But the Commander in Chief apparently has enough time between fixing the economy, managing the war in Afghanistan and dealing with a near-nuclear Iran to send personal birthday greetings to a sitcom actress.

Obama fired off his best birthday cheer Jan. 9 to Zooey Deschanel, the adorable star of Fox’s “New Girl” sitcom.

Michelle and I send our warmest wishes for a happy birthday … I hope your day is filled with love and laughter, and I wish you all the best for good health and happiness in the year ahead.

Sadly, Deschanel didn’t make the cut when it came time to crafting the president’s celebrity “surrogates” list, even though lesser lights such as Laura Breckenridge, Reagan Gomez and Eric Christian Olsen (“Dumb and Dumberer”) made the grade.

Deschanel is a star on the rise, no doubt. Perhaps this birthday missive will catapult her to not only greater fame but a higher rank on the president’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Mr. President, have you see Deschanel’s duet with Will Ferrell in “Elf?” She deserves to be on your A-list.

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…

I simply can’t imagine going through life caring about what someone as dumb and bubbled as Barbara Walters thinks.

WALT DISNEY, THE MAVERICK: A GUEST ESSAY BY JON FAVREAU

This, to me, is my favorite chapter of Walt’s life. The truly inspiring one.  The anointed king and namesake of Walt Disney Studios quietly slipped out the back door. He cashed in and took a handful of talented artists and, with Roy’s blessing, started over. He dreamed of a place. A place where families could come together and experience something unique yet familiar. A place to share an experience that offered comfort in a changing and scary world that seemed dead set on thumbing its nose at tradition and shredding families apart. A place where cutting edge technology and animatronics could create an immersive virtual reality of an idealized past and future, relying on each family to provide the present.

‘CHIPWRECKED’ REVIEW: BEWARE SARAH PALIN JOKES

In what can only be a bid to appeal to adults and to make amends for the idiocy of the entire outing, Chipwrecked is also packed with slightly out-of-date references – jokes about Sarah Palin, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the double rainbow guy, The Most Interesting Man in the World, and many more populate the film. These jokes are not funny. Yet, these attempts at adult-friendly chuckles are not alone, as Chipwrecked is clearly designed mainly to appeal to children. Oftentimes, when a studio screens a kid-aimed film for critics, they set the screening at a family-friendly time and allow the press to bring their children. It’s a nice touch by the bigwigs, but it allows grumbly old critics some key insights – mainly, are kids laughing at this? Kids laughed at Chipwrecked, but they didn’t seem taken in by it, delighted by the film, or even especially consumed by it.

‘RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK’ OPENING SCENE FANTASTICALLY RECREATED IN STOP MOTION

This is awesome.

BRUCE CAMPBELL CHATS WITH FANS LIVE DURING TONIGHT’S SEASON FINALE OF ‘BURN NOTICE’

How cool is this?

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

For some reason — probably the $3 cost of the DVD — I thought that after 23 years “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988) might play better, if only for nostalgic eighties purposes. Unfortunately, the movie remains so bad I can hardly believe the same director, the late James Bridges, directed “The China Syndrome.”

The story is dull, the performances — especially Michael J. Fox and Kiefer Sutherland — are one-note, and the production design and cinematography are even worse.  The sets look like, well, sets and the “crowd scenes” feel so staged you can practically see production assistants moving people in and out of shots.

The biggest problem, though, is the miscasting of Fox. While he’s a very talented comic actor, self-loathing is so far off his acting radar that you never believe for a moment his character is spiraling into some self-destructive black hole of debauchery.

The film’s biggest failure is that you never get any sense that the time and place of go-go Manhattan during the eighties has been captured. You’d have to work pretty hard to get that wrong.

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SCOTTDS’ EPIC LINKTACULAR

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS IN COSTUME AS LINCOLN

TOM SIZEMORE WRITING MEMOIR ABOUT HIS STRUGGLES WITH DRUGS

MOST LAUGHABLE ATTEMPT TO EXPLOIT A BLOCKBUSTER FILM

THE 25 CRAZIEST ROGER CORMAN MOVIE POSTERS

THE 10 FREAKIEST COMMERCIALS OF 2011

NEW PROMO BANNERS FOR ‘THE AVENGERS‘

‘THE AVENGERS’ GETS A PREQUEL (COMIC)

LEONARD MALTIN’S TOP 5 CHRISTMAS MOVIES THAT AREN’T ABOUT CHRISTMAS

NICOLAS CAGE AND JANUARY JONES’S ‘SEEKING JUSTICE’ TO FINALLY (AND MERCIFULLY) GET RELEASED

‘THE CRITIC’ AND 24 OTHER UNDERRATED ANIMATED SHOWS

ALL KINDS OF ‘AMAZING SPIDER-MAN’ IMAGES

74 FILMS YOU CAN WATCH ON YOUTUBE RIGHT NOW

FIRST POSTER ARRIVES FOR SACHA BARON COHEN’S ‘THE DICTATOR’

