Just in time for that royal wedding I actively avoid any news on, we’re getting the latest film to take home top honors at the Oscars, The King’s Speech.  While it wasn’t my personal pick to win Best Picture, The King’s Speech is a very good movie, and when Colin “Mr. Darcy” Firth took the Oscar for Best Actor, I could hear the sound of ladies all over America squeal with delight.  In an interview with the BBC’s Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, Firth called The King’s Speech a bromance, which is a rather apt assessment of the film.  On the surface, it appears to be a film about a monarch having to overcome something most people take for granted, the very act of speaking, in order to rally his nation.  Talking into a microphone isn’t easy, especially when you’re doing it by yourself.  I have no idea how guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved do it almost every day, it’s hard enough doing it with my co-host on my podcast.  To me though, the releationship between Colin Firth’s verbally challenged Bertie and Geoffrey Rush’s Australian actor/speech therapist, Lionel Logue, is the film’s center.  We root for Bertie because we want to see him overcome his stammer, but we also root for Logue, because we want him to win the respect he deserves, as his Australian nationality elicits bigotry among his British peers.  While I wouldn’t have tossed him the Oscar for Best Director, Tom Hooper is still a fine filmmaker who has made a film the United Kingdom can be proud of, the same way he made something Americans can be proud of with his magnificent John Adams HBO mini-series.  The King’s Speech isn’t a film that pushes the medium, or brings anything terribly interesting to the table, but it is an entertaining and enjoyable piece of cinema that is well worth your time if you’re one of the few that has yet to enjoy what it has to offer.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

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“Here I am, sitting here, losing my shirt, and you’re telling me what you’d be losing.” — Walt Disney in 1942, explaining to a director why the studio had to cut sequences from Bambi. 

 In 1937, full of confidence and pioneering spirit as to what could be accomplished in the cartoon medium, thirty-six-year-old Walt Disney acquired the film rights to the children’s book Bambi, A Life in the Woods.  Written by the Hungarian born Siegmund Salzmann, under the pen name Felix Salten in 1923, Bambi was amongst the many books banned in Adolph Hitler’s Germany in 1936 (reportedly the usually animal loving Nazis, saw the Jewish Salten’s story of woodland creatures trying to survive the menace of man as an allegory for Jews trying to escape persecution).  Despite warnings from his artists that it lacked a sufficient plot, and his heavy dependence on the German market, Walt saw Bambias a great opportunity to animate animals with human personalities.  

Typically Walt laughed off the idea that there were any political meanings in his films.  The Three Little Pigs (1933)was seen by many as an ode to the Great Depression; The happy swine danced like the carefree people in the 1920s until the big bad wolf wiped out their houses with the force of the 1929 stock market crash. The usually Republican Walt never intended that the hard-working pig that lived in the brick house be seen as an endorsement of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Seven years later, a columnist fumed over Fantasia. In hermind, the film’s climactic scene, where the devil damned human souls into a volcano, meant Disney was saying we were all helpless against Nazi demons.Perhaps the wildest accusation had been made three years earlier when a left-wing newspaper writer had written that in Disney’s Snow White,when the seven dwarfs had taken down the wicked queen, it was a clear triumph for a miniature communist society.  Walt no doubt would have been taken aback to find out that many people in the modern green movement would later cite watching Bambi as the beginning of their interest in environmentalism.  

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Several Thanksgivings ago an uncle of mine, an accomplished full Professor at a leading university, as well as an avid sportsman, made an interesting comment I’ve never forgotten. To paraphrase, Walt Disney’s 1942 classic, Bambi, was the beginning of the movement to end hunting in America.

In watching how Hollywood and the Left have gone forward from there, in some ways, I’ve come to see it as the, however unintended, subtle beginning of various lines of attack on capitalism and Western Civilization itself.

Speaking at an NRA event in May, Sarah Palin made a joke about Bambi’s mother being dinner.

“Some of these animal activists are just…crazy,” she said. “They think we’re killing Bambi’s mother. I love animals, but in Alaska, Bambi’s mother is dinner.”

A website called Vegetarian Star referenced Hollywood in their reporting. Perhaps anti-Palin, anti-hunting screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who freaked out over a recent episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska in which she shot a caribou, is on the editorial board.

After all, they’re all shooting deer in Hollywood.

“I have bad news for those groups,” Palin said, according to the Charlotte Observer. “Bambi’s mother is dinner – even in L.A.”

“Where do those people think their venison comes from? The deer didn’t die of natural causes. It wasn’t road kill.” 

Anthropomorphism, the assigning of human attributes to animals, or non-living things, dates back to the 1700s. Perhaps it’s become so appealing to the Leftists in Hollywood, not simply as a result of the growth in, and entertainment value of, animation, but because it gives expression to so many concepts that serve their political agenda quite well. (more…)

It’s hard to know what to make of a rich Hollywood mogul who announces that he “believe[s] in eco-terrorism” yet has a carbon footprint of his own that does to the environment what Godzilla did to Bambi.  As Pam Meister has pointed out here at Big Hollywood, it looks as though Cameron lives like a modern day rajah at his multi-mansion compound in Malibu and presides over an array of sprawling production facilities.  The greenest thing about this guy is the cash in his vault.

Now, it’s possible that his comment to Entertainment Weekly was just some off-the-cuff nonsense that just sort of slipped out.  That’s understandable.  Everyone says something mind-numbingly stupid once in a while.  Just ask Senator Coakley (D-MA).

You want to give the benefit of the doubt to the guy who, despite the freakin’ stupid  Avatar, made great movies like The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic and, of course, the moving Piranha 2: The Spawning.  The guy has what the hep kids today call “mad skillz.”  We really want his unbelievably dumb statement to be just an unbelievably dumb statement. (more…)