Does Peter Fonda consider himself a “have” … and what about his inherited-wealth grandchildren?

Secret Service to the white courtesy phone…

The Palme d’Or prize was accepted Sunday by two “Tree of Life” producers, Dede Gardner and Bill Pohlad, for the notoriously press-shy Malick, who has skipped all public events at the glamorous Cannes festival.

Malick is “infamously shy and low profile … (but) I know he would be thrilled with this,” Pohlad said.

“The Tree of Life,” which opens Friday in the United States, stars Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain in a far-flung story of family life that plays out against a cosmic backdrop, including glorious visuals of the creation of the universe and the era of dinosaurs.

Dunst won for her role in the end-of-the-world tale “Melancholia,” whose director, Denmark’s Lars von Trier, was banned from the festival after sympathetic remarks for Adolf Hitler at a movie press conference.

“Wow, what a week it’s been,” said Dunst, who plays a deeply depressed woman coping with her family’s foibles as a rogue planet bears down on a possible collision course with Earth.

“It’s an honor that is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for an actress,” said Dunst, who thanked festival organizers for allowing “Melancholia” to remain in the competition after von Trier’s Nazi remarks and offered warm words for her director. “I want to thank Lars for giving me the opportunity to be so brave.”

Von Trier was not allowed to attend Sunday’s ceremony.

Jean Dujardin claimed the best-actor prize for the silent film “The Artist,” in which he plays a 1920s Hollywood star whose career crumbles as talking pictures become the norm. In keeping with his singing, hoofing character, Dujardin did a little tap dance as he took to the Cannes stage.

Dujardin said he wanted to share his prize with co-star Berenice Bejo, who stood up and blew kisses at him on stage. The film was directed by Bejo’s husband, French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, who also directed Dujardin in the “OSS 117″ spy spoofs.

“I hope to make other silent films with you,” Dujardin told Hazanavicius.

Several well-received films, among them Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s horror thriller “The Skin I Live In” and British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” went home empty-handed.

Malick, who has made only five films in a nearly 40-year career, previously won the directing prize in 1979 for “Days of Heaven” on his last trip to Cannes. “The Tree of Life” was shot three years ago and festival organizers had hoped to premiere it at Cannes last year, but it was not ready in time.

Prizes were awarded by a nine-member jury headed by Robert De Niro that included actors Uma Thurman and Jude Law.

“The Tree of Life” was the first American film to win top honors at Cannes since back-to-back recipients in 2003 (Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant”) and 2004 (Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″).

De Niro told reporters choosing the top winner was difficult because of the range and “great qualities” among the 20 competing titles but that “The Tree of Life” ultimately fit the bill.

“It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize,” De Niro said. “Most of us felt the movie was terrific.”

The second-place grand prize was shared by Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time winners of the Palme d’Or, for their troubled-youth drama “The Kid With a Bike,” and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for his meditative saga “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.”

The third-place jury prize went to French actress-turned-director Maiwenn’s child-protection drama “Polisse.”

Despite a so-so reception from critics, von Trier’s “Melancholia” found favor with Cannes jurors.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the best films. I think it’s a great film,” said French director Olivier Assayas, a member of the jury.

Von Trier provoked a firestorm at the film’s press conference when he delivered rambling remarks about his German heritage in which he said he understood and sympathized with Hitler.

He also made wisecracks about Jews, comments that brought condemnation from Jewish and Holocaust groups and prompted Cannes organizers to boot him out, an unprecedented punishment for a filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or in 2000 with “Dancer in the Dark.”

Another Danish filmmaker, Nicolas Winding Refn, won the directing award for “Drive,” his action thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver caught up in a heist gone wrong. Refn gushed thanks for Gosling, who producers allowed to bring whatever director he wanted to make the film.

“He really wanted to make the movie and he really wanted to make it with me,” Refn said.

