73 year-old, two time Academy Award-winner Jane Fonda spends 4200-plus words “explaining” her infamous 1972 trip to Hanoi where she was infamously photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese (translation: the enemy) anti-aircraft gun (translation: a weapon used to kill American pilots).

It’s a long, anguished, intellectually dishonest rationalization from the aging actresses titled: “The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi.” 

Not sure it’s worth a read. Up to you. But the real meat is buried under thousands of words:

That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people’s attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we’d been hearing about.

I arranged the trip’s logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.

Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)

The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.

Imagine Jane Fonda’s father Henry Fonda (who, by the way, enlisted to fight in WWII)  saying, “In 1942, the Nazis invited me to Berlin where I was photographed on a Tiger II tank but I also did a bunch of other stuff while I was there, so please judge me by the full context of my trip to Berlin.”

Hilariously, to keep the focus off her fraternizing with an enemy desperate to kill American and allied troops and in the process of  subjugating the sovereign nation of South Vietnam into the slavery of Communism, Fonda crybabies about all the lies told about her trip, especially those told on the Internet. This is a semantic ploy meant to distract from her many serious critics who need not make a single thing up or exaggerated in the least to reveal her actions as despicable and outright traitorous.

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[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

They say exposing Hollywood’s liberal sucker punches is like a drug, and Big Hollywood’s secret script source had just handed one over that was practically ticking:  The Adjustment Bureau, coming out in March.  John Nolte ran down the situation for me:  Zinn-loving Hollywood half-wit Matt Damon is the star.  He plays a liberal politician.  And since it’s a fantasy, the liberal politician is the hero.

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This could have been the H-Bomb of sucker punch movies.  I knew that if I didn’t handle it just right it could detonate and splatter me with razor sharp shards of progressive clichés and jagged fragments of left-wing memes.  “Suit me up,” I said, “I’m going in.”

Sweat collected on my furrowed brow.  I cut the red wire.  Nothing.  I cut the blue wire.  Nothing.   I had defused a sucker punch dud.   

I was actually let down.  Where was the thrill?  I felt like trotting over to Safeway and acting bewildered by all the choices in the cereal aisle.

Sure, I’m disappointed – you don’t need me if a movie doesn’t treat half its audience like borderline morons.  But The Adjustment Bureau still has some important lessons – like how to be a liberal, make movies according to your vision, and still not gratuitously alienate potential moviegoers.

First, a quick look at the plot.  We’re not here to blow the lid off of the script’s surprises, so if you want more detail it’s probably lurking out there on the web.  In short, the story involves the aforementioned Matt Damon as a liberal congressman with a fateful destiny that an unexpected infatuation threatens to derail.  The infatuee is a quirky ballet dancer – she’s wacky in a kind of “Look at me! I’m wearing Doc Martens with this vintage prom dress!” kind of way that is only slightly less tiresome on-screen than it is in real life.  (more…)

When I read that 72-year old Jane Fonda was about to release two new workout DVDs “geared to the 100 million Baby Boomers and older adults,” two words kept popping into my head: “Hanoi Jane.” (I had a similar experience when she tried to re-emerge as a viable actress in Hollywood with the movie “Monster-in-Law” in 2005. Except the words that kept coming to mind then were “traitor” and “back-stabbing communist sympathizer.”)

What is Fonda’s deal? Doesn’t she know that real Americans have been sick of her since she took North Vietnam’s side during the Vietnam War? Does she really think she can pose for pictures in her workout clothes in 2010 and we’ll somehow forget about her posing for pictures with a North Vietnamese Anti-Aircraft gun in 1972?

Surely she knows we’ll never forget the radio broadcast she made to the North Vietnamese population in August 1972: a broadcast in which she referred to American fighting forces as “U.S. imperialists,” bragged that President Nixon would “never be able to break the spirit of [the North Vietnamese] people,” and then said Nixon “would do well to read…poetry written by Ho Chi Minh.” (It was during this same trip to North Vietnam that Fonda referred to our soldiers as “war criminals” and accused American POWs of lying when they alleged that the North Vietnamese had tortured them.) (more…)

Zen masters find that they are better able to focus their minds by mediating upon unanswerable questions.  What is the nature of existence?  Is there a God?  Why does Hollywood still consider John Cusack a movie star?”

You all know John Cusack– he’s that vaguely good-looking guy who, for about 25 years has turned his benign, angsty presence into a movie meal ticket.  He was kind of the Michael Cera of the 80’s, playing pretty much the same mildly amusing, smirky character in a series of films that are remembered more fondly for the nostalgia they provoke than for any intrinsic value.

Better Off Dead was okay, I guess – I was hammered when I saw it on dollar night in 1985. One Crazy Summer was okay, I guess – I was hammered when I saw it on dollar night in 1986.  Do you see a theme?

John Cusack is cinematic wallpaper.  Has anyone in recorded history ever said, “Dude, we MUST see this new flick.  It’s got CUSACK, man.  He’s EPIC!”  That’s as likely as saying, “I partied with Lindsay and Paris last night and this morning I didn’t itch!”

Cusack is most fondly remembered for his role as Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything (1989).  But not by me, since I found it unwatchably precious, a kind of manifesto designed to reassure terminally sensitive nonconformists that their inability to connect with normal people marked them as superior beings lesser mortals could never comprehend instead of marking them as the tiresome losers they usually are.  It does not hold up.  Also, that Peter Gabriel song he plays in the famous boombox-over-the-head scene sucks. (more…)

It’s time to take on the most important issue facing American conservatives today: Can a self-respecting right-winger be a fan of Alec Baldwin?

The answer is “yes.”  Allow me to demonstrate why:

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Now, that clip from 30 Rock is, without a doubt, one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever seen.  Bizarre, obnoxious and unbelievably politically incorrect, it’s a welcome reminder that television need not be a soul-sucking void of mindless time-killing.

Baldwin was awesomely amoral in Miami Blues.  He was awesomely arrogant in Malice.  He was just plain awesomely awesome in Glengarry Glen Ross.  And as NBC Vice-President of Television and Microwave Cookery Jack Donaghy, he continues his track record of awesomeness and fully deserves his multiple awards and nominations.  But does he deserve a conservative’s appreciation? (more…)