The Walking Dead, HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” Showtime’s “Homeland” and Fox’s “Terra Nova” could not be more different in concept, tone or execution, but what they have in common illustrates the biggest threat to Hollywood – and the solution to Hollywood’s problems.

The industry faces unprecedented technological challenges and dwindling audiences, but those alone won’t close down the Glitter Factory. Hackneyed plots, unquestioned political premises and disrespect for the audience will.  But great storytelling, fine acting and technical work – those can save it.

This is written as a fan, as someone who wants these shows to succeed, who wants the hundreds of people who are employed by them to keep working. Please note that spoilers will run free and without restraint throughout, flowing unhindered like stupid ideas from Ron Paul’s Fed-hole.

“Boardwalk Empire” is a near-great show, adult fare not only on account of the complex themes of loyalty and greed that it explores but also in the sense that it packs more female nudity per episode than a drunken Disney teen star’s hacked cellphone camera. 

“Empire” should be great, but it’s not because it falls into the same tiresome traps that we see again and again. As Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, the boss of 1920s Atlantic City, Steve Buscemi is fantastic. I had my doubts at first that this slight, weird-looking guy could pull off a ruthless politico/crime boss. Interestingly, his physical weakness – he’s not a standard tough guy, and the one fight he gets into is pathetic rather than brutal – is overwhelmed by the icy ruthlessness lurking beneath his cynical, smart-ass exterior. Nothing sums it up better than when he personally pops his former protégé in the face with a .38 in the season finale – then coldly blows his brains out. I can’t say it enough; Buscemi is amazing.

There is a lot of amazing in “Empire;” the other actors are uniformly terrific (even when playing poorly conceived characters). The sets and costumes are fantastic as well; you are transported back in time. Great performances and great technical production are what set a show up for greatness. So why is Empire not quite great?

Two things, things we see again and again in modern Hollywood that act to drive away audiences that want to love the show wholeheartedly. The first is – once again, as Ben Shapiro has vividly illustrated and thoroughly documented– the creators simply cannot help but impose their own insular, anti-religious, west-of-Interstate 5 cultural vibe. And second, they’ve bought into the hackneyed conventional wisdom that what makes great drama is talky, sludgy, momentum-stalling domestic conflict.

Can we have just ONE SHOW without characters dealing with weird daddy issues?

Here’s the thing – we watch “Empire” to see how these guys weave their criminal web. But the interplay between Nucky and his mistress, or Nucky and his dad, or his mistress and her brother? No. One. Cares.

I don’t know where this comes from; I suspect they don’t think women will watch if the show focuses too much on things that are interesting. They haven’t met my Hot Wife; whenever the mistress comes on screen she gets up and goes into the kitchen until the next scene.

Does anybody remember anything about Mrs. Godfather? Case closed.

Oh, and Jimmy Darmody’s relationship with his mother – did you have to go there? Did he really have to have sex with his mom? Really? I get the Oedipus thing, but you know, just because you have the cable-TV freedom to create a plot line that mirrors Oedipus doesn’t mean that you have to do it.

And the last scene, where mistress (I keep calling her that because I forgot her name because I stop paying attention when that soul-crushingly dull character comes on screen) signs the key deed over to the church, had better lead into Nucky popping her in the noggin with a .38 in the season three premiere. The story requires it. Keeping the audience watching requires it. Guys, it’s all upside.

That brings us to the other problem – religion, as conceived by a bunch of Hollywood writers. Every religious character is either a fundamentalist lunatic/hypocrite or just a sucker and a hypocrite. The priest seems to be a money-grubbing exploiter of the mistress’s conception of God as some sort of sacred vending machine where you put some money in and get your wish granted.

The only ones who don’t get treated as utter slime are the black churchgoers, mostly because Hollywood liberals always depict African-Americans of faith as harmless, childlike believers while everyone else who professes a belief in God is insane, evil or both.

“Homeland” has similar strengths and weaknesses, but while the finale of “Empire” hefted the trend-line skyward (the character of Jimmy Darmody had pretty much gone as far as he could go when he went as far as he could go with his mother), the trend line for what seems to see itself as the “thinking man’s ‘24′” cratered in the finale. It started strong and plummeted, as thoroughly documented at Big Hollywood.

We have the same strengths here, particularly acting. Claire Danes is astonishingly good as the mentally unbalanced CIA analyst who is quickly losing it. Even when her character’s actions are ridiculous, and when the screenplays let her down, she owns it. The other actors are likewise terrific, even Damian Lewis as the Marine turned terrorist. Plus, Morena Baccarin is there for those who enjoy attractive, dark-haired, vaguely Latin women who take their clothes off, a demographic otherwise known as “men.”

But once again we see the same problems – a focus on plot elements that no one cares about, and a multicultural vacuity straight out of the lib-left play book. “Homeland’s” home life is death; whenever Lewis’ TV family comes on screen the show grinds to a complete halt as feelings are shared and more feelings are shared.

Stop sharing feelings. It’s terrible. This is a show about hunting terrorists. Hunt terrorists and leave the hugging to Lifetime movies.

But the worst part is the moral relativism that manifests itself in ginning up sympathy for the terrorists by the hoariest, lamest tropes imaginable. Surprise! The Vice-President is secretly a war criminal whose evil antics brought this terrorist plot on. Gee, we’ve never seen a Hollywood product ever make out America to be the villain! What a radical new direction to take the story; never saw that coming!

Let’s keep breaking exciting new ground. How about next we have a romantic comedy where the lovers fight because of a misunderstanding then reunite for a happy ending?

Let me help out the producers and writers a bit. Americans are the unambiguous good guys in this war. The jihadis are the bad guys. There is no grey area. We did not “bring it on ourselves,” and we have not only a moral right but a moral obligation to hunt them and their scumbag buddies down anywhere they hide. An American who consorts or sympathizes with them for any reason is a traitor who deserves to be hanged and his corpse tossed in a fetid swamp. Jihadis’ views, ideas, beliefs and grievances merit no respect and have no importance except to the extent that understanding their sick, idiotic ideology allows us to more effectively destroy them.

