HOLLYWOOD’S NEWEST CRYBABIES: LEPERS … AND INDIA

It doesn’t bother me when crybabies crybaby. That’s what crybabies do, especially GLAAD and CAIR — two of the biggest, fascist crybabies in the history of crybabying.

What bothers me is that the politically correct cowards that run Hollywood only listen to certain crybabies. Southerners, Christians, stay-at-home-moms, Republicans, and pro-lifers continue to take hellacious beatings in all things pop culture. Everyone else is hands off at the first sound of a crybaby.

Those of us on the right can take a joke better than anyone; it’s being singled out by Hollywood cowards who pose as “edgy” that’s galling — the double standard.  Take us back to the good old days of “Blazing Saddles,” and we’ll never complain again.

It’s not satire when you’re singled out. It’s bigotry.

AMAZON PONDERS NEW CHALLENGE TO NETFLIX IN STREAMING MARKET

There’s a bigger story here than just this:

Ever since Netflix first alienated its consumers last summer with a price hike – ruining a perfect record of consumer satisfaction – the market seemed to open for new challengers. That door swung a bit wider after Netflix and Starz failed to agree to terms, further limiting the service’s movie offerings.

At the moment, Amazon has deals with the likes of CBS, Fox, Disney and NBCUniversal.

Hollywood is fighting streaming harder than they would ever fight terrorists and yet you have two of the biggest entertainment retailers on the planet — Netflix and Amazon — expanding this service. It was only a matter of time before someone stepped in to challenge Netflix Streaming, and Amazon is the perfect choice.

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For movie geeks, 1998 is still remembered as the year that Harvey Weinstein’s lobbying and schmoozing led to the underdog “Shakespeare in Love” beating “Saving Private Ryan.” In writing this series, I’ve realized how much Oscar snubs, wins, and losses affect the consensus perception of certain movies.

In other words, had Weinstein’s movie been snubbed altogether, I think people would remember it more fondly than they do. If I recall correctly, no one was complaining much that the movie was nominated, but the win immediately changed the perception of the movie.

I loved a lot of movies released in 1998, but only one of them was nominated for Best Picture. It’s a very tough year for me to pick a favorite. The nominees:

“Shakespeare in Love” – Only saw it once, and I liked it. Costume dramas really ain’t my thing, but costume comedies? Well, that’s…wait, I don’t like them much either. But I guess this one’s alright.

“Elizabeth” – See above. Never seen it.

“Life is Beautiful” – Roberto Benigni winning Best Actor for this remains one of the great whiffs in Academy history.

“Saving Private Ryan” - The invasion sequence alone remains worth the price of admission.

“The Thin Red Line” – For my money, this is a pretentious mess. I’ve got a buddy who says it’s his favorite movie. I say he’ s trying to seem smart. But what do I know? I’m the guy who would have nominated…

“There’s Something About Mary” - Stalker? Big time.

“The Big Lebowski” - Am I wrong? Am I wrong? No, you’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an assh*le.

“Out of Sight” - You don’t have an extra clip I can use, do you?

“Rushmore” - Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream I would have sons like this.

“Saving Private Ryan” - The Statue of Liberty is kaput. That’s disconcerting.

This is really an absolute squeaker. Why? Partially, it’s because I love all of these movies so much. But mostly, it’s because I’m stupid. (more…)

In the new film “Bad Teacher,” it’s obvious that Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is a terrible educator. She runs away from crying students, smokes marijuana in the school’s parking lot and doesn’t even decorate her classroom. That’s right. In an elementary school where teachers often decorate their desks so much that the students don’t even know where to put their homework assignments, Elizabeth chooses to leave her desk bare. Worst of all, she says things like “in some ways, movies are the new books” and proceeds to show films to her students on a daily basis.

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As “Teacher” begins, Halsey is saying goodbye to the elementary school that she has taught at for one year. The other faculty members give her a party to say goodbye, but Halsey can’t wait to leave so she can start living off her fiance’s money. However, when she arrives home, her fiance is waiting there with his mother (always a bad sign) and the mother/son duo soon call off the engagement. A few miserable months later, Halsey returns to the classroom where her students have nothing to fear except for the wrath of their professor.

