The film-focused network bought the rights to broadcast “The Kennedys” earlier this year, and the consternation over the film’s alleged mistreatment of its source drew plenty of eyeballs to the network.

Now, the cable channel’s newest special looks at some of the most controversial films ever made. Ten, in fact.

The latest installment of “Hollywood’s Top Ten,” airing at 7:30 p.m. EST tonight, counts down films which drew endless bickering around the time of their release. Some still draw heated debates amongst movie lovers today.

“Hollywoood’s Top Ten” executive producer Steve Holzer says the list came from a combination of online viewer voting and consultation with the network’s resident movie gurus, Leonard Maltin and Richard Roeper.

The Top Ten doesn’t include “Birth of a Nation” – “we know it’s a controversial movie for its time,” Holzer says – but the list spans the last 50 years of movie making.

By controversy, the network means the reaction to a film before and after it hit theaters, be it based on religious disagreements or cultural taboos being smashed.

“Some were very successful, and some were probably made more successful because of the controversy,” says Holzer, adding films like Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and “The Last Tango in Paris” didn’t make the final cut. “Had people not raised a ruckus, the films might not have been seen by that many people.”

Religion figures prominently in several selections, while other choices seem fairly tame by modern standards.

“Things that were so controversial 30-40 years ago, today with the onset of reality television and TMZ … people wouldn’t even blink at it,” he says.

One Top 10 selection Holzer would leak is the 1971 classic “A Clockwork Orange.”

“It was certainly controversial in its day and remains controversial, even though movies today get away with so much more,” he says.

One factor that became clear about the channel’s new list is the quality of the selections. The shock factor couldn’t hide the artistic merit of the chosen films.

“There’s not one movie on the list that’s a bad movie. They’re all well made, well acted and feature some of the most proficient directors who have ever worked in Hollywood,” he says.

Not every film turns out to be as button-pushing as expected. Some film controversies are much more smoke than fire.

“We ran into this with ‘The Kennedys,’” he says. “People had not seen it, and they thought they had seen leaked scripts. Then, it aired, and not one person raised an objection to the miniseries.”

He expects more fallout from the channel’s latest Top Ten program. In fact, he welcomes it.

“Lists like this are always controversial,” he says.

Stone’s thesis in a film designed to appeal to middle America is as follows: the military-industrial complex, allowed free reign under Eisenhower, killed Kennedy because he was trying to end the Cold War, especially in Cuba and Vietnam (the latter extremely important to the obsessed Stone).  Their point men were apolitical snipers, vengeful anti-Castroites, and a manipulated Oswald.  Far from being an angry leftist loner, Oswald was in fact a perpetrator for the more dovish elements of the American government’s schemes.  The low-level plotters included Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, and David Ferrie, a member of the Operation Mongoose team, a CIA operation in constant efforts to kill Castro.

Like all history lessons, the yardstick is whether further evidence has proved him correct.  On Shaw being a CIA agent, Stone was on sure footing: CIA Director Richard Helms admitted that the New Orleans defendant was an agent.  On Shaw and Ferrie knowing each other (a charge Shaw denied under oath at his trial in New Orleans), evidence in  the form of a car loan for Ferrie co-signed by Shaw has vindicated Stone.

But other revelations have not been so kind.  Far from being a patsy four  floors down from his supposed sniper perch, Oswald was shown in documents released after the film by the Dallas Police that his fingerprints were on the trigger of his Manlicher Carcano.  Re-created shooting by world-class snipers has shown that the head-shots did in fact come from the Sixth Floor Depository.  Computer analysis applied to the grassy knoll reveals that in order for a shot to have come from there the sniper would  have to have been on a forty-foot ladder (a stance that would have attracted notice).

Stone made much of the hobos rounded up by the DPD as being part of the assassination team (he even has the leader of the plot walking by and signaling them).  His evidence for this was in how they were never booked and were quickly released, but documents released by the DPD after the film revealed that the men in question were, in fact, hobos.

On Kennedy the dove, Stone has been invalidated.  He makes much of the American University speech in which JFK called for a reexamination of American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, but he says nothing about the bellicose anti-communist speech months later  in the “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” address.  Regarding Cuba, Kennedy was following a two track policy in the last days of his life.  On one hand, he was using intermediaries to seek normalization with Castro.  On the other, he had intensified efforts to kill the dictator (one congressman in the loop was shocked at how matter-of-fact Kennedy was when he told him).  And Kennedy had authorized the military to begin preparations for an invasion of the island in December 1963.

