—–

Looks like more of the same, which isn’t altogether a bad thing, but the Josh Brolin moment is inspired.

Is anyone really interested in this, though?

“MIB: 3″ opens May 25th

Josh Brolin sounding ridiculously defensive over a two-year old movie on Jimmy Kimmel:

“They want to criticise it because you think it’s Oliver Stone, it’s Josh Brolin, who people perceive as very, very left wing, which I’m not necessarily. They think it’s gonna be heavy hitting; it’s gonna be, like, a sledgehammer on George Bush and we didn’t do that.

“We wanted to know the guy that never should have been president and probably should have run a baseball team – and been very happy doing it.”

Brolin insists the Republican friends who did see the film were surprised by it: “They were like, ‘It’s kinda sad, isn’t it?’”

The actor has heard that Bush himself saw the film – and liked it. ….

“I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I love him, like, two in the morning in this blue glow of sitting at home and, like, maybe tears coming down his face.

Like, why does Brolin, like, talk like a fourteen year-old girl?

And wasn’t it just yesterday he was gushing like a groupie over Howard Zinn’s smile?

Anyway, if I remember correctly, the real problem with “W.” is that it sucked and that Brolin sucked in it.

Josh Brolin’s plays impersonates Bush in a way that’s off the chart silly and stuck on swagger and nervous chuckle. One-dimensional doesn’t begin to describe it. How could any serious actor or director miss that one of Bush’s most impressive strengths as a politician has always been how comfortable he is in his own skin. Brolin’s playing some other man, someone tightly wound in dire need of Ritalin.

The performance isn’t bad, it’s just … odd.

In a polmic filled with forehead slapping moments, Dick Cheney’s (Richard Dreyfus) speech in front of a Middle East map making the case for war in Iraq is the topper. All that’s missing is a white cat for the Vice President to stroke. Yes, Cheney’s portrayed as a Bond villain plotting the takeover of the world and its oil supplies (I wish).

Second place in the Inane Department is the normally reliable Jeffrey Wright who plays Colin Powell as an automaton of virtue. Powell’s futile but impassioned war room speech warning against the pre-emptive war (with Karl Rove in the shadows behind him) would’ve been a howler of bloated self-importance without the tinkling piano score backing it up, but with it I could’ve sworn I heard the ghost of Stanley Kubrick groan.

Yes, I remembered correctly.

Our contributors did a marvelous job documenting Zinn’s profane legacy and now, thanks to Josh Brolin, we’re reminded that we’ve arrived at the one-year anniversary of Zinn’s death:

By: Josh Brolin
February 2, 2011

It was a year this past January 27th that my friend, Howard Zinn, passed away in Santa Monica, California. …

The impact that Howard Zinn has had on the world of fair, conscientious people is profound, and the impact that he had as a friend will be forever felt by me and by all those that knew him with the deepest, most visceral tickle imaginable. He was mischievous, fun, childlike, and an appreciator of all things beautiful. My wife was so smitten with him and he knew, in that classy old-school way, how to sustain it. We had spoken about women and how we both felt that they are, ultimately, the keepers of all things good. He was a smart man, a gentle man, and a gentleman.

To admit: I still speak with him at times when I am alone. He brings that kind of solace. It’s not exclusive to crisis, no – it’s as a friend, as someone I could always have a laugh with, and as someone who could inspire with the simplest glance. He understood that to bring a smile to someone’s face was as important to our well being as was protesting the myriad issues that Howard did. His motive, how it resonated in me, was simply to carve a more loving life for our children and those to follow.

You are so missed dear Howard, but your smiles will always live on.

On background, someone told me Brolin’s original draft was written in longhand and that all the i’s were dotted with little hearts.

This is how the Ministry of Truth operates, though. You take a wickedly dishonest historian who happens to look kindly and grandfatherly, and turn him into some kind of folk hero. You use him to continue to rewrite the past so you can steal the present. You can never let a Howard Zinn truly die because he’s too useful to the Leftist cause. Better still, you blow him up into another Che Guevera, a chic commodity more attractive than truth and decency.

Think about it. We actually live in a world where a multi-millionaire movie star born in a stretch limo with NEPOTISM license plates can preach this shit and not be guffawed off the face of the earth.

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original?