Any questions? You guys have ten minutes into the season two premiere to “wow” me by showing that you’ve learned your lesson or I flip the channel. Dismissed.

“The Walking Dead’s” problems are well documented – once again, it focuses on boring peripheral feelingsy nonsense at the expense of zombie action, and its ideology is drawn straight from a seminar titled Hollywood Liberal Shibboleths 101. But the last, bleak, hopeless moments of the mid-season finale (whatever that means) provides some hope that TWD might reanimate when the show returns in February.

Until the last two minutes, the season had been a fiasco. The entire scenario had the survivors hunting for some stupid kid who didn’t listen and ran off into the zombie forest. Instead of letting Darwin do his job, these people spent every episode looking for her. Shane, the alleged “bad guy” who in reality is the only one who’s not a complete half-wit, became my hero. He was a bad-ass who packed heat when everyone else got wussy about guns (there’s this utterly bizarre gun control vibe running through the show), took on the dirty jobs, exhibited some rare tactical common sense and scored with all the hot women. I’m all aboard Team Shane.

When some fatbody who stupidly wounded a kid became a liability when running from zombies to bring back some medicine to save said kid, Shane’s innovative solution was to kneecap him so he could bring the stuff back while the zombies were occupied turning Mr. Chunky into a tubby smorgasbord. This was supposed to be some giant moral conundrum. Pffft. Hey, if either the kid or the dumb-ass who accidentally shot the kid has to die, I vote for the dumb-ass. And if he wasn’t man enough to choose to make the last stand so Shane could escape, then I have no problem with Shane volunteering him.

But the redemptive highlight was the final scene where the survivors are clearing out a barn full of zombies belonging to a religious nut (because, again, if you are religious you have to be a nut). After they smoke all the zombies, one more stumbles out, the little girl they had been hunting all half-season. Awesome. Then the hero pops her in the forehead. Nice.

You gotta have some guts to spend weeks having your characters hunt for a cute little girl then have her turn out to be a zombie and then have the hero cap her. That’s quality storytelling. So I’m moderately psyched about the rest of the season. Keep up the momentum.

Finally, “Terra Nova,” the time travel dinosaur show on regular TV, started weak with a lot of feelings and way too few dinosaurs. However, it’s gotten better, though the limitations of free TV take away any kind of edge. Older kids can certainly watch it, which is not really a selling point in my book. It is what it is. But there still aren’t enough dinosaurs.

There is lots of running around, explosions, and a lot less talk of feelings – though there’s at least a hug or two per show. The actors are finding their characters; Stephen Lang as the commander is awesome. The (as usual) daddy issues-centric mythology storyline makes little sense, but there are some intriguing hints about the show’s future direction.

Here’s the problem – once again, the same old Hollywood cultural premises and assumptions seem to prevail. Like “Star Trek” (many of the creative types worked on past “Trek” programs), the society in “Terra Nova” is militarized with a clear rank hierarchy. The thing is, such a structure (when applied to a society as a whole instead of just the military itself) is known as “fascism.” Sure, it’s a smiley face fascism, but it’s fascism – just a more militaristic socialism with spiffy uniforms.

The major means of production are all owned collectively and controlled by the government. Sure, there are a few small businesses – a bar, a trader – but those are on the fringe and treated as at least disreputable if not corrupt. Note also that the human villains are all puppets of – wait for it – a giant corporation from the future. The commander tosses people into jail at will; his whim is all the “due process” anyone is allowed. It’s a dictatorship – a benevolent one, but a dictatorship nonetheless.

And the show seems to think this is all okay. It’s kind of a liberal’s perfect world – no power bases outside government control, businesses marginalized (or, if outside their control, evil enemies) and no inconvenient dissent allowed. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman probably eats it up.

Also, as with “Star Trek,” there is no religion – none at all. It never comes up. Clearly, the producers don’t seem to see this as a bug – in fact, in their minds it’s probably a feature. But the scene where the military buries a dead soldier in a non-religious ritual uncomfortably evokes the Nazis’ neo-pagan rites. When leftists (of which Nazis are merely a better dressed subspecies – yeah, I know you leftists hate to hear the ugly truth) succeed in driving out God, they try to fill the people’s spiritual void with the State. Let me be clear; I am not saying “Terra Nova” is some kind of a Nazi show. What I am saying is that the show has a lot of room to explore some of the issues that the show’s scenario raises about democracy, capitalism and religion.

And that it could use more dinosaurs.

These four shows all have weaknesses, mostly stemming from taking their eyes off of what makes them interesting and focusing on hackneyed domestic drama that someone somehow decided was necessary to appeal to women. If I were a woman, I’d be insulted. As a man, I’m just annoyed. Further, they all, to some extent, embrace cultural and political premises that many if not most Americans reject – especially with regard to religion.

But there’s good news too. All of the shows are entertaining. All of them have good production values, and all offer fine performances. Hollywood has the talent to do great work. A little focus on the story, a little open-mindedness toward the views and ideas of others (by which I mean Americans who don’t live in the 310 area code) and it can consistently do so.

Again, we conservatives don’t want Hollywood to fall short. We want it to succeed. And if it chooses to do so, it can. So, less talking about feelings and more stuff about the mob, more killing terrorists, more zombies and more Tyrannosaurus Rexes.

This afternoon, the university in question reversed their decision.

—–

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

The recent discussion resulting from the removal of two posters hanging outside the door of a University of Wisconsin-Stout professor in Harvey Hall has raised serious First Amendment concerns, both on campus and across the country.

It is important to note that the posters were not removed to censor the professor in question. Rather, they were removed out of legitimate concern for the violent messages contained in each poster and the belief that the posters ran counter to our primary mission to provide a campus that is welcoming, safe and secure.