The screenplay award went to Israeli filmmaker

Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn said on Friday he was ‘repulsed’ by remarks by fellow Danish director Lars von Trier, who was banned from the Cannes film festival for saying he had “sympathy” for Adolf Hitler. Nicolas Winding Refn is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Drive”, the story of a Hollywood stunt driver who drives getaway cars in the LA underworld by night.

Who can forget the way Natalie Maines singlehandedly damned her little country trio – the Dixie Chicks – to infamy by bashing President George W. Bush in March 2003?  She was on tour in Europe criticizing our president while he was in D.C. sending troops to liberate Iraq. Country music fans rightly viewed Maines’ criticism as a move more befitting someone like Bill Clinton, who also protested American wars while on foreign soil (the Vietnam War), and the Dixie Chicks quickly disappeared from radio airwaves.

Here’s Maines’ quote:

 Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.

For the record: I’ve been critical of Maines’ attack on Bush ever since and plan to continue being critical of it. Because the bottom line is this: The American people — the salt-of-the-earth, work-hard-everyday-to-make-ends-meet, sign-up-to-fight-in-the-military people — don’t like to see someone standing with Europeans and hurling criticism at our President on the eve of war. They rightly equate that with criticizing the mission before it begins.

But this is not to say that the American people don’t support the freedom to criticize a president at the right time and in the right way, even overseas. And as a matter of fact, I’m betting that 99.9% of those same salt-of-the-earth folks who were outraged by Maines’ criticism of Bush are giving a standing ovation to Peter Fonda for calling President Obama a “[bleeping] traitor.” (The other .1%  will have a problem with the “[bleeping]” part.) Furthermore, I can imagine people throughout flyover country giving each other high fives as they read Fonda’s words.

Why did Fonda say this? Because he’s still outraged over the way Obama chose to use BP personnel for cleanup after the Gulf Oil Spill instead of allowing our own Coast Guard to get in there and get it done. Fonda described the BP personnel as “a bunch of Brits,” then added:

“I thought we kicked them out a long time ago. They tried to get back in 1812, but they didn’t make it.”

Give Fonda credit for knowing his history. We did kick the Brits out via the American Revolution and they did try to get back in during the War of 1812, only to be bested by us once more.

Perhaps someone, somewhere will still hold it against Fonda for saying what he said on foreign soil –- he’s at the film festival in Cannes – but I’m not that someone. Instead, I’m just going make sure you heard me right the first time when I told you that Fonda called Obama a “[bleeping] traitor.”

All I can say to the Easy Rider after that assessment is, “thank you.”

I’m a major Peter Fonda fan, think he’s one of the best character actors working today and can’t imagine life without “Easy Rider,” but this is way, way over the line. The sentiment is hard to disagree with and I’m no Obama fan, but he is the President of the United States and trashing him in this manner overseas at Cannes is hardly different than what all but ended the Dixie Chicks career.

CANNES, France (AFP) – Peter Fonda launched a four-letter attack on US President Barack Obama at the Cannes film festival on Wednesday, calling him a traitor over the handling of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill. …

Fonda — a keen environmentalist and co-producer of the film which centres on the explosion of the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon, the ensuing spill and its consequences — accused Washington of trying to gag reporting on the issue.

“I sent an email to President Obama saying, ‘You are a f(expletive) traitor,’ using those words… ‘You’re a traitor, you allowed foreign boots on our soil telling our military — in this case the coastguard — what they can and could not do, and telling us, the citizens of the United States, what we could or could not do’.”

Again, Fonda’s argument is exactly right. President Obama’s handling of the BP oil spill was uniformly atrocious and let us never forget that Obama was the biggest benefactor of BP’s political contributions. But no matter how failed the president, ”fucking traitor” — especially overseas and during a time of war — is the exact wrong way to make the case.

In other news:  Out of concern for America sovereignty when it comes to the Military, a Hollywood actor with the last name Fonda called a sitting liberal president a “fucking traitor” and as of now no pigs have been spotted flying.