For all of the talk by the Coens of keeping their movie closer to the plot of the novel, the differences between it and the 1969 film are fairly minor — so much so that enterprising fans have cut new YouTube trailers to the 1969 version that manage to almost exactly match the trailer for the 2010 one. Both pictures rely heavily on the dialogue penned by Portis (a good thing, as the meticulously crafted and exquisitely well-toned repartee between the characters is the best part of the book, and one only need look to Peter Jackson’s painfully inept adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s equally rarefied Lord of the Rings dialogue to see what happens when one strays too far from the original work of literature).

Both also make some of the same changes to the characters. In the novel, Rooster Cogburn is about forty years of age and sports an openly disfigured and useless eye. In both films, he is played by a sixty-one-year-old actor (Wayne and Bridges were the same age when they undertook their respective attempts at the role), with each wearing an eye patch nowhere to be found in the book. (“I noticed by the lamplight,” Mattie says at one point in Portis’ original, “that his bad left eye was not completely shut. A little crescent of white showed at the bottom and glistened in the light.”) The murderer Tom Cheney, meanwhile, changes from a twenty-five-year-old in the book to a 40-50ish man in both movies.

Neither cinematic version gives the girl, Mattie Ross, the fiery bible-quoting Christianity the novel uses to help explain her perseverance and courage (the Coens make a surface stab at this, including an epigraph card that quotes the first half of Proverbs 28:1, but they still fall far short of Portis’ immersive ideal). In the book, Mattie Ross is constantly quoting scripture with expertise and passion to justify her hardheaded prejudices and decisions, often going so far as to offer extended (and, to the degree they disagree with her own beliefs, humorously acerbic) asides on the differences in the ways Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics interpret the Good Book.

This is the kind of earthy Christianity that anyone who has roamed the South is familiar with. (Once, about ten years ago while in rural Texas, I asked an old lady whether a mutual acquaintance was a Baptist or a Methodist, at which point another old woman overhearing the conversation piped up with, “My momma told me Jesus was a Methodist!”) When writer Charles Taylor wrote in the New York newspaper Newsday that Portis’ Mattie Ross, “springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance” he was referring to that kind of deep faith, leavened by humor. Unfortunately, although the novel is filled with it, little seeped into either film beyond window dressing.

Setting aside the few non-crucial variances in plot between the two movies (things like the result of Mattie’s encounter with rattlesnakes, and the fate of the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf), it’s in other areas that the differences between the two pictures really manifest themselves. Neither can truly claim to have superior acting: I would rate Wayne, Robert Duvall, and Strother Martin in 1969 over Bridges, Barry Pepper, and Dakin Matthews from 2010, while 2010’s Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon take the prize over 1969’s Kim Darby, Jeff Corey, and Glen Campbell. The Coens are far more cinematic and talented directors than the competent but seldom inspired journeyman Henry Hathaway, but their stand-in locations for Arkansas/Oklahoma are far less memorable than the lush Colorado vistas chosen in 1969, and Elmer Bernstein’s musical score from the 1969 movie is light-years ahead of anything Carter Burwell has done here in 2010, or indeed in his entire career.

In the end, the 2010 True Grit is valuable in its own right, but doesn’t seem poised to knock the 1969 film off its pedestal as the definitive go-to version. John Wayne’s centrality to the western genre, and the film’s centrality to his reputation as an actor, guarantees that. Jeff Bridges plays a competent drunken hombre, but Wayne dug deeper into cinematic history by aping the voice and mannerisms of the great Wallace Beery (profiled in Part 2 of last year’s For Conservative Movie Lovers look at 1931’s The Champ). It’s the kind of performance that tells us that the actor is having as much fun with it as we are.

Coming full in the face of the onset of the Vietnam War and the Hippie Era (not to mention Leone’s genre-altering spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which was released a mere week after True Grit), this unabashedly entertaining and overblown character study was also a courageous thing to attempt, possessing a resonance extending well beyond the confines of the picture itself. Film critic Richard Schickel captured the full measure of Wayne’s contribution in his June 20, 1969 review of the movie in Life magazine when, talking of the story’s famous climax (capped by the salty declaration, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!”), he wrote:

Watching, one shouts, laughs and, unaccountably, feels tears beginning to tingle. For you feel you may be witnessing not just the beginning of a good movie’s climax but a full-throated valedictory for a tradition. Here is Wayne, the last of a great generation of western heroes, committing himself again to an action that at once affectionately parodies and joyously summarizes the hundreds — thousands — of similar moments that have preceded it in film history. And there is a tremendous sense of relief in the way he goes about it.

