According to the New York Times, even with upwards of 40 blockbusters released in 3D (meaning much higher ticket prices), box office revenues in North America dropped 4.5% this year. In worse news, overall attendance dropped 5.3%, which means that over the last two years attendance has dropped a whopping 11%. When you lose over 10% of your customers in just two years, something is horribly wrong. When you combine that with plummeting DVD sales, you have an existential problem.

Director Roland Emmerich at his London home

The Times blames much of the problem on the economy, but as anemic as it’s been, the economy has improved some since 2008 and 2009, while attendance and revenues have not. In other words, that’s a stupid excuse. But at least it’s a new excuse. After years of blaming Redbox and piracy, you have to give Hollywood’s media friends credit for coming up with a new way to avoid admitting the obvious: People don’t like Hollywood or their product very much.

Movies are a cyclical business and analysts say that 2010 benefited mightily from holdover sales for “Avatar,” which was released late in 2009 and became one of the most popular movies of all time. A decline of hundreds of millions of dollars is not catastrophic when weighed against the size of the industry. Over all, North American ticket revenue for 2011 is projected to be about $10.1 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data.

That is only a 4.5 percent falloff from 2010. But studio executives are alarmed by the downturn nonetheless, in part because the real picture is worse than the raw revenue numbers suggest.

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Well, I certainly learned that there aren’t many opera fans among the Big Hollywood readership.

The political intent of an opera that romanticizes Chou en Lai of Red China confirms the surrender of all American Arts to Marxism.

From Hollywood to “The Met,” from sheer entertainment to the pastimes of the privileged, the Elite of the Ivy League find themselves in the driver’s seat.

Whoever has gotten to the White House

In the last twenty years

Has  either an Ivy League diploma

Or a Rhodes Scholarship.

These enlightened despots,

As Voltaire might call them,

Have dragged America into slavish indebtedness to Red China.

According to “The Progressives” in both political parties, Sarah Palin needn’t apply for The Presidency.

Why Not?

She is blatantly and unforgivably not among “The Chosen”! (more…)

“The incubation period of the opera (Nixon In China) was rife with serious second-thoughts, by no less than Adams (the composer) himself, who initially resisted the proposal made by Peter Sellars (the director), a progressively radical director whose idea the composer found too risky.” – An excerpt from “Opera Review: John Adams’ ‘Nixon in China’” by Sam Juliano.

Hmmm … the course of Marxist genius never runs smoothly.

If you don’t believe me, read the life of Bertolt Brecht.

However, Peter Sellars’ Marxism, as Wikipedia prefers to translate it, is to be a “progressively radical” artist of some sort.

With President Obama in the White House, it can now be known as “radically Progressive”: the Progressive Clinton as versus the radically Progressive Obama.

Radicalism, a la Van Jones, even as seen through the eyes of the Huffington Post, is the inevitability of the “Progressive” New World Order, whether you like it or not.

There is, however, one impressively dialectical twist in this drama: women such as Alice Goodman, the librettist.

Her Marxist heresy, because of the ministerial collar, is what is sometimes referred to by the KGB  hardliners as the Western Sentimentality of “useful idiots” and the decadent schmaltz seems to have escaped even the intriguingly odd but hawk-eyed Peter Sellars.

Reverend Goodman is still a “Progressive” of the Progressively Baptist Bill Clinton sort. She is actually an ordained Anglican priest; and is now a chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge.

The initial Wizard of Nixon In China happened to be the director, Peter Sellars.

The real Wizard, however, is Alice Goodman.

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Actor/activist/committed Buddhist and Dalai Lama devotee Richard Gere showed up again on Capitol Hill to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about “religious freedom and human rights” in Tibet, Burma and North Korea.  

Why Richard Gere would be considered an authority on any subject besides the tango is a mystery to those who’ve had the opportunity to hear the man speak without a script. Then again, “Desperate Housewives” star Eva Longoria does intermittently “brainstorm” with the President on border security issues. 

—–

Following his gripping testimony, Gere was approached by a reporter and asked: “Has President Obama, in your mind,” – which is where it gets tricky – “been tough enough on China regarding human rights?” 

On occasion Richard has been known to criticize Obama for treating his holiness the Dalai Lama dismissively. Like for example the time the esteemed Tibetan monk was secretly escorted in the dead of winter out the back door of the White House and forced to maneuver in flip-flops around White House garbage bags. 

This time, appearing flattered to be asked another question from someone seeking further insight from his vast pool of expertise, Gere, without mentioning China’s “Paramount Leader” Hu Jintao being feted like royalty at a state dinner, said “No, no, he [Obama] has a ways to go.  I think he’s finding his way of how forceful to be.”  

