Five Best Picture winners in one Blu-ray collection with no shortage of special features is a pretty good deal… if you like the movies. Because I’m a fan of four out five of the titles, this was a real find.

The English Patient (1996)

Director Anthony Minghella’s sweeping WWII romance ranked as #24 in my countdown of the greatest left-wing films of all time:

Filled with poetic dialogue, lush cinematography, some truly extraordinary scenes — such as the sandstorm sequence where Katharine and Laszlo fall in love — and  a charming subplot involving the short-lived but sincere romance between Binoche’s Canadian nurse and Kip (“Lost’s” Naveen Andrews), a brave Indian who defuses bombs, you almost will yourself  not to notice the film’s depraved and shockingly selfish philosophy. The film is seductive, though, and you want to give into it, but in the end the only moral outcome would be to have the cast of “Inglorious Basterds” storm in and beat Laszlo to death with a baseball bat.

If you don’t mind being manipulated by an ingeniously crafted and immoral piece of propaganda (and I don’t), another bonus is the look of the film (the cinematography won an Oscar), which is a jaw-dropper on Blu-ray.

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Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Many will never forgive the fact that director John Madden’s fictionalized account of a passionate but ill-fated love affair between a young, struggling William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes)  and the beautiful young woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) who inspires some of his greatest work, beat out Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” for that year’s top Oscar prize.

This might be heresy, but I think the best film won.

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**UPDATE: I was a little careless with my language below. Readers have correctly pointed out that “Shark Night” is rated PG-13 and that there is no “gratuitous nudity.” This is correct. What there is, though, are a lot of young, very fit people running around with hardly any clothes on even at the silliest of times (not a criticism). So gratuitous near-nudity is a better description.

In the undeniably entertaining “Shark Night,” director David R. Ellis brings to life a couple of one-dimensional, stereotyped, Southern, racist rednecks to… lecture… us… about… bigotry… Talk about a disconnect. Naturally, there’s a young black man and Hispanic woman who are racially taunted by these two inbred-looking good ole’ boys, but when the film itself engaged in this kind of racial stereotyping (and more), I began to wonder if “Shark Night” was working on the kind of  high level, self-aware social satire only a dog could hear.

For instance, the black guy and the Hispanic woman are naturally a couple — can’t have them romantically mixing with Caucasians, I guess. ***SPOILERS*** Also, both are the very first victims of the shark. But it’s when the shirtless Black guy fights the shark with — ready for this? — a spear, that I began to see the real genius in this film’s penetrating racial commentary.

Or not.

Anyway, “Shark Night” is pure B-movie dumb in the finest way possible. Though no legitimate masterpiece like last year’s epic “Piranha,” you will be entertained throughout. Mixed in with the dumb is a little suspense, gratuitous nudity, gore, action and more dumb. “Shark Night” proudly is what it is and, by design or accident, more insightful when it comes to racial issues (that expose the Hollywood left) than the Academy Award-winner “Crash.”

It’s also a much better movie than “Crash.” Not that that’s a high bar.  

But the real brilliance in the storytelling comes from a shark-attack story where the gaggle of lovely, barely-clothed victims-in-waiting reside on an island. Oh the contrivances you’ll witness to get them into the water, especially after they know what’s in the water. 

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Actor Don Cheadle is having second thoughts about using the word “gangsta” in reference to President Barack Obama. But Cheadle, the star of the new Showtime series “House of Lies,” apparently is sticking with his support for Obama, results be darned.

Cheadle, best known for his work in films like “Hotel Rwanda,” “Iron Man 2″ and “Crash,” told Jet Magazine he wished Obama had been more “gangsta,” and less a “consensus seeker.”

Now, he’s trying to clarify those comments.

“I realize that when speaking to reporters who are looking for the juiciest comments to print, a word like gangster in connection with a black president uttered by a black celebrity can almost be too much to resist,” the Oscar-nominated actor wrote. “I say this not in defense but to offer some perspective. I believe I used the word gangster and I meant it. But I wasn’t talking about pants sagging and forties and ‘hoes’ or any of that other nonsense and I find it hard to believe that that is what some people thought I was saying. I was talking about wish fulfillment; my own and my desire to witness something more than I had.”

Cheadle then fell back on apology-speak, mixed with some revisionist history – didn’t The One have a Democratic Congress for his first two years in office? – to explain what he hopes to see from Obama now.

