And that’s just what the Republicans in Congress did to Hollywood when it abandoned the rush to pass SOPA and regulate the Internet for the benefit of Tinseltown. Astonishingly, considering its usual inability to perform competently at even the most basic level, the GOP not only managed to embrace good policy but drove a wedge into the Democratic coalition that may well have dramatic consequences down the road. And, best of all, it provided a bit of long overdue payback to the smug oligarchs of LA’s West Side who have spent the last couple decades treating Republicans like something you’d hasten to flush.

Hey, suckers, how do ya like us now?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is only the latest attempt by Hollywood to breathe some life back into its dying business model. Enraged that online “pirates” are passing around bootleg copies of movies, shows, books, music, and all other manner of intellectual property, the industry did what it has done for years: ran to Congress for ever more burdensome and onerous laws designed to hold back the inevitable consequences of progress. 

But this time, it went too far. Perhaps it was Hollywood’s arrogance. Perhaps it was the provisions allowing Hollywood to use the United States government to shut down any website it pleased on the mere accusation of “piracy” without any due process, a power lefty–fascist bureaucrats would be only too eager to accept.

Not surprisingly, the people who make their living on the web were less than thrilled about giving Uncle Sam and the media conglomerates an off-switch.

Initially, the Republicans once again fell into Hollywood’s trap. When Hollywood needs something from Congress, it dons the mask of “business” and enlists the GOP ideologically. After all, the Republicans are supposed to love “business.” Until now, they have been blind to the fact that many of the “businesses” that plead for special breaks before them are about as capitalist as your typical Occupy Wall Street mutant – the only difference is nicer suits and better drugs.

They aren’t capitalists; they’re cronyists, either relying on government handouts directly or basking in the protection of special favors. And that’s precisely the opposite of what we conservatives are about.

Businesses compete; “businesses” like the entertainment industry use the government to enact rules and regulations that make it so they don’t have to compete.

So, like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the dinner bell, the GOP started drooling when Hollywood started playing the business card. In fact, Republican Lamar Smith of Texas was only too eager to carry water for it – as were several other normally solid Republicans who should have known better.

Of course, Hollywood laughed. It laughed because it holds Republicans in contempt. For decades, Hollywood has endeavored to depict conservative Americans are weirdos, losers, petty tyrants, religious nuts, baby killing fanatics, and idiots. And, once again, the GOP was falling into its trap and dancing to its tune. “What a bunch of suckers!” snickered the Hollywood big shots.

Oh, and the Democrats? Not an issue. Not only are Hollywood and the liberals in ideological lockstep, but Hollywood represents buckets of money and bushels of glamor. The Dems are always on board for whatever Hollywood wants. They know where their locally-sourced, whole wheat artisan bread in non-dairy buttered.

But something funny happened on the way to the fascism.

There was a backlash. The peasants revolted! Tech savvy Americans, both right and left, saw that the Internet that they had grown up with and embraced was in grave danger of being bound by regulations for the sole purpose of ensuring that the dying Hollywood business model would last a bit longer – at the price of stifling everyone else.

No dice.

The rebellion came as a shock to the GOP congresscreatures, who in reality probably had not given much thought to the contents of SOPA – that is, until all hell broke loose. Suddenly, they became VERY interested in intellectual property and telecommunications law.

The Republicans, pushed by a groundswell of opposition from conservative new media types, bailed. SOPA was a non-starter, and now everyone will be looking the next time Hollywood tries to play them. Hey, Hollywood, there’s a new paradigm in Tinseltown.

And the Democrats who supported SOPA  – and who could not back out no matter how outraged the nutroots got – ended up looking both foolish and like tools of the corporate power structure.  And that’s just what they are.

But it gets better.

It gets better because this was a great object lesson all around. To those in Republicans in Congress, it brought attention to a subject that had been sadly ignored but is vital to a huge number of influential voters. It gave them an issue – Internet freedom – that is truly congruent with conservative values, unlike the past political payoffs to connected Hollywood cronies. We conservatives can run on this.

It was also a lesson to young, tech-savvy people who see themselves as culturally liberal and just kind of voted that way, mostly out of habit.  The group that really shares their values – creativity, enterprise, freedom – is the conservativees. The liberals they counted themselves among wanted to shut down websites, not the conservatives. SOPA opened a lot of eyes.

Everything they thought they knew was a lie. Here was Kevin Bacon, and he was telling John Lithgow not to dance.

Can you say “Wedge issue?”