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Standing up to imperialism has often been a theme in Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and given Hong Kong’s history, it’s easy to see why.  Hong Kong is a city that has long struggled with its own identity.  For a time, it was not part of China, and the city’s natives certainly weren’t considered British either.  China is a nation that spent an incredibly long stretch of history being governed by foreign powers, it’s ironic that now they hold the majority of our nation’s debt.  But Hong Kong was a city that spent almost the entire twentieth century as a British colony, and as the specter of Communist Chinese takeover loomed in the nineties, both Hong Kong’s identity and future seemed uncertain.

It was out of this cultural context that Tsui Hark’s classic martial arts epic Once Upon a Time China was released, an action-packed tale of the culture clash between east and west in 19^th century Hong Kong.   While the film’s protagonist, Dr. Wong Fei-hung, is a folk hero that has been portrayed in countless films, Jet Li’s version of the character helped reinvigorate Hong Kong kung-fu movies and would come to be his definitive role as an actor. Li’s take on Wong redefined the role of the intellectual warrior who must defend his countrymen against foreign tyranny.  Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, which is a continuation of a TV series called Fist of Fury, is the latest in this tradition. (more…)

So, according to the New York Times, China has banned time travel from its tv show plots. They say that it lacks “positive thoughts and meaning.”

I agree, but for different reasons.

As I mentioned on Tuesday’s podcast, I spend most of my life, thinking about useless things.

Which means that I would be no help, if I were to travel back in time. For there is no way I might explain how anything from the present day actually works.

I am but a barnacle on the ships of industry.

I complain, instead of innovate. I ponder petty grievances, fantasize about heroic endeavors, imagine what I’d say if I met a cartoon.

And so, I am useless to society. but somehow we – or you – continue to solve the world’s problems.

And that’s my point: If it weren’t for the ingenuity of giants who like solving problems, I would be nowhere. Dopes like me can exploit our resources, because you, the smart guy, always finds new things to exploit.

Human creativity is so relentless, that no matter the challenges, we are always better off than before. Where ever creativity is stifled, by bureaucracy, or something called “fairness” – people suffer.

And teachers’ unions break out.

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So, here’s the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

A lady named Lori, writing over at Feministing blog, says she just attended a panel on “transfeminism,” where one speaker says we should stop thinking of abortion as a women’s issue.

Okay!

—–

Let’s hear more!

Lori writes:

The thing is, it’s not just women that have abortions. Trans men have abortions. Gender queer people have abortions. Two spirit people have abortions. People who do not fit into the box of ‘woman’ have abortions. This is the reality we live in, and the more we pretend otherwise, the more dangerous it is for other people, and the more they are excluded by the movement.

This concept, she explains, will strengthen ” our reproductive justice work.”

Yep, “reproductive justice work.”

Sometimes I think they just pull random words out of the dictionary.

Sorry, vagionary.

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Looks as though the times really are a-changing:

Counter-culture hero and 1960s protest singer-songwriter Bob Dylan got a rapturous welcome from fans on Wednesday at his first ever concert in China, despite having agreed to sing only an approved set designed not to offend political sensitivities.

Famous for his songs against injustice and for civil liberties and pacifism, Dylan struck a cautious line in Beijing and did not sing anything that might have overtly offended China’s Communist rulers, like “The Times They Are A-Changin”.  …Promoters tried to bring Dylan to China last year, but the Culture Ministry did not give its approval, as is required for any concert in the country.

China’s agreement this year came with the proviso that Dylan “performed with the approved content”, according to a brief statement issued last month by the ministry, which gave no other details.

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So you remember “Red Dawn,” it was that 80’s flick about American kids arming themselves against a Soviet invasion.

I’ve seen it thirteen times, mainly because I’m a huge fan of C. Thomas Howell. And I’m lonely.

But that’s another story for another time. The film has since been remade, with the producers replacing the Russian bad guys with Chinese.

But now – According to the L.A. Times, China has become such a big market for Hollywood, MGM studios have decided to replace the Chinese with North Koreans.

Yep, in a first for Hollywood: filmmakers actually digitally erased Chinese flags and symbols and replaced dialogue… so now North Korea are the invaders.

Because, with that country, there’s nothing to be gained, financially. It’s as lucrative as a Kathy Griffin porn site.

Color me unsurprised.

Hollywood may be where dreams are made, but it’s also where wimps are cultivated.

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Keep in mind that this is MGM’s decision. The filmmakers have already made their film and went with the Chinese. I’m sure their frustration is off the charts and that it was rather scary when the MGM Suits took them into Room 101 to explain the situation. As Mark Krikorian at The Corner asks: “Haven’t we always been at war with Eastasia?”

So much for artistic freedom. And this is likely the wrong kind of artistic freedom to receive any kind of defense in the usual-usual entertainment press.