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If all goes as planned, as you read this the wife and I will be loading a moving van full of everything we own in advance of a cross-country move back to our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Eight years ago we did the reverse. Left our beloved home for what was supposed to be a three-year adventure in Hollywood. Much happened over those years — most of it wonderful. But we’ve been terribly homesick every minute we’ve been away and simply can’t wait to pick up our small town lives where they left off.

Crying out in anguished pretension

To say we’ve enjoyed our time in Los Angeles would be an understatement. Adventure we sought and adventure we received. Though I eventually failed out, I loved the few years I (barely) scraped out a living in the independent film world and that it led to eventually being a part of Andrew Breitbart’s BIG empire feels something like providence. There is very little, however, my wife and I will miss about the city itself. We learned pretty quickly that all the cliches are true about the crime, traffic, smog, tremors, and artificiality of it all. Simply put, this city is a dump with a 10% sales tax where light bulbs are contraband the seasons change from hot to scalding and throwing your garbage in the wrong bin ranks as something close to a capital crime. No offense, but I see Los Angeles as nothing more than a big, fascist, one-story ghetto and those of you who love it are welcome to it.  

One cliche that is a total lie, though, is the unbelievably phony narrative created by the Leftist media and Hollywood about the people who live here. Throughout my misspent life, I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and now California — and I have never met nicer people than the people of Los Angeles. That’s not hyperbole or rose-colored glasses or sentiment. It’s a fact. Over the years, I’ve been all over this city and have met and worked with folks from every possible background and income group; from movie stars, producers, journalists and politicians to cops, public school teachers, and factory workers. The people who live and work and make this city run are almost without exception uncommonly decent and kind.

Which brings me to the Paul Haggis film “Crash.”

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Let’s be clear – the upper echelons of Hollywood are dominated by weirdos, losers and mutations.  I’m not judging – I live in LA, so naturally some of my best friends are weirdos, losers and mutations.  I’m simply pointing out a fact.  Most of the normal, hardworking, all-American folks in Hollywood are crew – and they showed it with their heartfelt booing of Michael Moore when he removed the muffin from his pie-hole just long enough to run down our country during the 2003 Oscar ceremony. 

But these great Americans are generally not members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they don’t get to vote for who takes home the Oscar.  People like Sean Penn do.  And Tim Robbins.   And tranny vomit recipient Susan Sarandon.  

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These are the kind of folks who make up the majority of Oscar voters, so it’s no wonder that the Academy Awards show is so often a festival of nitwittery that leaves normal Americans scratching their heads wondering, “Um, what the hell was that?” 

Oscar has more than its share of astonishing failures, of crazy-uncle-locked-in-the-attic nods that the Academy sorely regretted about the time the after-party coke bowls ran dry.  The terrible Oscar choices listed here are only from the last few decades since the sting of choosing How Green Is My Valley over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon has presumably faded since 1941– well, for some of us.  Oh, and you won’t find Marisa Tomei on this list – she rocks.  Deal with that, haters. 

So, in no particular order of insanity, here are Oscar’s 10 biggest recent screw-ups: ]

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“Is that why you’re here, Colonel? Some kind of post-Vietnam experience like you need a rerun or something? You pour a hundred twenty million bucks into this place, you turn it into a military zone, so what, so you can have chopper parades in the sky?” 

Why it’s a left-wing film

Although he had directed the middling horror film “The Hand” in 1981 and a couple of short films, “Salvador” was Oliver Stone’s first Oliver Stone Film, a political-themed drama based on a true story and yet still skewed in unmentionable ways to condemn what would become the two-time Oscar-winning director’s usual targets: America, Reagan, the military, the CIA, and conservatives in general.

The film’s narrative covers the tumultuous 1980-81 Civil War period in El Salvador with a story that starts just prior to Ronald Reagan taking office in January of ‘81, but through a lot of exposition (masterfully delivered by star James Woods) Stone still manages to blame much of the country’s chaos on Reagan, the “right wing” and, of course, the CIA for supposedly supporting and training and enabling the military death squads that roamed the country murdering supporters of the leftist uprising.

Stone also uses a sleight of hand to make you think it was Reagan who was in office and who continued military and financial assistance after the brutal assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero (during a Catholic mass and just after a blistering anti-government speech) and the horrific rape and murder of four Catholic nuns. Both of these tragedies occurred in late 1980 while Carter was still in office, but Stone seems incapable of dealing with the fact that running the American government and continuing all that aid — though it was briefly suspended after the bodies of the nuns were found — in the face of the worst kind of human rights abuses was a Democrat president and Congress.