While showing her class well-known films like “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand by Me,” Halsey focuses on one thing: earning or stealing enough money to buy breast implants so she can find a new man to take care of her. When someone informs her how profitable the school car wash is, Halsey jumps to the chance to wash cars in a way that might make Paris Hilton blush. Unfortunately for her, Halsey’s goals for stealing money on this and other occasions are undermined by Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), a teacher so unabashedly peppy that her students seem embarrassed for her. As the story continues, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake), who says he’s pro-choice on everything except abortion, gets hired as a substitute teacher and Squirrel and Halsey begin fighting over him. In the meantime, the gym teacher (Jason Segel) desperately wants Halsey to go out with him.

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Sometimes a movie comes along that is so tone-deaf and utterly incompetent that viewers can only sit back in wonder at just how things could have gone so wrong. “Bad Teacher,” a new alleged comedy starring Cameron Diaz as an utterly contemptuous excuse for a human being who inexplicably lands a job as a high school teacher, is one of those films.

“Bad” tells the threadbare tale of Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz), who at the movie’s start is a foul-mouthed gold-digger who arrives home one day to find her wealthy fiance breaking up with her on the orders of his mother, who’s outraged that Elizabeth has burned through $16,000 of his money in a single month. Left without her financial lifeline, Elizabeth loudly wonders what she’s going to do to survive – and as the movie jumps four months into the future, we see that she has become a high school teacher who hates not only her fellow teachers but her students as well.

In fact, Elizabeth is so unwilling to do anything remotely educational that she merely orders her students to plug in the TV and DVD player each morning, and proceeds to show them movies about teachers, like “Stand and Deliver,” “Lean on Me,” and “Dangerous Minds.” While this idea is admittedly funny in split-second bursts as the students watch the films in slack-jawed befuddlement and wonder why they never seem to be given anything challenging to do, the running gag is also indicative of the lack of effort put in by “Bad” screenwriters Gene Kupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg; rather than putting in any effort into their script themselves, they’re content to kick back and allow viewers to elicit ironic chuckles at memories of much better films.

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The one (and only, I’m afraid) good thing that can be said about Bad Teacher is that it has some wonderfully pungent lines. My hopes were certainly raised when Cameron Diaz’ character stormed into her fiancé’s house yelling “Get yourself hard, ‘cause I’m gonna suck your dick like I’m mad at it!” All right!

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Unfortunately, the rest of the movie speed-races downhill. The usually appealing stars—Diaz, Jason Segel, Justin Timberlake, and the great Lucy Punch—are sadly miscast. And the ill-shaped script—by two writers whose only previous feature credit is the woeful Year One—constitutes an affront to the gods of plausibility.

Diaz plays Elizabeth Halsey, a hot-tramp teacher at an Illinois middle school. Elizabeth arrives in her classroom in tight red sheath dresses, stiletto heels, and impenetrable black shades to hide her hangover eyes. She keeps bottles of minibar liquor in a desk drawer and smokes pot in the parking lot outside. She’s hostile and insulting to her fellow teachers, and her classes consist of screening DVDs for her puzzled students of old movies related to the subject of education. (We see her starting off with Stand and Deliver.) Her only goal in life is to snag a rich man to support her; so when her wealthy fiancé understandably dumps her, she decides that her sole hope of corralling a well-heeled husband is to purchase “a new pair of tits.”

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Who better to expound on the institution of marriage than a promiscuous, never-been-married Hollywood liberal out promoting a movie about an oversexed teacher “saving up cash for a boob job?” 

Relationship expert Cameron Diaz felt moved to share her opinions with the boys of Maxim magazine.  This time she said marriage is a “dying institution.” Ms. Diaz, who’s seen more home runs than her current beau Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez has seen in his whole career, said “I think we have to make our own rules.  I don’t think we should live our lives in relationships based off old traditions that don’t suit our world any longer.”  

You remember Cameron – she’s the one who bragged about her promiscuity: “I can be attracted to a woman sexually, but it doesn’t mean I want to be in love with a woman. If I’m going to be with a woman sexually, it doesn’t mean I’m a lesbian. We put these restraints and definitions on people, but it’s hard to define.” 