In retrospect, however, it is clear that the removal of the posters – although done with the best intent – did have the effect of casting doubt on UW-Stout’s dedication to the principles embodied in the First Amendment, especially the ability to express oneself freely. As many people have pointed out in the days since this issue surfaced, a public university must take the utmost care to protect this right.

Therefore, UW-Stout has reconsidered its decision to remove the two posters from outside the professor’s office, meaning he can display them if he so chooses.

Read the original piece here.

UWS theater professor Dr. James Miller is relatively new to the short-lived, now cult hit TV series “Firefly.”  Some of his students are loyal fans and asked Dr. Miller to check it out for himself. He liked it enough to hang a Firefly poster on his office door. Given its remote location in the theater wing, where mostly only theater students would see it, who would have expected the poster to cause such a firestorm?

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

On September 12, 2011, Professor Miller posted on his office door an image of Nathan Fillion in Joss Whedon’s sci-fi series Firefly and a line from an episode: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” On September 16, UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter notified Miller that she had removed the poster because it “refer[s] to killing.” After Miller replied, “respect my first amendment rights,” Walter wrote that “the poster can be interpreted as a threat.” Walter also threatened Miller with criminal charges: “If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.”

In response to Walter’s censorship, Miller placed a new poster on his office door on the 16th. The poster read “Warning: Fascism” and mocked, “Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets.”

Walter escalated the absurdity. On September 20, she wrote that this poster, too, had been censored because it “depicts violence and mentions violence and death” and was expected to “be constituted as a threat.” She added that UWS’s “threat assessment team,” in consultation with the university general counsel’s office, had made the decision. College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Interim Dean Raymond Hayes then scheduled a meeting with Miller about “the concerns raised by the campus threat assessment team.”

The university has since canceled the meeting as of last Friday, but it hasn’t backed off its position.

Sorensen, however, dug a deeper hole. Together with Provost Julie Furst-Bowe and Vice Chancellor Ed Nieskes, Sorensen defended UWS’s censorship in an email to all faculty and staff on September 27. The three administrators wrote that “the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.”

To understand the importance of this as a First Amendment issue, one needs to closely examine what happened.  A university’s Chief of Police/Parking Enforcement Officer, ignorant of the context of the quote, took it upon herself to remove not one but two posters without ever asking their context or purpose.  The professor honestly expected his First Amendment rights would not be infringed, but the school’s Chancellor cowered behind bureaucratic zero tolerance policies and did just that.

Whether or not you agree with how the professor responded, the police chief clearly overreacted to something she misinterpreted.  You can read the full exchange of those emails at FIRE.  Nothing about the poster of a fictional TV Space Captain is intended to “cause others to fear for their safety”; in fact, it is the opposite of a threat.

Dr. Miller sent the administration the relevant clip from Firefly’s pilot episode Serenity.  The context of the quote is an homage to fair play and a code of honor that obviously prefers non-violence.

This is precisely the issue with freedom of speech; words are subjective and can be interpreted differently by separate individuals.  Sometimes this is done unintentionally, sometimes with malice, which is why the act of deciding what’s NOT free speech is ripe for abuse.  The UWS administration’s stated desire to “promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind—both direct and implied” may be well-meaning, but its meaning amounts to nothing.  How does one set a universal standard to determine what is an implied threat or in what context speech may “refer to violence and/or harm”?  As Dr. Miller pointed out in his email response to police chief Lisa Walter, would this also apply to “a poster from Hamlet? Or a news clipping about Hockey players that commit violent murder?”

When asked if he knew of any other examples of such posters or signs on campus, Dr. Miller replied that while he wasn’t aware of any prior attempts at censorship, a “Kill Bill” poster from the popular Quentin Tarantino film was prevalent on campus earlier in the year.  Some quick research finds the poster was actually a parody of the Kill Bill movie, as part of a campus-wide protest held in February against Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.

Oddly enough, police chief Walter was not at all concerned with the reference to killing or to the weapon of violence depicted in those posters.  In fact, she was quoted in this article at the time as being rather complimentary of the activities.

“The neat part of working in a university is that folks get to have their voices heard, and we try to make sure that it’s done in a manner that’s orderly and doesn’t disrupt the rest of the operations too much,” she said.

Walter also pointed out that the university’s union officers are not included in the exemption Walker provided to other law enforcement officers, firefighters and the State Patrol.

“He did not exempt UW police, Capitol police and, I believe, DNR wardens,” she said. “They will lose their ability to negotiate and have a union negotiate other work-related — other than salary. If the bill goes through, they will be without a contract — and without a union — on March 15.”

Is this because the police chief was not only overseeing security at the protest but also voicing her vested political interest in the highly controversial issue at hand? It seems clear that she was immersed in the context of that poster.

Words are subjective, indeed.

American Universities and colleges today are now, by design, overwhelmingly leftist in their belief systems and political activities.  Students and faculty alike frequently glorify monstrous leftists like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara.  To some, they are socialist revolutionary heroes, while to others their image alone is testimony of mass murder and oppression.

When Ward Churchill was fired from his job as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 for engaging in research misconduct, scholars insisted that Churchill was singled out for his political views, most notably his statements about 9/11 in which he “referred to the ‘technocrats’ working at the World Trade Center as ‘little Eichmanns.‘” There continues to be an outpouring of support for Churchill from the academic community, many of whom have stressed that Academic Freedom must be staunchly defended.

Whither tolerance and intellectual diversity?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison was recently ordered by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pay nearly $500,000 in legal costs to a student group that claimed its First Amendment rights were violated when the student government rejected a portion of its funds because they were earmarked for religious worship. Badger Catholic, a student Catholic group that conducts various religious and spiritual activities on and off campus, sued the university, which claimed that funding some of the group’s activities would “amount to an illegal endorsement of religion.” The Appeals Court disagreed with the University and the Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case. It’s been hailed as a victory for freedom of speech and religious expression on college campuses.  $500K was lost because, rather than protecting the fundamental rights of its students, the school chose to discriminate against their activities purely because of the group’s religious beliefs.

