The film stars Oscar winners Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and Jodie Foster and co-stars Oscar nominee John C. Reilly. Aside from a brief scene at its beginning and end, a cameo from the director and a few voices heard over the phone, those four constitute the film’s entire cast.

Its story focuses on two sets of parents who come together to discuss a fight between their sons. Reilly and Foster play Michael and Penelope Longstreet, the parents of the victim in the fight, while Waltz and Winslet play Alan and Nancy Cowan, the assailant’s parents. The concept is simple: these four parents spend the film discussing the incident that left the Longstreet’s son with two teeth knocked out of his mouth and several facial abrasions.

What’s interesting about “Carnage” is how that confrontation becomes so meaningless during the course of this film’s short running time -  eighty-nine minutes. The fight between the boys was simply that: a fight between two boys. It was simple and easy to analyze.

The battle between the four adults about the incident and its aftermath is not so easily understood.

While children fight with sticks, these parents use more impressive weapons. Penelope engages in battle with her rhetorically-elitist mindset. She uses loaded language like “deliberately,” “armed” and “disfigured” to stupefy the opposing parents. Nothing is simple with her. A short remark from her can carry the rhetorical ammunition of a dozen men.

On the other hand, Michael is a laid-back fellow who sells hardware for a living. He’s easy to get along with and very accommodating to the two guests. But he does have an angry side to him, a deviousness in him. When he became annoyed with the family hamster, he left it on the street to die without telling his wife or children.

The Cowans are more agreeable than the Longstreet’s but no less restrained as the story proceeds. Nancy is refined and kind, except when pushed. Alan, on the other hand, is a previously-divorced businessman who has no qualms about calling his own son a “maniac.”

If watching a character study of four people arguing doesn’t appeal to it, I would suggest you avoid this movie. It is, however, an intriguingly verbose film about the battles that we engage in as adults that aren’t so different from the playground fights that children participate in.

“Carnage,” as an experiment in filmmaking, might not have worked in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. Polanski, though, does a fine job with it taking a simple story about the relationship between these four adults and adding complex levels to it. There are times when the plot meanders and several silly occasions when the Cowans almost leave but never actually do. Overall, though, “Carnage” is a thoughtful and intelligent film abut the battles we engage in.

Battles that can do more damage than a simple jab from an “armed” teenage assailant.

So, where are the thrills, the chases and the heart-stopping revelations that usually accompany this doomsday scenario? And why can’t Soderbergh, an Oscar winner himself for the 2000 film “Traffic,” find the screen time to showcase all the Oscar nominees – and winners – in his cast?

The sound of a person coughing opens the film, and one of the first objects seen is a small bowl of bar nuts. Already, we’re dreading the kind of viral calamity about to strike courtesy of these small, deft strokes.

A married woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) arrives home from a business trip with a nasty cold, and before long she’s sprawled out on her kitchen floor, unconscious. Her husband (Matt Damon) rushes her to the hospital, but she never regains consciousness.

Did Soderbergh just kill off Chris Martin’s better half? (no spoiler here – we learn this in the film’s trailer).

From there, we get glimpses of how the virus which struck her down spreads. We see foreign cities with their population numbers emblazoned on the screen to highlight the stakes. We meet dedicated researchers (Kate Winslet, Elliott Gould), a compassionate Centers for Disease Control rep (Laurence Fishburne) and an aggressive blogger (Jude Law) who sees conspiracies all around him.

Every element a ripped from the headlines yarn demands is lined up for our approval, and for a while “Contagion” infects us to the core. But it’s s a thriller with few thrills, an impeccably acted disaster movie without the heart to go for broke. The movie hints at broad conspiracies, and then backs away from such accusations. For every villain there’s a hero following closely behind. It doesn’t condemn any quadrant of society but merely hints at the flaws in each. It’s dispassionate when it should be showing the fire in its storytelling belly.

It’s as if radio’s Fairness Doctrine were alive, well and applicable to feature films.

Winslet makes the most of her character’s muted story arc, while Fishburne summons every ounce of gravitas to play a man caught between personal and professional duties. Law is the live wire here, a muckraker out to spread the news that Big Pharma is up to its old tricks.

Marion Cotillard appears briefly in a subplot that adds nothing but confusion to the narrative.

It’s fascinating to see Soderbergh’s vision of societal chaos, and casting big stars to enliven small roles does make the subsequent epiphanies more profound. The filmmakers reveal just scientific jargon to keep the story’s structure sound, although a few whoppers rattle that foundation.

