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Readers of Big Hollywood have been a giant part of what has allowed Declaration Entertainment to gain momentum this year, and so we put together this behind-the-scenes glimpse at one of our action sequences just for you.

“The Arroyo” centers around the lawlessness on the southern American border and one man’s attempt to defend his land and his family when the government simply won’t live up to its obligation. It is an inherently conservative story about rugged individualism and personal honor, but more than anything it is an entertaining, action packed modern western.

At least, we hope it’s entertaining. Honestly, it’s a little early to tell. We’re having a heck of a time putting it together, but in fairness, we’re all so dehydrated, sun-baked, and exhausted that it doesn’t take much to entertain us at the moment.

Let us know what you think and take a look at a few of our other behind-the-scenes adventures (and of course our Bill Whittle FIREWALL videos) over at DeclarationEntertianment.com, and if you haven’t already, consider becoming a Citizen Producer and helping us continue in our quest to make the movies Hollywood simply will not make.

When that happens, disappointment is almost sure to follow. Hollywood promises are almost always empty promises.

So it is with the kind of frustration born of over a month of lying to ourselves about ‘this time being different’ that we take a look at the feature film “Hanna” on Take a Movie to Work at Declaration Entertainment.

Of course, it’s not all bad. This isn’t a Roland Emmerich movie after all. The first twenty minutes of Hanna are fabulous. The film opens in the bleak, barren wilderness of arctic Finland where a wild-looking young girl – Hanna – stalks a caribou through the frozen woods. The remoteness of the setting is accentuated perfectly by the utter lack of score or dialogue. When Hanna looses her hand-made arrow, the only sounds are hoof beats and panting.

As Hanna cleans her game, a man appears behind her. “You’re dead,” he says, “I’ve killed you.” A moment later, Hanna charges the man in a no-holds-barred fight that might leave either of them dead.

The man is Hanna’s father, Erik Heller – played by the always capable Eric Bana – a former operative for the CIA who has brought his charge to this rural wilderness to raise her, off the grid, and train her to be a self-sufficient, multi-lingual, brutal assassin. While the relationship is built on struggle, the love the two share for each other is palpable.

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna is brilliant, subtle and powerful, but able to perfectly communicate the child within the killer. In the end, all Hanna wants it to finally be a part of the world she has only heard about in stories.

The trouble is that for reasons that are mysterious in the beginning, the only way Hanna can ever taste of that world is to first confront the past that has driven her and her father to the edge of the world to begin with.

Man, just revisiting this set-up makes you want to see the movie again. So much promise. Terrific actors, mysterious pasts, the promise of a nearly insurmountable struggle. This movie couldn’t be off to a better start.

Tragically, that is about as far as it ever gets.

SPOILER ALERT!

After an incredibly compelling action sequence in which Hanna reveals her power to her CIA captors, killing many men double her size and shooting out the cameras that surround her in the concrete holding cell, HANNA the film utterly changes. Actually, ‘falls apart’ might be a more accurate statement.

Gone are the stark, slow, quiet scenes that so enthralled in the set-up. In their place, a music video of grating techno music, distractingly fast-paced editing, and 1970s reminiscent camera work that takes the viewer completely out of the world of the film and leaves them thinking far more about their hatred for hipster director Joe Wright than whether or not the heroine will escape. (In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that perhaps the most impressive steadicam shot in the history of cinema does occur about halfway through the film when Eric Bana does an entire, multi-location action sequence in a single, uninterrupted take, but it stands alone amid the utterly distracting camera work that mares the rest of the film).

Oh, and there are lots and lots of inexplicably flashing lights. Hanna has never seen working electricity before. Apparently the CIA hasn’t either.

From this point on, there are more plot-holes than running sequences – and there are A LOT of running sequences as Hanna makes her away from Africa – where the CIA naturally has giant, underground, saucer-shaped-concrete fortresses – to Berlin to rejoin her father.