This “tremendous sense of relief” is extended in a final scene that doesn’t appear in either the book or in the 2010 Coen version, where Mattie Ross is allowed to offer her family’s grave plot to Rooster while he is still alive, cementing their friendship, and Rooster rides off into the sunset, jumping the fence Mattie said he was too old and fat to attempt while shouting, “Come see a fat old man sometime!” Like the young boy in Shane shouting “Come back!” (which likewise wasn’t in the book, but was only added later for the film), it’s a scene so possessive of dramatic satisfaction (what Schickel called his “tremendous sense of relief”) that we walk away from the 2010 version feeling cheated that it has been replaced by the comparatively predictable, bittersweet, and elegiac ending of the novel, the kind of dreariness we’ve long come to expect from “real art.”

Regardless of the gateway to True Grit you choose — 1968 book, 1969 film, or its 2010 cousin — it has once again proven that it is a story good enough to sustain multiple treatments. I recommend taking them on in order: Portis, Wayne, Coens.

With that in mind, here are five drool-worthy stocking stuffers for the cinemaphiles in your family, all of them due to be released in the next few weeks.

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1. Frank Sinatra: Concert Collection (November 2, 2010, $54.99 at Amazon)

Get hep to this, man: seven discs containing fourteen hours of TV specials and filmed concerts, with Ol’ Blue Eyes joined by Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Gene Kelly, Antonio Carlos Jobim, John Denver, Bing Crosby, and of course Dino. Four of the specials have never been released, and a host of isolated TV clips are thrown in for good measure. Top it all off with a 44-page booklet chock full of rare photos and scholarly commentary, and the Chairman of the Board is truly back in all his scotch-soaked glory.

The seventh “Bonus Disc” sounds like the perfect thing to have playing in the background while you are decorating your tree: a “Happy Holidays with Bing and Frank” color TV special.

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2. The Goonies: 25th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition (November 2, 2010, $34.99 at Amazon)

A story by a pre-pretentious Steven Spielberg, a script by Chris Columbus, and a typically satisfying directing job by Richard Donner in between his work on classics like Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987). The Goonies is one of those movies that instantly time-warps guys and gals of my generation back to 1985. Nestled among other films like Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Breakfast Club, Real Genius, Cocoon, Rocky 4, Pale Rider, and Witness, it helped make that summer magical.

I remember first catching it on a triple-bill with Gremlins and some now-forgotten horror movie. This is one of those movies that, in hindsight, is seen to have assembled a particularly deep cast. Young Sean Astin (later to play Samwise Gamgee in the Lord of the Rings films) Josh Brolin, Eighties staple Corey Feldman, Ke Huey Quan (whose performance had been the best thing in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the year before) the always fun Joe Pantoliano, Eighties cuties Kerri Green and Martha Plimpton, and even one of Big Hollywood’s own, The Mighty Robert Davi! I’m not sure how they managed to fit so much awesome onto only fifty gigs of Blu-ray, but that’s technology for you.

Whereas so many special DVD sets have extras that don’t impress, I dig the inclusion of a new board game in this Goonies Ultimate Edition — given the treasure hunt motif, it’s something that your kids will likely have fun playing after experiencing the movie for the first time. There’s also the requisite documentary, outtakes, Cyndi Lauper video, souvenir booklets, and even a rare commentary track that manages to reassemble all seven main actors along with the director twenty-five years later.

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3. The Night of the Hunter (The Criterion Collection) (November 16, 2010, $36.49 at Amazon)

The great actor Charles Laughton is already being represented on Blu-ray this winter via 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty, but you’ll also want to pick up this, his sole directorial effort. François Truffaut once wrote that Laughton’s strange film feels “like a horrifying news item retold by small children,” and noted that “it makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact, discovers.” What did he mean by that, you ask? Buy this new edition on Blu-ray and find out.

One of the things that attracted me to this new release is the massive 2.5 hours of outtakes included in this two-disc set. It’s a rarity to be privy to so much detritus where an old classic film is concerned, and I’m wondering what sort of illumination it will cast on Laughton’s directing methods.

