Late last week, Emmy award-winning producer Joel Surnow (co-creator of “24″) was gracious enough to give me a sizable chunk of his time for a broad-ranging interview that touched on everything from the current controversy surrounding the History Channel’s decision to dump the ”The Kennedys” to Hollywood’s overall treatment of all things conservative to something I’ve always found interesting, how “24″ made right-wingers fall in love with President David Palmer, a Democrat. 

We start with “The Kennedys.”

For those of you new to planet Earth, Surnow’s the Executive Producer of “The Kennedys,” a $30 million, eight-part miniseries that just completed a successful cable run on the Reelz Channel. It starred Hollywood heavyweights Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Tom Wilkinson, and Katie Holmes and was originally set to air on the History Channel, until a last minute decision was made by the parent company’s board (Hearst, ABC Disney, NBC Universal) that the series didn’t meet History Channel’s standards.

No one bought that excuse for a second because at the center of this political storm sat Surnow, one of the rare, openly conservative players in Hollywood. From day one, the leftist knives were out and the narrative created that a conservative producer was determined to produce a hit-job against liberal Camelot. As early as last year, a left-wing documentary filmmaker launched a direct attack on the series that garnered a lot of attention and likely led to some of the the surviving members of the Kennedy family to successfully pressure History’s board to dump a completed project. 

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It’s easy to be cynical about the movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ stories. Earlier this year there was “Dear John” (which I reviewed here), a sentimental, adolescent, old-fashioned romance. And so is “The Last Song,” but this is a stronger film than its predecessor that manages to overcome its flaws thanks to an idealistic story about young love.

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A couple of young siblings are sent to their estranged father’s house for the summer. Singer Miley Cyrus and Bobby Soleman play the brother and sister, Ronnie and Jonah Miller, who are both unhappy to find themselves forced to spend time with their old man, Steve Miller (played by Oscar-nominee Greg Kinnear). While sulking and adrift in teen angst, Ronnie (Cyrus) meets a local boy and starts to fall in love with him. The boy, Will Blakelee, is played by Liam Hemsworth, and he charms his way into dating the new girl in town.

The story focuses on Ronnie’s budding relationship with Will and her damaged relationship with her father. The former relationship quickly develops even though Ronnie’s first impression of Will is negative, to say the least. The romance is an innocent and sentimental one depicting Will as a rich young lad whose parents are predictably not impressed by Will’s new and less-privileged girlfriend. The love story is sometimes dorky and goofy but the characters are likable and the couple does have chemistry. (more…)

The Hollywood adult drama is dead. Any talk of resurrecting it is futile. Nihilism and leftism killed it. It’s gone. If you miss it, get Turner Classic Movies.

A genre still salvageable, though in need of CPR stat, is the smart Hollywood comedy. These days, it seems were stuck with only an increasingly desperate Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell, the Judd Apatow gross-out collection, and overheated romantic comedies based on lame concepts like “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” or lamer still, catchphrases: “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “What Happens in Vegas.”  

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And while the Hollywood comedy may not be dead, every time I think it deserves to be killed there’s a spark of life, and most recently that spark came from “Ghost Town,” a delightful, heartfelt little sleeper from last year starring The Mighty Ricky Gervais and two actors I normally don’t care for: Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni (both have a television-level presence and project less warmth than ice). (more…)