Unlike the corrupt mainstream media, Disney Studios has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to inform anyone about the White House throwing a lavish Hollywood-themed party during the depths of the Great Recession. But it is more than a little revealing that just prior to the release of a big-budget adaptation of “Alice In Wonderland,” the studio wouldn’t use a White House event ATTENDED BY THE PRESIDENT AND THE FIRST LADY to help promote the film.

The New York Post:

A White House “Alice in Wonderland” costume ball — put on by Johnny Depp and Hollywood director Tim Burton — proved to be a Mad-as-a-Hatter idea that was never made public for fear of a political backlash during hard economic times, according to a new tell-all.

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009. It was so over the top that “Star Wars” creator George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

That was in October of 2009, five months prior to the film’s release in March of the following year. And yet, with over a hundred million on the line, the publicity-savvy Disney all but ignored an event that would’ve generated a ton of publicity towards the film and most certainly increased the all-important “awareness” studios crave most in the months leading up to the release of a tentpole such as this one.

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WERNER HERZOG TRASHES ‘LAWRENCE OF ARABIA’

Whuh?

German director Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Nosferatu; Cave of Forgotten Dreams) has disparaged Lawrence of Arabia as “not really that good anymore.” Herzog criticized the screenplay by Robert Bolt for depicting the Arab world as “very stupid.” He added: “Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t portray the Arab world in a good way.” … Herzog said that for a forthcoming film he himself is educating himself about the Arab world — “about the region, about Islam, about [the] Bedouin … about the dignity of the Arabian world. This is something which you cannot learn from Lawrence of Arabia. It does not show what is true of today.”

Good grief, the protagonist in “Lawrence of Arabia,” who just so happens to be Lawrence of Arabia, practically becomes an Arab in the film and demands the British treat Arabs as equals. Furthermore, Omar Sharif’s Arab character is portrayed as educated and sophisticated, and over and over again we’re shown the bravery and honor of the various Arab tribes.

Is it David Lean’s fault history recorded the truth about all the tribal squabbles and feuds that doom the third act?

Well, let’s see if Herzog has the sand to “show what is true today”– the good, the terrorism, and the Sharia.

Don’t get me wrong, I very much admire Herzog. But this is just dumb.

BARBARA WALTERS ANNOUNCES 2011 MOST FASCINATING PERSON. IT’S…

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This week’s HomeVideodrome podcast rambles from film festival cards, to Frank Miller comics, along with how awesome Guns of the Navarone is.  So go listen as we stumble on through it!

When the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie came out, it took everyone by surprise. Prior to its release, movies about pirates were seen as box office poison, with Roman Polanski’s ‘Pirates’ and Renny Harlin’s disastrous ‘Cutthroat Island’ being primary examples of seafaring movies that bombed spectacularly.

So when Disney put out this movie based on their theme park ride, it was a surprise to Hollywood that it took off the way it did.  This was thanks largely in part to Johnny Depp’s unique performance as Jack Sparrow, a wisecracking, guyliner-wearing rogue who won the hearts of audiences with his sharp wit and adventurous spirit. Then the sequels happened, and the trajectory of the franchise was not dissimilar to that of ‘The Matrix’ films. The second one was bloated, flawed, but somewhat enjoyable, and the third one was just a hot, wet, nightmarish mess.

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Only five times in my life have I been so enamored and completely spellbound with a film, so drawn into a world that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, that I immediately started the movie over in order the relive the experience and lose myself in the magic all over again: “The Wizard of Oz,” “To Have and Have Not,” “Life with Father,” “The Ten Commandments,” and “The Lion King.” When it came to the latter, the year  was 1995, the format was VHS, and once the credits rolled I simply sat there stunned by what I’d just seen — an 88-minute epic in every arena, especially story, music, theme and character.

Watching the just-released Blu-ray was almost as profound an experience because the sound and picture are so vivid that — well, I won’t say it’s like seeing “The Lion King” again for the first time, but it is certainly an enhanced experience. And this is the thing I hate about Blu-ray; there are 2500 DVDs sitting in my collection and Blu-rays like “The Lion King” make me unhappy with the whole lot of them. I finish the adventures of Simba in awe of what a difference Blu-ray makes and then think of my “old” collection with the sickening feeling that I just wasted a couple years’ pay on an Edsel.