Stone, in his effort to hammer home his thesis, omits certain key elements known at the time.  Nowhere in the film is there any mention of Oswald’s efforts to kill the far right military man, General Edwin Walker–odd, because Oswald missing him from a grassy knoll-type perch would have bolstered Stone’s portrait of him as poor shot.  To do so would have shown Oswald’s ability to plan an assassination.  He never shows Kennedy’s complicity in allowing a coup to remove South Vietnam leader N’Go Diem–proof that the president was seeking a more receptive leadership in order to secure the conflict’s key goal–to win popular support.

In a key moment in the film, Stone has a Deep Throat-esque journalist character pose the real questions that should be asked about Kennedy’s death: (1) Why was Kennedy killed? (2)Who benefited? (3)Who has the power to cover it up?

In light of recent evidence, the answers are as follows : (1) Not only the frustrated anti-Castro Cubans, but also target Castro, his sympathizers, including Lee Harvey Oswald;  (2) Beneficiaries were  Castro (especially since the new president, Lyndon Johnson, horrified at Kennedy’s “goddam murder inc. in the Carribean,” turned Mongoose off; (3) The American government, but they could have done so less from their participation in the assassination and more from their participation in using the mob to kill Castro or fears of nuclear war should the truth come out.

Similar questions could have been applied to Stone.  Why did he make this film?  Answer: to continue his cinematic efforts to exorcise his Vietnam demons.  Who benefited?  Answer: The Hollywood Left, with their love affair with Castro and the aged Camelot mythifiers.  Who had the power to cover up alternative theories of the assassination  and ones at political odds with the film?  Answer:  scriptwriter Oliver Stone.

Like most Camelot propaganda merchants, Stone laments what might have been had the assassination failed.  His “American Gorbachev” might have stymied the right-wing madness of the sixties.  But Kennedy’s pattern was to assure the worst of all possible worlds.  Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, he assured Castro’s position by promising Kruschev that he would never invade and horse-traded away the US missile defense for Turkey.  He then continued assassination efforts, and his plans for a December 1963 invasion would have violated his promise to Kruschev and triggered an even more dire reprise of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  With Vietnam, he allowed a coup to remove Diem in order to continue the doomed US support of the South.    Because of Kennedy’s risk taking, “what might have been” might have been worse than under Johnson.

The trouble with propaganda masquerading as film is that facts keep up with and invalidate it.  The documents keep on coming, says George Orwell.  In the case of JFK they did, but without an equally skilled director, they may never filter into the consciousness of moviegoers.

According to the police report, a naked D-S-k pulled the woman into a bedroom, and sexually assaulted her. She fought, but he dragged her into the bathroom, where he forced her to perform oral sex. She escaped, told the hotel staff, who called police.

—–

Now in just about every article, three facts pop up.

One, that Strauss-Khan is known in France, as “the great seducer,” which means they must set the bar pretty low.

Using their standards, Ted Bundy’s a Casanova.

And then there’s the constant reminder of the French, jaded view toward a leader’s sexual appetites – a progressive, permissive attitude that lets them mock those repressed yanks.

Yep – the French are so evolved, that maybe this is no big deal.

She’s just a maid. She’s probably lying. It’s a trap.

My favorite line comes from an ecology Minister named Nathalie Koscuisko-Morizet , who says there is another “clear victim, which is France.”

That’s from a French lady.

Which is maybe why, a previous victim of Straus-Khan didn’t press charges. Tristane Banon was attacked, but says, “I didn’t want to be known, to the end of my days, as the girl who had a problem with the politician.”

Finally, we’re told this guy’s a socialist. Yet, here he is flying first class, renting a three grand a night room. and maybe attacking women.

But socialism is such a grand idea – so much bigger than those who champion it, that it never matters if said champion is a creep. Their awfulness is justified by their desire for social justice.

Which, historically, ends up killing millions anyway.

And if you disagree, you’re a racist homophobe.

Tonights guests:

Joe Devito

Lori Rothman

Krystal Ball

6.  “Nuclear weapons are awful.” – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

There are probably a few inventions that have saved more human lives and prevented more suffering than nuclear weapons.  The wars since World War II, when we quite properly dropped two A-Bombs on Japan and ended the slaughter, have been a mere shadow of what they would have been without our thermonuclear arsenal.  That’s just a fact, and all the posturing about the “insanity” of deterrence in this inexplicably beloved movie can’t change that.  You should love The Bomb.

