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Posts Tagged ‘Hollywood bias’

Don Surber

10 Cinematic Clichés That Must Live!

by Don Surber

James Hudnall had a right-on post about 10 Cinematic Clichés That Must Die!, which he followed up with 10 more. I agree, but I offer my list of characters to replace them.

1. The Crazed Vietnam Vet. It started in the 1970s when Hollywood wanted a character whose violence could be excused as the work of the government. The original “Rambo” movie was actually this very cliché.

Far more interesting is the character Noah, played by Chris Klein in “The Valley of Light,” about a World War II hero who comes home to find the family farm sold off, his parents dead and his brother is in jail. Very quietly, he puts to great use the maturity he had tempered in war, and the movie (spoiler alert) ends with him letting the catfish go. (more…)

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Posted Jan 29th 2009 at 7:40 am in Entertainment, Media Criticism | 58 Comments

Chris Muir

Hollywood And Media Forget Half The Nation

by Chris Muir

I must confess to enjoying this election cycle; wherein Democrats (a party whose platform is unabashedly liberal) have jettisoned the bothersome linearity of doing what one says in favor of saying what one does to a degree that makes the stiff segues to falsehoods by politicians past seem positively glacial. This distinction between theory and application seems, these days, to be minimal and without risk. Perhaps it saves them energy, not actually doing what they say. Very Green of them, very Kyoto-ish.

And yet, their promises hang on awkwardly out there in the Internet, in Google Caches of Shame, forever contradicting their (lack of) action. You would expect some embarrassment on their part; you would be wrong. Blagojevich and his hair is out there jogging with a smile (have you ever seen a jogger smiling?) and when confronted with a media question that actually isn’t rhetorical, Hillary goes into her I-see-into-the-back-of-your-skull® look. And Reid, poor fellow, twists the English language into merely horrific shapes to explain himself. (more…)

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Posted Jan 21st 2009 at 7:35 am in Media Criticism, Politics | 28 Comments

Dallas Jenkins

Does Hollywood Love Christians Now?

by Dallas Jenkins

After my first feature film Hometown Legend had been sold to Warner Brothers, I had some meetings with the WB marketing team in 2001. Near the end of their presentation, I said, “Now you know that this film has some faith elements in it, and my Dad (the executive producer) wrote the Left Behind books, so we could take advantage of his fan base and also promote the film to churches and youth groups.” After an awkward pause where I assume they were expecting me to explain myself, they had two questions: “What are the Left Behind books, and what are youth groups?” After another awkward pause where I expected them to say they were kidding, I replied, “The Left Behind books have sold over 30 million copies, and youth groups are where the young people in a church gather every weekend and/or Wednesday night for an hour or so.”

They adjusted their marketing plan.

This was before the Left Behind movies sold a few million DVD’s and The Passion of the Christ opened to over $100 million despite being set 2000 years ago in a dead language. Now every studio in Hollywood is looking for “faith-based” projects, especially because this year’s highest-grossing independent film was Fireproof, produced by a church for about $700,000 and which grossed over $30 million. Several studios even have faith-based divisions.

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Posted Jan 5th 2009 at 9:40 pm in Entertainment | 31 Comments