Another boon is a video interview with actor Simon Callow, who in addition to being a fine thespian in his own right wrote a well-received biography of Laughton some years ago. Those of you who, like me, have been patiently waiting for Callow to finish the final tome in his magisterial three-volume biographical treatment of Orson Welles can content yourselves in the meantime with hunting down his Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (1988).

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4. The World at War (November 16, 2010, $112.49 at Amazon)

This ranks with Ken Burns’ The Civil War as one of the all-time great documentaries. Sprawling over nine discs and containing some thirty-five hours of material, it’s a must-see for all World War II buffs (and, in a better world, would be required viewing for schoolchildren). Narrated by the great Laurence Olivier and fully restored both visually (in 1080p HD) and aurally (in surround sound), each of the twenty-six episodes has never looked or sounded better — with one enormous caveat.

If you click over to this article on restoring the series for Blu-ray, you’ll note that the producers made the controversial decision to crop each disc’s image in order to make them fit comfortably onto the rectangular widescreen TVs which are commonplace in today’s living rooms. This has caused an uproar among cinema purists, who have damned the set with such ferocity that it now sports a paltry one-star ranking at Amazon despite its otherwise stellar production values.

Whether you mind losing 25% of the image in order to have it fit on your screen without black bars is an open question — I know plenty of people who hit the “zoom” button on their TVs as a matter of course, which effectively crops old movies the same way, so perhaps it’s not a big deal to many of you. But if it is, and you want the full image presented in the OAR (original aspect ratio), you’ll want to skip the Blu-ray entirely and buy the 30th anniversary DVD set released in 2009.

Either way, you’ll want to see this epic series if you haven’t yet been exposed to it.

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5. True Grit (December 11, 2010, $17.99 at Amazon)

As one commenter said on the Blu-ray.com forums when this title was announced, “Nothing makes a format viable like a large selection of John Wayne films.” Amen, brother.

This is, of course, a play at marketing synergy by Paramount, who is releasing John Wayne’s 1969 original on Blu-ray in order to coincide with the release this Christmas of the (admittedly promising) Coen Brothers remake starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and The Goonies’ Josh Brolin. But who cares about the excuse? It’s enough that Wayne’s Oscar-winning performance will be shining on your TV screen in high-def, with Elmer Bernstein’s wonderful score thundering through your speakers.

Don’t make ol’ Rooster Cogburn tell you twice to “Fill yer hands!” with this one.

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Is there anything else coming out on Blu-ray this Christmas that you’re particularly excited about? If so, share it with us in the comments below.

Already, Zinn’s far-left sympathizers are poking holes, some more credibly than others, in the 430 pages of documents, and trying to draw focus away from Zinn’s alleged membership in the Kremlin-controlled Communist Party USA and onto the fact that a Boston University administrator turned FBI informant once plotted to have him fired in the 1970s.

To the radical left, trying to interfere with an extremist professor as he dutifully decries his country as a police state is a far more egregious crime than belonging to a political organization allied with and controlled by the sworn enemy of the United States.

It’s all about perspective…

Still, Zinn’s apologists are not incorrect in pointing out that the evidence to support the claims that the professor was a card-carrying member of the CPUSA is hardly conclusive, or as J. Edgar Hoover had requested – admissible.

Despite the breadth of documentation in the file – the interviews with Zinn, the statements made by confidential informants claiming to have attended CPUSA meetings at which Zinn taught on “Basic Marxism” and encouraged participants to adhere to the tenants of Marx and Lenin, the suggestions that these meetings often took place in Zinn’s own home – proof of the kind the right might hope for is just not to be found.

That Zinn was a leftist is clear by his own admission. That he belonged to groups infiltrated by Communists is well-established, but that he was an actual, card-carrying member of the Communist Party is just not proven.

Which is not to say there is not a compelling case made. It is just not an iron-clad one.

Of course, the right’s desire to prove Zinn’s membership in the Communist Party in the late 1940s and early 1950s is certainly understandable. After all, this was long after the idealistic 1930s when the already liberal American media churned out stories to Americans wrecked by the Great Depression of a Utopian revolution occurring in the east. It was after the subjugation of Eastern Europe, the Russian bomb, and Stalin’s gulags.

To prove that Zinn was a member of the organization during this period would go a long way toward validating the animosity and distrust the right has for Zinn’s work, both as an anti-war activist, influential author and professor, and sainted historian of the left.

But it is a mistake to focus too closely on Zinn’s status as a member of CPUSA.