And sure, while the mind-blowing animation presented in mind-blowing high-def is certainly part of the draw, none of that means a thing without a compelling and timeless story that works on almost too many levels to count. Themes of courage, duty, manhood, and bravery are all explored through complicated (in a good way) relationships that often force our young protagonist to make emotionally impossible choices. This is heavy stuff for an animated film, but the presentation is so beautifully handled, nothing feels close to heavy.

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‘The Lion King’ has proven to be one of Disney’s top animated movies. When the “Circle Of Life” starts playing, it’s guaranteed goose bumps and smiles across the faces of everyone in the audience. The 1994 film is internationally known for that wonderful phrase “hakuna matata” which will never die out. A story about a father and son, friendship and love, “The Lion King” is certainly a tale beloved by all ages.

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“The Lion King” recently was re-released theatrically in a 3D edition, snaring the top spot at the box office for two straight weeks before settling for third over the Oct. 1-3 weekend.

“Lion King” producer Don Hahn’s impressive credits include “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the first animated film nominated for Best Picture Oscar. In 1996, Hahn published a book entitled “Disney’s Animation Magic,” explaining the step-by-step process of making an animated film. Currently, he is working with director Tim Burton on “Frankenweenie,” scheduled to hit theaters in October 2012.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Hahn on the development of “The Lion King” and how he and his team made what was a stunning 2D picture into a 3D masterpiece. I asked Hahn how he originally began production for “The Lion King.”

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Editor’s Note: Please welcome Tommy Wood and encourage his return! — JN

Could it be that somewhere, someone is targeting our kids?  Not with bullets made of lead but with surgical strikes of agenda.  A scheme scripted and softly veiled (sometimes not) into the nonsensical programming they love so much.  As if the ridiculous plot points and mind-numbing hyperactivity aren’t bad enough, there is something else in play that’s even more contrived than their recycled storylines.  Some might think me hypersensitive, but consider this…  if you see it in media, it is on purpose.  It was written, rehearsed, shot, edited and delivered. 

If it’s in there, it’s intentional.  Never forget that.

How about a date?

So what, then, am I so tweaked about?  I’m a father of three children; ages six, eleven and thirteen.  For years, it has troubled me that a selection of children’s shows were laced with strains of propaganda and amoral thought.  Some suggest they have scientific proof that modern children’s programming dumbs one down.  But, it has the potential to be much more dangerous than that.  No matter what side of the political fence you are on, there is one thing upon which I think we can all agree.  We don’t want our children exposed to certain subject matter before they are ready, much less have someone else’s opinion subconsciously embedded in their minds.

I’m guessing by now you would like an example.  I’m cool with that.  As funny as the show can be, one of the repeat offenders is Nickelodeon’s iCarly.  They follow the standard “aimed at tweens” obsession with first kisses, gross-out gags, rebellion and celebrity status.  The show is full of small desensitizing moments that include a half-naked chubby boy, made up “cuss” words and disrespect for adults.  Not too long ago, an episode called iWant MY Website Back aired.  Spencer, Carly’s crazy adult brother, dressed in elderly drag in order to hoodwink the grating Nevel.  The affable Jerry Trainor, who plays Spencer, sold the gag and yes, it was funny when an older man was mistakenly taken with her… I mean him.  If it stopped there, fine.  Of course, it did not.  Later in the episode the doorbell rings, and it’s the old man.  With a desperate tone, he tells Spencer to put the wig back on, and they can try again.  At a minimum, this brings into question sexual orientation.  So many issues are layered in that moment that we almost have to applaud the writer’s skill at subtext (just kidding).  Still, should this content be couched in a primetime kids’ show on a kids’ network? 

Don’t answer yet.

I have an even more unsettling example.  Remember … if it’s in there, it is on purpose.

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–WEREN’T WE JUST TALKING ABOUT MICHAEL RAPAPORT?–

Big Hollywood’s own Carl Kozlowski co-hosts a weekly (Thursdays 6-8pm PST) podcast called “GrandTheft Audio.” Tonight their special guest is actor Michael Rapaport.  Tune in here. And Sunday you can see the show live. More info here.

–DISNEY EXEC: “A GOOD SCRIPT IS UTTER BULL***T”–

In today’s Variety, Disney Exec Andy Hendrickson argues that moviegoers are only interested in spectacle and not story, and used the top 12 box office champs of all time to back up his claim.

You can argue as to whether or not that’s correct, but at the very least someone is telling the truth about the inexcusable crap studios are delivering these days.  But even if he’s right about moviegoer tastes, why not spectacle AND story? It’s not as though they’re mutually exclusive.