While the flap over the Firefly poster may seem trivial, it is anything but.  This incident and UWS’s ego-driven, bureaucratic response provides a teachable moment.  It should make us pause and think about how easily our freedoms can erode, in the arbitrary name of protecting others’ feelings.

It’s one thing to ensure that students and faculty are physically safe, but when we surrender to the Wordsmiths what may or may not offend someone or make them uncomfortable, we are helping to pave our own Road to Hell.

“Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.” – Mal Reynolds, Captain: Space Boat Serenity

Roger Waters’ presentation of Pink Floyd’s seminal rock opera The Wall, which I saw at Staples Center in Los Angeles, is nothing short of a total triumph at all levels.  More than just an outstanding rock n’ roll concert, the addition of story-driven spectacle and anti-authoritarian thematics elevate this experience far above any other live music experience one is likely to see.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Waters’ work, and for those who need a reminder, The Wall charts the autobiographical tale of Mr. Waters, whose father dies in WWII, and how a series of subsequent traumas forces him into a self-imposed isolation behind a metaphorical wall.  This alienation drives him mad, eventually forcing him to face an internal trial, in which his inner judge tears down his wall.

Heady stuff for a rock album, much less a concert.  Yet Mr. Waters succeeds in transcending his personal story, delivering a moving allegory, calling for each of us to tear down the walls we have erected to separate ourselves from the proverbial “Other.”

The work presented is utterly faithful to the original, complete with sound effects and background voices familiar to Pink Floyd fans, played with passion as well as technical sophistication.  It is also apparent that Mr. Waters’ voice is as fit as ever, complete with varying foreign accents, hisses, groans, and whispers.

Those who love the material will be delighted, while discoverers of the work will likely be thunderstruck by the presentation.  It’s difficult not to be.  From the opening fireworks and plane crashing onstage in a ball of fire, Mr. Waters signals that visuals will be as important (possibly more so) than the music itself.

There is no subtlety here, and yet the opera’s sledgehammer tactics come off as a strength.  For starters, this is a rock concert — who wants subtlety?  Second, it’s about the ravages of war and the inner spirit.  There’s nothing ambiguous about those themes.

Some of the imagery projected onto the massive wall is Gerald Scarfe’s familiar animation from the album cover and Alan Parker’s film adaptation.  However, Mr. Waters has added enormous helpings of geopolitics.  There are repeated, and emotionally moving, images of both soldiers and civilians killed in the world’s string of never-ending conflicts–

There is authoritarian propaganda (“Trust us”, “Everything will be fine”); and contemporary television juxtaposed against classic war films.  Technology has advanced to the point where these images are able to recede into space behind the wall into swirling vortices, granting the performance space a third dimension that further draws the audience into Mr. Waters’ complete vision.

Oh yes, there are the giant puppets.

The pig is back, this time painted black, its red eyes glaring at the audience, fascist propaganda graffiti written all over its body.

The wall is constructed throughout the first act, sealing the band off from the audience for much of the second act.  Not to worry — Mr. Waters in front of the wall after Hey You.

The work’s most beautiful moments are also its most haunting — when images of an infinite sortie of B52 bombers drop gravestone markers, corporate logos, and religious symbols onto the countryside below, and the lyrics of Goodbye Blue Sky echo through the arena.

But the most compelling and emotionally powerful moment comes during Vera and Bring the Boys Back Home.  With Waters now encased inside his wall, mourning the loss of his father, an image of Vera Lynn appears on the wall.  Over Mr. Waters’ plaintive cry:

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?
Remember how she said that 
We would meet again
Some sunny day?
Vera! Vera!
What has become of you?
Does anybody else here
Feel the way I do?

Films of children being reunited with their fathers, home from Iraq or Afghanistan, are played in the center of the wall.

—–

Some may regard the moment as manipulative, but how can one not feel for Mr. Waters, and all the other children, who have been denied that reunion?  That tears should involuntarily come streaming from my eyes at this moment — at a rock concert! — should serve as evidence of the power that this moment delivers, when all the elements of sound and image collide to perfection.  The dominance of the subsequent segue to Bring The Boys Back Home, is thus multiplied a hundred-fold.  The song’s title is scrawled across the entire wall, and Mr. Waters leads the crowd in a heart-rending plea for our soldiers to return safely to their children.

This is where I believe it is possible to see beyond Mr. Waters’ self-proclaimed status as “bleeding heart and artist,” given to scathing critiques of world leaders, including George W. Bush.  Certainly his public statements reveal his left-wing politics, but it is a mistake to dismiss the work based upon the artist’s public statements.

The Wall as album and concert are, in fact, apolitical and anti-authoritarian.  The beauty of the work is its humanism.   The macro theme Mr. Waters’ impresses upon his audience is that war is unquestionably Hell, and the bell does indeed toll for every single one of us — regardless of nation, religion, or ideology.  One can criticize the anti-war message as ignoring the deeper subtleties of international conflict, but to do so ascribes greater meaning to the material than it intends.

Nor does Mr. Waters offer a safe haven to jihadists or terrorists, as one might expect.  The images of the dead are Allied soldiers of past and present, and innocent civilians.  During the intermission, in which each brick holds images and short obituaries of the deceased, tribute is paid to those who died in conflicts all over the world — from the jungles of Colombia, where a civilian visiting an indigenous tribe for educational reasons was murdered by government death squads, to Navy SEALs who died in Afghanistan.  Not a single brick nor image is given to a terrorist.