A LOOK AT THE CAREER OF LANCE HENRIKSEN

PARAMOUNT PICTURES REACH THEIR 100TH ANNIVERSARY AND GET A NEW LOGO

10 SATIRICAL NOVELS ABOUT THE FUTURE

CLASSIC INSULTS FROM CLASSIC ACTORS

10 DOCUMENTARIES TAILOR-MADE FOR NERDS

‘CSI’ DELIVERS ITS LARGEST AUDIENCE SINCE PREMIERE

‘REBEL WITHOUT’ A CAUSE VS. ‘HUD‘

CHARLIE KAUFMAN TALKS SCREENWRITING: ‘IT ISN’T EASY BUT IT’S ESSENTIAL.’

TOP 10 STANLEY KUBRICK STARES

HBO TEASES NEW COMEDIES WITH ‘GIRLS’ & ‘VEEP’ TRAILERS

DEADLY DOMESTICITY: A LOOK AT THE GENRE OF ‘HOME NOIR’

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CLASSIC PICK FOR FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16

TCM:

10:00 PM  EST: Christmas In Connecticut (1945) –  A homemaking specialist who can’t boil water is forced to provide a family holiday for a war hero. Dir: Peter Godfrey Cast:  Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet. BW-102 mins, TV-G, CC,

The whole story is made possible because the protagonists want to display their patriotism and do something good for a war hero.

A reminder that Hollywood didn’t always suck.

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Please send comments, suggestions and tips to jnolte@breitbart.com or Twitter @NolteNC.

The hit show has something special up its sleeve for next Tuesday’s new installment, according to a breathless post at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog.

“The First Time.” It’s without a doubt one of Glee‘s best installments ever and features two popular couples on the show having sex for the first time.

The couples losing their virginity? Finn and Rachel and…Kurt and Blaine! Yep, the couple — who was featured on the cover of EW’s Gay Teens on TV issue – finally decide to take the next step in their relationship.

Hey, if it can distract us from worrying about Kim Kardashian’s post-divorce woes …

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USA Today:

Stars have been belting out the national anthem before each game of the World Series. Country singers Scotty McCreery, Trace Adkins and Ronnie Dunn performed before Games 1, 2 and 3. And last night, Zooey Deschanel of Fox’s new hit show New Girl did the honors.

How do you think she did

Full story here.

L.A. Times:

An adoptive mother is using an online advocacy platform to distribute a petition calling on the producers of Fox’s “Glee” to create a public service announcement that would offset what she calls “harmful” inaccuracies in an adoption-based story line.

Amber Austin said she initiated the petition on Change.org because of a plotline involving cheerleader Quinn (Dianna Agron), a teen mother who placed her baby up for adoption. On the show, Quinn is, as the petition puts it, “actively (and with malice)” trying to get the baby back from Shelby (Idina Menzel), the birth mother of Glee Club member Rachel (Lea Michele).

Austin said the show irresponsibly raises fear for adopted children that they can be taken away from their families, and that the plot also could cause confusion for families who adopt. She said the story line perpetuates one of the most pervasive and harmful myths about adoption: that a birth mother can take a child away from a family or pop back into the child’s life.

Full story here.

 Glee is back! Come on, guys, get excited!

Anyone?

Just me? Well ok then. I’m not afraid to admit, loudly and proudly, I totally heart Glee. I’ve been a fan of high school dramedies since Joey crawled through Dawson’s window, and when you throw musical theatre into the mix … pure entertainment, Baby!

So what if it’s a microcosm of leftist indoctrination that spoon-feeds liberal drivel into eagerly waiting mouths? What isn’t, these days? Cue my theme song, because that’s where I come in. This year I’ll be tuning into Glee and reporting back to you fabulous Big Hollywood readers the blatant misrepresentations of reality that were sung and danced into living rooms across the nation.

Get the facts! Fight the smears!

(Sorry. Couldn’t help it.)

Anyway. The season 3 opener on Tuesday was filled with blog fodder: Cheerleading Coach from Hell Sue Sylvester is running for congress, the only stable relationship continues to be the one between gay boys, and Quinn tries to ‘find herself’ by dying her hair pink and lighting a purple piano on fire with a cigarette.

Sue Sylvester gains in the polls by announcing that she wants to cut all funding for the arts at public schools. She goes on the local news station to tell parents they’re going to have to pay for music lessons themselves, because taxpayers don’t care if your kids can sing or not. Or something to that effect. You know, because Tea Party people are monsters that hate children. And music.