Proving it is difficult, and even if it could be proven – what does it prove? Undoubtedly many people in their twenties made poor choices and joined organizations that as adults they would shun. To judge Zinn’s life and career by how he spent his youth, the Eddie Vedders and Danny Glovers of the world would argue, ignores the larger question of how he spent the rest of his life.

And it is that question – how Howard Zinn spent his life – that the right should desire.

The left undoubtedly loves dancing around such myopic questions as, “Was Zinn a member of the Communist Party,” expressly because it detracts from the larger question of, “Was Zinn a communist?”

Did Howard Zinn espouse communist philosophy? Did he openly sympathize with America’s communist enemies? Did he seek to use his influence in academia and the media to convert America’s young to the cause of communism?

These questions do not require the kind of definitive proof the left can demand of the more precise issue of Zinn’s actual political affiliation. They only require the smell test, and Howard Zinn cannot pass the communist smell test.

From his well-known early work on behalf of infiltrated, trans-national labor and civil-rights organizations, to his radical anti-war activism, his seminal and revisionist historical work, The People’s History of the United States, and his lesser known entries into literature, the theater, and television – like his play Marx in Soho, or The People Speak – Zinn continually championed a view of America, capitalism, and the west in general that was utterly sympathetic to the views of Marx and Lenin.

Where he departed from their views was only in the nuanced world of implementation, the ultimate fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, and questions regarding the scale – regional or global – of the communist cause.

That our Hollywood betters continued to promote Zinn’s work is not a testament to their naivety about his official party membership status; it is a testimony to the fact that they agree with his broader communist views – at least as far as they safely can from their positions in the upper echelon of the bourgeois elite.

Consider these words from Zinn’s forward to a compilation of Anarcho-Communist activist and philosopher Alexander Berkman’s work titled Life of an Anarchist.

“Alexander Berkman is one of those lost heros of American radicalism, a rare pure voice of rebellion against the state, against capitalism, against war. …[He] is an inspiring example of living an honest life, as well as a vision of a better society.”

It might be worth here noting that Berkman did fifteen years in prison for the attempted murder of businessman Henry Clay Frick in 1892, opposed American intervention in World War One, and was eventually deported to Russia where he was a first hand observer of the revolution. So inspiring… At least to Howard Zinn, who imported hundreds of copies of his work, The ABC of Anarchist Communism into the United States, “for my students to use” and wrote a play about him.

It is Zinn’s conclusion to the introduction that is the most illuminating though.

“[Life of an Anarchist] is a welcome introduction to the ideas of anarchism,” specifically Anarchist Communism, “which appear more and more relevant in this era of bullying governments, corporate ruthlessness, and endless war.”

Viva la Revolution!

In the end, Zinn’s own words damn him, and his Hollywood appostles, far more than anything J. Edgar Hoover ever dreamt of.

This dark, cliché quote reflects the film. Hex was a Confederate soldier, not because he believed in slavery but because he opposes government control. While serving, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) – the father of his best friend – orders him to burn a hospital filled with women and children to the ground. He refuses. This event disillusions him from the Confederate cause, and in his ensuing side-switch, he kills his friend. The vengeful Turnbull tracks Jonah down and forces him to watch as he murders his family, then brands his face so he won’t forget. Jonah swears vengeance. When Turnbull dies in a fire he thinks he has it – until he hears from President Ulysses S. Grant that Turnbull is still alive, and plans to terrorize the country during its bicentennial celebration. Grant begs Jonah to find Turnbull and stop him before it’s too late – a request Jonah is only too happy to oblige. 

As a comic book adaptation, the beginning of the film plays out episodically like the beginning of a TV show, with cartoon images showing the transition in Jonah’s life from a soldier to a man whose near-death experience gave him the power to talk to dead people. 

The other TV-type element is the film’s length. Running between 70 and 80 minutes, it feels like just another adventure in the life of a well-established protagonist. 

While short, at least there’s no needless dialogue. There’s not much character development either, but let’s face it, character development isn’t exactly the strong suit of “Jonah Hex” writers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the minds behind the “Crank” movies. 

Brolin and Malkovich are both strong as hero and villain respectively. Brolin’s Jonah is a witty brute with a strong sense of justice regardless. When a sheriff and mayor try to swindle him out of reward money he earned for killing local outlaws, he cuts them down without regard for their status. Criminals are criminals. As he says, the man was a sheriff, but he wasn’t a law man. 