Mr. Waters does not offer praise to any liberal world leaders, even President Obama.  The President is glimpsed only once, drowned out in a cacophony of other voices and images that are subsequently smashed into silence prior to Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3). Indeed, those familiar with Mother recognize that, following the lyric, “Mother, should I trust the government?”, a dissonant minor chord is struck — the musical equivalent of “No F***ing Way,” words which in fact appear in red scrawled handwriting on the wall.

Government, corporate and religious ideologies are all the same to Mr. Waters. They are the enablers of the wars that rob children of their fathers.  It need not be more complicated than that.  A simplistic truth, perhaps, but a truth nonetheless.

During Bring the Boys Back Home, the other text to flash on screen are the words of President Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

It is no coincidence that Mr. Waters invokes John Lennon’s Imagine in articulating his hopes for a different world.  Mr. Lennon’s song is easily dismissed as a hippie’s atheistic call for a world of hand-holding and swaying.  The deeper meaning, however, asks us to consider the downside that possessions, religion, and nationalism have brought to our species.  There are no easy answers in real life, and there are unquestionably just wars to be waged.  Mr. Waters merely asks us to consider just how much damage we risk doing before we set out on a path of destruction.

For those interested in seeing this experience first-hand, it is regrettable that Mr. Waters is closing out his domestic tour here in Los Angeles over the next week.  Until its inevitable DVD release, I encourage readers to watch his performance of The Wall (Live in Berlin), filmed just months after the Berlin Wall came down.  Fitting enough that it is performed at Potsdamer Platz, where the wall itself stood, but even more fitting (and moving) that members of East German Army appear on stage — free.

That question was posed to Werner Herzog a few weeks ago in an interview with the German broadsheet Die Zeit (The Time). Those of you who tuned in last week know that ecstatic truth is Herzog’s way of describing the poetic, transcendent heights of illumination to which his films aspire. “Yes, there is something of that there,” Herzog replied, “something of late medieval mysticism.”

However, he immediately provided a caveat, one that should warm the cockles of conservative hearts everywhere: “But I want to get away from the religious, from the mystical,” he stressed, “because it leads all too quickly to the cloudy waters of the New Age, which is the most horrific thing you can possibly imagine in the spiritual realm.” And then, the coup de grace: “And this is something you see in a film like Avatar, by the way.”

Whoops — guess Herzog didn’t get his marching orders this awards season!

“It is basically a New Age fairytale film,” the Die Zeit interviewer mused airily, at which point Herzog could no longer restrain himself: “What annoys me is the way the film romanticizes and idolizes nature,” the director of Grizzly Man said. “It’s celebrating a new form of paganism, and it gives me knots in my intestines just thinking about it.”

Thus Herzog rebuked the mindless praise lavished on Avatar by the tonsured acolytes of Tinseltown, aligning himself instead with those of us at Big Hollywood who understand that the luxurious three-dimensionality of Avatar’s visuals was fatally offset by the plodding one-dimensionality of its puerile eco-worship. In another interview, he once admonished that, “Nightmares and dreams do not follow the rules of political correctness.” After decades of rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s motley array of ex-hippies, pseudo-reactionaries, and eviro-cultists, Herzog’s on record as concluding that, “I believe, among the entire scene of filmmakers here in Los Angeles, I’m the only clinically sane one. Period.”

He first encountered the rage of what he regularly dismisses as “the dogmatic Left” quite early in his career. “At the end of the Sixties,” Herzog remembers, “German film saw itself solely as an instrument of world revolution. People were also babbling on about how we should join forces with the proletariat. And I was thinking: which one of you is from the proletariat? I had actually worked as a welder in a steel factory to fund my first film. So at least I knew something about what factory work meant.”

In 1970 Herzog made Even Dwarfs Started Small, a darkly funny movie about the midgets populating a remote island institution and their failed anarchistic revolt. Meant to echo Tod Browning’s absurdist classic Freaks (1932), it was widely banned as politically incorrect, and the young maverick director was spat on by Leftists at film festivals. “I was basically accused of ridiculing the world revolution,” he remembers, then adds with wry humor, “Actually, that is probably the only thing they might have been right about. . . They insisted that when you portray a revolution you have to show a successful revolution, and as Even Dwarfs does not do this, for them it was clearly made by a fascist.” Fascism, of course, was a loaded term in postwar Germany, the equivalent of calling someone racist in today’s America — an appellation with the power to ruin a career and a life.

During the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982), activists from what Herzog teasingly calls “The Diaspora of Shattered Illusions. . . doctrinaire zealots of the failed 1968 revolution” accused him of abusing the Peruvian natives and despoiling their pristine Pandora. Some even came to the jungle and showed the Peruvians “photos of Auschwitz victims, piles of skeletons and corpses,” telling them that “this is how the Germans treat everyone.” A few months after the release of the film, Herzog was walking down a street in Munich when a Leftist protester (the same sort that throws pies at Republican speakers on university campuses and disrupts government hearings) ran at him, kicked him in the gut, and yelled, “That’s what you deserve, you pig!”

Ah, the Peace and Love emanating from the Left — I never tire of their tolerance for diversity.

In 1984 Herzog made Ballad of the Little Soldier, a short documentary on the tribulations of children conscripted into the civil wars of Nicaragua. It was the height of the Reagan era, and the socialist Sandinista movement was the current sacred cow of the Left. “For some people,” he says, “showing nine-year-old kids fighting against the Sandinistas meant I was clearly an American imperialist. . . the film does not mince its words and when it was released I was immediately labeled as being in the pay of the CIA. . . The intellectuals were simply unable to understand that politically dogmatic cinema is not something I practice, and they didn’t bother to look at what the film is really about.”