Cameron Diaz was described by the international men’s magazine as a “rarefied creature even by Hollywood standards,” but to vulgarity aficionados Ms. Diaz is a woman full of “beauty, intelligence, and humor witha 4.0 in Potty Mouth.” Evidently, for consumers of “soft pornfor male adolescents,” Diaz’s coarse language elevates the ‘Vanilla Sky’ actress to the position of matrimonial philosopher and discerning harbinger of “new rules.” 

Summing up her marriage insights with advice that is sure to strengthen the fabric of society, theorist Diaz said: “Guys need women who challenge them and don’t let them get away with their s**t. Women, conversely, need to not be crazy bitches who blow up when their guys tell them something that scares them.” 

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In the kick-off to BH’s “Death of the Movie Star” series, Steven Crowder posited that new media has rendered the Hollywood machine irrelevant. If you have the talent and the drive, you don’t need them. And writing for the UK Telegraph earlier this year, David Gritten has a similar theory in that Hollywood can no longer afford A-list stars (who are also aging and may not appeal to younger audiences) and is relying more heavily on lesser-known names and reality-based entertainment. They both make valid points. However, I think there’s something more to this rapidly spreading phenomenon.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire – class and glamour during Hollywood’s heyday

The term “movie star” used to mean a lot to the American public – glitz, glamour, excitement. It embodied an “other worldliness,” if you will, that took hard-working people away from the daily grind and gave them something thrilling and new to take their minds off of their troubles. An afternoon or evening at the movies really meant something then, and the stars who populated the silver screen lived up to the hype – publicly, anyway. This was due to the studio system. During the 1930s and ‘40s:

…the major studios groomed their stable for stardom by picking suitable vehicles that developed their personae—sophisticated comedy for Grant, intense melodrama for Davis, and so on. They also controlled the stars’ publicity, doling out digestible, often-erroneous tidbits on their personal lives for the fan magazines and gossip columns.

Once the studio system was broken, however, we began to see Tinseltown’s residents through a very different lens. Stars began to develop their own careers, making their own decisions and living with the consequences, both good and bad. And the press, which was once held at bay by the studio bigs, had much more access to celebrities. Television talk shows like The Tonight Show and Merv Griffin brought us even closer to our idols. They became…well, more like us, except with oodles more money, fancy cars, designer duds and entrée into exclusive clubs and resorts. (more…)

The story for Tom Cruise’s new action film “Knight and Day” opens at an airport where the two lead characters, Roy and June (played by Cruise and Cameron Diaz), bump into each other several times before getting on the same airplane. On the plane, the lives of these two strangers are tied together through a series of events, and the rest of the movie revolves around their unlikely partnership as they try to stay alive while being attacked by numerous foes. Unfortunately, their partnership and the talents of a lot of the individuals involved in the making of the film, are wasted on an uneven actioner that begins with potential and ends with embarrassment.

As noted above, things start out at an airport where our two protagonists meet for the first time. They’re supposed to be on the same flight but plans change when an airline employee does not allow June onto the aircraft. Consoling her, Roy says, “Sometimes things happen for a reason,” right before he boards. However, a few moments later, June is invited back onto the plane to Roy’s surprise.

The plane takes off and after flirting with each other, June heads to the restroom and Roy — who is actually a government agent — is confronted by a number of  passengers who try to kill him. June returns from the bathroom and quickly realizes…actually, she doesn’t realize anything until Roy tells her, that the pilots are dead (supposedly, she’s too self-absorbed to notice the other passengers have been killed). (more…)

The new billboards for the fourth and ostensibly final “Shrek” movie, “Shrek Forever After,” feature Shrek helplessly tied down by the nefarious Rumpelstiltskin, the green ogre’s worried eyes accentuated by the slogan “What the Shrek Just Happened?” Unfortunately, fans of the series may wonder the same thing while watching the new adventures of our hero, which –alas- are not that adventurous at all.

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When “Shrek” hit the world’s movie screens in 2001, it created a daring new standard for animated films seeking to balance entertaining children as well as adults, and drew outstanding reviews and more than $400 million in box office worldwide. “Shrek 2” scored even bigger with audiences, exploding to more than $900 million in ticket sales and placing it in the rarefied stratosphere of the highest-grossing films of all time.