A-list directors rarely tackle material as pulpy as “Contagion.” And, after seeing Soderbergh’s approach to an epidemic epic, maybe we know why. Sometimes, a disaster movie should skip the nuance and just tell a darn good story.

The Blu-ray extras will do nothing to make you sleep any easier after considering the real-life implications of the film.”The ‘Contagion’ Detectives” talks to some of the experts who helped make the film as realistic as possible.

“They’re trained not to panic,” notes Cotillard of the men and women trying to keep our population safe behind the scenes.

“The Reality of ‘Contagion’” is a standard, albeit dense look at the film’s creation.

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” says Law regarding what the contagion experts told the crew about the possibility of a global pandemic like the one shown in the film.

Perahps the most innovative extra is “Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World,” an animated look at how something spreads so rapidly through our modern society. It’s goofy and fast paced, a darkly comic riff on a worst-case scenario that even mentions Bieber Fever to lighten the mood. The segment wraps with some proactive steps we can take to prevent a real-life “Contagion,” starting with the simple act of washig our hands regularly.

So what went so wrong?

“Mildred Pierce” is based on Cain’s classic potboiler of the same name, about a woman living through the dark days of the Depression in the generic suburb of Glendale, California. Mildred’s attractive, smart, and knows her way around a kitchen. Her ongoing downfall, however, is perpetually brought on by an attraction to bad men and an unnatural dedication to her oldest daughter Veda, a monster of need and manipulation — who’s really just a carbon copy of Mildred minus humanity.

After Mildred (Winslet) kicks her cheating husband out of the house (a very good scene), she has no car, no way to make a living, and in these economic times, no real prospects. She eventually “lowers” herself to accept a waitress job in a cafe where her smarts and notable cooking abilities gives her the know-how and confidence to open a place of her own — with a little help from her husband’s former business partner, the shady Wally, who Mildred is also enjoying loveless sex with.

As fate would have it, on her last day of work, Mildred meets Monte (Pearce), a handsome playboy with a Clark Gable mustache who haunts the attic of the mansion (that’s now up for sale) his family once occupied until the Depression wiped him out. On their first date, Monte and Mildred enjoy passionate HBO-ey sex and spend the night together. Fair or not, the consequence of this behavior sets the stage for the next decade of Mildred’s life, which will include professional successes, failures, and more personal turmoil than a full season of “One Life to Live.”

At nearly six hours over five chapters, “Mildred Pierce” is just too long. Cain’s novel is less than 300 pages, which means the screenplay for this 336 minute mini-series was probably longer. In the first and last two chapters, the pacing is downright stifling. Reportedly, Haynes wanted to do a slavish adaptation of Cain’s novel, but there’s a reason why even the most popular novels are almost always altered and cut dramatically for the silver screen — and that includes director Michael Curtiz’s far superior 1945 “Mildred Pierce” adaptation, which won its star, Joan Crawford, a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar.

When it comes to an art form, novels and films are as different as juggling and playing the tuba. To attempt to mash them together is only inviting trouble. Haynes (who also co-wrote the script) actually gets away with more than he should. There are number of compelling scenes and sequences, especially in chapters two and three. But for the most part, there are so many unnecessary scenes and so much extraneous dialogue that time and again you’re taken out of the story wondering what the point of it all is.

Another problem is the title character. Whereas Crawford played Mildred as a strong, clever, and unassuming woman who’s regularly conned and caught off guard by her awful daughter and the equally awful men in her life, Winslet portrays her as a sap, a perpetual victim and self-appointed martyr (You’ve come a long way, baby!). Over the course of a two hour film, it’s much easier to digest and sympathize with a mother who keeps falling all over herself to please a spoiled, ungrateful daughter who’s impossible to please. After three hours, though, you start to lose sympathy with someone who seems to enjoy being used like a doormat by everyone around her. It becomes frustrating to witness a woman who’s obviously intelligent continue to beat her head against a wall which we all know will never budge.

And then there’s all that HBO-ey soft-core porn. Winslet is gorgeous, but after a while even I got tired of seeing her naked. In almost every chapter, the story simply stops for various sex scenes performed in various positions that serve no story purpose whatsoever. Do I really need to see Pearce with his head in Winslet’s naked crotch?