Hollywood can point to the Top 12 all they want, and no doubt that piece of junk “Avatar” is right at the top. But after the spectacle wears off, what does Hollywood have? After the technology is everywhere and no longer “spectacle” and all the “ooh” and “ahh” is removed, who’s going to return to James Cameron’s lame-o, Pocahontas-lite again?

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Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and here for part 4 on Breitbart’s righteous Gen-X indignation.

Generation Y’s great filmmakers have not yet arrived. And don’t expect too many of them.

William Strauss and Neil Howe argue in their fourth book of generational theory, Millennials Rising, that the babies born from 1982 through 2003 are part of a “Civic” generation. This is the same as the GI Generation (the accurately named “Greatest Generation”) born from 1901-1924 who went through World War II as young adults.

The Greatest provided us with many cinematic giants but none made a deeper footprint on the 20^th century than Walt Disney. The Disney Effect came not just in the artistry of his films but his technological innovations and capitalist ventures. He constructed a billion-dollar corporation which has changed our lives. That’s what leaders of Civic generations do: build transformative institutions.

The Millennial Generation has already seen our Walt Disney emerge and release his equivalent of “Steamboat Willie.” It’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook is only the primitive beginning of what he’ll build in the coming decades. Today because of our saturation in cartoons we fail to appreciate how groundbreaking “Steamboat Willie” and “Snow White” were to a world that had never seen such creatures. And so it shall go with Facebook in a few decades’ time.

Narrative films and television programs were America’s unifying, transformative cultural experience of the 20^th century. Computers, the internet, and technology are their equivalent for the 21^st. (more…)

It’s no stretch to say that Disney’s new film Prom is a squeaky clean affair, but according to Washington Post film critic Sandie Angulo Chen, this is apparently a bad thing.  Prompting responses from Newsbusters and Christian Toto, Chen’s piece laments the lack of edge, angst and subversion in Prom, stating that the event is associated in cinema with things like the iconic pig’s blood prank from Carrie, and the race to lose one’s virginity in American Pie.  She wonders why there are no violent outcasts or brooding bad boys that smoke cigarettes, as though the House of Mouse is a studio that has a reputation for delivering hard-hitting works of gritty social realism.

A trap many film critics fall in to is that they feel that movies have a responsibility to speak absolute truths and subvert the norm, which is a nice way of saying that they want movies to conform to, and confirm, their own worldview.  Just look at Roger Ebert, a critic who loses his mind any time a movie treats violence in a manner he doesn’t deem politically correct.  A good recent example would be the way Ebert childishly punished James Gunn’s Super for being too violent by spoiling the ending in the opening paragraph of his review.  This is the same Roger Ebert who scolded Michael Medved for doing the exact same thing to Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby in 2004.  But I digress, critiquing a movie is one thing, actively punishing it is another.  Of course, Chen doesn’t stoop to Ebert’s level, but what she does do is expect the movie to behave according to her perceptions.

I’m not criticizing Chen for attempting to put Prom in the context of the real world, one reason we enjoy movies is to think about how they relate to life.  But Chen’s review seems to confuse real life with “reel life.”  She acts as though Prom has a responsibility to portray the titular event in a way that she deems realistic, yet her view of the activities that go with said event seems to be informed primarily by other movies.  This causes her to come across as an out-of-touch film critic living in a movie bubble. 

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“Here I am, sitting here, losing my shirt, and you’re telling me what you’d be losing.” — Walt Disney in 1942, explaining to a director why the studio had to cut sequences from Bambi. 

 In 1937, full of confidence and pioneering spirit as to what could be accomplished in the cartoon medium, thirty-six-year-old Walt Disney acquired the film rights to the children’s book Bambi, A Life in the Woods.  Written by the Hungarian born Siegmund Salzmann, under the pen name Felix Salten in 1923, Bambi was amongst the many books banned in Adolph Hitler’s Germany in 1936 (reportedly the usually animal loving Nazis, saw the Jewish Salten’s story of woodland creatures trying to survive the menace of man as an allegory for Jews trying to escape persecution).  Despite warnings from his artists that it lacked a sufficient plot, and his heavy dependence on the German market, Walt saw Bambias a great opportunity to animate animals with human personalities.  

