The overrated Meryl Streep (whose acting meter broke decades ago) proves once again that this current crop of actors the world is saddled with is about as classless a bunch as we’ll ever see (hopefully). Not content to enjoy the the accolades she’s receiving for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, the Academy Award-winner not only ripped the former prime minister’s actions as sub-human (monstrous!) but then propped herself up on a piece of non-existent moral high ground and sanctimoniously insulted an entire country.

The New York Times: [emphasis added]

Ms. Streep said, laughing: “We’re not interested in King Lear’s politics. We’re not saying we would have voted for him.” She added: “What interested me was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from? How do those formulations begin, how do they solidify, calcify, become deficits? How do a person’s strengths become weaknesses? Look at me. I tend to go on too long. I’m a little dogmatic, and that could get really awful over time. If you are self-aware, as actors are, you let these things go into your pores, including criticism. I hate being criticized.”

(more…)

“A lot of America’s global actions stink. The U.S.’s international focus is based on money.”

Guess who is responsible for the above quote. Is it:

a.) Jacques Chirac
b.) Fidel Castro
c.) Vladimir Putin
d.) Captain Jean-Luc Picard

(Hint: The answer can be added to the list of reasons why Kirk was the better Starship captain.)

The answer is of course d., Captain Picard, lesser known as accented actor and British bore Patrick Stewart. The quote is from an interview Stewart gave to the now-defunct George magazine back in 2000. His candid comments inspire a few of my own: “A lot of your movies stink. Your career focus is based on money. TV viewers found your robot more interesting than you.”

I had remembered part of Stewart’s old George quote while researching actors and the irritating things they say. Originally, I had a different piece in mind entirely, but for some reason when I was finished I found that I’d wound up with a list top heavy with British actors who have made lots of money in America. The rest, lamentably, is not silence.

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Ed. Note: In August of 2010, Big Hollywood reviewed the “Iron Lady” screenplay. Looks as though we got it right Of course, guessing that any film about Margaret Thatcher would be a smear job is no real stretch.

Today’s Daily Mail:

Friends of Margaret Thatcher last night expressed their revulsion at a new film that shows her having nightmares about the miners’ strike and the Falklands War, while her late husband Denis appears as a ghost in a pink turban raging at her -‘insufferable’ selfishness.

Viewers invited to an early screening of the film, The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as the former Prime Minister and Jim Broadbent as Sir Denis, were aghast at the way that it mocks her frail condition in recent years.

One called it ‘insulting’. Another said: ‘I didn’t come here to see a film about granny going mad.

One person who attended the event, organised by Anglo-French film-makers Pathe to test audience reaction, has given a detailed account to The Mail on Sunday.

In the film, Lady Thatcher constantly hallucinates, under the impression that her husband, who died in 2003, is still alive.
Pathe says the story is about ‘power and the price that is paid for power’ and claims her health is ‘treated with sensitivity’. It concedes the film is fiction but says it is ‘fair and accurate’.

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So Freakanomics tweeted about a research paper linking budget cuts to social unrest in Europe.

It claimed, “Once you cut expenditure by more than 2% of GDP, instability increases rapidly … especially in terms of riots and demonstrations.”

The conclusion: governments fear austerity programs for this reaon.

Meaning, riots. Bloodshed. looting. And so on.

Which is a sad and scary point: what protects bloated government and entitlement is a visceral fear that if you take candy from a baby, that baby will hang you in the square.

I suppose that’s one reason to avoid cutting programs, if you’re a coward.

Bottom line: you cannot be held hostage by fear of unrest. You must always do the right thing, no matter the risk. For in a free country, the expectation should be for civility at all costs.

What guarantees that civility? Punishment? Fear of death?

Maybe.

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IMDB News:

Alec Baldwin has called on Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron to resign over his handling of the ongoing News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been at the centre of claims reporters at his now defunct U.K. tabloid, which he closed earlier this month, used a private investigator to illegally access voicemail messages belonging to royals, celebrities, and the families of crime victims.