The performances are mostly good, especially Pearce, but the harder-edged characters portrayed by Leo and Winningham seemed a bit over-the top at times, and Winslet — who’s in every scene — can’t do much after the second hour except repeat all the same emotions we’ve seen so many times before. And it’s the repetitiveness of these emotional beats that do the most damage in bogging down the story and sapping your sympathy for a protagonist who, shame on her, is fooled way more than once.

A fascinating exercise for Haynes and HBO would be to re-edit the entire production and cut the run-time to something closer to 150 minutes. There’s a choice steak in all that fat. I’m sure of it.

Near the beginning of the story, a mother named Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a trip to Hong Kong and becomes sick in Minneapolis. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) isn’t concerned at first but when her condition begins to rapidly deteriorate, he brings her to the hospital. Soon afterwards, Mitch find out that Beth has died and learns that his son is infected as well. While Mitch seems to be immune to the virus, he watches firsthand as his family falls victim to it.

“Contagion” soon introduces a large group of characters who will be affected, either directly or indirectly, by the virus. Laurence Fishburne plays Dr. Ellis Cheever, the Deputy Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is hired to create a cure for the virus.  The doctor sends Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) to Minneapolis to investigate the roots of the rapidly-spreading sickness. In the meantime, conspiracy theorist Alan Krumlede (Jude Law) becomes obsessed with the virus after watching an online video of a man infected with it. Krumlede starts spreading rumors online about pharmaceutical companies working with the government in a grand scheme to help the companies earn a massive profit. The film’s cast is huge and also includes Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould, and John Hawkes.

Unfortunately, few of these characters are well-developed. With such a large cast, it feels like the script was more focused on the virus than the characters who are affected by it. When some of these characters eventually become infected, it’s difficult to care about them. With a smaller cast, this story could have worked a lot better because the filmmakers would have been able to better develop the characters early on. Instead, we’re introduced to characters who die off before we even care about them.

Halfway through, the story also takes a dramatic turn when it starts focusing more on Alan’s theories. The first half of the film is strong as it shows the virus spreading and the work being done to stop it.  In the second half, though, Alan seems to become a main focus of the story. His ideas feel like the rantings of a conspiracy theorist and slow down the pace of this otherwise interesting story.

“Contagion” starts with a simple idea: a deadly virus is spreading uncontrollably.   But then overwhelms it with too many characters and a bizarre side plot about government conspiracies. If it had focused on the medical community’s reaction to the virus and the spread of the disease itself, the story could have worked a lot better.

Director Steven Soderbergh knows how to make movies with a wide range of characters and he showed off that ability in films like “Ocean’s 11” and “Traffic.” However, the screenplay written by Scott Z. Burns does Soderbergh no favors. If the characters aren’t well-crafted in a story like this, the film doesn’t work as it should and that is the ailment that infects “Contagion.”

The Telegraph:

Kate Winslet praised the “great” Roman Polanski as she promoted the first film he has made since being released from house arrest.

Polanski remains a fugitive from US justice after fleeing the country in 1978, having pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

However, Winslet had no qualms about the director’s history and jumped at the chance to appear in Carnage, a drama which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

“When Roman Polanski invites you to join him in any project you really don’t say no,” she said. “I felt extremely fortunate to be included.”

She admitted to feeling nervous about meeting Polanski on set, but only because she was over-awed by his film-making.

Recalling her first day on set with co-stars Jodie Foster, John C Reilly and Christoph Waltz, Winslet said: “We were working with the great Roman Polanski. We are only human beings and we are still perfectly capable of being terrified, whoever we are.”

The other cast members were equally effusive about the director, who stayed away from the press conference.

“When Roman Polanski calls you, after you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, you say yes,” said Reilly, while Waltz said: “I love Roman Polanski and I really learned to admire him.”

In 1977 Polanski plied 13-year-old Samantha Geimer with champagne and drugs before raping her at the home of his friend, Jack Nicholson.

There’s something so wrong with some people, it defies explanation.

Stars Vow To Carry Out Good Deed To Mark 9/11 Anniversary
 

Oddly enough there’s nothing in this story about publicity-seeking celebs doing something that would truly mark 9/11; like killing a terrorist, donating to a military charity, or voting against Barack Obama.

Hey, how about demanding Sony Pictures NOT turn their killing Bin Laden film into a $50 million Obama 2012 campaign commercial! Oh wait, that would take principles AND the courage to back them up.

Kate Winslet Forms All-star Anti-cosmetic Surgery Group 

Winslet says: “I will never give in. It goes against my morals, the way that my parents brought me up and what I consider to be natural beauty.”