He is also a loner, who trusts no one but himself and Megan Fox’s Lilah. And though the Civil War is over, and in the end he fought for the Union, he still sports his Confederate hat – a symbol of his uncompromising views on personal liberty. 

Malkovich’s Turnbolt is a refined, but brutal, southerner. He and his men target hospitals and towns, not military outposts. The Mexicans call him “terrorista,” and his tactics are familiar. He strikes fear into people so they don’t trust the government’s ability to protect them – a strategy effectively used by terrorists in Baghdad before the Surge restored order and gave Iraqis safety once again. This documentary by the Institute for the Study of War clearly illustrates the tactic. 

Megan Fox as Lilah, is barely in the film. When she is, talks in a monotone. 

There was also a commentary on the atomic bomb. In the film’s back story, Eli Whitney, creator of the cotton gin, was hired by the U.S. Government to create a “nation killer” weapon, which, once the government realized its true power, never created because it “couldn’t forsee using such a devastating weapon.” After the designs fall into his hands, it’s Turnbolt’s weapon of choice. 

Though a dark film, it doesn’t restrict the use of color. Grass is vibrantly green, the sand a strong brick red. Some scenes have a “300” vibe to them. But there’s a lot of night-time action that is difficult to see because of quick cuts. 

In the end, “Jonah Hex” isn’t terrible, but the dark hellish undertones combined with its length don’t justify a theater viewing. If you’ve seen the preview, you’ve seen most of Megan Fox’s scenes, so just watch that and you should be good to go.

But arguably the most satisfying sighting in my nearly 16 years by the beach, happened just last week in the back of a corner health food market called One Life.  I stopped in for a tuna on whole wheat, queuing directly behind the legendary Tim Robbins in some stretchy bike shorts, a wool skull cap and open-toed sandals.  So COOL! 

However, Tim seemed distracted.  He kept looking towards the front of the store where an exotically stunning  woman was shopping, next to who appeared to be her boyfriend.  Mind you, I was 3 feet from Timmy and he’s a good 6 foot 5, so he had no trouble looking directly over me, clearly ogling the girl and making that “woo” face consistent with a fella on the prowl. ( In hindsight, I’m pretty sure he was trying for one of those camaraderie moments with me, where complete strangers bond over how hot a chick is.  But I wasn’t 100% sure, so I didn’t engage).

After grabbing his food, he headed towards the check out line and paid.  But before he left, he noticed that the dude the hotty came in with had walked out.  In an instant Timmy doubled back and B-lined for the chick, who now was only a couple of feet from where I was waiting.  Man, she smelled great. Timbo with a huge grin, gallantly says hello in that soft, unmistakable, ”Andy Dufresne the day before he busts out of Shawshank Prison’, kinda way.  He asks where she’s from.  It’s Italy.  He asks if she’s single.  She says no.  He asks if she’s with her boyfriend.  She says yes.  He asks if he can have her phone number.  She says no.  He asks if she’d like to have coffee, she says no.  He says OK, nice meeting you and walks away.  He stops.  He comes back.  He asks if she’d take his phone number, she says no.  He basically empties his entire ‘I’m Tim Robbins’ quiver of arrows without so much as grazing the target.  If only Morgan Freeman (who I saw eating a scone on Main Street about 2 months ago) was there to narrate!

So that seemed like a goodly amount of celebrity silliness for one afternoon, but it ended with an even bigger dollop of dumb. I walked outside just as Tim is mounting his 10-speed bike, while as if on cue, a stocky Mexican kid with a video camera starts asking questions.  “Hey Tim, will you cook me a vegan omelet at your house?”  Yep, it’s TMZ! 

Tim peddles away, right past the Italian girl’s boyfriend. He now has the defeated look of a man who’s actually been tossed into solitary confinement by Bob Gunton.  

Crap day for the Timinator.   Fun day for me.

-ANONYMOUS

There are some very important people in our country who have aligned themselves with Zinn. With his philosophy. With his view of history. With his view of the United States. And, with his strategy for getting his message into the public schools outside of the legal construct of School Boards and State Departments of Education.

They made a film of his book.  They walked the red carpet and they posed with the man they admired.  He was the inspiration for their film and they spoke of him glowingly, almost like he was a hero.  They began their film with him striding out alone onto a stage in a theatre full of admirers.  It was his way of taking a curtain call (a standing ovation, by the way) before the show even began.