—–

Of course, Dr. Strangelove provides a better idea than nuclear deterrence by wholeheartedly embracing anti-missile defense.  Nah, just kidding.  The film advocates nothing except ironic detachment, essentially abdicating any responsibility and simply complaining about a strategy that, well, worked.  And let me be blunt – it just doesn’t hold up after all these years.  There, I said it.  Except Slim Pickens – Slim will always rock.

7.  “Greed is not good.” – Wall Street (1987)

Oliver Stone makes his third appearance on this list with a searing indictment of the financial industry that overwhelmingly supported the Democrats in 2008.

Like most liberals and leftists, Stone is either unaware of the difference between greed and enlightened self-interest or he simply does not care.  But sadly, he has managed, for a whole generation of half-wits, to make the face of capitalism Gordon Gekko instead of Adam Smith.

Note that Stone recently released a sequel to Wall Street, Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (2010).  It cost $70 million to make but only grossed $52 million.  That’s okay, though, because Oliver Stone isn’t in it for the money.

8. “True courage means helping out the Nazis.” – The English Patient (1996)

John Nolte recently dissected the utter moral bankruptcy of The English Patient, but this astonishing film deserves another mention here.  Basically, the film approves of its hero’s selling out information to the Nazis in order to preserve his chance to score with his lame girlfriend.  I’ll rephrase that, because you probably think you read it wrong – this critically hailed motion picture’s position is that when you are given a choice between helping or not helping the Nazis, you should follow the instructions of your penis.

The problem isn’t that some screenwriter spews this kind of poison.  It’s that there are so many moral illiterates out there who mistake it for morality.  The English Patient was praised high and low for its profundity; in fact, at its heart it is nothing but a sickening, despicable ode to selfishness.  Greed may not be good, but apparently horniness is a virtue.  If you really dig a chick, so what if a few thousand guys battling Hitler get wasted?  Gimme a break.

At least The English Patient has a happy ending – the traitor gets burned up and dies, so it has that going for it.  You get to at least leave with a smile.

9.  “The CIA is both all-powerful and shockingly inept all at once.” – The Bourne Films (2002-2006)

What’s astonishing about the Bourne films, other than the fact that anyone watches these tiresome action retreads with a hero who cannot be defeated, deterred, or killed and a cinematographer who doesn’t own a tri-pod, is how the CIA is alternatively omnipotent and impotent.  When the plot requires it, the CIA can do anything it wants, right up until the plot needs it not to be able to.  Then it becomes less effective than the TSA on Quaaludes.

There have been a hundred films about the CIA, most picturing it as some sort of super spy force that has its wicked claws in pretty much everything around the world.  We wish!  The idea that American intelligence has an army of killbots designed to hunt down and eliminate our enemies at a moment’s notice would be totally awesome.  Sadly, the reality is more likely that any action request would get routed through three bureaus, six directorates, and a suite of lawyers before someone leaked it to the New York Times while the bad guy sips champagne with his hookers in a villa in Caracas.

10.  “The central tenet of Christianity is preventing teenagers from dancing.” – Footloose (1984)

As Hollywood understands it, Jesus brought the Ten Commandments to the people on a magic carpet largely because he wanted them to stop enjoying themselves.  And the first and most important commandment was that no Christian can ever dance.  It’s right there, written on the side of the Ark of the Covenant that Indiana Jones found.

Now, perhaps you missed these theological insights at Sunday school, but you gotta understand that the Hollywoodoid’s understanding of the religion embraced by most Americans is rather limited.  They know that Jesus is somehow involved, and that he has superpowers and can probably fly, and that everyone who is religious is repressed, and that to Christians all sex is bad.  Why red states like Utah seem to actually have a growing population while God-free blue zones like San Francisco are withering away is a question they never ask.

Now, Christians often complain that Hollywood doesn’t understand them, but they shouldn’t feel bad.  Hollywoodoids don’t understand any religion – they don’t discriminate in their ignorance.  Well, there is one religion they do understand and embrace wholeheartedly – leftism.  And if hackneyed lefty tropes constitute their sacraments, their pinko deity must be well-pleased.

Any attempt to pick the worst of the worst is bound to disappoint someone.  This list by no means contains all of the hackneyed, parochial, and just plain obnoxious bits of liberal received wisdom that the Hollywood brain trust has spewed forth over the years.  For every nitwit insight on the list, there are dozens more floating around the nether reaches of Netflix, waiting to annoy the unwary.  No doubt the commenters will find many more.