Obviously, I’m no fan of those who plastic surgery themselves into ghouls, but isn’t moderation the key? What in the world is wrong with wanting to look better and doing something about it? A tummy tuck, an eyebrow lift, having a mole removed…

Not everyone was born with the genetic make-up of a Kate Winslet. Furthermore, not everyone has the free time between pictures and the millions of dollars needed for the diet and exercise specialists many of today’s stars hire on to keep them, uhm, ”natural-looking.”

Winslet wears make up, right? I’ll bet she plucks, waxes, and has her hair done, as well. What’s “natural” about that?

What say we form an all-star committee that opposes all-star committees packed with privileged elitists who tell other people how to live their lives? Who’s with me?

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

Last night I hung a garage door. It was actually kinda fun in a challenging sort of way until I had it mostly complete and realized it won’t open because there’s not enough headroom. So now I’m either going to call a door specialist or make lemonade by installing carpeting and a pool table.

Laugh all you want but do you think it’s easy being an idiot.

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TODAY’S QUICK HITS

TOM HANKS PERSONALLY REFUNDS DISAPPOINTED COUPLE’S ‘LARRY CROWNE’ TICKETS

BETTY WHITE VOTED AMERICA’S MOST TRUSTED CELEBRITY

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ EXPLAINS ‘4-D’ SMELLS IN ‘SPY KIDS 4′

FIVE WAYS PIXAR CHANGED THE ANIMATION GAME 

GREAT FARK HEADLINE 

DIRECTOR TRIES TO SAVE “LONE RANGER” 

THIS WEEK IN MOVIE POSTERS

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CLASSIC PICK FOR FRIDAY AUGUST 18TH

TCM:

2:15 AM  EST: Singin’ In The Rain (1952) –  A silent-screen swashbuckler finds love while trying to adjust to the coming of sound. Dir: Gene Kelly Cast:  Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds. C-103 mins, TV-G, CC.

Simply one of the greatest musicals (and movies) ever produced. MGM was at their high-water mark in 1952 and for my money the musical productions coming out of the magical studio during this period of time represent the best we’ll ever see in the art of making motion pictures. Acting, screenwriting, lighting, color, cinematography, editing, song, score, choreography, production design and costume design — all came together in an exquisite way we will never see again.

Along with “The Band Wagon,” “Easter Parade,” “An American in Paris,” and others, “Singin’ In the Rain” represents the very best of the very best of this wonderful medium.

Infectious storytelling at its finest.

–Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

But these great Americans are generally not members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they don’t get to vote for who takes home the Oscar.  People like Sean Penn do.  And Tim Robbins.   And tranny vomit recipient Susan Sarandon.  

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These are the kind of folks who make up the majority of Oscar voters, so it’s no wonder that the Academy Awards show is so often a festival of nitwittery that leaves normal Americans scratching their heads wondering, “Um, what the hell was that?” 

Oscar has more than its share of astonishing failures, of crazy-uncle-locked-in-the-attic nods that the Academy sorely regretted about the time the after-party coke bowls ran dry.  The terrible Oscar choices listed here are only from the last few decades since the sting of choosing How Green Is My Valley over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon has presumably faded since 1941– well, for some of us.  Oh, and you won’t find Marisa Tomei on this list – she rocks.  Deal with that, haters. 

So, in no particular order of insanity, here are Oscar’s 10 biggest recent screw-ups: ]

1. Crash: Best Picture 2006: Before Paul Haggis annoyed the Scientologists, he annoyed most of the rest of the world with Crash, a ponderous stew of liberal guilt and condescension that lucked into a Best Picture Oscar through a combination of pinko button pushing and the pure dumb luck of having an equally tiresome raft of competing nominees.  

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With fellow nominees Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Capote, and Good Night and Good Luck, Crash was up against sodomy, moral equivalence, more sodomy and George Clooney.  Apparently, the voters found Crash the lesser of five mediocrities. 

2. Shakespeare In Love: Best Picture 1999:  Well, I guess I’m just being petty.  I mean, Saving Private Ryan was merely a stirring, technically magnificent tribute to the unbelievable bravery of the heroes who stormed the beaches at Normandy and freed Europe from the grip of Nazi tyranny.  But Shakespeare In Love was about show business and it also displayed Gwyneth Paltrow’s epically unimpressive rack.  So I guess it was an easy choice for the Academy – they got to pick a flick about Actors and Acting while also dissing those dirty brutes who do Army stuff.  To pat themselves on their collective backs and diss the proles – how could they pass up that opportunity?  Well, they couldn’t, and they didn’t. 

