Former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated his 80th birthday with a bash in London on Wednesday.  And celebrities were out in force to glorify the life of a dictator.  Tickets went as high as $160,000. Talk about surreal: the co-hosts were Sharon Stone and and Kevin Spacey.  Entertainment was provided by the aging rock bank The Scorpions. Sporty Spice of the Spice Girls (now Mel C) also showed up.

It was all wrapped around the theme “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World.”  The Moscow Times reports that Spacey and Stone were, err, “cheesy.”  Standing in front of neo-classical columns “decorated with pink curtains,”  the two co-hosts “continuously mangled various Russian names and concepts.”  Stone (who they described as “ditzy”) went through a number of dress changes and Spacey tried to crack a joke about perestroika that was, well, “mangled.”    In between The Scorpions sang their songs “Wind of Change”  and later “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” Spandex anyone?

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Ted Turner was given an award.  Then came a Russian pop group named Khor Turetskogo singing the old black spiritual,  ”Go Down Moses.”  Strange choice if you are celebrating the birthday of an atheist,  don’t you think? You can’t make this stuff up.

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Everyone of any political stripe knows that North Korea is one of the worst – if not the worst – dictatorship on the planet. For even as we have plenty of other hostile nations to choose from, extending from the overtly aggressive enemies of nations like Iran to the more subtle threat of Vladimir Putin in the questionably democratic Russia, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has ruled with such an iron fist and for so long that hardly anyone from the West ever gets to see inside the nation and no truly in-depth, legitimate footage or information of what life is like there ever seems to get out.

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But tonight through Thursday, anyone who is curious about what life is like in that insanely repressive regime can find a rare – literally one-of-a-kind – opportunity to see what goes on inside the borders of that nation, as LA’s Downtown Independent movie theater finishes a one-week-only run of “The Red Chapel,” a film that does not appear to be available on video in the United States. And better yet, the filmmakers behind this incredible film manage to do their expose in a way that blends the harrowing sadness of its citizens’ lives with staggeringly funny moments of outright satirical sabotage against the regime.

The fascinating and richly entertaining results parallel the work of “Borat” and “Bruno” mastermind Sacha Baron Cohen, but here the stakes are literally life and death if the filmmakers get caught. And the filmmakers pull off their achievement with taste rather than tastelessness, and do so in the service of a profound and daring mission: to shame the regime before the eyes of the free world.

In my nearly two years of reviewing films for Big Hollywood, I have never felt more compelled to encourage all those who love freedom to see a movie as much as I have this one. And due to the near-guerrilla nature of this film and the fact that the Downtown Independent is a nonprofit with almost no marketing budget, this film was hopelessly under-attended this weekend.

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Slash film:

Sacha Baron Cohen will indeed reunite with his Borat and Bruno director Larry Charles [Ed. note: both pictured above] for The Dictator, a new comedy in which the actor will play both a dictator and a goat herder. Paramount has set a release date: May 11, 2012, so this one is happening soon. And it will draw inspiration from one of the most revered sources of comedic influence: Saddam Hussein.

Deadline also offers up a logline: The film tells the heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed. It is inspired by the best selling novel, Zabibah and The King, by Saddam Hussein.”

Guardian:

Zabibah and the King was published anonymously in 2000, complete with a strapline that promised royalties would go “to the poor, the orphans, the miserable, the needy”. It is widely accepted within Iraq that the book was authored by Saddam, although the CIA later concluded that it was probably produced by ghost-writers, acting under direct instruction from the Iraqi leader. (more…)

In 2008, when Woody Allen last spoke of Barack Obama to a group of Spanish journalists, he declared that it would be a “disgrace” if the then-U.S. Senator failed in his quest to become the 44th President of the United States. Now, 16th months into Obama’s first term, Allen has apparently mistaken La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

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? (more…)

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Returning once again to the land beneath the Big Hollywood sign for a most important poll question. “The Stoning of Soraya M.” has received powerful rave reviews across the political spectrum. The buzz is hot. From the leftie pundits at HuffPo (who only seem to be discovering the true human rights horrorshow nature of that regime now, most curious) to the Righties at Big Hollywood and elsewhere, SORAYA M. is a must-see movie that will linger with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Strangely enough, Amnesty lnternational’s Elise Auerbach doesn’t like it. Because stonings in Iran are so rare, don’t you know. No suspension of disbelief for Ms. Elsie. I’m sorry, what’s her job again? Oh yeah, Iran Specialist for Amnesty International. Go figure. Personally, I happen to think one stoning is one too many. And it wasn’t the only one, not by a country mile! But that’s just me. I’m not an Iran specialist for AI. Like, say, Ms. Auerbach. Nice work if you can get it, huh, Ms. Elsie? (more…)