So, here my top ten in no particular order:

1. “All American Soldiers are psychos.” – Platoon (1986)

It’s pretty obvious that the American soldier is the greatest force for evil in all of human history – or it would be, if all you watched were post-Vietnam War Hollywood movies.  It seems that to most of the hacks in Hollywood, the mere act of donning an Army uniform turns you into a bloodthirsty killing machine with an appetite for murder.  And that’s not just on the battlefield.  In American Beauty (1999), the conservative Marine neighbor not only abuses his wife and son but murders people because he’s secretly gay!  That’s a liberal stereotype trifecta – they probably think it makes him a prime candidate for King of the Tea Party.

Oh, but they support the troops. See, it’s the system that turns these guys into monsters – a meme that lets the Hollywoodoids both trash the guys dumb enough to end up in uniform while at the same time showing how much they care for these pitiful “victims.”  So, it’s a win-win…or, more accurately, a libel-libel.

Platoon is a prime example of this despicable trend, made all the worse by the fact that Oliver Stone – who makes his first of his several appearances on this list – is a Vietnam vet.  This technically well-crafted slice of propaganda portrays American soldiers in Vietnam as near-savages barely able to contain their bloodlust long enough to function as a military unit.  What’s sad is that there are such things as war crimes, and soldiers can do wicked things, but Hollywood has zero credibility left to tell those stories. Regardless, Platoon sort of raises a question about Stone himself – either he’s a scumbag for slandering troops by accusing them of crimes he didn’t see them commit, or he’s a scumbag for seeing such crimes and not standing up to stop them.  Either way, Stone’s a scumbag.

2.  “All misfits, losers, and malcontents are inherently heroic.” – Animal House (1979)

No one loves Animal House more than I do, but one unfortunate legacy (besides convincing a generation of sheet-clad college drunks that they should try to sing Shout) is that it help popularize the very silly notion that somehow being a total failure confers upon you some sort of superior moral status.  Sure, the frat guys are a bunch of creepy jerks whose initiation practices would fit in at a Halloween party at Robert Mapplethorpe’s loft.  But in real life, weirdos, losers, and mutations like the Delta House guys are, well, weirdos, losers, and mutations.  Their antics may be amusing, but you just don’t want them trying to hang out with you.

Now, the Hollywood elite’s embrace of slobs is no surprise because the deadbeat demographic has become a vital and essential element of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.  Perhaps putting the lazy and stupid on a pedestal by depicting such doofuses as role models is really a kind of marketing campaign designed to increase their numbers.  Combined with the Democrats’ firm commitment to pro-parasite policies, like Obamacare and the expansion of other government handouts to layabouts who refuse to support themselves, maybe what we are seeing is part of a cultural conspiracy of shocking proportions.

Or maybe the Hollywoodoids are just too creatively lazy to do anything else.

3.  “Those darn conservatives killed JFK.” – JFK (1991)

Leave it to Oliver Stone to once again not let inconvenient truths get in the way of his conclusions.  Why should the fact that a commie piece of human waste who had defected to Russia and who was actively advocating for Cuba shot Kennedy keep Stone from making another technically great movie that instead posits a conspiracy including but not limited to the Pentagon, the CIA, General Motors, Denny’s restaurants, Microsoft, the state of Alabama, miscellaneous Norwegians, three of the Doobie Brothers, the Sham-Wow guy, shiny reverse vampires, and the mastermind, a 12-year old Rush Limbaugh.

We’re through the looking glass here, people.  Especially where Costner names noted tool of the rightwing capitalist conspiracy Arlen Specter as one of the ringleaders.  Yeah, that Arlen Specter.

4.  “Every American who is not an affluent urban elitist is a drooling degenerate.” – Deliverance (1972)

It’s always fun to see how the liberal elites in Hollywood and their comrades in D.C. and New York seem to look at the rest of their country like medieval folk looked at ancient maps – as if the lands beyond the fringes of the known world are described with the words, “Beware! Here be sodomites!”

Now, no one is parochial like a Hollywoodoid.  These folks think driving south of the I-105 requires a passport and heading east of the I-5 (except maybe to Vegas) requires vaccinations.  The fact that they know nothing of the world outside their manicured lawns is not surprising; the fact that they constantly portray it as at best quaint, but usually malignant, is just getting tiresome.

In reality, the insular Hollywood community of today, drawing as it does new blood only from the same set of prestigious schools and from the offspring of its own members, is more incestuous than any backwoods West Virginia hollow.