Britain’s leader Cameron has been dragged into the controversy because he hired the newspaper’s former editor Andy Coulson as his communications director. …

In a post on his Twitter.com page, the actor writes, “Cameron should resign. England is filled with people who could do a better job.”

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There are some celebrities who manage to put up a wall of secrecy around their lives, and who make a clear distinction between their public and private personas. And then there are people like Steve Coogan, a major British comedy star who’s built a unique and very funny career out of blazing two career paths.

Coogan has built a rabid cult following in the U.S. to go with his more noticeable British stardom by alternately immersing himself in characters and impersonations so thoroughly he’s compared to the legendary Peter Sellers. Yet he’s also wildly popular back home for letting himself play the fool, Larry David-style, in a series of awkward and embarrassing filmed misadventures. And now he’s put both approaches together quite winningly in the new comedy “The Trip,” which has been doing strong and growing business at arthouses nationwide for the past couple of weeks.

In “The Trip,” which is actually a tightly edited mix of highlights from a BBC mockumentary series of the same name, Coogan teams up with his friendly rival and fellow comic Rob Brydon for a tour of Northern England’s finest restaurants. The idea is to combine humorous insights with genuine culinary opinions for a TV series, but while their stops at gourmet restaurants and deluxe bed and breakfasts offer up plenty of delicious  imagery, the actual focus of the film and their journey within it is to create a framework for the two leads’ non-stop and hilarious banter. (more…)

Oscars are more often distributed to women in Hollywood who play to the downfall of their species, rather than to its nobility. Or, in the case of Gwyneth Paltrow, winning an Oscar for playing a prepubescent boy in “Shakespeare in Love.” Gwyneth Paltrow has her eye on another Oscar, and she may be onto something. She’s playing a country-western singer with an addiction in the soon to be released, “Country Strong.”

The problem with Paltrow taking on the role of a troubled country-western singer is that she’s vying for an award portraying the very people she has openly expressed contempt.  That being hard working people who live in the states she flies over traveling to New York and Los Angeles.

In 2006 Paltrow, talking to a Portuguese newspaper said, “I love the English lifestyle, it’s not as capitalistic as America. People don’t talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner. I like living here because I don’t fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans.”

Elitist snobbery like that knows no bounds when unchecked, so when you’re a Hollywood star it’s easy to follow up your asshat view with a second musing on your country.

In 2009, while in Spain doing a TV show about food for PBS, she told the Spanish press this “(Spain) is so different from the United States. It seemed to have a history, and the buildings are years and years and years old. Here in the United States an old building is about 17 (years old), and over there it’s from 500 B.C., it’s incredible,” said Paltrow. “Also, the way people live over there. They seem to enjoy life a little bit more. They aren’t running around as much as in New York. They enjoy time with the family.” (more…)

So students (a.k.a dirtbags) took to the London streets to protest the government’s plans to let colleges raise their tuition. They broke into the Conservative party’s offices, set off flares and started fires – while painting the universal symbol of the jobless, Starbucks hipster (the anarchy sign).

Here’s a rule to remember: someone who still thinks the anarchy symbol is an edgy sign of revolutionary bravado, is also someone who still sponges off mummy and daddy – and yet never pays for a drink. In short, they are babies.

So, yeah – tuition limits are going up to 9,000 pounds – in our money that’s $14,500. Which, as Americans can attest, ain’t much. That’s a used Jetta with 70 thousand miles. Or three hours with Ashley Dupree.

The gov also wants to scrap some subsidies for students, which will definitely cut into their hair gel.

So, how did this happen?

Well, the West is witnessing the continuation of the first real global tantrum – stretching from Greece, to France, to Berkeley, to London. The babies in every country – so used to entitlements – are now being told that the piper must be paid. But because no one taught them the basics of finance – their only reply is “wah, wah,” and “wah.”

Thanks to education fetishists, there’s a belief that there should be no price tag on classes like “Lady Gaga’s Effect on Transgender Truckdrivers,” and that the only limits to your education is your desire to be educated. (more…)

The very same entertainment industry that produces film after film after television show after television show ripping the very same Patriot Act that has helped to successfully foil heaven only knows how many terrorist attacks, is now using about as Orwellian a technology as there is to not only detect when their precious product is being pirated but also for market research.