All of these things stem from the “turn on, tune in, drop out” crowd and their infatuation with revolution, socialism, and a hatred of Western Civilization. When once asked “Why were you resistant to late 1960s politics?”, Herzog’s answer was telling, and worth quoting in full:

The ideas and actions sweeping the world in 1968 were not for me because at that time, contrary to most of my peers, I had already been much further out into the world. I had traveled, I had made films, I had already taken on responsibilities that very few people my age had. For me, this rather rudimentary analysis that Germany was a fascist and repressive prison state, which had to be overpowered by a socialist Utopian revolution, seemed quite wrong. I knew the revolution would not succeed because it was rooted in such an inadequate analysis of what was really going on, so I did not participate. And because I have never been into using the medium of film as a political tool, my attitude really put me apart from most other filmmakers. As there were very few reviewers and journalists who were not wildly into revolutionary jargon at the time and who did not put ridiculous political demands on filmmakers, my films suffered at the hands of many of the critics.

He has little use for film analysis (one notable exception being Roger Ebert, an early champion of Herzog’s work — in appreciation, the director dedicated his 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World to the now-ailing Pulitzer-Prize winner). “The audience reactions have always been much more important,” he says. “The opinion of the public is sacred.” When critics learn that Herzog routinely throws all of his unused footage in the trash, original negatives and all, they frequently recoil in horror — all of that potential fodder for study, gone forever! The director himself remains nonplussed by their anguish. “A carpenter does not sit on his shavings,” he says with a shrug.

Over his long career, in interview after interview, Herzog has stressed his blue-collar views on his craft: “Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. . . For me [filmmaking] is much more about real life than about philosophy. . . Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind . . . Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.” These thoughts frequently set him against film snobs who think that, in Herzog’s words, “If you do not make a black-and-white political statement you are on the side of the devils, a point of view that is clearly overly simplistic and stupid.”

Although he’s made many documentaries for the small screen, television has long been a bête noire of Herzog’s (among Hollywoodists, only Michael Medved is as public about his disdain for the medium). “Those who read own the world,” he states emphatically, “and those who watch television lose it.” Herzog thinks the boob tube, “ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. . . .television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

A big part of why TV is so sterile and predictable is that its content is dominated by the left-wing, and thus by political correctness and ideological purity of all kinds. Herzog treats Big Media with grudging equanimity, answering banal questions and posing for sinister “madman director” photographs, but occasionally Life presents him with a chance to laugh at it all. When a few years ago the BBC was interviewing him outdoors in Los Angeles for Grizzly Man, a hidden assailant shot an air rifle at Herzog from some nearby woods and hit him in the stomach with a pellet, leaving a bloody wound in his abdomen. “I was not injured badly,” he says, “But the people from the BBC were shitting themselves. That was pretty funny.”

In recent years the German director has lived in LA, a city he likes although he decries its superabundance of “idiocies like hippies and New Age.” He also despises the left-dominated structures that cast endless reams of red tape between a filmmaker and his vision:

I remember one time I was shooting in New York and showed up with my rental van at the place where I wanted to rent some equipment. The man said, “You cannot pick it up yourself, a union truck has to deliver it.” I said, “But my van is ten feet from your door here.” There was an endless debate until I just picked up the cameras and carried them to my van. An absolute waste of time. In Hollywood there are too many rituals and hierarchies, and to be independent means to be free of things like this. I have always known that true independence is a state of mind, nothing more. I am self-reliant.

Seeing first-hand Hollywood’s ravenous perversions and vices has made Herzog wary of falling into all the usual traps of fame. “This life can easily turn you into a clown,” he admits. “My way of dealing with the inevitable is to step out of filmmaking whenever I can. I travel on foot, I direct operas, I raise children, I am learning to cook professionally, I write. Things that give me independence outside the world of cinema.” Unlike many Hollywood jet-setters, he is totally at home in, and appreciative of, rural America. “I truly love places like the Midwest,” he says. “For me it is the very heart of America. You still see the self-reliance and camaraderie our there, the warm open hearts, the down-to-earth people, whereas so much of America has abandoned these wonderful and basic virtues.”

When he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) — a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who was shot down and tortured during the Vietnam War, only to stage an amazing escape — the Left noticed that the usual anti-American propaganda was nowhere to be found. “The film was generally very well received by American audiences,” Herzog says, but adds that “Inevitably I was asked why I did not denounce American aggression in the Vietnam War and why the film made no political statement.” Herzog’s reply to this pressure was to double down, raise more money outside of the system, and make Rescue Dawn (2007), a fictional treatment of the exact same story starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Werner Herzog, you see, is no slave to political correctness, no lap-dog for the media, and not at all on board with the hippy-dippy attitudes of the Hollywood Left. He saw in Dieter Dengler a man who, in his words, “had all the qualities that make America so wonderful: self-reliance and courage, a kind of frontier spirit.” That was what counted, and no amount of disparagement was about to deter him from portraying Americans at their best.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was the brand of rock-solid intellectual honesty brought to bear on Grizzly Man.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Werner Herzog and Timothy Treadwell by delving into how Herzog used his unique blend of deep spirituality and down-to-earth rationality to make Grizzly Man such a memorable and compelling film.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Werner Herzog DVD Collection: Documentaries and Shorts. At Herzog’s personal website you can purchase a 6-DVD set containing most of his non-feature directorial efforts. It will set you back a pretty penny (15o Euros, or around $230 U.S. dollars), but it’s worth it if you find yourself wanting to collect the director’s work. Many can also be found on Netflix if you’re interested.

THE INFAMOUS SNIPER INTERVIEW: Watch the now-legendary video of Herzog getting shot by a hidden sniper while doing an interview in Los Angeles. He completes the interview (it’s about Grizzly Man, so give it a listen) before condescending to show the BBC reporter the bloody hole under his beltline. “You’re bleeding!” gasps the interviewer. “Somebody shot at you and created a wound in your abdomen!” Shitting himself, just like Herzog said. But for a director who’s been kicked, spat on, and shot at during his filmmaking adventures, getting pinged by a pellet gun is just another ordinary day on the mean streets. I love how he deadpans to the interviewer: “It’s not a significant bullet.”