Along the way, she encounters an unlikely cast of characters (unlikely because there is no one like them on Earth), from the wonderfully acted but miserably condescending British hippie family – a family so liberal that they think it is a charming alternative parenting style to allow a beautiful, blonde, under-aged girl to wonder around Muslim Northern Africa alone – to the hermaphroditic pornographer assassin, to the vaudevillian carney safe-house operator who has the iron will to withstand torture but not, apparently, to get a job.

The good guys are all liberals, of course, or people that liberals reduce to characters.

The bad guys are Americans, from the American operatives and soldiers she spends the first half of the movie killing to Cate Blanchett, the cold, barren agent with the deep southern drawl who murdered Hanna’s mother years before.

What little storytelling occurs in the second two-thirds of the film is tired and stale. Super-soldier, evil American government, blah-blah-blah.

No explanation is ever given to why the well-trained, genetically enhanced Hanna can so ably defeat scores of trained American soldiers in the first act, but then spends the rest of the film running like a helpless child from three German thugs. She even lets the thugs presumably murder the only friends she has ever had she is so terrified of facing them, which seems even more ludicrous a few scenes later when her none-genetically-enhanced father kills two of them with his bare hands…

In the end, this film is just a two-hour, mildly anti-American music video – and the music sucks. If you want a really good time, just watch the trailer again…

For more on this film, and for top-notch political video commentary, see Bill Whittle’s review on TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK at Declaration Entertainment.

They just can’t be counted on to do it on purpose or with any consistency.

But what happens when our elite betters get their hands on a property, an underlying work, champions western values? A project so infused with pro-military, pro-Republican, and pro-civilization ethics and themes that they simply cannot be denied?

The answer is: They turn it into 1997’s farcical, self-hating flop: “Starship Troopers,” which Bill Whittle discusses on this week’s TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK segment at Declaration Entertainment.

In his 1959 novel, Robert Heinlein celebrates the idea of the Republic – a nation where the citizen holds supreme power. Like our Founding Fathers, who call for a Republican – and not a democratic – government in the Constitution, Heinlein sees direct democracy as an untenable form of government where the mob rules, voting themselves more and more power and resources at the expense of the perpetual “other.”

In Heinlein’s vision of Republican government, by contrast, only those who serve their society – not only militarily, but through various forms of service that require personal sacrifice – for two years are given the right to be citizens, and only citizens can vote. No member of the population, regardless of color, creed, sex, or religion, can be turned away from service if they are willing, and every person has fundamental rights protected from lawmakers (what a novel concept!), but only citizens can vote.

Of course, to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, these beautiful ideas are, wait for it, FASCIST!

Says Verhoeven said in an interview with AV Club, “all this playing with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society…” He goes on to say, “If you were very nice to the movie, you would call it prophetic,” because of what he sees as the, “‘Let’s all go to war and let’s all die,” jingoism of the War on Terror. BushHitler, BushHitler!

So Heinlein’s political sci-fi classic is reduced to a cheep-shot at the author’s own beliefs. Verhoeven says he never even finished reading the novel. He didn’t have to. He knew what kind of story he wanted to tell, but lacked the creativity to come up with a compelling setting for his diatribe. So he borrowed it from Heinlein, and he destroyed it.

Which is why we started Declaration Entertainment. If Hollywood won’t make the kinds of movies we want to see, we think maybe we should just make them ourselves. Stop by and consider joining us, and see Bill Whittle’s new video on “Starship Troopers,” “Destination Moon,” and Robert Heinlein.

So clearly, you have got to go see this movie!

On the most recent addition of Take A Movie to Work over at Declaration Entertainment, Bill Whittle discusses the importance of this terrific action movie, which – MOST SHOCKING, EXHILARATING SPOILER ALERT OF ALL TIME – makes American soldiers, the best people our society has to offer, look like THE BEST PEOPLE OUR SOCIETY HAS TO OFFER!