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Now, there’s nothing really wrong with Shakespeare In Love.  It’s a perfectly serviceable film if you happen not to have testes, or merely hate all they stand for.  Sure, there are some guys out there who think a topless Gwyneth from 14 years ago is sexy, but movies need to appeal to more than just lonely shut-ins whose life partners are manufactured by the Kleenex Corporation.  This condescending, anti-American snob is to hot women what her husband’s band Coldplay is to cool music,and she needs to stick to her goop.com blog where she comments on the everyday problems that real moms face, like uppity butlers and “tiara hair.”  Enough said about her.  

In ambition and execution, Private Ryan – a film I have my problems with – was so manifestly superior artistically and technically that to overlook it could not simply be a mistake.  The electrifying initial landing scene is so unforgettable that it alone justified a Best Picture award regardless of what came after.  No, there had to be an agenda.  And that’s what makes this choice more than just risible – it was despicable. 

3. Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman: Best Actor 1993:  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  From his iconic roles in the 70’s like Michael Corleone to the bizarrely over-the-top but unforgettable Tony Montana in the 80’s, you could always count on Al to deliver.  But this?  It’s bad enough that it came to this; it’s worse that the Academy acted as an enabler to Pacino’s sad decline into tedious caricature. 

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Hooah?  I don’t think so. 

4. Roberto Begnini in Life Is Beautiful: Best Actor 1999:  This award was so manifestly undeserved that it made President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize seem as underwhelming as a third place middle school science fair ribbon tossed at Albert Einstein.  Let me put this out there – Life Is Beautiful is perhaps the stupidest, most offensive major motion picture ever made.  When the Nazis came looking for Begnini, this holocaust comedy literally had people in the audience yelling, “Hey, he’s hiding in the alley!” 

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Someone told Roberto Begnini a terrible lie – that he was amusing.  In fact, he is the most annoying performer in the entire history of cinema, a history that includes Matt Damon and Channing Tatum.  What takes him to a whole new level of suck is that he thinks he’s hilarious, which he is – in the same way a giant herpetic lesion is hilarious.  

The “wacky” English-mangling acceptance speech he offered when presented with this award was brilliant…to those who hit the sauce in their limos beforehand.  For the rest of the audience, it was like a root canal sans anesthetic, but without the fun.  Fortunately, Begnini has faded into well-deserved obscurity and his movies are today largely forgotten, a tribute to the collective human mind’s ability to block out traumatic experiences. 

5. Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine: Best Supporting Actor 2007:  “Let’s honor a trangressive indie comedy where the grandpa swears and drinks and does drugs – yeah, that’ll blow the collective minds of those squares out there in Jesusland!”  Such was no doubt the thought process that went into handing the little gold naked guy to veteran Alan Arkin for what was essentially playing the same curmudgeonly character he’d been essaying since the great Freebie and the Bean.  Now, that was an amusing, truly un-PC movie: 

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So rent Freebie and let Little Miss Sunshine fade into a vague, unpleasant memory. 

6. Diablo Cody for Juno: Best Original Screenplay 2008:  Once again, the Academy experienced the equivalent of a “double bagger,” where it wakes up in the morning, looks at what it brought home, and asks “What the hell was I thinking?” 

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Juno is not the most horrible movie of all time, despite the presence of the spirit-killing Michael Cera and Ellen Page and a soundtrack full of crappy, waify hipster alt-folk songs that are so twee they make Justin Beiber seem like Megadeth.  It’s just that Juno is embarrassingly pretentious, with the precocious heroine’s vocabulary packed with painfully cutesy words like “shenanigans.”  And when Rainn Wilson’s character calls her “home skillet,” well, you just want to slap him. 

This is the problem with a novelty act movie – the Academy is amused for a few minutes, votes it an Oscar, then spends the rest of eternity shaking its collective head after figuratively sobering up.  

7. An Inconvenient Truth: Best Documentary 2007:  It’s hard to believe that it was only four years ago that people actually believed in global warming.  But it’s not hard at all to believe that among the biggest suckers were the pampered quarter-wits who do most of the Academy Award voting.  Al Gore’s ridiculous exercise in propaganda, delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, was a natural choice for the Oscar voters, but they were probably pretty disappointed they couldn’t also vote for the nominated documentary that dissed Christians or the other one that trashed America over Iraq.  Whoever said that Hollywood doesn’t embrace a diversity of thought?  

