—–

“Captain America: The First Avenger” is set in the latter half of World War II.  The action begins with a scrawny Steve Rogers (a digitally depreciated Chris Evans) doing everything he can to enlist in the U.S. Army.  Rogers has all kinds of heart, but he’s gaunt and is thus 4-F.  The plot turns when an impassioned speech to a friend (“There are men laying down their lives.  I have no right to do any less than them.”) catches the ear of Dr. Abraham Erskine (a very Stanley Tucci Stanley Tucci).  Erskine is a German scientist who is working with the U.S. Army to develop a Super Solider Serum–the ultimate performance enhancing drug–and is on the lookout for a test subject.  The serum amplifies what’s inside of you, so someone of Rogers’ size and character makes him the perfect candidate for this breakthrough procedure.  Erskine and engineer Howard Stark (father of Tony) put Rogers in what looks like a retro-50s refrigerator, crank up the dials until all the power in the building short-circuits, and out comes this guy:

So what does the Army do with the most-badass solider ever to exist on earth?  They use him as a propaganda tool, of course!  Rogers goes state to state shilling war bonds in elaborate stage productions as the character Captain America.  At first, Captain America is played for laughs; the stage shows are absurd and Rogers is no more than a jingo indoctrinating the public.  The show is an acid-trip of brightly colored American flags that are starkly contrasted with an otherwise dimly-lit movie.  Not content to profiteer for the war industry, Rogers ultimate breaks away and goes off to fight his future nemesis, Johann Schmidt, aka Red Skull (played with typically villainy awesomeness by Hugo Weaving).

There are a handful of legitimately patriotic moments that were a treat to watch.  One such scene is when the under-sized yet hopeful Rogers longingly watches a recruiting video with a perfect balance of pride and jealousy; the scene will make not a few of you want to enlist on the spot.  Another moment that should give conservative viewers the warm-and-fuzzies is when one character exclaims that the success of the procedure that turned a normal young man into a Super Solider is the “first step on the path to peace.”  Imagine if that was said every-time the real military developed a new type of bomb or unmanned drone?

But, predictably, these moments are offset by a smattering of mini-sucker punches.  Clichéd racist, sexist, and stupid American soldiers abound and are constantly being outsmarted or needing their asses saved by Captain America and his personal motley crew of multi-colored troops (including a French drunk guy) you’d think he plucked out of a United Colors of Benetton ad (joke hat tip: Mr. Breitbart).  When the War is won, we see a celebration scene in the streets of the United… Kingdom.  Rogers’ love interest is sexy-feminist (not an oxymoron after-all) Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who is an American in the comics but is British in the film.

A credits sequence that’s pure Americana leaves you with a good taste in your mouth, but I can’t help but wonder if the same one will appear in the cut of the film that is seen overseas.

The movie is typical of Hollywood in the 2011: What it lacks in deep, compelling storytelling, it makes up for with excellent production quality.  There were many appealing performances (along with a handful of caricatures), and the film has a nostalgic look that captures the era with just the right amount of modern flair.  Evans is solid as our hero; strong, charismatic, yet vulnerable, and I didn’t catch him Blue Steeling even once.  A scene where Captain America chases a car… by foot… is pure fun and the movie’s payoff sets up “The Avengers” (due out next summer) quite nicely.  Stick around until the very end for a teaser for “The Avengers,” and do take note of how Captain America’s suit has all of a sudden gone from the dull coloration that inspired our ire a few months ago to a brighter, more authentic blue.

Still, in the well-paced two hours, I can’t think of one bold decision when it comes to the plotting or the characters.

It’s also worth drawing attention to a bizarre story-line that Captain America isn’t fighting the Nazis as much as he’s fighting Schmidt/Red Skull’s extra-nasty fringe sect.  It seems unnecessary to have nuance when it comes to the Nazis in this case, considering the bad guys are supposed to be pure evil.  The Nazis were the ones that carried out the Holocaust and sought to dominate the world, and that’s who Captain America fought in the comics!  Lou Loumenick over at the New York Post thinks Paramount may have made this call so as not to piss off any German movie-goers.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to complain about how patently distracting and unnecessary this 3D experiment has been.  (Social liberals like to argue that one day we’ll look back on this time and think we all supported same-sex marriage; I think we’ll look back on it and remember hating 3D movies.)

The line that best encapsulates “Captain America: The First Avenger” came early on in the film when Dr. Erskine asks Steve Rogers, “Do you want to kill Nazis?”  Rogers replies, “I don’t want to kill anyone.  I don’t like bullies.”  I hate bullies, and all of you on the Bigs Team know that we strive to fight them every chance we get, and it was good on Hollywood to give us a hero dedicated to standing up to them.  Yet, standing up to bullies is not specifically American (think the British who fought along side us in World War II or the Iraqis who fight with us now, just to name a couple), and I think Captain America would want to kill Nazis.  It’s a decent line, it’s a decent film, it just doesn’t soar in that magical way we all hope something called “Captain America” will when the lights go down in the theater.

The IMDB description of the film states that Captain America is “a superhero dedicated to defending America’s ideals.”  Dennis Prager is keen to note that American values are best summed up on your coin: e pluribis unum (“out of many, one”), in God we trust, and liberty.  None of these ideals are seriously touched upon in Joe “Jumanji” Johnston’s film.  This Captain America is a hero of unquestioned bravery, but he’s more interested in the general and unspecific “doing the right thing” and having his friends’ backs.  That’s all well and good and makes for a very likeable lead character, but it’s just not uniquely America, and you can bet that’s by design.

As a retired Air Force veteran, I viewed this movie from a slightly different vantage point than one who has never served in our armed forces. And I loved every minute of this fast-paced, heart-stopping, riveting movie…silently cheering on the small platoon of courageous Marines, led by 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez (Ramon Rodriguez), sent out on what seemed like a suicide mission to rescue a few stranded civilians in Santa Monica before the Air Force was to completely level the entire city that had fallen to a devastating alien invasion.