But the magic started to wear off with 2007’s “Shrek the Third,” as the returns tumbled back down a couple hundred million or so. But that clearly didn’t worry the folks at Dreamworks, who now have trotted out Shrek and his band of eccentric friends and family and placed them in a richly 3D world without bothering to give the actual script much dimension as well. (more…)

The new film “The Box” starts off with a simple premise. A stranger leaves a box at a young couple’s door early one morning in Richmond, Virginia. Later on, that stranger comes to visit the couple and he tells the young wife that if she pushes the red button in the box, she’ll receive a million dollars but someone that she does not know will die. The stranger does not explain how or who or even why this will occur. He just gives her the instructions and a time-frame. The premise is an interesting one to develop but unfortunately, this movie fails to develop it and the film is quickly overwhelmed by a bizarre series of events that follows the choice over whether or not to push the button.

The film is set in the mid-1970s and the lead couple, Arthur and Norma Lewis, are played by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz. He works for NASA and she’s an elementary school teacher. They’re a relatively boring couple with one son  The movie begins with the doorbell ringing very early in the morning and the couple finding the box on the doorstep. Mrs. Lewis learns more about the box from Arlington Steward, played by Frank Langella, the mystery man who dropped it off. The young couple has recently faced some disappointing news about their jobs and the financial benefits of pushing the button are obvious to both of them, even though their financial situation has not been detailed enough to show a compelling desire for them to lean towards pushing the button at the expense of another person’s life. (more…)

It happens all the time in Hollywood: A friend has a dream of making a movie and wants to hire his friends as cast and crew. But most of the time, those dreams stay dreams, as the money to fund those projects rarely materializes.

For South Pasadena-based actor Greg Sestero, however, the dream became reality when his friend Tommy Wiseau managed to raise $6 million to write, direct and star in a movie called “The Room.” Keeping a promise he made years before when the two thespians met in a San Francisco acting class, Wiseau hired Sestero to be his co-star.

That should have been a happy ending, with the film either fading into oblivion or rising out of Sundance-style film festivals to become an indie sensation. Instead, “The Room” became wildly popular for an entirely different reason: it’s regarded as one of the great camp classics of all time, a movie considered so bad it’s brilliant.

Its monthly midnight showings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood routinely sell out all five of the theater’s screens simultaneously, with crowds that have turned the viewing experience into the craziest interactive movie party since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” (more…)

If you’ve been taking notes from such brilliant minds as Bill Maher, Cameron Diaz or ever taken a moment to observe Hollywood in the past few decades, you’d know that marriage is a dead institution. I mean, who gets married anymore (unless you’re gay)?! It’s like, “Hellooooooooooo”!

I happened to catch Cameron “My Career is Over Thanks to HD” Diaz discussing the intricacies of marriage on “Real Time with Bill Maher” this week. A lot of tinseltown jibber jabber ensued but you needn’t be bored with the self-indulgent details. Cameron basically proclaimed that she’s glad that she’d never gotten married because she “definitely would have been divorced (multiple times).”  She just needed to do what was right for her and that that was constantly changing. Maher, of course, agreed and praised Cameron in her wisdom for having learned to put herself first and foremost, before all others in her life. Marriage can’t work because you have to look out for “Numero Uno”… That’s the Hollywood way! (more…)

Recently, when babysitting my 8-year-old niece, she had trouble with her homework and came to me for help. The assignment was based on Time for Kids, a weekly publication for elementary school children about the news of the day (much like Weekly Reader when I was growing up – does that still exist?). She had to explain in her own words what Earth Hour, coming up on March 28, was all about. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell her to write “it’s a load of hogwash” – she would have failed the assignment. Such is the brainwashing and social engineering that goes on in our school system today.

But it’s too bad my niece didn’t have actor Edward Norton to look to for advice. Not only is he the official U.S. ambassador for Earth Hour 2009, but he was on CNN’s Larry King Live this week, along with Alanis Morissette, to explain just how this symbolic act of the entire world turning out their lights for one hour will encourage world leaders to cap or tax carbon emissions through legislation. Global unity and all that. (more…)

Many of the celebrities that were central to demonizing and making life impossible for President Bush for eight loathsome years NOW want to help with the heavy lifting of bringing America back together under President Barack Obama.

Witness Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s cavalcade of shiny, happy situational patriots appearing in a derivative public servitude announcement: A “Presidential Pledge” to President Barack Obama.

Forgive and forget? Right.

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