5.  “Nuclear Power is eeeeevvvvvviiiiiiilllllll” – The China Syndrome (1979)

Hanoi Jane stars as a crusading reporter in this cheap-looking relic that was shot with all the technical flourish of a very special episode of CHiPs.  Sure, we know that all corporations are evil, but The China Syndrome teaches us that the nuclear power industry is especially evil.  We know this because, well, anyone who opposes the liberal agenda is evil.

The title refers to the idea that a nuclear plant core meltdown would send the core deep into the earth, releasing a cloud of radiation that would destroy, well, if this movie is to be believed, pretty much everything.  This silly movie was lucky enough to come out around the time of the Three Mile Island incident, where a little radiation was released and nothing much happened.  Sadly, it gave ammunition to the liberal Luddites who oppose safe, clean nuclear power.  And who also oppose coal and oil power.  And hydroelectric power.  And solar power.  And wind power (at least in their backyards).

But on the plus side, when we have no electrical power at all, we’ll never have to watch crap like The China Syndrome again.

Stay tuned for Part II.

To say there’s nothing funny about this President is elevating him to the level of a deity, the way leaders are looked at in some third world totalitarian state. I’m quite certain that North Koreans cannot see anything funny about Kim Jong, Il, although the majority of the world thinks he is as entertaining as a circus midget. Ditto for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Paul Waldman’s piece is just another apology for the inability of the American Humor Industry to construct a proper satire on this President; a topic as ripe for satire as November apples. It’s such a shame, too.  Epic ineptitude has been a comedic staple since before the Three Stooges, all the way through to the era of Tim Allen. When Moe Larry and Curly are accidently mistaken for plumbers, you just know there’s going to be a flood.

This is unconscionable. From the days of JFK right up to the Bush Administration, I have enjoyed watching comedians mock the occupant of the White House with wild abandon. Open satire has always been the hallmark of a free society. A president that can’t be mocked is no longer a leader of a free nation

As Jeffrey pointed out, there are a lot of comics who have been fairly adept at coming up with Obama humor; they’re just not breaking into the mainstream. Those of us who enjoy talk radio might not even recognize the hands-off policy that the major comedy outlets have instituted for this fragile presidency; because the satirists of talk radio have been entertaining countless millions with their Obama comedy.

Paul Shanklin, nailed his voice years ago on the Rush Limbaugh Show. In some local radio markets, (like the Chris Baker Show in Houston and the Twin Cities & Jerry Agar in Toronto) comedian Tim Wilkins  does phone-ins as the President with an impression so accurate you would think it was real. Since these comics have never been on TV, elitist J-school bloggers probably don’t realize they’re already part of the national zeitgeist.

The obvious reason is that the majority of the talent coordinators for the late night talk shows and the cable networks are liberals. They are simply not going to greenlight a comic who fails to amuse them, and they see nothing funny about the current president. Remember, Fred Armisen was reprimanded with a CNN fact check for attempting what SNL viewers had been enjoying since the Ford era, so others have been lax to repeat his blasphemous act.

In the article, Waldman claims that maybe this president is just too cool. This isn’t the first time the allegation was made, David Letterman used to giggle about how cool the guy was too. (“Man, is he cool!”). Of course, anybody who has seen Obama golf, bowl ,or throw a baseball knows this is just preposterous. He can’t even dance. He is nerdy, and un-athletic with big ears and a girlish walk. Calling him “cool” is as unintentionally racist as the white fraternity notion that all black guys can play basketball

Which is the biggest reason for their scant ability to mock the president, and little tolerance for people who do. There is a residual shame in the white community leftover from the days of Amos and Andy, that has made it extremely difficult for anyone to go after a black president. Modern tradition in comedy holds that White Comics make fun of White People, and Black Comics make fun of White People.

Conservatives are labeled as racist for simply opposing health care, so if the Conservatives find anything funny about the President, you just know it’s going to be dismissed as hate. Meanwhile, shows like Evan Sayet’s Right to Laugh, and my own Stand-Ups for America are capitalizing on the inability of mainstream comedy to touch the President.

Which should stand as a warning to the mainstream comedy industry: If you continue to refrain from supporting the opinions held by over 50% of America, a segment  of the population that is growing larger with every recession vacation, you will eventually marginalize yourself out of business. 

Just ask the New York Times.

I think it’s because entertainment journalists seem to think he’s hot.

I mean, after all, Stone “is a man’s man… a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam “

Wow, a Purple Heart “for bravery” – glad we have the MSM’s famous layers of fact-checkers and editors hard at work making sure reporters don’t make basic, embarrassing errors.  But I digress.