What was originally reported to be meteors falling into the ocean along the Los Angeles coastline (as well as the coastlines of 20 other major cities around the world) was quickly determined to be a well-orchestrated invasion of a massive force of seemingly impossible-to-kill aliens… and they were everywhere… annhilating everything and everyone in their path.  As I watched the fast-paced, chaotic, and gripping action unfold, I often found myself holding my breath and sitting on the edge of my seat — myheart racing wildly, pulling for our heroes.  It has been a long time since I’ve been to a movie that left me exhausted like that, in a good way.

I appreciated how they introduced each member of the platoon and gave us a little insight into their frame of mind just prior to their embarking on this terrifying mission, setting the stage for some of the heart-wrenching actions and decisions that occurred throughout the movie.  It made them more real to me, as real as the stories and situations faced every day by our men and women deploying overseas into hostile combat zones.

The main hero of the movie, Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), was very convincing as a tough, no-nonsense, war-weary Marine.  In spite of having just gotten his retirement papers signed — a man who was struggling with some demons from his past (something not uncommon to our brothers and sisters who have served in a war zone) — SSgt Nantz displayed the kind of leadership, ingenuity, courage, selflessness, and compassion commonly found in the members of our military, most especially in our Marines, who are always on the front lines … and go where few dare to go.

I love that the movie producers hired members of our Marine Corps to serve as Technical Advisers during the filming of this movie to ensure every shot rang true to how Marines operate in battle and that the cast members had endured three weeks of intensive Boot Camp where they had no mobile phones, no television, no internet and no contact with the outside world.  They all slept in the same big tent, ate rations together, and acted like a cohesive Marine unit, wearing 40 pounds of gear at all times and staying in character between takes.

That rocks.

Coincidentally, I found myself relating to and rooting for the tough-as-nails Tech Sergeant Adriana Santos (Michelle Rodriguez) who was in Air Force Intel (I spent my 20 year AF career in this field), and kicked ass with the military hardware (pictured below with an M4A1 carbine).  Never fired one of those but have no problems handling an M-16 or a 9mm.

I thoroughly enjoyed the intensity and suspense of this movie, never knowing what to expect next.  Yet, according to Ebert:

“In a good movie, we understand where the heroes are, and where their opponents are, and why, and when they fire on each other, we understand the geometry.  In a mess like this, the frame is filled with flashes and explosions and shots so brief that nothing makes sense.”

 Clearly he has never been on a real battlefield.  War is hell.  And in today’s largely asymmetrical conflicts in the Middle East, it is every bit as chaotic and unpredictable as depicted in this movie.

It is no wonder the critics on the left panned this movie the way they did.  It is a pride-filled drama that highlights true heroism, military might, camaraderie, friendship, and forgiveness.  There were some very poignant moments in the movie that made my eyeballs sweat a bit and the popcorn hard to swallow having to negotiate its way past the large lump in my throat.  My heart swelled with pride at how these fine warriors took on every unpredictable, dangerous situation they encountered with uncommon valor — fighting for their families, their homes, their country.  They showed what true heroes are made of … and it made me think of all our brave men and women currently deployed who face unknown dangers, not knowing if they will ever see their loved ones back home again. 

God bless them.

I couldn’t help but notice some parallels in this movie to what we are experiencing right here in our own country.  These Marines faced an unknown, ruthless enemy who wanted our resources and were bent on destroying anything and everything standing in the way of achieving their objective.  There was a scene where one of the civilians being rescued, a young boy named Hector, told his father “Maybe we should try to talk to them.  Maybe they just want to be our friends”.  Sound familiar?  Sorry.  That doesn’t work when the enemy wants you dead…at all cost.

Honor, courage, service-before-self, love of country, and faith (love the close up shot of one of the Marines’ Bibles and the highlighted words “Through Christ comes freedom.”) …all things foreign and distasteful to the left and all the more reason for you to head to the theaters and enjoy.  As a strong proponent of promoting conservative art (music, films, etc.), I enthusiastically recommend this movie.  Go see it.  Let’s make it #1 for the third week in a row!

P.S.  And to our brothers and sisters in the Corps (the “ps” is silent for those who don’t know) …Godspeed and Semper Fi.

But this time he ratcheted things up a few notches. His first column immediately following the most recent Oscars telecast was not just another pooh-poohing of the liberal bias stereotype, but an assertion that the Oscars actually proves the reverse.

Patrick Goldstein

Witness his eyebrow-raising title: “‘The King’s Speech’: The Triumph of Hollywood Conservative Values.” Wow. Not only is conservative griping about Hollywood unjustified, but we have in fact triumphed. Culture war over, people. In your face, Matt Damon! Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out, Sean Penn!

The article begins, “[I]t’s become an article of faith in Conservative America that Hollywood is a ‘collection of hopeless la-la-land liberals — or worse, an elitist gaggle of heartland-bashing snobs.’” Notice how Goldstein refers to it as an “article of faith,” as if this perception of Hollywood is not based on evidence but is as insubstantial and unprovable as the existence of God. After all, how else could Conservative America possibly have ever gotten such an impression?

He continues: “Conservatives have routinely ridiculed Oscar movies for attacking the military (Avatar), promoting homosexuality (Milk and Brokeback Mountain) and depicting corporate executives as evil villains (The Constant Gardener and Syriana).”

Good start, Mr. Goldstein, but don’t stop there; Conservative disappointment and frustration with Hollywood don’t stem only from a handful of Oscar nominees. They derive also from Hollywood’s general proclivity for rewriting history, burying inconvenient historical truths, attacking the Bush administration’s response to the war on terror, sucker-punching heartland audiences, cravenly appeasing our enemies, tearing down conservative heroes while embracing dictators, and whitewashing Islam while denigrating Christianity.

Oddly affirming what Big Hollywood has been pointing out all along, Goldstein proceeds to admit that this conservative “article of faith” actually is grounded in reality: “Since the arrival of the Easy Rider generation in the late 1960s, Hollywood has been a bastion of liberalism.” Thank you. “It may be a town full of liberals” – thanks again – “but when it comes to its most prestigious awards show, the most exalted statuettes went to films that espouse conservative values.”