The L.A. Times:

China has become such an important market for U.S. entertainment companies that one studio has taken the extraordinary step of digitally altering a film to excise bad guys from the Communist nation lest the leadership in Beijing be offended. …

[P]otential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower, one of the fastest-growing and potentially most lucrative markets for American movies, not to mention other U.S. products.

As a result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from “Red Dawn,” substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.

Wait. I’m confused. Hollywood bashes America constantly. Aren’t we “an important market for U.S. entertainment companies”? I guess some markets are more equal than others. (You’ll be glad to know that I’m now out of Orwell references.)

Back to the Corner, this time Daniel Foster, who points out the utter absurdity of portraying North Korea as any kind of threat to any country other than their own:

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The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner recently hosted a dinner for the man who’s holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison. The Hollywood community and their human rights lobby were oddly silent on this event. Could it be because Hope and Change has been placed over all those “Free Tibet” bumper stickers in Hollywood?

Most notably missing on the current subject of China’s human rights record is Richard Gere, a man who has championed the Tibetan people for years and one who I believe to be sincere in his cause. In 2008, Mr. Gere took to Washington and said this about the Bush administration and Tibet:

But the Bush administration was not silent on the subject and did more than just show the public where Tibet could be found on a map. In 2007 Bush hosted a very public event for the Dalai Lama (also a Nobel Peace Prize winner) and awarded him one of the highest U.S. honors and called on China to open talks with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader whom Beijing reviles as a separatist.

In 2009 the current administration snubbed the Dalai Lama before Obama’s trip to Beijing, later holding a private meeting with the exiled leader in the Whitehouse Map Room away from the press and then sending his Holiness out the back door. (more…)

The Los Angeles Times:

If Sony made “Karate Kid” with a Chinese partner, it could be a part of that Asian gold rush, but the deal would come with some foreseeable obstacles, including possible government censorship.

Belgrad didn’t think long before giving his answer. “That was enough to say yes,” says Belgrad, who had long been fascinated by the country and had developed a “Sinbad” movie that would be set there. “It’s a fascinating place.”

Here’s the story’s best quote by way of  James Lassiter, one of the film’s producers. (more…)

Hard Boiled is a film that serves as not just a great movie in its own right, but as a fitting capstone to a complete body of work. The highly-charged stories, emotional spectrum, visual magnificence, and moral subtext of John Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” canon owes everything to the circumstances of the man’s early years. His is a directorial mind forged in the crucible of a hard but spiritual life.

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.” (more…)

This is our sixth month of Obama Nation strips. Huzzah!

The script of the upcoming remake of the infamous America-conquered-by-Commies movie Red Dawn (1984) raises an intriguing question – can Hollywood actually still produce a movie where it takes America’s side?  The answer is “Sort of.” 

“Wolverines!”

There are some welcome ideological surprises lurking within the script’s 104 pages.  Shockingly, Hollywood actually seems to accept the premise that if the Chinese and Russkies invade the United States we are justified in fighting back with hot lead instead of teach-ins and choruses of Kumbayah.  But the script also displays a bit of the moral illiteracy we’ve come to expect from the Hollywoodoids – naturally, the script has to imply that we kinda brought the invasion on ourselves and that resisting tyranny somehow means becoming just as bad as the tyrants.

The re-imagining of Red Dawn will be released later this year and does very little actual re-imagining of the original’s simple plot.  We first meet some all-American teenagers.  They play high school football, party, and talk and look like CW series cast members – not real bright, but pretty (the pretty part in the script).  For some reason, the Soviets (replaced here by the Chinese with a Russian assist) invade America and seize their hometown.  Their town’s tactical significance appears to be that invading it advances the plot.  Anyway, the teenagers go up into the mountains, score some of the firearms our prescient Founders ensured we’d always have the right to keep and bear despite the best efforts of those gun control-loving wusses, and launch a bloody guerrilla war against the invaders.  (more…)

While we get bombarded with the white noise of politics, this is what’s happening:

In short, China is a top-tier strategic threat to the United States, and its ideology of predatory state mercantilism constitutes one of the greatest challenges to America’s new Global Generation – like the danger posed by the Soviet Union to the Greatest Generation.

Wake up. Do not let our leadership sweep this under the rug:

But the Obama administration seems terrified of the implications of Google’s behavior. Google reportedly consulted the White House before acting, but the most the Obama people could say was that the events were “troubling,” or “raise serious concerns” or that they want to encourage China “to work with Google.

The administration’s timidity in facing the reality of China’s new superpower status was highlighted in October when the Obama White House directed the Intelligence Community to downgrade China to a Priority 2 intelligence target. This would be the first time in postwar history that China has ever been anything but a top-tier intelligence priority. Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Bill Gertz of The Washington Times last week, “China should be at the top of the priority list, not moving down.”