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In any case, An Inconvenient Truth is destined to be the Reefer Madness of 2007, with stoned UC Berkeley students from the Class of 2032 laying around their dorms laughing at how stupid people were back in the mid-aughts.  Well, some people. 

8. The English Patient: Best Picture 1997:  Perhaps the Academy wanted some balance after properly awarding the magnificent Schindler’s List Best Picture in 1994, which is the only possible explanation for why this over-praised, under-interesting celluloid atrocity could have won.  After all, this is the film that seriously posits that collaborating with the Nazis is perfectly cool if it will help you score with a mediocre chick who happens to be married to some other dude.  

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Sure, we can’t expect the film’s mere utter moral bankruptcy to dissuade the Academy voters – these are the folks who think Roman Polanski is the real victim.  But couldn’t they at least notice that this soapy melodrama is about the most boring way to spend nearly three hours outside of a Meet the Press marathon?  

9. Kate Winslet in The Reader: Best Actress 2009:  What the hell is it with Hollywood and Nazi sympathizers?  Well, admittedly Kate Winslet’s character had more going for her than just cavorting with brownshirts – she was illiterate and liked to do underage boys.  In Hollywood, that’s like an acting trifeca, and Kate went the full fascist-illiterate-pedo. 

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Oh, the performance itself?  Um, I have a question:  How did Kate Winslet get tagged as some sort of great thespian revelation?  In every movie she is in, she always seems to bear the same furrowed-brow, vaguely troubled expression, as if she was suffering from mild indigestion.  It must be something else – perhaps her willingness to doff her clothes and display her chubby charms in pretty much everything she’s been in.  Whatever.  

10. 3-6 Mafia’s “Hard Out here For A Pimp”: Best Song 2006:  Perhaps the most hilarious pick of all time, the Academy’s choice of the year’s Best Song from the rap/hooker extravaganza Hustle & Flow was just awesome.  For once, the saccharine Disney ditties and the generic pop hits were thrust aside in favor of a gritty urban tune that finally dared to musically explore the difficulties that industrious entrepreneurs face in their daily lives.  Yeah, nothing like a song we can all relate to. 

Most amazing were the hip hop stylings of those past and future unknowns, 3-6 Mafia, cavorting on stage while a bunch of dancers dressed like Hollywood’s idea of “hos” gyrated and frolicked before the bejeweled and bewildered audience: 

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Simply spectacular.  Yeah, it sure is hard out here for a pimp who’s trying to get his money for the rent.  Who can’t identify with that?  Especially in Hollywood.  

And this year, Oscar, don’t forget to keep your pimp hand strong!

But when we look at the leading actresses of 2010, the dearth of great performances and great parts is stunning.  The Golden Globe nominees for best actress this year were Halle Berry in the anonymous flick Frankie and Alice, playing a crazy person in her usual over-the-top style; Nicole Kidman in the anonymous flick Rabbit Hole, playing a grieving mother in her usual cold and remote style; Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, playing a teenage girl looking for her meth-making dad; Natalie Portman in Black Swan, playing a crazy person with a constipated look plastered on her mug; and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, playing a spoiled girl who gets knocked up, married, and presumably divorced.  Has anyone seen any of these women in any of these films?  And if the disastrous Natalie Portman – Queen Amidala masturbating, anyone? – is the frontrunner for Best Actress at the Oscars, how far have female figures fallen?

Far.  Quick, think of the ten greatest living film actors.  It’s not that tough – we have iconic male film stars all the time.  Now think of the ten greatest living film actresses.  Now take away all women over 50.  Still thinking, aren’t you?

The simple truth is that actresses were far more iconic fifty years ago than they are now.  We may want to shtup most of the actresses we see on screen today, but we don’t show up to see them because of their standout screen personas.  That isn’t because today’s actresses are less talented than their predecessors – we have many talented actresses on the scene.  It’s because screen executives have decided that truly feminine women, with both brains and looks, are no longer in keeping with the times.  Instead, film execs have cut a sharp dichotomy between “sexy” women and “smart” women – it’s either Megan Fox or Kate Winslet.  Charlize Theron can’t play a strong, graceful, beautiful woman – she’s got to be either a lesbian serial killer or a piece of eye candy.

