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Lucas describes “Red Tails” as “very patriotic,” “very jingoistic,” “old-fashioned” and “corny.”

NewsBusters:

“I showed it to all [the studios] and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.”

When Stewart asked why, Lucas first responded, “Because it’s not green enough. They only release green movies.”

The filmmaker clarified, “It’s because it’s an all black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all black action pictures ever made.” ….

Sadder still was how Hollywood balked given the message Lucas was trying to convey.

“I wanted to make it inspirational for teenaged boys. I wanted to show that they have heroes, they’re real American heroes, they’re patriots that helped to make the country what it is today. And it’s not glory where you have a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fodder. It’s like a real, they were real heroes.”

And Hollywood said, “No.”

After pretty much ruining “Revenge of the Sith” with all that obvious Bush-bashing, anti-War On Terror messaging (while we were at war), Lucas sounds a little like a pander bear to me.

“Red Tails” also looks like a story that’s been told both literally and thematically many times before.  It is a great story and a great American story, but George Lucas is a creative force behind it and with the Ewoks went his mojo.

So that means Stewart and his fellow humorists, who more often than not set entertainment criteria aside to promote their agendas, will have to do some fancy footwork to keep Obama in office for four more years.

Voila, the race card.

Get the f[bleep] out out of here. Santorum? Really? Republicans, you gonna try every chocolate in the box? Is that, look, look, here’s your candidates. Here’s your candidates. Let’s call it a “White Man’s Sampler.”

Stewart couldn’t find the race card when the overwhelmingly white Occupy Wall Street crowd clogged up public space for weeks at a time. Handy that he found it just now, right?

Republicans were eager to cast their vote for Herman Cain before a series of sexually-charged allegations shut down Cain’s campaign. Don’t tell that to Stewart. He’s got to play the full race card deck before the last vote is tallied this November.

Never let a good, albeit false, meme go to waste.

In the attached clip, Stewart explains how the show incorrectly claimed that Congress worked on Christmas Day for 67 years straight, thereby showing that Christmas isn’t as deserving of federal respect as many claim it is.

Turns out the number was off by 66 years, as Stewart cheerfully notes.

So Stewart jumped into the “Back to the Future” time machine to check the facts himself with Benjamin Franklin. The bit is bawdy, to be sure, but it sure seems like a lot of tap dancing to keep the show’s “war” with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly alive.

“Essential Killing,” available now via Video on Demand services as well as iTunes and Vudu, follows a Taliban fighter named Mohammed who is captured by U.S. military forces and transported to Europe where he escapes and goes on the run. While evading his captors, he must do what is necessary to survive, including taking life, which we graphically witness beforehand in the film when he kills some private contractors with an RPG.

It comes as no surprise that Hollywood would provide us with a story about the Afghanistan war that is from the point of view of a terrorist. I’m sure liberal after liberal would argue he is an “enemy combatant” and is justified in his killings. Political correctness aside, we witness him murder private contractors and then later murder more people. He’s a terrorist, no matter what the been-in-college-too-long-and-stay-up-too-late-watching-Jon-Stewart types would have anyone believe.

Why would we want to watch a movie where the protagonist is a terrorist? Well, we wouldn’t. But using the word “protagonist” here is a bit of a stretch. Sure, Mohammed is the main character, but there seems to be no attempt to make us identify with him, which is a relief. Instead, the film looks on its own events without much investment or insight. The camera is neutral. We are simply witnessing what is happening. But, hence comes the film’s fatal flaw. Without investment, what point is there in watching this ordeal? Mohammed is forced into some pretty horrid conditions and ordeals, but we could care less whether he lives or dies, so we watch the film with little more than semi-queasy fascination.

The film’s saving grace is Vincent Gallo. He’s brilliant in the lead role. He’s completely believable and brings a realism to every ordeal his character faces (probably because a lot of it was semi real–for instance, he really was forced to trek barefoot through the snow). But, why would a diehard Republican like Gallo sign up to play a terrorist? Well, according to the director, Gallo mainly responded to the challenge of it, especially to filming in the cold weather. And Gallo has admitted to almost never reading the scripts to films he stars in or actually watching them.