Really? The winners were pro-family films that promote limited government, fiscal restraint, adherence to the Constitution, and a strong national defense? I must have nodded off when those elements had walk-on roles in, say, The Social Network. Meanwhile, it certainly could be argued that the one film conservatives were most rooting for was Waiting for Superman, a documentary that was tellingly excluded from consideration.

As evidence that the Oscars was a “triumph of Hollywood conservative values,” Goldstein notes that “all the la-la-liberals” spent the night “honoring their elders and celebrating tradition.” Sorry, but I fail to see how a clip from Gone With the Wind and extended screen time for Kirk Douglas and Bob Hope constituted a conservative coup. True, it could have been worse: a tribute to Howard Zinn, for example.

As further proof, he notes that this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay winner The Social Network “is far from a liberal critique of capitalistic excess. It’s a thoroughly pro-business film.” I’m not buying this simplistic, disingenuous analysis; I’m more inclined to agree with iconoclastic critic Armond White that The Social Network glamorizes “moral confusion, social decline and empire building — although leaving out… the moral consequences of all that glorified disconnection.”

The supposed knockout punch of Goldstein’s argument is that The King’s Speech won Best Film, a movie that was “brought into the world by a host of ardent liberals” and yet “is a profoundly conservative film,” “a fable of egalitarianism,” “resolutely Old School… Could a movie be any more richly conservative in its values than that?”

Besides the fact that “egalitarianism” – at least in the crushingly anti-individualistic sense in which the totalitarian Left reveres it – is not an especially conservative ideal, I’m not certain how “Old School,” whatever that is, represents the apex of “richly conservative” values. Perhaps he thinks that nothing is more satisfying to all us stuffy old white conservatives than a big-budget Masterpiece Theater.

“If you study Oscar history,” Goldstein lectures, “you see liberal Hollywood has often rewarded films promoting conservative values”: Patton beat out MASH, for example, The Deer Hunter won over the openly antiwar Coming Home, etc., all the way up to last year’s The Hurt Locker and now The King’s Speech. Of course, it’s more likely that those films won for a variety of reasons, including because they were better than the competition, not because the Academy appreciated and identified with any conservative values that might have been present.  But even granting Goldstein his point, one could point to liberal Oscar winners as well – American Beauty, anyone? Crash?

How does Goldstein explain his claim of the paradox of liberal Hollywood honoring supposedly conservative films? “[P]eople are making movies, not trying to send a message. Artists, as well as the studio executives who finance their movies, are not ideologues. They are storytellers whose work is propelled by emotion, relationships and the dramatic sweep of a script, not its political content.”

I’ll go make myself a sandwich to give Big Hollywood readers time to recover from hysterical laughter… So, contrary to that conservative “article of faith,” Hollywood is not infested with left-leaning ideologues pushing a political message. Tell that to the makers of (just off the top of my head) The Green Zone, Syriana, Lions for Lambs, Reds, Bulworth, The American President, Dead Man Walking, The Contender, and countless others one could list.

Patrick Goldstein points to conservative disgust with Hollywood and insists that “Hollywood isn’t so easily stereotyped” – and had he stopped there, I might have agreed. After all, most films are mere money-making entertainments without an overtly political theme. Some films do embody conservative values. No one ever said that every single Hollywood product is as ragingly leftist as the recent Fair Game, Sean Penn’s shameless, Bush-bashing snoozefest.

But the stereotype is a fair one, and Goldstein’s insistence otherwise, his claim that Hollywood has no leftist political agenda or ideologues among its artists and execs… Now that’s an Oscar-worthy fiction.

The other day, I clicked the link at the top of Big Hollywood that led me to a commentary by Michael Lee at “The Wrap.” Mr. Lee takes aim at John Nolte’s commentary about the Ricky Gervais performance at the Golden Globes.  As I waded  through the piece I quickly realized that Mr. Lee didn’t understand the basic points that John made.

And this, unfortunately, is typical.

John Nolte made the astute observation that Gervais‘ performance was awesome because he took the witty, acidic, and mean spirited humor that is usually aimed by Hollywood at the American populace and turned it on the sanctimonious, self-righteous entertainment community.   Had Gervais been ten times more vulgar but aimed it all at Sarah Palin, George Bush, and people who believed in God, there would be no discussion.  There would be no outrage.  There would be absolutely zero press.  Gervais would probably be paid double to return next year.

Lee explains that many of Gervais‘ targets, like the Bush supporting Bruce Willis or the Libertarian minded Angelina Jolie, are far from typical Hollywood leftists.  Make no mistake, Lee informs us, Gervais is no friend to conservatives.  Just because he’s making fun of Hollywood, we anti-intellectual, anti-science types need to think about who he insulted during the show.  If we just “connected the dots” we probably wouldn’t be so excited.

But the point lost on Lee is that we already have.

There’s simply no need for Lee to explain to us that Gervais is no conservative; no one at Big Hollywood has ever claimed him to be one.  Nolte was merely making light of the fact that Gervais and we at Big Hollywood just so happen to share the pleasure of taking anointed Hollywood elites down a peg.  We’re talking what’s truly edgy humor in 2011, Lee’s talking political ideology.  We’re talking apples, he’s talking space ships.

Here’s another aspect to Gervaisgate that hasn’t been touched on.  It’s an aspect that I’m sure will fall far beyond the scope of understanding by our detractors.

Even though my resume doesn’t contain a bunch of projects with “A” list celebrities, I do know them.  Personally.  You see, Leigh Scott knows how to party.  I’ve never been the guy to use those relationships to further my career because I always figured I’d be better off approaching them from a more level playing field.  I’ve always felt awkward, sitting drunk at a table at the Sky Bar, brining up a screenplay or project.  I enjoy being “the fun guy” who doesn’t talk business but can drink everyone under the table.  I like it when an actor says to me, “I didn’t know you made films.  Why didn’t you call me?”

We will see how my plans works out.

But I was there when a certain A-list actress stripped nude in the hallway of the Chateau Marmont and decided it would be fun to do cartwheels.  I’ve sat with a notorious, leftist, movie star drinking Grey Goose and hitting on UCLA sorority girls while he texted his sick wife telling her he’d be home soon.  I’ve had drinks with a certain talk show host while he entertained his high priced call girl.  And, I’ve crammed into a nightclub restroom stall with an Oscar winner and an Emmy winner to consume illegal narcotics.