The feminism embraced by most of today’s execs is antiquated.  They still think that women must act like men in order to promote equality of the sexes.  Make Natalie Portman’s character a man in Black Swan and take away Darren Aronofsky’s idiotic and self-centered camera movements and you’ve got an oversexed Ronald Colman in A Double Life.  There’s nothing feminine about Ellen Page in Juno – she’s more of a dude than Michael Cera in the same film.  What ever happened to Bette Davis, to Vivien Leigh, to the old-school, unmannered Meryl Streep?  They’re gone, replaced with pale imitations starring in angst-filled nonsense glorifying aberrant behavior.

Ironically enough, the feminism of today’s Hollywood has killed the female movie star.  If Hollywood wants to restore that luster, they’ll need to embrace femininity, in all of its three-dimensional glory, once again.

Sixteen of the top 20 box office earners have either a G or PG rating which should be a clue that R rated films ( “Titanic” being the exception) don’t do as well yet studios continue to add gratuitous irrelevant sex scenes that ruin the film. Why? It certainly can’t be artistic license because the principal reaction to them is usually-‘Ew!!! Why did they do that?” 

Movie-going statistics have dropped significantly among older adults and that’s understandable since most fare today cater to hormonal adolescents without a clue as to the true appeal of sensual art. Yet senior citizens today are former film buffs who would relish worthy theatrical offerings but their treks back to the wide screen lonely leave them disappointed. 

A few years ago I went with an elderly friend to see, “Love Actually,” because we’re both great fans of Alan Rickman. The film has various vignettes of romantic couples and their curious experiences pursuing the love game. One of these couples happens to be two individuals acting in a porn movie and although the intent was to inject irony in the sex scenes showing the relative naïveté of the participants as they try to hook up, it failed miserably. My friend later said that particular graphic display spoiled the otherwise charming film which she no longer would add to her DVD collection when it came out. 

Who decides to add these charm-busters to films? What is it about major appliances like washing machines that attract sexual activity? In the film, “Little Children,” Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson drop their drawers to perform sexual gymnastics in the laundry room and several other inappropriate venues. “ Annette Bening has her head banged against a motel headboard while her adulterous lover humps her energetically in the Oscar winner “American Beauty.” Did we have to see Viggo Mortensen’s bare butt as he had sex with his wife on the stairs ( note: stairs are a very uncomfortable place to indulge in this activity) in “ A History of Violence?” Of course not and every film would have generated better box office without these unnecessary insertions — pardon the double entendre. 

I could blame corrupt producers and directors but none of these quality-busting scenes would be possible without the cooperation of the actors and actresses involved. I’m continually flabbergasted that these so-called artists actually consider it of thespian merit to simulate raw sex before the eye of the camera. In a way, Eight Avenue peep shows are more candid about their industry. 

Madonna was said to be embarrassed about old nude photographs that might impede her adoption of  the Malawi child David. Her daughter Lourdes is rumored to be more conservative than her Mom. Big surprise that! 

I wonder what the children of Julianne Moore will think of her naked lap dance in “Boogie Nights” when they’re old enough to see the film.

Helen Mirren has managed to eclipse her “Caligula” and other nude, lascivious roles with an Oscar win for “The Queen,” in which she appeared fully clothed but she’s British so she’s can carry that off somewhat. 

As a teen and a young woman, I’d buy all the movie mags with their color pictures of beautiful people who could honestly be called STARS. Now I find it difficult to name one female star today who doesn’t dress or act like a skank. Sorry. I realize it’s a sign of the times but that doesn’t mean I can’t prefer a time when class was what determined stardom. 

When I look at today’s crop of movie denizens, every single one pales in comparison to our former screen legends. There is no one as gorgeous or as talented as the late Paul Newman. Ava Gardner may have had a checkered love life but her on-screen image is still a paean to her beauty and acting ability not her sexual proclivities. 

Supermarket tabloids used to be my guilty pleasure but for the past few years, I can’t drum up interest in any of the figures that the paparazzi chase down. The word “star” is applied to reality TV people who fail to excite my curiosity. I don’t care who’s sleeping with whom nor do I give a whit about what any of them have to say. 

Erotica is now dead in cinema and has been replaced by pornography. I’m trying hard to imagine which of today’s Hollywood elite could produce the same sexual heat that a long gone Maureen O’Sullivan and Johnny Weismuller managed to generate in our own minds. I’ve drawn a blank. Any suggestions?