“They” are the elite Hollywood stars who believed they gave themselves intellectual and cultural relevance by aligning themselves with the man who made it his life work to tear down the traditional American narrative.

And now, after his death, his legacy is to move that effort, subversively into the public school room despite the curricula established by democratic process. In other words, he wants teachers to teach his lesson plans and go against the wishes of “the people” whom he claims to admire so much.

Matt Damon and Josh Brolin gave this man a very glitzy and high profile platform on the History Channel.  And they celebrated his words as a wise, breath of fresh air:

“We didn’t want to hear the words of the people in the White House, we wanted to hear the words of the people picketing the White House.  The agitators, the anti-war protestors, the socialists and anarchists, in other words:  The people who gave us whatever liberty and democracy we have in this country.”

Forget, for a moment, about Mr. Zinn.  Forget that these are the tired and boring words of a bygone era. When shower-deprived protestors outside the Nixon White House were receiving whimsical admiration. When Leonard Bernstein feted the Black Panthers and John Phillips made people feel like everything was OK as long as it felt good.  This is not about Mr. Zinn.  He is old news.

This is about Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and all of the beautiful, well-paid actors who went out of their way to ensure that “The People Speak” was made, and distributed and now is available for your child to see in the school room you are paying for.  And, the lesson plans that are being brought into that class room, hidden in a teacher’s satchel so as not to get the attention of a school administrator.

As Big Hollywood has previously revealed, the Zinn Education Project has been designed for the sole purpose of providing teachers a means to bring Zinn’s biased and subversive version of American history into the public schools using subterfuge and (in Zinn’s words) “Guerrilla warfare.”

And now, it is time for the stars who reaped the benefits of appearing on behalf of the celebrated historian to own these ideas too.

Mr. Damon, you enjoy a level of prestige by making a “serious” film like “The People Speak”.  It gives you credibility in certain circles so that some people don’t regard you as just a dumb actor.  So, now let’s put that to the test.  Are you prepared to embrace your hero’s words?  We hold you accountable for the actions of the Zinn Education Project.  You must speak out and either denounce this subversion of the democratic process or you must embrace it.

Josh Brolin, you can’t just sit quietly under the guise of pseudo-intellectualism and reap the benefits of appearing so studied and so well read and so… concerned for the education of our children (as you expressed in so many interviews promoting this film) and not take a stand on Mr. Zinn’s advice to a future history teacher: 

“Don’t obey the rules.  Don’t be intimidated by what they tell you you must teach.”

Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Marisa Tomei, Sean Penn, Rosario Dawson, Casey Affleck, Don Cheadle, David Straithern, Danny Glover, Kerry Washington, Benjamin Bratt, Sandra Oh, Jasmine Guy…  you are all part of this.  You went out of your way to be in this film.  We know because Director Chris Moore told us:

“ He went on to explain that as word spread about the project, the buzz grew and it became a cool thing to be associated with.  He would field calls from actors who wanted to get in and he would respond to them:  Go out and DO something.  Get involved, be an activist for a cause.”

So, you got your wish and you were in this film… this film that was the “cool thing to do.” Now that you are “cool” you get to own all the baggage that comes with being “cool” in the world of Howard Zinn.

His words are now your words.  Own them.  Unless, you’d like to tell us otherwise?

The actor Viggo Mortensen has apologized to Canada after inadvertently accusing the country of policy misdeeds for which he meant to chastise political leaders of the United States. The go-round occurred Sunday night at a Toronto International Film Festival panel discussion introducing ”The People Speak,” a documentary about dissent and resistance to power based on the book ”A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Mr. Mortensen wore a T-shirt that read: ”Impeach Remove Jail.” By way of explanation Mr. Mortensen, in Toronto to promote the movie ”Appaloosa,” began a plaint about things ”that have been happening in the last eight years in this country.” He was checked by the moderator, Tom Powers, the festival’s documentary programmer, who asked if Mr. Mortensen was referring to Canada. ”Ladies and gentlemen, the angry left,” said a laughing Matt Damon, who was joined on the panel by Josh Brolin and Marisa Tomei, among others. Mr. Mortensen allowed that Canada may have committed misdeeds of its own, without leveling a specific charge against either country. ”My apologies,” he concluded.Read the full article here.