Typically Walt laughed off the idea that there were any political meanings in his films.  The Three Little Pigs (1933)was seen by many as an ode to the Great Depression; The happy swine danced like the carefree people in the 1920s until the big bad wolf wiped out their houses with the force of the 1929 stock market crash. The usually Republican Walt never intended that the hard-working pig that lived in the brick house be seen as an endorsement of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Seven years later, a columnist fumed over Fantasia. In hermind, the film’s climactic scene, where the devil damned human souls into a volcano, meant Disney was saying we were all helpless against Nazi demons.Perhaps the wildest accusation had been made three years earlier when a left-wing newspaper writer had written that in Disney’s Snow White,when the seven dwarfs had taken down the wicked queen, it was a clear triumph for a miniature communist society.  Walt no doubt would have been taken aback to find out that many people in the modern green movement would later cite watching Bambi as the beginning of their interest in environmentalism.  

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We the People, in order to form a more perfect union,

Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,
 provide for the common defense,

Promote the general welfare and
 secure the blessings of liberty

To ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish
This Constitution for the United States of America.

If you are like me and grew up on Schoolhouse Rock than you can’t help but sing The Preamble of the Constitution.  I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to recite any of it if I didn’t watch Saturday morning TV.  Sure, there was Bugs and Woody for some mindless entertainment (side note: I can argue that I learned a lot from Bugs) but there was plenty of entertaining academic options to make parents comfortable that their kids were glued to the television.

Yes, times have changed.  The highly desirable demographic, known to us as preschoolers, is now spoiled for choice. Nickelodeon and Disney have gone head to head with academic based shows.  Nickelodeon has always come out on top with hits like “Dora The Explorer.”  Based on market research, Disney has decided to scrap Playhouse Disney and offer Disney Jr.—a block of preschool programs that focus on social and emotional growth rather than academics.  Apparently, some mothers feel that there is plenty of academics offered to children early on and that they would rather see their children become emotionally prepared for what lies ahead.

Preschoolers are expected to know their ABCs and 123s before they ever even set foot in a classroom.  Then why are mothers saying they would rather their children watch programs that favor social values over academics? According to Nancy Kanter, Senior Vice President of Playhouse Disney Worldwide, “Moms are saying they want their kids to be emotionally strong to really understand how to live in the world. There’s a huge place for storytelling to help do that.” Sounds like a tall order to me.  Isn’t it easier, more practical and more beneficial to teach kids the basics and leave the emotional preparation to the parents?  Is there some kind of universal emotional preparatory curriculum that all parents can agree upon?  Not a chance. While we can all agree that lessons in honesty, integrity and courage are important, there is a subjective nature to all of these attributes.  I don’t think that anyone can argue the product of 3 times 3, but what about dealing with bullies? There is more than one answer to that problem.  I doubt Disney Jr. will invest in programs that teach kids how to stand up for another child or fight back. 

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There are many kinds of prisons in this world, some literal and some figurative but no less destructive to the basic human need for freedom. And from childhood, one fairy tale that teaches us about that imprisonment and quest to be free is “Rapunzel,” the story of a girl who’s locked away in a tower to hide her amazing golden hair from the world.

Now, Disney has finally gotten around to bringing Rapunzel’s story to life on the big screen with the new 3D cartoon “Tangled.” Since Disney scored lackluster results with last year’s Christmas-season cartoon, “The Princess and The Frog,” and realized that that film had almost zero appeal to boys, they’ve strived to make sure this new cartoon holds strong appeal for males and females of all ages.

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So here, the Mouse House wisely decided to add a heroic male character named Jake (voiced by Zac Levi of “Chuck”), who stumbles across Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) in the highly hidden tower she’s kept in by an evil woman, Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) who kidnapped her as a child. Mother Gothel has kept Rapunzel a lifelong prisoner because of the fact that her golden hair has the magical power of imparting eternal youth upon whomever sings a special song to it, and Mother Gothel wants that power for herself alone.

When Rapunzel tricks Mother Gothel to embark on a three-day journey for supplies, she takes advantage of her new friendship with Jake and embarks on her first journey to the outside world in the hopes of discovering why a shower of lights hits the night skies every year on her birthday. The lights are launched by the king and queen she was taken from, as they hope someday she’ll see them and return to her rightful life as royalty.