When Reagan did take office, he merely took over a policy his liberal predecessor had long supported.   (more…)

There is perhaps no greater mystery than what happens to each of us after we die, and in a healthy family, perhaps no greater love than that between its members. Two new films of uncommon depth and emotional power tackle those issues and are arriving in theaters this week, as director Clint Eastwood teams up with Matt Damon to explore the Great Beyond in “Hereafter” and Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell deliver performances that might set the standard for this year’s Oscar gold in “Conviction.”

“Hereafter” applies “Crash” and “Babel” school of storytelling, interweaving the stories of three distinctly different people in different parts of the globe in an intricate fashion. The film kicks off with a bang as Marie (played with a touching sense of fear and wonderment by French actress Cecile de France) is knocked out by the notorious Indonesian tsunami of 2004 before springing back to life and finding herself haunted by the visions she had while unconscious.

Marie’s a newscaster and is expected to keep a level-headed scientific mindset, but she is soon obsessed with her quest to figure out what happened and risks losing her reputation, career and relationship. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a lonely man named George (a surprisingly vulnerable Damon) struggles to ignore the psychic abilities that have haunted him since he nearly died in a childhood accident. (more…)

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Is this from the same Paul Haggis known for the soulful Hispanic slow-motion scream and leading the way in 2007 with the trashing of America’s troops? Just very hard to believe because “The Next Tree Days” looks like a fairly straight-forward action thriller. Seems rather shallow to produce such a thing with America still in Iraq … and racist.

Oh, that’s right, now that Obama’s in office no one screams in slow motion anymore and Tommy Lee Jones can now feel comfortable flying the American flag right-side up.  (more…)

Internet hoaxes that look too good to be true usually are. Over the weekend, a leaked resignation letter written by director Paul Haggis spilling all kinds of dirt about the Church of Scientology hit the web and looked way too good to be true. But now that New York Magazine and the Hollywood Reporter have picked it up….

After 35 years as a member of the Church of Scientology, Paul Haggis is calling it quits. In a badass letter to Scientology’s national spokesman Tommy Davis (who hates Martin Bashir), the filmmaker lays out the reasons why.

It all started when a San Diego church publicly supported Prop 8. Haggis asked Davis to denounce its actions but Davis never went through with it. Then the already-pissed Haggis read an interview in which Davis denied Scientology’s practice of “disconnection” (forcing members to cut off communication with loved ones who oppose Scientology). But Haggis knew disconnection first-hand. His wife was forced to cut ties with her parents.

Choice snips from the Haggis letter: (more…)

It’s a cinch to see why actors like Ray Liotta, Forest Whitaker and Jessica Biel signed up for the gritty drama “Powder Blue,” out this week on DVD. The film lets them wallow in bleak, bleary-eyed scenarios, the sort of heightened reality that acting school monologues are made of.

It’s even easier to see why “Blue” shot straight to DVD.

The film goes the “Crash” route, a trail that, more often than not, gets most screenwriters hopelessly lost. Jessica Biel famously sheds her top to play Rose, a single mother and stripper who goes by the name Scarlett on stage. What, Rose wasn’t strippery enough?

Her son is in a coma and it’s all she can do to make ends meet while keeping her cretinous boss (Patrick Swayze, enlivening a very silly role) at arm’s length. She’s less wary of Jack (Ray Liotta), a new strip club customer who doesn’t seem very interested in watching her doff her clothes. We also meet Charlie (Forest Whitaker) a man whose personal grief has left him suicidal. Charlie meets un-cute with a waitress (Lisa Kudrow), but he’s too numb to respond to her advances. He doesn’t need a Friend. He needs a shrink – or a more fully realized character to play. (more…)

There is a phenomenon known as “the Oscar bounce.” When a movie receives Academy Award nominations, especially one of the five coveted Best Picture slots, ticket-buyers generally follow. The Oscar seal of approval used to mean something to the rank-and-file moviegoer, but that seems to have changed.

Only one of this year’s Best Picture nominees has inspired any real passion from the broad public. The almost-certain Best Picture winner is Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight), and its devotees, including critics and members of the Academy (not to mention yours truly), have made it a word-of-mouth smash hit. The Danny Boyle-directed feel-good Bollywood fusion movie made for a meager $14M added another $2.05M or so on Friday and is charting a 3-day course for about $7.4M. That will give the Slumdog a $77.4M take, and it could reach $90M-$95M before it’s through in American theatres.

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