Missing are all of the clichés we have come to expect from movies that depict our fighting men and women. There are no brooding loaners bemoaning the futility of war, no racist loud-mouth adrenaline junkies itching to kill anything they don’t understand, the troops aren’t victims of nefarious political posturing or trying to steal from the third-world…

Even the relationship between Aaron Eckhart’s battle-hardened Staff Sergeant Nash and the fresh-faced, just-out-of-school, naive Lieutenant is respectful and authentic. When the Lieutenant breaks down from his first exposure to the chaos of battle, there is no condescending moment of the wise-old enlisted man rising up to take command. Instead, Eckhart reminds the younger man of his responsibility, pulls him out of his own head, prompts him to make a decision, and then says “Yes sir.”

Every moment of this film inspires envy of the discipline, decisiveness, charity, and just general good character our military demands of its fighters.

Plus, they kick butt. Lots of it.

You know, according to German authorities, Arid Uka, the terrorist who shot and killed two US Servicemen last month, had recently viewed an Islamist propaganda video titled “American Soldiers Rape our Sisters!”

The four-minute YouTube video featured footage to backup its claim – footage of American soldiers sexually assaulting a Muslim girl – courtesy of Hollywood, USA. Specifically, the fictional footage is from Brian De Palma’s anti-American, anti-Military film, Redacted.

Redacted, of course, is just one of the litany of films to come out since Vietnam that portray our soldiers as rubes, murderers, rapists, dope-fiends, adrenaline junkies, or all of the above.

Movies have power. People spend almost as much time watching film and television as they do working – almost 1,500 hours a year. How much of our view of our military is informed or at least influenced by the way Hollywood typically portrays them?

It’s about time we started portraying them as the heroes they actually are.

“Battle: Los Angeles” deserves our support. Boycotting anti-military movies isn’t enough. You need to use the carrot as well as the stick.

While this movie, with its strong violence and salty language, is not for the kiddos, it is for everyone else – everyone who complains about the way Hollywood usually degrades our best and brightest, and who longs for a better day.

For a full video look at this film from Bill Whittle, and some great commentary, visit Declaration Entertainment and enjoy this week’s Take A Movie to Work.

Well, we started Declaration Entertainment because we believe that politics is downstream of culture; that like all cultures, we get our values and morality from our mythology – and in 20th and 21st century America, our mythology mostly comes to us through the movies. So we thought we’d start a little video segment called ”Take a Movie to Work,” where we pick apart a movie and find out some of the lessons it is trying to teach us, under the actual plot.

We started with an all-time classic: MGM’s 1956 classic, Forbidden Planet”.  You can watch the video at DeclarationEntertainment.com.

You see, if you think trillions of dollars of deficit spending is not the path to financial stability, if you think East Anglia may not have your best interests at heart when they fabricate global temperature statistics from whole cloth, if you believe that the Commerce Clause does not give the government the right to govern commerce – much less your very thoughts, then chances are you have been informed by the left that you are simply not intelligent enough to understand your own interests.  Fortunately for you, your betters in the government are happy to understand these things for you.

From priests and kings to scholars and journalists, elitists of every stripe have always believed that they knew better how to order society than society – which when free has always been perfectly capable of ordering itself.  Everywhere we look, this meme is reinforced, nowhere more so than in Hollywood.  But that has not always been the case.  There was a time when the movies championed wisdom and individualism above knowledge, good intentions, and collectivism.

In Forbidden Planet, Leslie Nielson plays an enterprising and intrepid starship captain – John J. Adams who is ordered to the planet Altair IV to search for the survivors of the Bellerophon sent there 20 years earlier to establish a colony and never heard from again.  There, he encounters the only survivors of the doomed expedition, the brilliant, well-intentioned Dr. Edward Morbius, and his beautiful and virginal daughter, Altaira.

Morbius, informs the captain that his entire crew was destroyed by a rampaging monster of nearly supernatural proportions.  After his murderous spree, the monster inexplicably disappeared, leaving only the scientist and his infant daughter alive.

Since that time, Morbius – one of the most elite minds in the galaxy – has devoted himself to the exploration of the technology of the planet’s original inhabitants, the Krell, whose entire, fantastically advanced population vanished without a trace 200,000 years prior.  Their key technological breakthrough was the PLASTIC EDUCATOR, which increased their intellect exponentially, allowing them to control their planet with their minds.