Glee creator Ryan Murphy denies that the election plotline is a mockery of the Tea Party, but Jane Lynch (the actress that plays Sue) says of her character: “She’s going to be more right-wing than Michele Bachmann.”

She even got glitter-bombed. Yeah. I’ll let you guys judge whether or not Glee is mocking conservatives for yourselves.

In high school relationship news, the teenagers are still super slutty. In one scene, Santana and Brittany try to convince Quinn to come back to the Cheerios and glee club by referring to their trio as the unholy trinity, and making light of the fact that they had all slept with Puck the previous year. I bonded with other girls in high school by sharing lip-gloss, by the way.

The only stable relationship continues to be the one between Kurt and Blaine, the flamboyant gay boys. Blaine actually leaves his prestigious private school to join his boyfriend at McKinley High, because he can’t stand to be away from the one he loves so much.

Fine. Go ahead and have a happy gay couple. But pretty please with a cherry on top could we see some happy hetero teens in committed and loving relationships? Pffft. Teenagers in committed and loving relationships. Like that’ll happen on primetime. Well, I guess it does … but only if they’re gay.

Oh yeah, and Quinn rocks a new hairdo and a bad attitude. I foresee a Janis Joplin cover in the near future.

It’s going to be awesome.

“America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh, whose TV crime show has helped police capture 1,500 fugitives and find 50 missing children since 1988, is being given an honorary award from organizers of the Emmys.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said on Tuesday said it will give its Governors Award to Walsh for making an impact on society through the use of TV.

“John Walsh has dedicated his life to the betterment of society, and while doing so has used television in an inventive and extraordinary way,” academy chief executive John Shaffner said in a statement. “His contribution to society goes far beyond just hosting a hit TV show, but sets a prime example of how television can be used to convey an important message.”

Walsh became known around the world as a crime fighter and victims’ advocate after his 6 year-old son Adam was abducted from a mall near his home in Hollywood, Fla., on July 27, 1981 and found murdered two weeks later.

The case remained unsolved for 27 years until 2008 when police linked the slaying to a serial killer who died in prison and who claimed responsibility for hundreds of murders.

Read the full piece here.

“Do you know that the bank can just take your house?” he asks his friends. As if some suited bankers showed up one morning on their doorstep and demanded that they vacate their residence. There was more to the story – their family had relocated for Dad’s new job, and with such a bad economy, it’s last-in-first-out. They had depleted their savings in the move, and therefore had nothing to fall back on when the job was lost. 

This is the perfect example of the liberal drivel that Hollywood spoons out. It’s the banker’s fault! If only the bank had given them some time to come up with the mortgage payment, everything would be ok! Evil bankers (synonymous with Republicans for some strange reason in many people’s minds) are destroying the American dream! 

Let’s look at some facts, mmmkay?

Glee is set in Ohio. In that state, it can take six months or longer for the bank to foreclose on your house after you stop paying the mortgage. The bank doesn’t just show up and kick you out of your house. They give you multiple chances to pay your debt, and would prefer it if you did, because taking the whole thing to court is expensive and no one likes dealing with lawyers very much anyway. 

Six months is a long time to figure out what the heck you’re going to do. 

This fictitious family also made a major mistake by not having a financial safety net to fall back on. They depleted their savings to make a move to a new state for a new job? Is common sense not taught anymore? They couldn’t have bought a house with one less bedroom or something to make sure they still had money in the bank for emergencies? 

Note to readers: If you don’t have money in the bank for emergencies, start saving now. Just take $20 a week and stash it away. I recommend setting up an ING account; it’s super easy to transfer money, and if it’s not in your checking account, you won’t spend it. It might not seem like much, but it adds up, and you have to start somewhere. 

Another fallacy of the evil banker stereotype is that it fails to recognize that the banker is a person too. He has bills to pay himself, with the money he makes from the interest payments on the money he loaned out. If people stop paying him, he can’t pay his own bills. He has to collect the money owed to him, especially after six or more months of lenience. 

The economy sucks. Three out of five homeowners in the country are upside down on their mortgages. Unemployment is high. People lose their homes when they stop making payments. This is not some evil banker’s fault, as Glee suggests, it’s just reality.

So we have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology.

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are “consistently” misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

Stewart’s response…

In short: “Yes, I lied, but look at how much Fox lies!”

The response is significant in two ways; first, Stewart’s subtly shifting the goalposts to cover the black eye this has given him. Minus a shred of context (such as “Who said these things on which program?” or “what are the criteria by which Politifact deems this a lie?” or “how frequently is Fox caught in a false statement that it doesn’t correct compared to other news networks?”), Stewart has quietly changed the conversation. Since he wasn’t in his element (constant brown-nosing) on Sunday, he slipped up and made a claim that could be refuted by statistics, so last night, given time to plan and after much ego massaging by his staff, Stewart could make safe, anecdotal charges against FNC as if they prove the same point as the lie he spat at Chris Wallace.