The Cannes Film Festival Board of Directors is unwilling to lay out a set of excuses for director Lars von Trier’s pro-Nazi comments yesterday. If memory serves this is the first time Cannes has ever declared “persona non grata” a director of astonishingly dull and pretentious films only liars and masochists claim to have watched all the way through*:

CANNES, France – Danish director Lars Von Trier was expelled from the Cannes film festival on Thursday after remarks he made at a news conference, apparently in jest, in which he declared himself a Nazi and Hitler sympathizer.

“The festival’s board of directors … profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the festival,” the festival said in a statement.

“The board of directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.”

*”Breaking the Waves” is actually kinda brilliant.

If you remember, on Sunday night, film critic Roger Ebert was all excited after Salon’s Joan Walsh and NBC’s David Gregory (two people with racial issues of their own) called Newt Gingrich out for the hideous crime of labeling our failed food stamp president the “Food Stamp President.”

Here’s his tweet:

So “food stamp President” is “coded racism,” but when you fast-forward a mere couple of days to today you’ll find Roger Ebert publishing at his Chicago Sun-Times Journal a report written by Chaz Ebert that contains a lot of excuse-making for a famous director of pretentious films trashing Israel and proudly declaring he’s a Nazi:

[Von Trier] said he grew up thinking he was a Jew, and he was very happy to be a Jew. Then he discovered he was a Nazi, and that also gave him some pleasure. “Yes, I am a Nazi!”, he declared.

While his cast (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Udo Kier and John Hurt) looked on in horror, Kirsten Dunst tapped him on the shoulder and whispered to him to moderate his comments. He looked at her in confusion and said, “But this has a point, it will be okay.”

Then he proceeded to dig himself in deeper, saying that he understood Hitler, and that he could sympathize with his being down in that bunker toward the end. He continued, “Well that doesn’t mean I have anything against Jews, except Susanne Bier (Danish filmmaker, “In a Better World”).

“Well, Israel is a pain in the ass …

“Okay, I am a Nazi…

“Nazis tend to do things on a grander scale…

“Perhaps we can have a Final Solution for journalists….”

With that moderator Henri Behar called a halt to the conference because it was clear at that point that Von Trier just could not stop himself.

That’s some fine reporting on Chaz Ebert’s part, more information than we received from the video clip we posted earlier. But in the following paragraph, Chaz Ebert doesn’t condemn these objectively outrageous and offensive remarks. Instead, excuses are made on Von Trier’s behalf:

It is widely known that Von Trier suffers from bouts of depression, and “Melancholia” obviously reflected his state of mind. Ironically, before the declaration about Hitler and Nazism, Von Trier looked happier and more relaxed than he had at any of his previous press conferences at Cannes. He announced that he has broken through his depression and he has stopped drinking.

Leftists don’t have values, only tactics.

What kind of man hears coded racism in the words “food” and “stamps” on Sunday but publishes excuses for pro-Nazi/anti-Israel remarks on Wednesday?

Comments are open…

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That event is perhaps best remembered by Mr. Panahi’s empty jury chair and actress Juliette Binoche’s tearful plea. Mr. Panahi responded to Cannes’ supportive efforts to liberate him by smuggling out a thank you note from Evin. The regime’s response to that heinous offense was to sentence Mr. Panahi to an additional two months in Evin, followed by a Gestapo-like raid on his home to terrorize his family into media silence. Yet the international pressure seems to have worked then, as Mr. Panahi was freed from prison on May 25. Mr. Panahi’s liberty turned out to be short-lived. In December, Mr. Panahi was convicted of “propaganda against the system” by an Islamist kangaroo court in Tehran and sentenced to six years in prison.

