a stern rebuke of what they see as a criminally disingenuous movement to destroy the west and the progress that modernity has brought.  The film is a brutally honest look at how much damage is done to actual humans by those claiming to save the world.  “Rosia Montana never got their mine, but the Romanian villagers facing another winter of extreme poverty can shiver to sleep secure in the knowledge that the greedy capitalists were defeated.”  Environmentalists called the movie “Nazi propaganda…”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” picks up on the same theme, and carries it much farther.  If free-markets, trade, and employment are the only tools ever used to effectively end poverty, then what would it mean to take those tools off of the table, as the modern environmental movement seems bent on doing?  Who will suffer and who will gain?  According to Phelim and Ann, who will suffer is everyone, especially the poor.  Who will gain is Al Gore and the rest of the multi-billion dollar Big Environmental Businesses.  And of course, America loses the most.  Says Ann, “China produces more genuine pollution than any other nation on Earth, but none of the international regulations on the table do anything to curb them.China’s cities are badly polluted with dirty fumes. If Greenpeace wanted to stop global pollution they should move all their offices to China. And I’m talking about genuine pollution – not CO2 which is essential for life and one of the elements that keep our crops growing and our children healthy. But Greenpeace is not in China because there is a strong anti-business, anti-capitalist and above all anti-American element to the environmental movement.  If the world is really ending, why wouldn’t they want to stop everyone polluting and not just single out the American economy for destruction?.”  Or, as Phelim puts it, “They say America should lead by example, but what example is that?  Suicide?”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is the anti-”Inconvenient Truth,” not only because it exposes and rebukes the foundational premises of that film, but because it advocates humanity first, and nothing serves humanity better than morally checked, free-market capitalism.  As it turns out, that’s another topic Phelim and Ann know rather well.

“We’re trying to do something innovative,” Phelim told me on a recent call.  “We figure that lots of really interesting and intelligent ideas have come out of the American home and almost nothing interesting or intelligent comes out of the current American cinema.”  Phelim and Ann’s innovative answer?  They are going to launch their films in the former, not the latter.  The idea is as profound as it is simple.  In a world of flat-screen televisions, high-speed Internet, streaming media, and cell-phone movie rentals, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” is leading the way in direct-to-consumer marketing.

On Sunday, October 18th, the largest, simultaneous film-premiere in history will take place. “Not Evil, Just Wrong” will be screened in well over 4000 private locations in America, and more than a thousand more worldwide.  People from all walks of life are hosting screenings in their homes and churches, they are renting small theaters and community centers and school auditoriums.  It is a grassroots movie premiere.

You can visit their website for a map of screening locations. It is impressive.  Better yet, you can tune in to Big Hollywood and be a part of this historic premiere event yourself tomorrow night at  5PM PST, just like thousands of other venues around the nation and world.  It is a very human model for getting a very human movie out into the culture, and as Phelim and Ann are always quick to remind, humans are what this story is really about.  As Phelim told me recently in Texas, “The vast majority of human history has been spent in darkness and hunger and tyranny.  That’s what these environmentalists, by their actions, seem to want to bring back, only not for themselves, of course.  They just want everyone else living in huts and starving to death but with a “quaint” centrally approved lifestyle while the environmental elite run the show.  America’s existence and success is the only thing stopping them, and it’s the proof that they’re wrong, which is why they have to destroy it.”

Or, put more simply, “These people don’t give a damn about polar bears.”