The direction by Jerzy Skolimowski is also pretty great. Every technical aspect of the film is well done. The cinematography is very well crafted. And some of these challenges the character faces are, in fact, quite thought-provoking and intriguing. But why do we follow a man like Mohammed? We have absolutely zero investment in the character or the situation. We see him kill American people and are supposed to care that he’s forced to eat bugs from feces? And not to mention the fact that the film’s overall point is flawed: it’s called “Essential Killing” because we are supposed to see a normal man forced to face his inner animal and kill in order to survive, but we already know that Mohammed is a killer. We witness it within the first ten minutes of the film, so there’s no real progression – or rather, regression – in the film.

“Essential Killing” is, if nothing else, fascinating in a weird sort of way. Sure, it’s intriguing to see a man survive the conditions presented here, but we are watching in such a neutral fashion that it really doesn’t matter one way or the other what happens. The film tries, at moments, to be slightly ambitious. We are given too-brief flashbacks of Mohammed’s life before this story, but the flashbacks add up to random images that provide no larger context to the character, so they are about as worthless as Nancy Pelosi’s help on an IQ test. The film also has no idea how to end, so it just ends.

The only reason to see “Essential Killing” is for its technical achievements and Gallo’s dazzling performance. But that shouldn’t be enough to drag anybody to see this film. It’s a little too insidious and, at the same time, a little too neutral for its own good. Don’t waste your time. There’s no reason we need to watch a terrorist kill innocent American men. It happens everyday in real life, so why see it on the big screen when there seems to be no point and no larger context behind it?

“The Daily Show” honored the end – for now – of Occupy Wall Street’s Occupation of Wall Street by sending one of its crack reporters to cover the movement. What they found was hypocrisy of the highest order, the kind of uncomfortable to watch comedy conservatives have been waiting to see since OWS first began.

So much material, and so few comedians having a crack at it.

But even the liberal folks over at the Comedy Central program couldn’t hold back. The result? A dilly of a comedy segment which didn’t even bother interviewing the most mentally unstable OWS members for comedy gold. They didn’t have to in order to mock the oh, so mockable OWS.

Stewart opened the segment by calling OWS the “least toileted generation,” while the studio audience tittered awkwardly. Stewart then handed the show over to reporter Samantha Bee.

“Occupy Wall Street was divided by class. On the one side, the elites with their library, apple pop up store and … espresso machines. On the other, the downwardly mobile with their drum circles,” Bee said.

From there, Bee highlighted the arrogance on display, from affluent OWS members who dare not say a politically incorrect word about their poor brethren to the very fact that some OWS members can barely make ends meet. Then, she went in for the comedy kill.

“Let me get this straight. You’ve been here for eight weeks, and you already have a ghetto?” she asks an OWS protester, who looks seriously dazed by the question.

When you’ve lost Stewart and his progressive pals at “The Daily Show,” you know you’re far-left movement is in trouble.

Wash Times:

If President Obama can spare a moment from such chores as winning re-election, he might find a few chuckles on late-night TV.

Times are tough for Mr. Obama, especially when it comes to his approval ratings. But things could be worse.

With Election Day looming one short year away, Mr. Obama’s most effective heat shield turns out to be his loyal opposition: Republicans scrapping to unseat him and getting lampooned for it by late-night TV comics.

The jokes range from blistering to silly to simply sophomoric. But it should be all the same to Mr. Obama: They’re not targeting him.

Among Republican challengers, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney holds steady as “the uncontested front-runner for everyone’s second choice,” in the wry appraisal of “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s rivals scramble to gain an upper hand without falling prey to the next punch line.

In that latter mission, they often stumble as they, not the White House, take the brunt of late-night talk shows’ jibes.

On a recent edition of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,”Mr. Stewart played sound bites of such GOP contenders as Mr. Romney, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

“Did you spot the trend amongst the Republican nominees?” Mr. Stewart posed. “As a trained eye, I’ll give you a hint,” which he voiced in an exaggerated whisper: “They’re all saying crazy things.”

On Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,”Stephen Colbert noted that, with the NBA lockout, there might not be a basketball season this year. “But if you want to watch millionaires throwing elbows, there’s still the Republican presidential race: So many characters, so many twists; it’s like a Mexican telenovela that wants to deport itself.”

“How about I start tonight with good news,” offered TBS host Conan O’Brien in a recent monologue. “KFC has just introduced the new Cheesy Bacon Bowl, which is filled with mashed potatoes, cheese, gravy, chicken and bacon.” The Cheesy Bacon Bowl, he went on, is “now the Republican front-runner for President.”

For a time, Mr. Perry was a front-runner.

Full story here.

***END UPDATE

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Chaos is unfolding in Oakland and on top of that, we’ve documented over 125 separate incidents of violence, vandalism, perversion, drug use, sexual assault, and an overall draining of precious and limited police resources throughout the country. The $50 Million Dollar Man’s response:  blame the cops.

Like his political soul brother Jon Stewart, Michael Moore is only in love with first responders when being in love with first responders is good for your image and career. But as soon as it’s politically useful to attempt to blame those same first responders for the violence committed by your real political soul brothers, they do.

Original tweet here.

My guess is that Trump is upset over the way in which Stewart’s voice changes at right around the 3:50 mark when the “Daily Show” host assumes the role of Cain while making a joke about the Lindbergh baby.

Stewart has been criticized in the past for mocking Cain with a “black  dialect,” and Trump has had to defend more then a few phony charges of racism created out of nothing by Obama’s MSM Palace Guards. Therefore, since he wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt, Trump’s probably wondering why Stewart is.

Personally, I’m not seeing the racism. Stewart just sounds like Bing Crosby to me, but I don’t mind seeing leftists hoisted by their own petard. Hyper-sensitivity and fascistic political correctness are of their own making, and Stewart is one of America’s top 10 Speech Policers.

I do wonder, though, how the MSM would react in the exact same circumstance if it was Dennis Miller mocking Barack Obama instead of Jon Stewart mocking Herman Cain.

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Now, late night talk show hosts have taken the bait.

Last night, the majority of the comedy elite had fun at the expense of Herman Cain, the popular GOP presidential candidate accused of sexually harassing two women during the 1990s. The wobbly reportage was condemned by not only conservatives but the left-leaning Pro Publica media outfit. But it proved too irresistible for the usual comic suspects (source: The daily Hotline roundup):

David Letterman: Now (businessman) Herman Cain when he was the chairman of the National Restaurant Association back in the ’90’s is saying there was a claim of sexual harassment. I looked it up. … Here’s what happened: he was just listing the specials. (‘The Late Show with David Letterman,’ CBS, 10/31).

Jimmy Fallon: “Herman Cain was accused of sexually harassing two women in the ’90s. Which explains his new campaign slogan, ‘did somebody order a pizza with extra sausage?’” (‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,’ NBC, 10/31).

Jimmy Kimmel: “Cain says it’s a misunderstanding, he never sexually harassed anyone. He owned a pizza place, he just asking them if they wanted extra sausage and — it happens.” (‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!,’ ABC, 10/31).

Conan O’Brien: “Herman Cain is having to respond to claims that he once sexually harassed women. Did you hear that? Apparently a German woman kept telling him nein-nein-nein!” (‘Conan,’ TBS, 10/31).

Jon Stewart: “In Herman Cain’s defense, there’s very little in the pizza world that’s not sexually suggestive. ‘Hey, you want sausage on your pie?’ ‘Hey, you want me to stuff your crust?’ ‘No, no, I told you, I guarantee I will come in 30 minutes or less. I told you.’ By the way, that is a very optimistic — I think the key phrase there is ‘or less.’ … If he’s telling the truth, he’s just a nice church-going guy and everything he does now is tainted by these allegations. … That clip of Herman Cain smiling at the end of his political ads. That’s just dirty. That commercial is always going to play with different music in people’s heads now. (Sexy music playing) Hey, stop looking at my black walnuts.” (‘The Daily Show,’ Comedy Central, 10/31).