As she and Jake make their way to the kingdom, they befriend a bar-ful of scary-looking yet good-natured rogues who become invaluable support as the duo are threatened repeatedly by the Stabbington Brothers, two giant and malevolent goons enlisted by Mother Gothel to force her return to the castle. (more…)

The Cameraman marks an exact crossroads in the career of Buster Keaton. It was his last genuine silent film, made after his previous three pictures (all now hailed as classics) had underperformed at the box office. Coming at the very pinnacle of his career, it represents the last chapter of his prime “Golden Age” years, and the final opportunity to see him at the very top of his game, expertly doing what he did best.

At the same time, it was his first picture made with mighty Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who in 1928 had lured him out of the independent wilderness with a lucrative contract and promises of big budgets for production, advertising, and distribution. The Hollywood studio with “more stars than there are in heaven” sought to add a genius comedian to that celestial firmament, and who better to fill that role than the guy whom critic James Agee would later credit with bringing “pure physical comedy to its greatest heights”?

Keaton initially thought that his new deal, the richest in M-G-M history up to that time, would ensure his stardom for many years to come. “This was still before the stock market crash,” he said years later in an interview. “There was money everywhere. . . I was successful, I was famous, I was free. Hell, I was sitting pretty and didn’t have enough sense to know it.” (more…)

During John Stewart’s recent “Rally for Sanity” there were all of the usual signs one would expect the Left wants us to forget about. Signs about “9/11 truth” and the popular “teabagger” slur to Hitler comparisons and references to McCarthy, it’s all terribly predictable and boring. If these people want to do some research about the real Senator McCarthy and what he did then maybe they would learn that many of today’s Democrats have incorporated similar tactics.

On September 10th and 11th, 2006, The Path to 9/11 aired to an audience of 28 million viewers gaining seven Emmy nominations. It was a major success for ABC and Disney. Everyone involved was proud of the unbiased portrayal they created about the lead up to 9/11 from the 1993 attack on the WTC to September 2001. However, the miniseries almost didn’t air when the leftists began to circle their wagons before even seeing the film.  It is eerily similar to when yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst rallied his troops in Hollywood to get all copies of Citizen Kane destroyed in 1941. Fortunately, you can still watch Orson Welles’ great film.

As chronicled in the great documentary, Blocking The Path to 9/11, the Clinton camp got wind of The Path to 9/11 after the first half of it aired for the National Press Club. Shortly thereafter, their machine began to chew away at the project. Pundits and policymakers who had not seen a frame of celluloid rallied against the film as some kind of right-wing propaganda. The silly accusations have been refuted on numerous occasions by people involved with the project. Cyrus Nowrasteh who wrote and produced The Path to 9/11 has commented about his approach to the film: (more…)

Selling our home of 21 years necessitated cleaning out the garage, and going through all those boxes was instructive. Several were full of cheap imitation-metal trophies for athletic achievement, accrued by our son from the age of five. I remember each and every end-of-season picnic and trophy presentation. Every kid got one. It was only fair. Rewards were for participation. Excellence, not so much. That is the culture in which our children have grown up: one of political correctness and everyone-is-equal to such a point that we stand today on the brink of losing our very national identity, that of American Exceptionalism.

So I’d like to offer a tip of the derby to Disney for producing the family film “Secretariat” which comes wrapped in this positive message: It’s OK to be a winner!  Competition is good. Racehorses do it. Captains of industry do it. Even – and most importantly in the context of this story – “housewives” do it! They strive to achieve their personal best in life, settling for nothing less from themselves.

As did – thanks to the so-called housewife – the horse.

So, who is this movie about? The horse or the housewife?

The two appear as mutual reflecting pools.

It is 1973.  Penny Chenery’s daughter aspires to join the hippy anti-war movement.  She  spends two of the first three years of the promising young colt’s life fighting to put on an anti-war play at her school. Just as Big Red is about to burst forth on the professional racing scene, Penny’s daughter finally gets to perform her play. Penny¸ shepherding the burgeoning career of the horse, misses the performance because her flight home is grounded due to rain. (more…)

“Farenheight 9/11” is a frustrating film due to bad reporting, suggestive editing and the messaging goals of its director, the infinitely leftist Michael Moore. But he knows how to work the system, and how to play politics. 

Edward Jay Epstein reports in “The Hollywood Economist” that in 2004, Moore didn’t have a distributor lined up for his film. He signed a contract with Miramax to receive funding to film, but Disney (which owns Miramax) wouldn’t back the movie by distributing it to theaters. This left him hanging in limbo. So what did Moore do? He turned to the press. 