I’ve seen these people at their worst.  Going off on racist and misogynist rants.  Cheating on their wives and husbands.  Crying over failed relationships and cancelled pilots.  Getting sick and throwing up all over their Mercedes 500 SL.

If you’re reading this, “you know who,” you remember that night.  Awesome, right?

My intent is not to create a Big Hollywood version of Gawker’s “Blind Items.”  The point is, I know that the politically correct nonsense, the sanctimonious lectures and soap box speeches, and the displays of charity and compassion are all for show.  Most of the people who grace our movie and television screens are insecure degenerates.  Charlie Sheen, believe it or not, is by far not the worst.  He just doesn’t try and hide it.  He doesn’t care what people think.  I kinda respect that.

What Gervais did was let us, the humble masses, in on the joke.  That wasn’t just a routine.  It’s what he would say if you were doing shots with him at the China Club.  It wasn’t that he “brought down” the elites of Hollywood, he elevated the viewer into the inner circle.  Bringing down the top appeals to progressives.  The notion of elevating the bottom appeals to conservatives.   No wonder we liked it.

Now, if he had included hookers and blow, we could have had the full experience.

To recap: Leftists are often unwilling or incapable of engaging the cogent arguments conservatives make. Ricky Gervais gave us a glimpse into the inner workings of the Hollywood social scene.  Actors are degenerates.  I just admitted to committing a felony on a conservative website.  Yeah, that about sums it up.

Let’s hope Ricky Gervais hosts another awards show, or that other hosts follow in his footsteps.

Likewise, let’s hope Michael Lee rereads John Nolte’s post and writes a commentary that actually addresses the issue at hand.

And yet is that very different from the disastrous decisions Cameron himself has made since Aliens appeared in 1986? Take his Terminator franchise — the director’s initial script note when first conceiving of the sequel read, “Young John Connor and the Terminator who comes back to befriend him.” Cameron’s buddy and fellow Terminator scribe Bill Wisher remembers that “The idea of a boy and the Terminator seemed real funny to me, and we both had a good laugh about it. But after we finished laughing, Jim looked at me seriously and said this was the story we ought to do.”

For those of us who thought that a Cameron-helmed Terminator 2 would build on the space marine look-and-feel introduced in the first film and perfected in Aliens — in the process bringing the story into that way-cool dystopian future, perhaps with Sarah Connor traveling forward in time to somehow reunite with a still-living Reese and change history for the better — Cameron’s decision to make Arnold the good guy and build the movie around a Hollywoodized moppet was the worst possible outcome.

It wasn’t just the decision to make one of the greatest villains in movie history into a joke that ruined Terminator 2: Judgment Day, it was the simplistic preachiness underlying the plot. Joe Morton, the actor who portrayed the doomed Miles Dyson in the film, recalls that, “[Cameron] told me how Terminator 2 was going to be an anti-nuclear film and that it would show authority figures as the real Terminators. I had read the script and so I remember laughing and telling him ‘Sure Jim. I think kids are going to walk out of the theater after seeing this movie, saying ‘Did you see the way the Terminator shot that guy in the knees?’ But Jim insisted that it would be much more than that.”

This sort of creeping socio-political nonsense began with Cameron’s The Abyss, a film that the Los Angeles Times correctly derided by writing, “It’s not hard to think that James Cameron has carried this film in his head since he was seventeen. It’s a seventeen-year-old vision.” Terminator 2 continued that trend, and for me ruined that mythos just as Alien³ destroyed its own franchise. Sure, it made a ton of money, but hey, so did The Phantom Menace. Coming on the heels of The Abyss, it was a sign that the maker of The Terminator and Aliens had lost the essence of what made those two movies great. Twenty years later, Cameron continues to make mega-hits that fall woefully short of that early creative promise.

Making matters worse is how the director has made himself a poster boy for the mean-spirited, audience-insulting, hyperbolic trend in modern Hollywood. He’s called us right-wingers (who form a large swath of his movie-going public) “just people ranting away, lost in their little bubbles of reality, steeped in their own hatred, their own fear and hatred.” Glenn Beck “is a f***ing asshole. . . dangerous because his ideas are poisonous,” while climate-change deniers — i.e., most of the country — are “boneheads” and “swine,” with “their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me.”

All of this scattershot name-calling is tedious because it’s such transparent bluster. That’s why, when Cameron boldly called for a climate change debate with his conservative detractors last March, Big Hollywood’s John Nolte was able to accurately predict how it would eventually play out:

If Beck calls Cameron’s bluff (pretty please, Glenn), I’d bet all kinds of money Cameron locks himself in his air conditioned mansion and refuses to come out.

That of course is exactly what happened once Andrew Breitbart picked up the gauntlet that the director — apparently spurred on by an inflated sense of self-regard fueled by his box-office receipts and technical achievements in Hollywood — had so carelessly tossed down. We should remember what Cameron once said about his method of getting ahead in Tinseltown: “So much relies on personality and not logic. . . it’s hype. . . it’s the pitch.” That might work well when selling studio executives on sci-fi scripts, or when producing “documentaries” worthy of Erich von Däniken, but it’s a lot less effective when going up against intelligent opponents well-versed in the minutiae of real-world problems. He thought that, just like in Hollywood, he could bluff and bully his way to victory, but it was not to be. Oh well — as Cameron himself said about Sigourney Weaver after he taught her how to shoot: “Another liberal bites the dust.”

To Cameron’s credit, sometimes he does come down to earth to join the rest of us, as when he called the engineers working on the gulf oil spill “morons,” only to later backtrack and come clean with: “I got into it and I talked to petroleum engineers and we started this study group …They’re not morons. . . There are good engineers out there. . . working very hard. It’s a very, very complex problem to solve.” Indeed it is — so why not refrain from all the knee-jerk vitriol? What possible good can come of a movie director alienating huge swaths of his audience with such crude, simplistic caricatures?