The overriding theme of the profile – and Stone’s own personal narrative – is simply how hunky the auteur is.  Whether he’s palling around with Castro and Chavez or simply talking about his Daddy issues – which, trust me, are nowhere near as terrifying as his Mommy issues – we learn that Ollie is all-man, all the time.

“There seems an almost hyper-masculinity to Stone’s oeuvre,” coos the correspondent. She continues:

On paper, he’s so much the alpha male that, as one interviewer put it: “One expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair.” As well as his war record, there are his various arrests for possession of drugs, as well as his well-rehearsed views on monogamy (“unnatural”).

Cadwalladr spends a lot of time on his monogamy issues – “He is a self-confessed womaniser” – but she allows her subject to provide the reader with the cheery news that he has now found, after several marriages derailed by his rampant philandering, the perfect woman.  Apparently, he imported her from Asia, where they apparently put up with his kind of crap:  “She’s cool.  She’s Korean.  Different mentality.  Mutual respect… she laughs and trills and she sings when she speaks.  I love the sound of her voice.”

No stereotypes there.  Maybe next he’ll remake Teahouse of the August Moon.

—–

And then there’s his art.  “[O]ne of the most appealing aspects of Stone is the sheer depth and breadth of his interests and ambition,” she announces.  Recently, he’s made forays into pro-Chavez propaganda, pro-Castro propaganda, and anti-capitalist propaganda, but now he’s ready for a startling new direction with some anti-American propaganda. 

We’ve all heard how his new series, Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America, promises to put Hitler into context.  Well, apparently his brave vision is in danger.  As Cadwalladr breathlessly writes:

I fear for Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America. Oliver Stone will do it Oliver Stone’s way, whatever the critics think. He exhibits an artist’s singlemindedness, an ideologue’s obduracy.  If his ambition occasionally exceeds his talent, it’s not because his talent is small, but that his ambition is so very, very large.  The Alexander comparison is really not as far-fetched as it might seem: he really is trying to remould the world according to his vision. Watch out, world.

Oh my.  I can only hope she was wearing latex gloves when she made that paragraph happen.  And her article explores literal masturbation as well:

So, I ask him straight out: “Did your mother teach you how to masturbate?”

“Well, I can’t live with denial – sure.”

“She physically showed you?”

“It was no big deal. It’s not English. It’s French. It was no big deal.”

Look, I’m the last to stand up for the Frogs, but I’m not sure even they need to be tarred with that particular brush.  But I do think we’ve found a plausible explanation for why Stone is such a freak.

There’s also this:  “You have to understand that I grew up a Republican conservative,” Stone notes.  It’s unclear if he meant a Larry Craig Republican.

The point of all this is not that Oliver Stone is a dictator-hugging, drug-addled degenerate with an ego orders of magnitude larger than his talents.  It’s that the celebrity press refuses to call him on it.  Hollywood journalism is all Hollywood and no journalism.  Instead of challenging, probing inquirers, we get an uncritical cheering section that whitewashes the contemptible, narcissistic has-beens they profile.

The important issue is not that Ollie Stone is a creep – he is.  The problem is that he is insulated from his artistic failures by the hallelujah chorus just as he is protected from his personal ones.

Stone used to have a modicum of talent – Platoon is dreadfully overrated, but there are those who like Wall Street and JFK, for all its idiocy, was compulsively watchable.  Even Natural Born Killers, as contemptible, confounding and constantly violent as it was, showed some imagination.  But years of people telling Stone just how awesome he is have taken their toll. 

In the off chance you can even remember an Oliver Stone film of the last 15 years, it is likely as a punchline.  Alexander managed to make one of history’s most intriguing figures into one of the goofiest – what drug did he gobble that made him cast then-29 year old Angelina Jolie as then-28 year old Colin Ferrel’s mom?  Yet the closest the crusading Cadwalladr can get to criticism is the tepid, painfully diplomatic observation that “Stone’s passion projects haven’t always ended well.”  Ya think?

The Hollywood journalism circle jerk is a disaster, morally and artistically.  It enables awful behavior and it retards artistic growth.  A soft cushion of acceptance and excuses might soothe the ego of a guy like Stone, but it also ensures that he will never develop, never mature and never improve as an artist.  It is masturbatory in the truest sense of the word – a transitory amusement that tries to compensate for the lack of something real and meaningful.

Stone doesn’t need gentle caress from a Carol Cadwalladr; he needs a butt-kicking by a Simon Cowell.