A New York Times front-page article, which used Moore’s agent as a source, claimed that Disney didn’t want to distribute the film because the company was afraid of losing tax breaks. Moore himself claimed online that Disney had decided not to distribute the film in 2004, which gave the decision a timely element, though the decision had been made in 2003. 

The publicity launched his film at Cannes, where he received the Palme d’Or because of Disney’s supposed efforts to censor him. And Disney, which realized the potential to make significant earnings from the film, decided to back it through a trail of paperwork that kept their name out of it. The film made millions, as did Moore.  (more…)

Okay okay, Big Hollywood — and people all over the world — love Pixar.  I get it, I get it. But why is Hollywood missing it?!

It is obvious the studio honchos can’t quite fancy what gives Pixar the upper hand in churning out hit after hit, otherwise they would have bottled and sold it in mass quantities.  Here’s a hunch — Pixar’s success might have something to do with respect for the audience.

Toy Story 3 was again the week’s #1 movie topping new fare from Adam Sandler, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.  For well over a decade, Pixar has single-handedly delivered a new golden-age of animated film-making.  Just like it was thrilling to be a teenager growing up with Luke Skywalker, E.T. and Marty McFly, it is easy to see why today’s kids are electrified by Buzz Lightyear, The Incredibles and Wall-e.

But it’s worth considering that the original Toy Story never should have worked under the Hollywood studio executive orthodoxy.  In the early 1990’s, computer animated feature films did not exist, yet Disney took a risk to fund a group of PhD’s who swore they could make it work.  It wasn’t just the technology they believed in, but in the stories they could tell.  The animation was futuristic, but Pixar leader John Lasseter envisioned using it to tell a home-spun tale of a typical American boy and his best pal Woody, who happened to be a 1950’s era toy cowboy.  But… (more…)

Robin Hood is back on the big screen in his umpteenth adaptation and he’s not only fighting social injustice by robbing the rich and giving to the poor, he’s fighting it by forcing English King John the cruel to sign the Magna Carta. More on that later. For now, let’s stick with the redistribution of wealth by banditry.

People love that idea. And because they do, Robin has had a massive influence on popular culture because the implicit anti-establishment message in his story can be used as a device to criticize society or sell almost any social movement, legislation or outright criminal activity in modern societies that have no relation to the brutal feudal times in which his legend originated. The result, the Sherwood Forest outlaw can be anything one wants him to be.

A Robin who “robs the rich to give to the poor” can be that mythical Marxist revolutionary or populist hero righting the wrongs of capitalism for the oppressed proletariat — even if he happens to be nothing more than a mass murderer like Che Guevara: (more…)

Hollywood isn’t an institution filled only with hypocrites, it’s an institution filled with scumbag hypocrites. Annually we are showered with Leftist films created by morally superior beings who lecture us on human rights, civil rights, feminism, lookism, racism and any other “ism” they can conceive, when in real life they’re the very worst in all of these departments.

Hollywood isn’t just an industry that preaches in practice and on film against tax cuts for the wealthy as they themselves use their lobbying power to secure every scrap of corporate welfare they can get their hands on; this isn’t just an industry that celebrated its own “progressivism” for finally awarding an Oscar to a black man and woman in leading roles decades after mainstream Americans had made black men and women wealthy movie stars by fully embracing them; this also is an industry that produces sanctimonious feminist crap like “North Country” while behaving like the worst kind of sexist pigs imaginable behind the scenes:

Disney is searching for real treasure chests for its upcoming shoot of the next “Pirates of the Caribbean” swashbuckler — that is, women with natural breasts.

The movie studio has banned actresses with artificial enhancements for the fourth installment, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” directed by Rob Marshall and starring Johnny Depp as the drunken buccaneer Jack Sparrow.

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Associated Press:

After departing Hollywood, Parker got into real estate with his wife, Marcella, whom he had married in 1960.

He bought and sold property, built hotels (including the elegant Fess Parker’s Wine Country Inn & Spa in Los Olivos and Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort Santa Barbara) and grew wine grapes on a 2,200-acre vineyard on California’s Central Coast, where he was dubbed King of the Wine Frontier and coonskin caps enjoyed brisk sales.

After its inaugural harvest in 1989, Parker’s vineyard won dozens of medals and awards. The Parkers’ son, Eli, became director of winemaking and their daughter, Ashley, also worked at the winery. (more…)