As President Obama says, let’s be clear: that comical Copenhagen conference wasn’t about science, it was about wealth transfer. The gist: because of America’s “hyper-industrialization,” we need to pay off poor countries for all the harm we’ve caused in the world. That’s the real green in the green movement: It’s cash, not grass.

What’s this have to do with Christmas? Well, I think the world has forgotten that the biggest gift to this planet is America’s industry – and it’s time to remind them where they would be without it.

1. Whenever a horrible disaster hits, they would be dead. Be it an earthquake, a tsunami or a Madonna tour – we’re usually the first and biggest responders – saving the injured, and helping to rebuild. It is because of our tremendous capability to mobilize quickly that makes us a nation of superheroes. It also takes planes, trucks and tractors to do that stuff. Imagine that carbon footprint.

2. If they ever get sick, they would be dead. It’s true. While critical cretins like Chavez and Mugabe actually harm their own people, we save millions of strangers’ lives. Even that bozo called Bono admits it was George Bush who helped prevent the death of millions of Africans from AIDS. Yeah – I know what our critics will say: it’s easy for America to do this stuff. Well, it’s even easier not to do it.

3. If their family is hungry, they would be dead. Let’s not forget Norman Borlaug, who invented disease resistant wheat, saving hundreds of millions of lives in India and Pakistan. You can only do that if you’re of an industrial mind – thinking about people, not polar bears.

4. If they’re under the thumb of fascism, they would be dead. We possess the greatest military technology in the world, and we’ve used it to end horrible wars. Our industry of annihilation gave new life to many countries.

In sum, the very people complaining about America would not be alive, if it weren’t for America. Which is why, I say to them: Merry Christmas.

It sure beats a pair of socks.

Tonight we have the lovely Remi Spencer, the delightful Mike Baker, the witty Steven Crowder, and the always awesome Dr. Michael Baden.

No, it’s not The Ann Coulter Story.

The movie is We The Living, based on the Ayn Rand novel of the same title.  Rand said that We The Living “is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write.”

Conservatives and libertarians have long lamented the scarcity of movies that depict the evils of communism.  Let’s see, there’s Doctor Zhivago, The Killing Fields, The Lives of Others, and… and, well, now there’s We The Living — a long-lost classic filmed in 1942, and now available on DVD for the first time ever.

WTL takes place soon after the Bolshevik takeover of Russia (which Rand experienced as a young woman).  The stunning Alida Valli plays Kira, a fiery college student who detests the communists ruining her country.  (Valli is perhaps best known to American audiences for her indelible performances in The Third Man and The Paradine Case.)

Kira’s formerly bourgeois family struggles to survive as the government outlaws most private trade, rations food and shelter, and implements health-care death panels.  (Okay, I might be confused about that last part.)

Life is a grind for all but the politically privileged.  The masses endure shortages and injustice, while well-connected Party members enjoy special treatment and profit from corruption.  Everything is politicized:  the economy, education, even science (as Party officials inform Kira and her fellow students).

But some forces override politics and even good sense.  At college one day, secret police officer Andrei (Fosco Giachetti) overhears Kira pouring scorn on Bolshevism.  Instead of arresting Kira, the officer is smitten with her.  In turn Kira develops a respect for Andrei bordering on love, despite their ideological differences.

Shortly thereafter, Kira has a chance encounter with the handsome, mysterious Leo (Rossano Brazzi), a free spirit like her, hunted by the authorities.  Kira and Leo have an immediate, almost animal chemistry.

This is one of the most affecting scenes in the movie, an instance of “love at first sight” made credible by the sublimity of the acting.  When they agree to see each other in a month in the same spot, you can’t wait for that month to pass so you can see what happens next.  From here unfolds a tragic romantic triangle marked by jealousy, deception and sacrifice.

WTL has some of Rand’s most layered characters.  In her later work, a character like Andrei the communist might be portrayed as an unalloyed villain.  But in WTL, Andrei gradually reveals a sensitive and decent humanity at odds with his repellent politics.  (Who hasn’t encountered such paradoxes in real people?)

The story behind the movie is nearly as remarkable as the film itself, further proof there is little daylight between fascism and communism.  (Jonah Goldberg, call your book editor.)

We The Living was made during World War II in Mussolini’s Italy, of all places.  The government warily allowed it to be filmed as a propaganda vehicle against the Soviet Union.  But when Mussolini realized the movie was a critique not only of communism but of all forms of statism, he banned it from theatres, where it was a smash hit.

The government rounded up and destroyed all copies of the film – save one, the original negative, which was secreted away.  As we are informed by the fascinating documentary (included among the DVD extras), the film’s reels languished unseen for decades until Rand’s attorneys went hunting for it among the Italian film community.

Duncan Scott, who produced the DVD release, explains how as a young editor he talked his way into recutting and subtitling the film alongside Ayn Rand herself. WTL had originally been released as two separate films.  They combined them, trimmed away some of the excess, and removed or redubbed pro-fascist propaganda speeches inserted at the insistence of the authorities.

Scott tells how in the original version, Andrei delivered a heated diatribe against the evils of capitalism.  Needless to say, this speech didn’t exactly belong.  Not content merely to change the subtitles, Scott actually hired a sound-a-like Italian actor so he could redub the voice track in Italian to match the new subtitles.

Unfortunately the digital transfer was done in 1987, and the cost of a high-definition remastering was prohibitive for this DVD release, so the picture quality isn’t quite as crisp as one might wish.  Nevertheless, it is completely watchable.

Considering the circumstances under which We The Living was made and later restored, this inspiring classic is a tremendous achievement, and a worthy addition to every liberty-lover’s DVD library — and to the too-brief list of films exposing the pitfalls of socialism in whatever form.

A. Nothing?
B. Anything?
C. A lot?

The answer is C, but we just didn`t see it.