Joining the Boston Pops on stage at the city’s famous Hatch Shell, Keith played his hit song “How Do You Like Me Now?” and his famous homage to the military, “American Soldier.”

The host of the event was late night TV personality Craig Ferguson, a native of Scotland, who’s such a fan of America that he became a United States citizen in 2008.

After Ferguson introduced Toby Keith, large screens on each side of the stage displayed footage of Keith’s work with the troops overseas. The video below shows the intro segment and Keith’s live performance of “American Soldier.”

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Overall, the evening’s entire program was very supportive of America’s military heroes. Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart led the orchestra in a musical tribute to the armed forces with uniformed men and women on stage to cheers from the massive crowd.

This July 4th, with the help of our military heroes, Toby Keith, the Boston Pops and a proud new American citizen from Scotland, we were all reminded of our potential as American patriots.

The program also included a video tribute to John, Robert and Ted Kennedy. I purposely saved this part for last to leave you with my favorite quote from JFK.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” – John F. Kennedy, January 1961

On that note, I hope you had a great 4th of July and God bless America.

Stone returned to the familiar territory of Vietnam with 1993’s “Heaven and Earth,” and the world said, “eh.” Claiming that film wore him out physically, mentally, and psychologically, he went looking for a more conventional movie to direct, and wound up with Quentin Tarantino’s script “Natural Born Killers.” He was going to make a popcorn movie. We should have known he was just messing with us. After all,  he was mentally and psychologically deranged way before 1993.

Unless Stone’s definition of a conventional, crowd-pleasing movie is a psychedelic art film with a flimsy story and unlikable characters, the only explanation for Stone’s claim is that he was lying. Still on a controversy high from JFK, Stone, slapped footage of OJ and the Menendez Brothers on the end of the movie, and helped Warner Bros. market the movie as a comment on America and the media’s obsession with celebrity and sensationalism. Ironically, if he’d stuck with Tarantino’s script, it would have been a stronger comment on all of the above, and it probably would have been a fun time at the movies.

I admit I really loved the movie when I saw it, but I’m pretty sure I fell for a load of horseshit. And I wasn’t the only one. Not that I don’t find certain sequences mesmerizing and others intense and involving. But back then, I thought the use of so many different formats (film, video, super-8 film) worked with the inter-cutting of snippets of commercials to give the impression that the viewer was channel surfing. The kineticsm of the editing and camera work effectively conveyed a mood and tone that reflected these themes. So, then, why did he make “Nixon” and “U-Turn” similarly kinetic and shaky and intense? Those films don’t employ all of the same techniques, but enough of them to wonder why he thought they would fit in any movie other than NBK (as a cooooooool guy I knew in college used to call it).

Still, I remain impressed with the interview sequence that ushers in the ridiculous prison riot climax of the film. We half-expect Mickey (Woody Harrelson) to be deep just because of movie conventions. But he’s an idiot to the end, claiming that he’s hardly responsible for his crimes, because, like a wolf, he’s simply doing what he was put on earth to do. He can’t help it, you see, because he’s an NBK (maybe that guy I knew was actually a dork). He’s a sort of victim, see, born a killer incapable of accountability which makes him a liberal hero, which explains the liberal media’s fascination with him.

In this sense, Mickey Knox is a great character for his time. He would have been totally at home on the Ricki Lake Show next to morbidly obese people who were not fat because they stuffed anything and everything they could find down their gullets, but because of their upbringing, genetics, or God.

I’m sorry Oliver, but as a *wink-wink* pro-Hugo Chavez filmmaker you can’t ask the Venezuelan strongman to let you film him pedaling around on a little girl’s bicycle and then not edit out the part where he falls off without giving away that subversive right-wing desire of yours to make a world-wide joke of a tyrant clown who hates your beloved America and cozies up to the terrorists who would do her harm. So don’t blame me. You blew your own cover.

And for those who doubt this theory, let me present to you the facts. Below are highlights from Stone’s illustrious career. Take a good look at what this patriot’s accomplished and then tell me he’s not a double agent for God and apple pie:

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SCARFACE (1983): Stone wrote the screenplay about the consequences of a feckless president (Carter) being duped by a dictator (Castro) into letting a bunch of criminals into the country. If there’s a stronger and more effective piece of anti-open border propaganda, I have yet to see it. Stone was ahead of this curve by a full quarter of a century.