HYPOCRITES

Torrent Freak reports on what’s going on and where things are headed over in England, but it’s all about protecting Hollywood’s product, isn’t it?:

For most people going to a cinema is a good night out. Only a few realize that they are often subjecting themselves to extreme and privacy invading security measures that most airports could only dream of. Filmgoers are already being carefully watched for suspicious behavior by Big Brother’s cameras, but soon this technology will be upgraded with sophisticated emotion recognition software.

Hindering piracy is priority number one for movie theaters nowadays. In dealing with a tiny minority, theater owners are slowly alienating their customers by employing measures such as metal detectors, night-vision goggles, bag and body searches and audio watermarks. Everyone is treated as a potential pirate. …

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So last week, a Muslim protestor who vandalized a war memorial in England, walked free after prosecutors said his crimes weren’t religiously motivated.

His actions? Spray-painting “Islam will dominate the world,” “Osama is on his way” and “kill Gordon Brown.”

Yeah, no religious motivations there.

Apparently the punk, Tosheef Shah, must have just randomly come up with those phrases – perhaps overcome by aerosol paint fumes, which is really the manufacturer’s fault, when you think about it. I smell a lawsuit. He probably wanted to write “Unicorns are awesome” and “Pez is groovy.”

In his defense, his lawyer claims, “He is just an ordinary guy.”

Yeah – ordinary. Which makes one wonder: if those messages are not intolerant, for god’s sake: what is??

I guess there are different definitions of intolerance for different people. (more…)

A curious aspect of the Bond legend is that Ian Fleming’s socialite wife despised the character. She went so far as to host upper-crust parties at which she and her lettered friends — literary giants such as Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh — cattily disparaged her husband’s popular creation as embarrassingly lowbrow, the English equivalent of American pulp fiction (and thus the modern heir to the “Boy’s Weeklies” of Orwell’s famous essay). “Utterly despicable,” was Muggeridge’s quoted verdict in Time magazine soon after Fleming’s death. “[Bond is] obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, towards whom sexual appetite represents the only approach.”

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.” (more…)

So according to an article in England’s The Daily Mail, Muslim doctors and nurses will be allowed to opt out of strict hygiene rules aimed at stopping the spread of deadly superbugs. Apparently the change was made after female Muslims resented having their arms exposed below the elbow under new laws enacted in 2007. Some Muslims may be allowed to use disposable sleeves, although some say this “compromises patient safety.” If you don’t change the sleeves, you spread superbugs, which kill thousands of patients yearly.

Now, I don’t care what religion you follow: if it compromises your job, and the safety of others – that blows. I mean, if Catholicism required that you wear a crucifix over your left eye at all times – I’m not hiring you as a pilot. Or a table dancer.

This decision to sacrifice hygiene to appease religion arrives just as our own government decides to remove the terms “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” from national security policy. Obama feels that linking Islam to terror is hurtful to non-terrorists. My philosophy is simple: I don’t care what you call homicidal maniacs, as long as you kill them.

Which Obama’s been doing, so cool. (more…)

Almost fifty years ago, in the film journal Sight and Sound for Winter 1964/65, critic Roger Hudson wrote that the talent of motion picture production designers “is often overlooked, except where it is the greatest element in a film’s success, as it is in Goldfinger.”

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw: (more…)

(San Francisco, CA) Michael Savage, ’shock-jock’ author of over 25 books with a radio audience of 10 million listeners who was banned from entering the United Kingdom in May by Gordon Brown will argue against the insanity of ‘political correctness’ on Thursday, October 15 at 8:00pm GMT. Savage will appear via internet link to argue his case for freedom of speech.

Quoting Winston Churchill, who said, “You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic…” Savage will attempt to ’save England from a descent into mental slavery where petty bureaucrats dictate what can and cannot be discussed.” (more…)

Ah, Gwyneth. Obviously being fabulously rich and famous just isn’t enough for some people. A few years ago, after making the decision to make her home in London with beta male rocker Chris Martin of Coldplay, she told us how much she prefers living in Britain to her native country:

I love the English lifestyle, it’s not as capitalistic as America. People don’t talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner…I like living here because I don’t fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans.