Not long after the new crew’s arrival on the planet, the incredible creature that destroyed the original ship’s crew 20 years before returns to wage war on the planet’s newest arrivals.

SPOILER ALERT!

In the end, the monster that has consumed so many lives is not flesh or bone.  It is the Oedipal subconscious of an over-protective father – Morbius himself – made manifest by the terrific, mind-enhancing technology of the Krell, who were likely destroyed by their own “Monsters, John.  Monsters from the Id!”

It is good intentions that destroy civilizations.  Good intentions in the hands of powerful elites who know not what they do.  They do not know themselves, cannot face what is inside of us all, and so create systems that look like the future on the outside, but still look like fallen man in practice.

For a full explanation of what the movie is saying and a top-notch political commentary, please see Bill Whittle’s full video on the subject here and to keep these messages coming, become a Citizen Producer at DeclarationEntertainment.com.

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According to the show’s tagline, “Politics and Poker” will give viewers the opportunity to “get inside the minds of some of today’s most relevant actors, comedians, politicians, and pundits as each week we invite guests to play cards and talk shop. The poker winnings may go to charity, but the banter is a battle for the hearts and minds of America.” 

Each show focuses on a five-man card game, where each player gets to pick the type of poker and the topic of discussion for the round they deal. And it supports charities. The winner of each game wins a thousand dollars for the charity of their choice. See who won when you watch the first episode for yourself. 

The pilot episode stars singer/songwriter Lloyd Marcus, commentator Bill Whittle, actor Nick Searcy and writer Joe Reinkemeyer as guests. Actor/entertainer Tom Wilson hosts the show, keeping things light but moving, and with a new slew of cultural commentators each week (and a ditsy TV wife to help with commercial transitions) it’s a solid addition to political debate. 

“We talk politics, we play poker,” Wilson says, introducing the episode. “If you don’t like either of those things get out now.” 

Now, these are not the politically established, so the show feels more like a coffee shop conversation than to your typical CNN or FOX News talk show. Today, voices for and against reason are abundant, and generally not very profound. This show stands out by delivering straight-forward talk presented in an inoffensive, unobtrusive, open and honest atmosphere, that gives five uniquely positioned commentators from the entertainment and political worlds the opportunity to open up and share their thoughts in a clean public forum. 

Shows need a few episodes to find themselves, and I think after a few more this one will settle into a good rhythm. Right now it’s a few good (if occasionally nervous) laughs with some good insight. The show has a lot of potential. 

Aside from that, my only thought is that I hope they bring Adam Baldwin on the show as soon as possible.

This past week, the Stage Right Show (below the fold) featured a great line-up of guest hosts because I was travelling on a cruise ship and unable to broadcast.  Guest hosts included Adam Baldwin, Mike Rauseo, Billy Hallowell, Ben Shapiro and Eric Porvaznik.  And, the interviews on this week’s highlight show include Bill Whittle, Jeremy Boering, Kevin Jackson, Dana Commandatore, Jason Mattera, John Nolte and Andrew Breitbart.

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The Stage Right Show broadcasts live every week night at 9PM Pacific Time.  All past shows are available in their entirety at itunes.

Tonight on The Stage Right Show, Guest host Alexander Marlow welcomes Steven Crowder and John Nolte for a “Big Hollywood Oscar Re-Cap”.

Note: No hippies were actually shot during the making of this video… Well, with  muskets anyway.

Also, a special thanks to Bill Whittle and Sonja Schmidt for their appearances.

So many of us in the business know people who have been overseas to help entertain the troops, and the luckiest among us have actually had the experience ourselves. I’m proud to have moved from Category A to category B this last week, when I was able to spend five days down at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s a lot to talk about. But the thing that struck me hardest was the fact that even though I expected to be blown away by our men and women in uniform, I really had no idea of just how far my high expectations would be exceeded. The competence and discipline I took for granted going in. It was the soldier’s generosity that kept knocking me on my butt.

So here are the remarks I was privileged to have been able to give. I hope that it in some small way captures not just what I feel, but what all we civilians feel, and not just about the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but rather about every single one of them: past, present and future.