This impulse hasn’t just harmed his reputation, it’s done palpable damage to his filmmaking. Increasingly, the characters in his movies are painfully one-dimensional, while his plots are chock-full of nonsensical holes. “The beauty of movies,” Cameron has said, “is that they don’t have to be logical. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” In truth, many of the same fans who bristled at the criminal stupidity of other mega-hits like George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds also harbor a near-incandescent animosity for Avatar.

My suspicion is that time will not be kind to Cameron’s post-Aliens career, that once the effects and spectacle begin showing their age, there won’t be much left worth revisiting. It’s bittersweet to remember how guys like Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron once entertained audiences of all political persuasions by crafting a shared popular culture that we all enjoyed and took pride in. It was a time when our favorite directors didn’t go on national television to call half of their audience “boneheads” or “swine.” And, perhaps not coincidentally, it was also a time when movies like Aliens — with richly drawn characters, rousing heroism, sparkling humor, and believable, lived-in worlds — came out of Hollywood with something approaching a pleasant regularity.

This concludes our look through a conservative lens at James Cameron and his magnificent space-marine thrill ride Aliens. Come back next week as we study an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

You guys might want to wait until October 25 to watch (or re-watch) Aliens. That’s the day when a humongous new Blu-ray set comes out with all the trimmings. The Cameron movie in the set sports the following extras:

1986 Theatrical Version
1991 Special Edition with James Cameron introduction
Audio commentary by director James Cameron, producer Gale Anne Hurd, alien effects creator Stan Winston, visual effects supervisors Robert Skotak and Dennis Skotak, miniature effects supervisor Pat McClung, and actors Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Carrie Henn and Christopher Henn
Final theatrical isolated score by James Horner
Composer’s original isolated score by James Horner
Deleted and extended scenes
MU-TH-UR Mode interactive experience with Weyland-Yutani Datastream

Superior Firepower: Making ALIENS
* 57 Years Later: Continuing the Story
* Building Better Worlds: From Concept to Construction
* Preparing for Battle: Casting and Characterization
* This Time It’s War: Pinewood Studios, 1985
* The Risk Always Lives: Weapons and Action
* Bug Hunt: Creature Design
* Beauty and the Bitch: Power Loader vs. Queen Alien
* Two Orphans: Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Henn
* The Final Countdown: Music, Editing and Sound
* The Power of Real Tech: Visual Effects
* Aliens Unleashed: Reaction to the Film

Pre-Production
Original Treatment by James Cameron
Pre-Visualizations: Multi-Angle Videomatics with Commentary
Storyboard Archive
The Art of Aliens: Image Galleries
Cast Portrait Gallery
Production
Production Image Galleries
Continuity Polaroids
Weapons and Vehicles
Stan Winston’s Workshop
Colonial Marine Helmet Cameras
Video Graphics Gallery
Weyland-Yutani Inquest: Nostromo Dossiers
Pre-Production and Aftermath
Deleted Scene: Burke Cocooned
Deleted Scene Montage
Image Galleries
Special Collector’s Edition LaserDisc Archive
Main Title Exploration
Aliens: Ride at the Speed of Fright
Trailers & TV Spots

The above short wouldn’t be so funny if the horrid little things weren’t so ripe for parody. To be fair, the trailers of old were just as bad in their way — if you watch classic film DVDs and take the time to run the special features, you’ll soon grow weary of seeing every film advertised as the GREATEST CINEMATIC TRIUMPH EVER! But we’re supposed to be better than that these days, we’re supposed to have evolved, right? In truth, our stuff’s just as cheesy, and will be revealed as such in a couple decades, when people yet unborn will watch them on some as-yet-unfathomed format and chuckle at how predictable and “of their time” they are.

Every once in awhile, however, a trailer comes along that’s startling in its freshness, that manages to break all the rules and become memorable in its own right. So it was with the two-minute teaser to Aliens, first spied by my then fifteen-year-old self in the spring of 1986. Can’t remember which movie I was at — Cobra probably, or maybe The Karate Kid Part II. But I’ve never forgotten that daring, brilliant bit of marketing:

No gravelly-voiced narrator intoning exhausted platitudes. No giving away the plot of the movie. In fact, no dialogue at all, just chilling music and sound effects overlaying a brooding nightmare, all of it implicitly promising equal parts horror and action. A true teaser trailer, that manages to recapture everything audiences loved about director Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979) while clearly marking itself as something much more than a pale retread.

I still remember hearing others in the theater catching sight of Michael Biehn in full futuristic military gear and whispering, “Hey, that’s Reese from The Terminator! Cool!” Blending the original Alien’s carefully measured horror with classic sci-fi author Robert Heinlein’s blistering space-marine concept was a stroke of genius. These days the decision seems obvious and inevitable. But at the time the film was being made, many thought that all the action would dilute and destroy the wonderfully creepy, character-driven atmosphere created for the first picture in the series by Ridley Scott and his talented crew.

Because of this, the movie took more guts than most to make. It was a follow-up to a treasured movie, an “instant classic” from seven years earlier. Director James Cameron recalls power lunches with various executives and agents in the wake of his success with The Terminator, where everyone was warning him away from the project. “Kid, kid, kid, trust me,” they all told him. “Don’t make this Alien II thing. It’s a losing proposition. It’s a no-win for you. If it’s good, it’ll be good because Ridley Scott did such a good first film. And if it’s bad, it’ll be totally your fault.”

When we movie-buff civilians talk about films and how we’d do things different, we often forget the pressure-cooker atmosphere that these people work under, making career-altering decisions with millions of dollars on the line. Could any of us honestly say that we’d have implacably stuck to our guns in the face of all those warnings from people with a lot more experience than us? To his credit, and to the benefit of an entire genre of literature and filmmaking, Cameron did. As he recalls, “My response was, ‘Yeah, but I really like it. I think it’ll be cool. Can’t I just do it?’”