Second, his deflection reinforces the impressions we got from his recent incident with Steven Crowder:

1. Stewart is a coward. For those who aren’t aware of what I’m referring to, one of Stewart’s producers emailed Steven Crowder’s manager and literally said “we never book conservative pundits.” When Crowder made the message public, Stewart freaked out, and his producer intimidated Crowder’s manager until he severed ties with our fellow blogger for fear of being blacklisted. This wasn’t a move to save face; there was no more information to suppress; this was pure bullying. Crowder embarrassed Stewart, so Stewart tried to destroy an up-and-coming comic’s career.

To clarify his producer’s email remarks, he has conservative *pundits* on the show– suit-and-tie WASPs, dry political types who he knows will be on defense the whole time. He gets to own the debate by being the sole possessor of the Comedy card. If he dared to have a conservative comedian like Greg Gutfeld or Crowder, he might have someone who pushes back against him and beats him at his own game. He can’t let conservatives be funny in front of his audience; why, they might start believing crazy things, like conservatives can be funny! We see it in his recent interviews and debates with Bill O’Reilly; in an environment that Stewart can’t control, the Fox host gets to break this unspoken rule, taking witty, deadpan jabs at Stewart, himself, and the television culture in which they operate, much to the visible discontent of the Most Trusted Man in America. And that brings us right to our next point:

2. Stewart is incredibly thin-skinned. Any time someone goes on offense against him, Jon gets beyond indignant. We see it most clearly on his Sunday appearance; he’s practically snarling at Chris Wallace. Why? Because Wallace doesn’t treat him as the wizened statesman/hip cat persona the rest of the MSM has built up for him; Wallace treats him like this guy. Instead of going, “Oh, garsh, I guess my entire existence really is based around an organization designed solely for malevolent propaganda, and you’ve convinced me to do some soul-searching!”, Wallace challenges him to admit Fox is no worse than outlets like the New York Times. With the grace and poise of a college freshman, Stewart barks back his “consistently… every poll” nonsense. Because Wallace doesn’t automatically acknowledge him as the smartest guy in the room, he commits an unforced error, revealing that his hatred of Fox is an a priori prejudice, not an evidenced conclusion. And now he’s doing his best to tap dance around it with a number of anecdotes drawn from a multi-year period– a number we could match from a week’s worth of content from any other cable news network.

3. Stewart’s downfall will be his insistence that he’s not on the playing field. If we take just a smattering of the issues Stewart has covered in the past couple years– reasons for the Iraq war, waterboarding, 9/11 first responders, Stewart has gone full-on editorializing pundit multiple times, shoehorning the occasional sardonic joke into angry rants and gotcha-grasping interviews that would make Charlie Gibson vomit. Even progressive pundits see through it; he’s the only one with blinders big enough to deny the obvious. In an interview as fascinating as it is uncomfortable, Rachel Maddow spends 50 minutes trying to get him to admit that his schtick, on which she has shamelessly modeled her own schtick, is actually comparable to her schtick. Yet, by leveraging her undying admiration, Stewart pushes Maddow away again and again, going so far as to say outright, “we have no responsibility.”

He’s desperately trying to hold together the fantasy that his work exists in a vacuum devoid of any cultural significance– that whatever happens on his show stays on his show since he’s only on the sidelines– but the fantasy is falling apart faster than ever in the wake of this Fox interview; If he keeps it up much longer, he’s going to become the joke, like David Letterman has become to us (if you’re a Stewart fan, just switch out Letterman with Leno so you can understand that). And based on his response to the Politifact article about his Fox claim, we may look back at this whole affair as the moment that Jon Stewart officially jumped the shark.

Cross-posted at the Landmark Report.

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Daily Mail:

‘I’m a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there’s no question about that.

But the thing that you will never understand…is that Hollywood, yeah, they’re liberal, but that’s not their primary motivating force. I’m not an activist. I am a comedian.’

Addressing issues of bias in the main stream media, Stewart responded:  ‘Do I want my voice heard.

‘Absolutely, that’s why I got into comedy. Am I an activist, in your mind? A partisan ideological activist.

Mr Wallace answered with a short, ‘Yeah.’

‘Okay, then I disagree with you.’ Stewart said.

Rising in temper again, he said: ‘You can’t understand, because of the world that you live in, that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change because that’s the soup you swim in.

‘And I appreciate that, I understand it. It reminds me of in ideological regimes, they can’t understand that there is free media other places because they receive marching orders.’

Full piece here.