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WALL STREET (1987): Pure genius. Hands down the greatest recruitment tool for Wall Street ever produced, and done so with Leftist Hollywood’s money. Stone so romanticized the business of finance that Wall Street was flooded with young men wanting to get their greed-is-good on.

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BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989): After winning the Oscar for “Platoon,” Stone could make any film he wanted and chose the most damning portrayal of dirty, filthy, narcissistic, anti-war hippies ever.  Tom Cruise portrays Ron Kovic, a heroic individual who fought for his country in Vietnam, but the director (who would win his second Oscar) turns him into one of the most unlikable screen protagonists of the last 25 years.

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THE DOORS (1991): Stone does it again, this time portraying the baby boomer’s precious sixties as a hedonistic nightmare of drug addiction, domestic violence, and open paganism. Jim Morrison’s legions of poorly dressed worshippers (and the surviving Doors) were furious at Stone’s deconstruction of their precious idol.

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JFK (1991): An absolutely brilliant film, maybe the best of the decade, and the finest piece of reverse-propaganda ever committed to celluloid. Stone wraps his cinematic ridicule of the Grassy Knollers into a wild fever dream of outlandishly stupid conspiracy theories knowing that the result would be a renewed interest in the JFK assassination in the era of computer technology and forensic science. And now, thanks to both those sciences, we no longer doubt Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone. Yes, we owe Oliver Stone a debt of gratitude for helping to heal the deepest national wound of the 20th Century.

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NIXON (1995): Only Nixon could go to China and only Stone could ask us to feel sorry for the crook.

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WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006): This is where Stone almost screwed up and let his true self show. Like every other rational American, the director made the mistake of thinking Hollywood would finally turn around and rally to their country’s side in the war against Islamic terrorism after the attacks of September 11th. Obviously, when Stone looked over his shoulder and found himself alone he realized he had made the same mistake we all did.

But ever the genius spy, he rallied quickly with…

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W. (2008): To save President Bush from further cinematic embarrassment, Stone wisely got ahead of the Hate-Filled Hollywood Hack Brigade to intentionally produce a money-losing Bush bio so embarrassingly awful it would poison the well and make it impossible for anyone to even consider making another. Mission accomplished.

And Stone’s 4th of July gift to America this year…?

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SOUTH OF THE BORDER (2010): Stone completely blows his cover as an obvious right-winger by simply going too far in acting the Useful Idiot. No one is this useful of an idiot.

For 78 minutes that feel like a bad “60 Minutes” segment that never ends; Stone’s on-camera, running around South America interviewing Leftist leaders of various countries who hate America. After making kissy-face with Hugo, the director then heads South to chew coca leaves with Bolivia’s Evo Morales, during — ironically (or not?) — a discussion about how the DEA is just another tool of American Imperialism. After the coca leaves take effect, the subtitles should’ve read AWKWARD when Stone asks Morales to step outside the Presidential Palace so the two of them can kick around a soccer ball. Obviously star-struck, Morales agrees and the result is like a deleted scene from Chaplin’s “Great Dictator.”

Michael Moore makes an appearance bawling out CNN’s Wolf — I lost on Jeopardy – Blitzer for waiting until 2007 to get angry with Dick Cheney; Stone gushes to Chavez, “I’ve never seen such energy, never,” and later asks (no joke) Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner how many pairs of shoes she owns. But the topper is how the two-time Oscar winner continually spits out the words “capitalism” and “privately-owned media” as though they’re both bad things.

The documentary is unforgivably dull and the America bashing repetitive. “Border” isn’t even well produced. Instead of coloring the subtitles yellow, they’re white and at times impossible to read. And Stone just tries too hard to convince us he’s a left-wing dupe. The soaring, over-the-top score that accompanies every speech Chavez gives about the people’s revolucion is right out of a Zucker brothers’ spoof.

So obvious are the lies here, that the New York Times – The New York Times – felt compelled to fact check. But even they missed some obvious ones. Are we really supposed to believe President Bush told one of these leaders that war is the answer to a bad national economy? Stone never questions that little anecdote. He just shakes his head knowingly before yukking it up with Uncle Fidel’s tyrant brother.

If anything, the premise of Stone’s agitprop is all about hair-splitting. The director’s indignant that the American media, especially Fox News, refers to Chavez as a dictator. My guess is that Chavez would prefer being called a dictator on Fox and Friends as opposed to being seen on big-screens throughout the world falling off his little sister’s bike.

But that’s Stone’s brilliant right-wing master plan, right? What else could it be? The only other answer is that he’s laughably incompetent….

Nah, he’s one of us.