When she says she doesn’t fit into the “bad side of American psychology,” she means she’s become one of the cultured elite overseas whose life mission seems to be badmouthing those mouthbreathing colonials from across the pond – although she’s happy to accept their money. (more…)

I’ve already risked losing any credibility I might have in the theatre community by defending Andrew Lloyd Webber and his conservative politics, but I have to go back to that well once again because Webber has written an op-ed piece for London’s Daily Mail that received international attention and a surprising lack of criticism within the theatrical community.  The hardest part of writing this post is condensing his article down to just a few pull quotes so I encourage you to follow the link and read the entire piece.  He starts off by confronting the typical banal argument he is so used to getting when he raises concerns over the Labour Party’s confiscatory taxation:  (more…)

FROM : ALL US CONGRESS AND PRESIDENTS OF THE US

TO: ALL THE PEOPLES OF THE EARTH AND THE AMERICA.

CC: Madame Pelosis, Hary Reide, Sen. Frank, Not Bush. Mr. Gietner Taxes.

Dear American Friend!,

Oh the happytimes for us are coming without Bush. Assureing the future pleasent times for the Americans. Her’is what we are doing for this things: (more…)

Reporting from the BBC in London…

Good morning, and welcome to the 34th Annual Bobby-Bash in East London, England!  Today’s event promises to be ripping with action and a jolly tough competition!  As you recall, after yesterday’s bash the Anarchists hold a slight lead over the Bobbies, having yesterday knocked seventeen helmets off policemen’s heads and conked five Bobbies with protest signs and flying bottles; but in the third Over, the Bobbies rallied a strong surge with some fine baton swatting and scored twelve bloody noggins upon the Anarchists. An umpire disallowed three of those, however, in the sixth Over, due to a BPC infringement (or Blatant Posturing for Cameras, i.e., exacerbating of the head wound and rubbing of the blood all over the face), which is clearly against International League Bobby Bashing Association rules.

It’s rumoured by some ILBBA officials that Blatant Posturing by the Anarchists has been steadily on the rise, and that unless something is done to reign in the such over-acting, and what one BBC columnist vehemently decried as, “sympathy sucking”, the spirit of the games “…could be tarnished irrevocably!  And therein, I ask you, where lays our…tradition of…”   The anonymous columnist was unable to continue his remarks, and, so overcome with emotion was he, that he was forced to retreat to the Ten Bells English Pub and counsel with his awaiting and anonymous three pints of Guinness. (more…)

President and Michelle Obama have just visited the Queen of England.  Of course, such a State visit demands a gift befitting her royal status and our First Couple has deftly fulfilled that lofty obligation with something that so exemplifies the greatness of America, it surely made Her Royal Highness swoon with delight.  Yes, the Obama messianic magnanimity is not fettered by mere earthly limitations and the gift he presented her rivals in grandeur and thoughtfulness to the finest Faberge Egg.  It is exactly what the Queen has been dreaming of possessing from the moment she saw candidate Obama deliver his blindingly brilliant speech to the massed multitudes in Berlin. 

Ah yes… I can see it now… bedtime at Buckingham Palace…  The Queen emerges from her powder room after her nightly ablutions and gently pads across the oriental carpet in her pink, fuzzy slippers to the edge of her royal bed.  She calls to her maidservant, “Fatima, my dear, before I retire would you fetch me my video iPod?  Not the old one, but the new one I just got from Barry and Michelle.”  “Of course, your Highness,” she replies, quickly exiting the Royal Suite.  Moments later Fatima returns, reverently cradling the radiant object in her hands.  Tenderly taking it from her, the Queen puts in the royal iPod ear buds.  Then, Fatima helps her out of her slippers and into the massive bed, making sure that the goose-down pillows are properly fluffed.  Finally, Fatima places the Royal night-cap on the Queen’s head, and, as the Queen snuggles further into her down comforter, Fatima bids her a pleasant “Good night.”   (more…)