We know that some of our brave troops died fighting for freedom. Protestors in Iran were violently silenced too, fighting for a glimmer of what we have. You can also be certain that the opportunity to actively undermine fascism in Iran has passed – our President choosing “wait and see” over “hope and change.” He also snuck a few hundred pages of climate-bill baloney past us in the dead of night.

No biggie, right?

But I`m not wagging my stubby, sausage-shaped finger. In that same span of time, I probably purchased about 50 bucks worth of music on iTunes. I saw a pile of movies (including “Up,” and “Zoo.” One is about tracking a rare bird; the other sleeping with a horse – please don`t confuse the two when making plans with the kids). I caught up on “Daisy of Love,” “Charm School,” and the clumsy replacement for “Project Runway,” “The Fashion Show.” I now know that Izrah could never replace Heidi.

Not to belittle the coverage of the passing of “the world`s greatest entertainer,” in fact I`m in awe of it. But while Jackson took over the news, Obama made a deal with Russia – signing an agreement to reduce nuclear stockpiles by as much as a third.

Is this good or bad? Who cares? You can`t download nukes or fast forward to their best parts, so what good are they? Never mind that the whole point of having nuclear deterrents is HAVING them. And that by HAVING them, they are effectively a nuclear deterrent, whether or not the shrink wrap is removed.

In a way, nuclear weapons are like Stephen Hawking books. I have one on my coffee table. It`s never been opened, but it serves its purpose (it`s where I place the stromboli).

But here`s what do I know. if we are going reduce our nuclear warheads, let`s at least replace them with something we know can obliterate a city. I`m talking a years worth of “The Hills,” a million “Transformer” DVDs, and of course, the entire Michael Jackson catalogue. I`m thinking the only way to effectively beat our enemies is by making them as aimless and satisfied as we are.

TONIGHT:

GWAR!!!

Kimberly Guilfoyle!

Andrew WK!

Alison Rosen!

Me!

So Obama was right: he truly is the citizen of the world, even as his own country is left wandering and confused. I suppose it’s easy, however, for Jabrail in Azerbaijan to swoon over Obam, when he’s not faced with cap and trade, nationalized health care, and those new mandatory curly light bulbs. But then again, in Azerbaijan, I guess you’re just happy to have any kind of light bulb. Even if it’s a candle shaped like a light bulb.

But I digress. The poll looked at “confidence ratings” and found that while Obama had the highest, and would “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had the lowest. Now, these standings might mean something, if Obama actually had the balls to take advantage of them. I mean, what’s the use of being loved if you can’t actually scare the crap out of those who love you? It’s what confuses me most about our President. He chose initially to sit on the sidelines – as the people of Iran cried out for help – preferring to see which dude wins. A true leader, however, would know that it’s not the leaders who matter, but the people caught in the middle.

Which is why Obama’s recent response to the Honduran mess is even more bizarre. Immediately after the coup – Obama raced to condemn it. So our President develops a spine over an abducted politician in pajamas – but not about widespread bloodshed of innocent folks in Iran? Where the heck are his priorities, or his sense of proportion?

Does Obama make a list of things that piss him off, and if so – what’s at the top? Fascism or poorly inflated tires? The murder of innocent protestors, or midtown bodegas that sell cigarettes to teens? Nukes pointed at Hawaii, or sugary sodas at school? Our nation’s prosperity or his abs?

I don’t know. Which is why – at least for now – I’m taking down my Obama poster from the ceiling above my bunk bed. I’m replacing it with a poster of Sarkozy. He’s got abs, and balls!

Tonight’s guests include Remi Spencer, Mike Baker, Greg Proops and actor Mike Doyle.

… Anywhoozer, I’m thinking later how crazy it was that they even got Hogan’s Heroes on the air, but at least the fascists were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys. CUT TO: Any given night this week, no less than three contemporary movies are running on cable where the fascists are the good guys and the Americans are the bad guys… wow, talk about crazy.

And everyone over 35 remembers that, amazingly, the farcical sitcom Hogan’s Heroes grew out of the Hollywood-made drama; “Stalag 17,” where – get this – the fascists were the bad guys and the Americans were the good guys! Hey Sandy, looks like all you gotta do is make the Gitmo terrorists the good guys and the Americans the bad guys, and its green-lightville, baby!

But it’s all moot because our new president signed an executive order to shut down Guantanamo Bay Prison requiring it be closed within a year. And I say; “More power to ‘ya, President Obama – close down Gitmo!” Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Rodney Lee, if you close down Gitmo, where do you put the prisoners?” Answer: American prisons… “But Rodney, then they’ll get the same rights under the Constitution that regular American prisoners get.”

This is true.

But for you folks who don’t want Gitmo closed and the “detainees” relocated to American prisons to get fair trials and rights and lawyers and book deals and remote interviews on Oprah; I ask you: What good are rights under the Constitution when you, yourself are under a 270-pound Samoan cellmate named; “Chester”?… Say what? Chester lost a friend in the 9-11 attacks? Ouch, mommy!

And good luck chatting with your ACLU lawyer with a mouthful of shower soap and a shiv in your ear. Oh, and about that speedy trial? Hope it’s speedier than ten minutes because that’s about how long these guys are going to last in an American prison. “But Rodney, they’ll segregate them from the other prisoners – they’ll be protected.” … Oh yeah, a lot of good that did Jeffrey Dahmer, who was “protected” in prison – yet was beaten to death with a meat tenderizer (kind of ironic, eh?).

But I digress… Back to Guantanamo – I hear you get to read the Koran, eat three squares and what – pray five times a day? I got bad news for the idiots who think the enemy are being treated poorly at Gitmo: Put these guys in Rikers Island and the only thing they’ll be praying for is to be back in Cuba. Give these fanatics a choice between San Quentin and Abu Ghraib and they’ll form a naked pyramid faster than you can say; “Thank-you Slave-mistress Lynndie, may I have another?”

Put them in American prisons, my friends, and as Ross Perot used to say; “Problem solved.”