Last year Miramax released “Doubt,” a high-profile piece of Oscar-bait starring Academy Award winners’ Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Streep plays a puritanical nun on a moral crusade to expose a Priest (Hoffman) who she believes is sexually abusing a 12 year-old boy. Both characters are portrayed as unsympathetic (especially Streep’s) but in just a couple scenes the boy’s working-class mother (Mrs. Miller, played by Viola Davis) is established as the moral center of the film – the only one truly interested in the welfare of her child. When Mrs. Miller’s informed that her son’s being molested, the Moral Center Of The Film responds that her 12 year-old boy is gay, a social outcast, and beaten regularly by his homophobic father … so maybe the best option for him is a sexual relationship with a forty-something child predator.

Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, and written and directed by Oscar-winner Alan Ball, last year’s “Towelhead” is a film Roman Polanski might have seen many, many times while wearing a rain coat. The protagonist is 13 year-old Jasira (played by the then barely eighteen Summer Bishil) and the story surrounds her sexual abuse at the hands of a number of men, including Eckhart’s Gulf War Vet. Rather than the repeated abuse damaging the young girl, the filmmaker portrays the rapes and molestations as a healthy and sexually liberating experience. More than once the audience is “treated” to lingering shots of Jasira’s bare legs as she discovers the joys of the orgasm while masturbating to photographs of naked women.

Kate Winslet won last year’s Best Actress Oscar for her role in “The Reader,” in which she plays a “sympathetic” Nazi guilty of mass murder who seduces and then engages in a steamy sexual affair with a 15 year-old boy. The sex scenes between this mature woman and a child lean heavily on the erotic, as opposed to the creepy. (The “sympathetic Nazi” issue we’ll save for another post.)

Yes, in just one year, Hollywood released three films that in one way or another portrayed sex with children as potentially healthy or their molester as sympathetic. And these aren’t fringe, indie films either. All three involve name stars and Oscar winners.

Unfortunately, this is not a conspiracy. Hollywood deviants never gathered together to plan for a slate of films aimed at a drip-drip campaign designed to dull our moral outrage towards the most heinous crime imaginable. It’s worse than that. We’re up against a culture; the same culture that can’t quite grasp why a child rapist should have to serve prison time for a crime he’s confessed to.

And this is how cinematic propaganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s motivations are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thoughtful people to start second guessing themselves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held captive by the powerful sound and fury of the moving picture. First we’re led to identify and sympathize with a particular character, then that character does something designed to challenge our belief structure. This can range from, “If John Wayne opposes racism, maybe I should,” to, “Well, if a loving mother is okay with it, maybe I need to get a little more nuanced and tolerant about this whole child-rape thing.”

On its face, that may sound laughable, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean our eyes are lying to us. Last year merely topped off a campaign targeted at our children that began some time ago.

In 2006’s “Notes on a Scandal,” Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett plays a school teacher engaged in a steamy sexual affair with one of her students. Like “The Reader,” the sex scenes between a mature woman and her student strive for the erotic and never once does the story stop to examine how such a destructive affair might psychologically affect a teen-aged boy. That same year, in “Little Children,” Jackie Earle Haley was Oscar-nominated for his support work as a molester just released from prison who’s the victim of that favorite Hollywood whipping boy, suburban hypocrisy. Just two years earlier, Kevin Bacon’s heroic molester in “The Woodsman” not only saves the day and wins the pretty girl, but in his valiant struggle to “reform” he’s presented as a kind of “civil rights” metaphor as policemen and “intolerant” co-workers torment him.

The award for Most Unsettling, however, must go to 2004’s “Birth,” where Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman stars as a widow convinced her dead husband has returned in the form of a 10 year-old boy. If watching a near-forty year-old woman exchange longing looks with a little kid isn’t creepy enough, wait till they end up naked in a bathtub together.

Whether it’s true or not that seventy-five years ago Clark Gable nearly bankrupted the t-shirt industry by not wearing one in “It Happened One Night,” what is true is that billions of dollars are spent annually by advertisers convinced sound and images can alter behavior. You’d have to be a fool to make an argument against the persuasive powers of moving images, but those fools do exist. Most of them are liars.

The Hollywood Left is many things but they’re not fools and they fully understand the power of the medium under their control. Certainly, damning everyone who works in the entertainment world would be unfair, but this is also a culture where only a handful of “names” were willing to speak out against the pro-Polanski movement – including many Leftists who have never been shy about speaking out in the past.

The film industry has a history to be proud of when it comes to opposing racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the most vocal from this current crop seem all too ready to tarnish that legacy as they target our children for profit and worse.

Is it too much to ask of the Hollywood Left that they show as much intolerance towards the sexualization of young children as they do towards conservatives and Christians?

That question has already been answered.