This past November I was in Michigan filming when I had dinner with my friends’ Congressman Thaddeus McCotter from Michigan and Philippe Martinez (Producer and Director). I think McCotter is one of the special jewels in our government and I hope that  at some point he runs for national office, perhaps for the White House. He is not what one would call Project Runway material, but his humor and intellect are stunning, and he can stroll the catwalk with the best of them. Anyway back to the dinner… (more…)

I thought about writing a script about China – thriller, action, intrigue.  The last film that dealt with China would be “Red Corner” which a Wikipedia review said, “…more the movie’s subtext swallows its story, until all that is left is Gere’s superior virtue, intermixed with his superior virility — both of which are greatly appreciated by the evidently under-serviced Chinese female population…”  The film was banned in China.  But it’s fertile ground for material.  Imagine the conversation with a Studio Executive…

Me: So, I found this article by Secretary of Defense Gates: “China Could Undermine U.S. Military Power in the Pacific.”  China is expanding its navy in the Pacific to secure disputed territories in the South China Sea with lots of oil and gas.  A Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford thriller.  I’ve followed the Chinese military since the nineties and it’s a central plot of my novel, “Stealing Thunder.” (Shameless Plug! 600 pages long; waiting for Amazon jerks to come through with the darn discount price…).   Think “Clear and Present Danger,” “Hunt for Red October”…

Executive: Liked ‘Sum of All Fears.’ (more…)

I often find myself thinking that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. 

For instance, consider the uproar from the left when Don Imus opened his silly yap about the black women on the Rutgers basketball team.  Now compare that to their response when David Letterman made his smarmy cracks about Sarah Palin and the governor’s 14-year-old daughter.  The liberals immediately sprang to his defense, pointing out that Letterman is nothing more than a TV personality and is therefore free to make offensive jokes without fear of censure.  So what do they think Don Imus is?  The secretary of state? 

Or consider how choleric those on the left become any time that Dick Cheney defends the former administration.  Well, if Obama and his cronies didn’t constantly attack Bush and Cheney and their policies, the chances are the ex-vice president wouldn’t feel compelled to set the record straight. Furthermore, Jimmy Carter never stopped bashing George Bush during the eight years he was the president, and yet nobody on the left ever suggested he shut up.  On the contrary, he was hailed at the 2004 Democratic convention, and even had the honor of being seated next to the patron saint of left-wingers, Michael Moore.  Speaking of Carter, how is it that he, who is always volunteering to monitor elections anywhere on earth, including the Westminster Dog Show, wasn’t in Iran, making sure that Ahmadinejad got 110% of the vote?  (more…)

The tin-pot dictator, Kim Jong-Il (who has turned his entire country into a Communist Gulag) has snatched a couple of American journalists, dragging them across the border from China to be tried on trumped-up spy charges and sentenced to twelve years of hard labor.  Here is how the North Korean news agency reported it: “The trial confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing as they had already been indicted and sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor.” Isn’t that a great line, “Reform through labor…”?   Given that almost everyone in North Korea is already starving, I suspect that Euna Lee and Laura Ling are not likely to survive twelve years of “reforming” big rocks into gravel.

At the same time, dictator Kim Jong-Il rattles his puny saber and threatens that if any of his ships carrying nuclear materials to other rogue nations are stopped on the high seas, he will consider it an “act of war.”  Well, gee… There was a time not too long ago when the kidnapping of American nationals would have, in itself, been considered an “act of war.”  I imagine that had Teddy Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan been at the helm when Kim Jong-Il took two American nationals hostage, the response would be quite different.   More likely it would have gone along the lines of: “You have 24 hours to return our citizens before we start obliterating your military bases – one every hour until the hostages are set free.  If we run out of military bases and you still continue to hold them then, unfortunately, we’ll have to start on your cities.  Have a nice day.”  Then, like any good parent, we would follow through with our pledge. (more…)

On Dec. 12, 1974, my grandparents were driving home when a vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour hit them. On March 17, 2002, I was driving home when a vehicle driving traveling 50 miles per hour hit me.

My grandparents were killed instantly. I lived.  My grandparents were driving an AMC Gremlin. I was driving a Dodge 3500 diesel dually pickup truck.

AMC is now out of business. Dodge Trucks are still selling well. The free market decided that we didn’t need AMC Gremlins.

I still drive a Dodge dually. We factor in safety versus miles per gallon on every automobile purchase that my wife and I make. Devo could not have said it better: “Freedom of Choice…It’s what you want!” Freedom to choose is a basic American right. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are guaranteed to me and 299,999,999 other Americans by the Constitution. (more…)