Mr. Panahi was also banned from the film arts and leaving the country for 20 years. In effect, the regime issued Mr. Panahi an artistic death sentence. This time, however, Mr. Panahi had notable company. Director Mohammad Rasoulof, who had campaigned for Mr. Panahi’s freedom last year from outside Iran, was issued a matching sentence for his alleged crimes against the Islamist state. Both filmmakers are currently out on bail awaiting appeal. So once again, Cannes is neck-deep in campaigning for Mr. Panahi’s exoneration as well as Mr. Rasoulof’s now. The organization just issued a statement linked to a petition containing 17,000+ signatures that reads like a who’s who of the film world.

It remains to be seen what the Islamist regime’s response will be, but some key outside factors are now in play that weren’t last year that may harden the regime’s stance this time around. The Ahmadinejad regime’s response to the Arab Spring has been to let a crimson tide of blood at home, exemplified by its brutal repressions of the 25 Bahman protests on Valentine’s Day and an increase in the rolling executions of political prisoners. Recently the regime claimed the bloody crown of world’s most murderous state for 2010, yet the official numbers do not include de facto executions or the secret dumping of mutilated bodies of political prisoners in the Iranian desert. It’s even worse this year. Much worse.

Only time and events will determine the filmmakers’ fates, and events are moving at a very fast clip. Unlike past uprisings, the Green Revolution isn’t collapsing under the regime’s bloody iron boots as other failed rebellions have. It is also noteworthy, based on my interactions with hundreds of Iranians the past two years, that frustration with the regime is now boiling over and reaching a tipping point. It is becoming more and more apparent to freedom-loving Iranians that the only sure way to end the Islamist Groundhog Day of terror in Iran for Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof, Mohammad Nourizad, Ahmad Zeidabadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Habibollah Latifi and all the other prisoners of conscience in Iran is real change that results in the lawful ruling Iran and the criminals in jail instead of the other way around, as it has been for thirty-two long hellish years under the murderous Khomeinists.

The famous director proclaimed in a recent interview:

“It would be good…if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

If Allen had any regard whatsoever for the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, he would never fathom such a scenario. The day that the citizenry of this nation is forced to live under a tyrannical dictatorship, the great American experiment would suffer an unimaginably horrible demise; our cherished land of the free and home of the brave would be relegated to nothing more than dirt and real estate.

For whom exactly would an Obama dictatorship be good for?

Prior to his ascension to the Oval Office, Allen and his Hollywood brethren co-signed Obama like Twitter and the South Beach Diet. Subsequently, he became just as much of a celebrity as many of them are. They immediately pledged to be of service to him; in their eyes they are the president’s teammates. Being a part of such an exclusive team requires possessing the commonalities of money, power, and fame, all which ensure that the players are virtually insulated from the ill-effects of the star player’s over-reaching, powerful rule by decree.

Apparently, as far as they are concerned, those who will be dictated to are you and me, not them.

It is us who will see our freedoms and way of life obliterated, while they take the bubbles under which they live and relocate to exotic locations.

We know exactly for whom an Obama dictatorship would be good for; Allen and the rest of the Hollywood already-haves. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he desires it, but it speaks volumes he shared his asinine, un-American wish with a foreign newspaper.

It’s about time someone told him, “Cut.”

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair.

Once again, people: there is no evidence that the “Bush White House” conspired to leak Plame’s name to the media, or that it was done to discredit her husband or expose her identity. Even the Obama Justice Department dismissed the Wilsons’ attempt to sue Rove, Cheney, and Libby, stating flatly that Joe Wilson had provided no evidence that the three officials had caused him harm.

But back to the media sleight-of-hand. Ms. Abramowitz then refers to “the eventual trial and conviction of ‘Scooter’ Libby, a top aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney,” without clarifying what he was convicted of. Her phrasing, and the screenplay itself, suggest that Libby was guilty of the leak (and Cheney as well, via guilt-by-association). No, Libby perjured himself to investigators by concealing what he knew and when he knew it; it was State Dept. official Richard Armitage, by his own admission, who leaked Plame’s name. And he did it not in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the administration, but inadvertently, claiming he didn’t realize she was covert. But as I wrote before at Big Hollywood, his name does not appear in the script. That’s because it would utterly suck the wind out of the movie’s already limp sails to admit that “the Bush White House” did not conspire to punish the Wilsons.