By the time he was finished, he had “done it” all right. Costing only $18 million dollars (anyone who says we aren’t living in a time of immense, catastrophic inflation is nuts), it brought in many times that and became one of the biggest hits of the year. Anyone worried that Cameron would forsake horror in favor of gunplay, or that seeing dozens of the eponymous creatures mowed down would somehow demystify their power to frighten, had their concerns allayed in short order. Gale Anne Hurd, the movie’s producer (and, for a few years, James Cameron’s second wife), remembers one screening where “There was one woman who could not look at the screen, and she was grabbing the side of the seat so hard that she actually pulled it off. And then she started pounding the arm of the seat onto her boyfriend’s leg because she was so terrified by the film. But she couldn’t stop looking.”

Ever since its debut in 1986, it’s also been ranked as one of the best action movies ever made. Unlike the majority of films where the fights become dated, the passage of time has only made Aliens look better. BH’s John Nolte put it well in a previous column: “The one thing Cameron has always done well is to create busy, energetic, brilliantly choreographed action scenes that allow the audience to follow what’s going on. That’s not a small thing because it’s becoming a lost art in Hollywood as more and more filmmakers lazily trade coherence for the artless shaky-cam and hyper edits.” The many adrenaline-pumping fight scenes in Aliens still thrill, and even after a quarter-century they look more visually effective and accomplished than 99% of modern action movies.

“This Time It’s War,” was the tagline Cameron crafted for his own version of the Alien legend. “It’s blaster action rather than Gothic future horror,” said the Los Angeles Times in its review. David Giler, one of the film’s producers, called Aliens a cross between his own Southern Comfort (1981) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). Writing in The Futurist, her book on Cameron, Rebecca Keegan adds that, “For Aliens, Cameron envisioned something reminiscent of World War II combat pictures like Sahara or The Dirty Dozen, where a scruffy, ethnically diverse squad of soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and pull together to face an overwhelming foe.”

World War II wasn’t the only influence. At the time Cameron wrote the picture, he was also hard at work on the script for Rambo: First Blood Part II, and the latter’s focus on the pain and betrayal left behind in the wake of the Vietnam War bled over into the sci-fi script. Aliens features spaceships that drop marines off on planets with visuals eerily similar to Hueys landing soldiers in the jungle on 1960s newscasts. “It was a definite parallel to Vietnam,” Cameron admits, “to tell the story of a technologically superior military force which is defeated by a determined, furtive, asymmetric enemy.”

Also like Rambo — and unlike many cinematic stories that reference stories of Vietnam-era defeat and loss — Aliens features not just characters who are jeer-worthy but heroes who are cheer-worthy. To my mind, by far the most interesting Aliens influence is one brought up by Rebecca Keegan in The Futurist: “He also had in mind John Wayne’s film The Alamo, in which Wayne, as Davy Crockett, galvanizes his overmatched, ragtag troops against the advancing Mexican army. As Cameron saw it, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, was John Wayne, the unflappable leader in a hopeless battle.”

Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens character as John Wayne? I like it. I also like the other great characters Aliens introduced to movie audiences: Vasquez, Hudson, Hicks, et. al. It’s amazing that, even after twenty-five years, one need only mention those curt surnames for the fully-formed personalities to come roaring back out of the past. Has there ever been a more memorable assortment of grunt soldiers in movie history?

Aliens, then, is a film that can only have been made by a man bearing a peculiar assortment of influences, talents, and an absolutely incredible amount of mental fortitude. For if Aliens is a war story, so is the tale of its making. . . .

Big Hollywood hater Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times jumped right into full “gotta defend our pals in the Industry” effect with a hysterical (in both senses of the word) counterattack supporting Glee creator Ryan Murphy.  The LAT, for those not residing here, is a small, local pamphlet of uncertain financial stability which recently reduced the physical size of its dead tree edition to about that of an Applebee’s menu.  Its innovative marketing strategy of providing its dwindling readership with even less content for their money has somehow failed to halt its downward spiral toward Chapter 11.

Pat writes:

Poor Ryan Murphy. I guess it would’ve been oh-so-much simpler if he’d just had Jane Lynch tell the silly cheerleaders that they were the dumbest teens she’d ever seen. And that was saying something, since she’d once taught cheerleading to … Megan Fox. It would’ve gotten a nice knowing laugh without prompting any hysterical shrieks of angst from the right-wing blogosphere, which is so paranoid about Hollywood’s oppressive Marxist-Obamaism that it seems bent on getting worked up every time anyone in show business shows any signs of liberal bias.

Poor Ryan Murphy indeed!  He insults the large portion of the American people who respect and support Sarah Palin – you know, the same Sarah Palin who the LAT reported had an approval rating within one point of the President’s – and those vicious monsters dare to respond!  With shrieks of angst no less!

We hicks are getting downright uppity.

And, of course, it’s because we’re sexist, racist, and imperialist to boot!  Pat links our anti-Glee agenda directly to our mindless hatred of the idea of tolerance:

“Glee” was already in hot water with the right wing, since the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, had in previous episodes made fun of abstinence education and, as Newsbusters puts it, “tried to normalize teen homosexuality.” Apparently on the right, treating gay kids as regular folks, instead of as scary deviants, is cause for alarm.

Oops, sorry!  Looks like I forgot “homophobic” – we’re so many awful things that I sometimes get mixed up and overlook some of our flaws.  Yes, Pat, you’ve figured it out.  We conservatives love being mocked to our faces by people who expect us to consume their products.  That’s cool, but our real problem with Glee is not that it calls people we support – and by extension us – “stupid,” it’s that the show is insufficiently hateful to gay kids.

You caught us, Scoop.  We’re so busted.  Only a reporter of your keen skills could sniff out the clarion calls for more hassling of gay kids that dominate our Tea Party rallies/cross burnings.  That’s the kind of ace reporting and deep insight that’s made the LAT into the unstoppable journalistic success story it is today.  BTW Pat, can you yell across the room to the folks at the subscription phone bank and ask them to stop calling me during dinner to beg me to re-subscribe?

The fact is that Pat and those like him hate the idea of outsiders like us presuming to challenge the Hollywoodoids.  He reasons that, “The conservatives rule talk radio and cable TV, the liberals rule Hollywood and that’s the way it goes.”  Except we never got the memo relegating us to the nether regions of the AM radio spectrum plus one cable news network while granting Pat’s team sole title to the rest of the cultural playing field.  Just like we never got the one dated January 20, 2009, making dissent unpatriotic again.