Abramowitz says that, according to Liman, “events in the movie follow the facts.” Yes, if after “the facts” you add “according to the anti-war Left’s willful delusion.” Having thus established for her readers that the film is “true-to-life,” Ms. Abramowitz then gets to the article’s astonishing central claim: that in Fair Game, “ Liman pushed the politics of the events into the background.”

Yes, if by “background” she means “foreground.” The Valerie Plame story is political in its very essence. The whole point of the Wilsons’ story is their claim that they were targeted for retaliation for challenging the administration’s justification for war. Removing that linchpin by “pushing the politics into the background” would simply cause the entire story to vanish.

Armitage: left on the cutting room floor

The filmmakers “leave the political debate largely off screen,” Abramowitz continues, “and much of the activity of the Bush White House officials is presented in news clips.” True, as I noted in my previous piece, top figures like Bush and Cheney are presented in Fair Game only in film footage; but those clips are carefully selected to suggest a White House cover-up, and the script itself hammers that theory home. The scenes that do fictionally depict White House officials show Rove’s and Libby’s characters conspiring to “out” Plame’s CIA identity.

Liman chimes in, describing how producer Janet Zucker “was particularly impassioned about the behavior of the Bush administration… It was actually very helpful to have this incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer in the mix because it put me in a very reactionary mood, which ultimately drove the politics out of the movie.” (A liberal-minded producer in Hollywood? Who knew?!)

Drove the politics out of the movie? Not the movie I read. Liman is claiming that he and Zucker balanced each other out and created a compromise in which politics is merely a walk-on character. I find it impossible to believe that an “incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer,” whose driving motivation for pursuing this story was to expose Bush wrongdoing, would accept such a compromise. I also find it impossible to believe the Wilsons themselves would be happy having the crux of their story redacted from the film (the real Valerie Plame, by the way, went to Cannes to promote it).

Politically neutral?

And what about the star Sean Penn? Raise your hand if you believe that the openly far-left activist Penn would cheerily go along with a politically neutral take on this affair… Uh huh. As I expected, not a single hand.

In all fairness, I haven’t yet seen the movie, so perhaps it now bears little resemblance to the openly partisan script I previously examined on Big Hollywood. But based on that screenplay, to say that the movie is about the Wilsons’ strained relationship and only marginally about politics is, well, let’s be charitable and call it disingenuous. After all, no sooner does the Times article claim that Fair Game is a politics-free zone, when Liman contradicts himself with a revealing analogy to Spielberg’s Jaws: “The shark is a lot scarier when you see less of it. I decided to apply that approach to the White House.” Sounds like the politics hasn’t so much been driven out of the movie as elevated to a central, ominous presence.

The Bush White House

Lest one question why we shouldn’t take Liman at his word, he helpfully points out that “I’m used to manipulating people. That’s one of the main criteria of making it as a director in Hollywood… You have to be a con artist.” With this in mind, one can’t help but wonder if he and L.A. Times enabler Rachel Abramowitz are trying to pull off a con themselves: to reassure readers that Fair Game isn’t just another leftist, politicized attack on the Iraq War – because they know, as I have written before, that that would be met with even greater audience indifference than was Matt Damon’s dud The Green Zone (Abramowitz herself raises the fearsome specter of that movie’s failure.)

Audience indifference except at Cannes, of course, where international cinema sophisticates gather to congratulate themselves on their anti-Americanism, and among the media leftists like reviewer Jeffrey Wells, who giddily predicts Cannes-and-Oscar glory for a ”film which exposes right-wing scumbaggery.” 

They eagerly embrace Fair Game’s political slant – a slant the L.A. Times denies the movie has.