And our refusal to be satisfied with our assigned seat at the kids’ table in the back of the banquet hall is actually starting to drive them nuts.  For example, Pat whines that we even dared question the deep thoughts of that guy from Bosom Buddies:

As you may recall, the righties were up in arms for weeks when Tom Hanks seemed to imply, while doing interviews promoting HBO’s “The Pacific” series, that there was some link between our war against Japan during World War II and the modern-day war on terrorism.

Pat, you’re the professional, government-licensed and approved journalist here.  Surely you can see that Hanks didn’t imply anything.  He said it.  Your own article even repeated his quote:

Back in World War II,” he told Brinkley, “we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different.  Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?

Well, maybe who said what about how we’re just as bad as the people we’re fighting just isn’t important to Pat – celebrities utter this sort of nonsense so regularly that it’s hard to keep which celebrity is making what numbskulled comment straight.

But Pat’s too busy posing as a lonely defender of Murphy’s right to speak freely to bother with things like facts.  Now, it is refreshing to see a LAT writer taking a stand for free expression, in light of the LAT’s strong editorial stand against free speech for those it deems unworthy – us.  But Pat isn’t really defending the concept of free speech, free inquiry or free anything except the notion that the liberal establishment should have free reign to treat popular culture as an undisputed free fire zone for slamming conservatives.

Welcome to the dispute, Pat.  We’re the popular culture insurgency, and the day of the unchallenged, unanswered insult is over.  Your unspoken assumption is that our place is to sit quietly as our betters instruct us on our myriad failings and to dully nod our slack-jawed noggins in agreement.

Not.  Going.  To.  Happen.

Here’s our assumption – popular culture belongs to all of us and when your buddies say something obnoxious, insulting or just plain stupid, they are going to hear about it.

Ryan Murphy is no martyr to free speech.  No one is saying Murphy shouldn’t write what he wants.  We’re just saying that we can, and will, call him on it.  Sure, people might not watch because we’ve exposed his agenda.  We call that a “consequence.”  If Murphy feels so strongly about the powerful, unprecedented, and brave artistic statement that is calling Sarah Palin “stupid” – the political comedy equivalent of a ten minute hack stand-up set on how airline food tastes bad – then he should say it and the Nielsen numbers be damned.  This is a free country, no thanks to and despite the best efforts of modern liberals, and that’s Murphy’s right.

But we’re also free not to watch his stupid show.  You know, Pat, just like you exercise your freedom not to listen to those dirty, nasty, mean old right-winger radio programs by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Big Hollywood’s own Stage Right.  Although it goes against everything you’ve ever known or believed, we conservatives have the same right to choose what we watch as you lefties do.  And we’re choosing.  And there are a lot of us.

Pat, we sympathize.  We understand that this new media-fueled change is having the effect of breaking your gang’s hold on the flow of information and control of the message.  Change can be painful, but your loss of your coveted gatekeeper status is something that we can live with.  And hey, here’s an idea for you.  When the LAT goes under you can always get a new job where your distaste for conservatives and ability to ignore facts will be fully appreciated – working for the Obama administration like so many other liberal ex-journalists.  Well, at least until January 2013.  And unless you’ve paid your taxes.

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see).

But the thought of bringing Fair Game to a theater near you or anyone else must have the producers quaking in their Kenneth Coles. After all, they’re facing the almost certain prospect of their political thriller going down in flames a là the recent cinematic Hindenburg known as The Green Zone, which many are claiming is the final nail in the coffin of Iraq-war-themed movies. The Plame project is a joint production of Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation Entertainment and Participant Media, which describes itself as focusing on “socially relevant, commercially viable” projects.

I think they need to adjust their focus. Fair Game not only is socially irrelevant to everyone except obsessive Bush-haters, but isn’t commercially viable either, since American moviegoers have rejected Hollywood’s anti-war propaganda over and over again. Actually, “anti-war” is a misnomer, since if the Hollywood Left were truly anti-war, they would denounce the actual aggressors like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas et al. But they’re usually too busy heaping moral condemnation on the U.S. and its allies to protest against real evil in the world.

And the concept of evil is too simplistic anyway for the Hollywood Left, which believes the world is more nuanced than conservatives are capable of comprehending, much less admitting. “There are no bad guys or good guys,” say writer/director Stephan Gaghan and George Clooney about their 2005 movie Syriana, in which Americans are clearly the bad guys and radicalized Muslims are the moral center. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s morally inverted view of the world, in which leftists are pillars of truth and integrity, bad guys are simply misunderstood, and conservatives are utterly Satanic. “Bush lied, people died” – you know, nuance.

This isn’t the place for a thorough re-examination of Plamegate or of the justification for going to war with Iraq, which have been written about exhaustively elsewhere: check out Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors, for example, in which he discusses the scandal and eviscerates the Wilsons in the process, or Party of Defeat, in which David Horowitz and Ben Johnson concisely lay out the reasons for going after Saddam. But in case you didn’t keep up with the mainstream media’s four-year, off-and-on front-page obsession with the Plame scandal, here’s a quick recap:

In 2003, the White House sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead that Iraqi maniac Saddam was trying to purchase fissionable materials from Niger. Wilson reported back that the rumor wasn’t credible; but when the Bush administration proceeded to put forth the suspicion as part of the case for going to war, Wilson wrote a controversial editorial entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the wake of which journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of the war, undermining morale and the war effort, although a Senate investigation ultimately discredited the Wilsons’ accusations.

Not to be dissuaded by the facts, Hollywood is dipping into the well again in Fair Game. My own undercover source deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast (okay, it’s Big Hollywood editor John Nolte and his Whistleblower) has slipped me a copy of the script, written by Jez and John Butterworth. I don’t know whether this is a first draft or the final shooting script or some version in-between, but based on what I’ve read, the movie is more than just a desperate attempt to turn this already overblown scandal into a nail-biting political thriller; Fair Game is a full-out assault on Bush’s “war of choice” and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls “neocon evildoing.” (There’s that nuance again).

Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a “coordinated” coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea. He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to “bury” Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being “fair game” – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).

But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation. In other words, as Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, “the entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.” Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush – the whole criminal pantheon of the Left’s fevered imagination – were not responsible for Plame’s outing (Libby was found guilty, though, of perjuring himself during the investigation). Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Penn and Watts play the Wilsons as a couple whose only character flaws are their unshakeable professional integrity, love of country, and willingness to risk everything to speak truth to power. The script highlights the personal cost to Valerie Plame; even her friends turn on her for the “betrayal” of keeping her CIA job secret. “You lied to me for 20 years,” says her best friend in the script. “Who are you?”

Except that this isn’t what happened. Valerie says in her own autobiography that her close friends, without exception, were generously supportive and understanding, and that even old friends, distant relatives and long-lost acquaintances came out of the woodwork to offer their support. But hey, in fairness, the filmmakers have to ramp up the drama somehow.

Meanwhile, Penn’s worldly-wise Joe Wilson is busy speculating about government lies, fending off vicious “right-wing reporters” and lecturing captive audiences about having fearlessly confronted Saddam himself. “Have you met Saddam?” Wilson snaps at dinner guests casually discussing the Iraqi threat. “Have you looked him in the eye? Did he threaten to kill you? You don’t know Saddam. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Later, Penn/Wilson complains to the press that “those in the Highest Office sought to destroy the career of a public servant to punish me for speaking the truth.” If Penn, an actor who says journalists should be jailed for criticizing Hugo Chavez, can deliver a line like this with conviction, then perhaps he should get another Oscar.

To make sure we get the message that Penn’s Joe Wilson is a true American hero, one character tells him, “You’re a true American hero.” And modest too: “The real heroes,” he replies, ”are in Iraq right now fighting a war which was prosecuted on lies and falsehoods.” He got that half-right – the real heroes are fighting in Iraq (and Afghanistan), not here in the comfort of home undermining the war effort.

The anti-war Bush-bashing (yawn) continues to pile up. While driving Penn/Wilson in a taxi to the White House, a West African immigrant expresses his gratitude at being in the “Land of the Brave, Home of the Free” and out of war-torn Sierra Leone: “Over there we have no truth. Just power. Over here it’s a different world.” Apparently this praise for America wasn’t “nuanced” enough for Penn/Wilson, who tells the driver, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Leave it to an immigrant from an anarchic hellhole to appreciate America’s freedoms, while the comfortable leftist broods about the “threat” of “right-wing reporters” and speechifies about imaginary Republican abuses of power. In a later scene, Valerie’s father tells her, “One day this country is gonna look back on these years, and it’s gonna hang its head. It’s gonna weep. Then it’s gonna stand up straight and walk on.” That “stand up and walk on” bit feels tacked on, considering that the Left seems to think America should be in a perpetual state of shame and apology.

Coincidentally, Valerie Plame Wilson is back on the fringes of the news again, thanks to the release of politico Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. This prompted terrorist sympathizer and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans to attempt to handcuff Rove at a recent book signing, shouting, “Look what you did! You outed a CIA officer! You lied to take us to war!” (Um, if Evans is going to attempt citizen’s arrests of war criminals, perhaps she could start with her associates in the Taliban and Hamas). Rather than just trashing the book with a one-star Amazon.com review, the Wilsons actually released a statement, dismissing Rove’s book as

a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.

Yes, very nuanced. But ultimately it’s hard to see the real-life Wilsons as victims. They ended up as the toast of the elitist, anti-war Left, with a glamorous Vanity Fair spread, a $2.5 million book deal for Valerie, and a feature film glorification starring Hollywood A-listers – albeit a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.

One has to wonder if Sean Penn simply doesn’t care whether this movie does well at the box office – after all, how could he expect it to?  Back when anti-war activist Robert Redford directed the 2007 talky bore Lions for Lambs, it was still possible for Hollywood to delude itself into thinking that America would flock to see such superstars as Redford, Cruise and Streep in a sanctimonious plea for pacifism.

But Lions for Lambs fizzled, as did every other Hollywood attempt to flagellate America for the supposedly pointless waste of Bush’s wars, all the way up to last month’s disastrous The Green Zone. (Meanwhile, the 2006 movie 300, an unabashed celebration of warrior virtues and love of country, has racked up $457 million without a single bankable star). If the American people can’t be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood’s leftist morality tales even by a Bourne-style thriller featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?

Americans aren’t buying it. They simply aren’t the morally unsophisticated, uninformed dullards that a condescending Hollywood believes them to be. Or is that too nuanced for the Hollywood Left to grasp?

This past week, the Stage Right Show (below the fold) featured a great line-up of guest hosts because I was travelling on a cruise ship and unable to broadcast.  Guest hosts included Adam Baldwin, Mike Rauseo, Billy Hallowell, Ben Shapiro and Eric Porvaznik.  And, the interviews on this week’s highlight show include Bill Whittle, Jeremy Boering, Kevin Jackson, Dana Commandatore, Jason Mattera, John Nolte and Andrew Breitbart.

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The Stage Right Show broadcasts live every week night at 9PM Pacific Time.  All past shows are available in their entirety at itunes.

Tonight on The Stage Right Show, Guest host Alexander Marlow welcomes Steven Crowder and John Nolte for a “Big Hollywood Oscar Re-Cap”.

We also have an interview with Andrew Breitbart and Adam Baldwin on location in a bar in Hollywood.  They speak about the current political climate and how Big Hollywood is moving the conversation forward and motivating the tea party movement.

Internet sensation Demon Sheep joined us on Wednesday and provided a lot of laughs.  Big Hollywood contributor Gary Graham also joined us and discussed life in Hollywood as a conservative as well as his recent mission to Haiti.

Finally, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche was our guest for a thorough interview on the NEA conference call story as well as his life and career before the story broke last year.

The Stage Right Show broadcasts live every week night at 9PM Pacific Time.  All past shows are available in their entirety at itunes.

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This week we will feature live broadcasts from CPAC in Washington DC!