Internet freedom, besides being the right thing to do, is a powerful banner to carry aloft into the battle for the next generation’s hearts and minds. The young, affluent, educated voters the Democrat Party is counting on for the future have to choose between the stolid, limited, controlled world of the Democrat’s corporate owners or the free market of the conservatives where their only limits are those they impose upon themselves.

The Democrats can’t flex on this – they are bound to Hollywood for money and what’s left of its fading aura. But the GOP? It won’t miss what it never had.

In fact, Hollywood’s history of trashing conservatives only make it sweeter when its emissaries come to us for help and we laugh in their botoxed faces.

With its crappy product, promotion of (mostly) non-stellar “stars” and sneering contempt for the majority of its customers, Hollywood seems desperately committed to failure. That’s why when is asks us for a life preserver, we should be only too happy to hand it an anvil.

The arrival of a serious film about a serious conservative presents liberal reviewers with a quandary. When the film trashes the conservative, that’s great – the slander in and of itself is good for at least a star on its own, and if the boom mikes aren’t looming in the frame and the actors don’t forget their lines you’re guaranteed at least a three star review if only in the name of socialist solidarity.

But if the movie, as some say happened here, refuses to take a position on its subject, then there’s a problem for the liberal reviewer. As we shall see, they tend to handle it by simply inserting their own limousine liberal insights into the review. Somewhere, sometime, someone must have lied to them and told them that the world gives a damn about the political views of guys whose job it is to discourse upon movies that feature singing chipmunks, space robots and/or Ashton Kutcher.

No one is really sure about what might happen in the third theoretically possible situation. It will be interesting to see how liberal reviewers respond if Hollywood ever makes a major movie biography about a prominent conservative that views him or her in a positive light.

The reviews for “The Iron Lady” are mixed, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 55 percent score by the critics.  Not surprisingly, the critics are having a tough time sticking to the substance. Many of them just can’t resist taking a whack at her – as if she had not spent her career being hit harder by better.

Roger Ebert, a reflexive leftist whose pinko opinions usually saturate his movie reviews, wrote a thoughtful review here. He objected not to the opinion the film held of its subject, but that the producers seemed too timid to offer any opinion at all:

Was she a monster? A heroine? The movie has no opinion. She was a fact. You leave the movie having witnessed it. Whatever your feelings were about Thatcher were before you saw it, you now have some images to accompany it.

Love him or hate him, that’s some sharp writing. If true, it represents a valid criticism and is the kind of keen insight one looks to a reviewer to express. But, of course, Ebert could not resist a long digression into lefty/peacenik silliness over Thatcher’s steadiness in the face of Argentine aggression in the Falklands which then morphs into a lament for her heartlessness:

Thatcher held office for an unprecedented three terms, bitterly divided Great Britain, and led her nation during the Falklands War, which seemed to be largely an exercise in hubris on both sides. Before the war (and now), no one frankly gave a damn about the Falkland Islands, and Thatcher’s foreign policy amounted to: “They’re ours and you bloody well can’t have them.” For this brave troops on both sides were killed, and those who cared to could deceive themselves that there was one small spot of foreign soil that, as far as Thatcher was concerned, would be forever British. (Footnote: The British didn’t consider it foreign.)

Of course, Argentina started the war by invading the Falklands, over which it had disputed Britain’s claim since 1833. You can’t say they didn’t wait long enough before taking action. And if Argentina mounted a military invasion, what could Thatcher do? She was compelled to defend the islands. The loved ones on either side who lost someone in that war must have been hard-pressed to understand why death was useful or necessary.

That wasn’t Thatcher’s concern. In a striking scene that takes place in her increasingly senile old age, she declares that ideas are more important to her than feelings. That seems to have been a governing principle in her life, allowing her to look with apparently limited concern at unemployment, hunger and homelessness on the domestic front.

Ebert’s feelings about British policy of the 1980s really aren’t the issue – we just want to know if “The Iron Lady” is any good. But like all liberals, Ebert seems to think we’re dying for his insights on politics when the important question is whether we should drop $40 for seats and popcorn to watch this flick.

Lesser reviewers likewise join in the Thatcher-bashing. You’ll be shocked to learn that Karina Longworth of the Village Voice resented Thatcher not being presented with horns and a pointy tail. Variety accepts the unexamined premises of the community it serves, showing why it is Hollywood’s own Pravda when reviewer Leslie Felperin fumes that “[m]uch is made of how Thatcher broke through the glass ceilings of gender and class on a personal level; rather less is said about how her policies disadvantaged the poor.”

While it’s no shock that Slate’s Dana Stevens thinks that it was Thatcher’s “policies of economic deregulation and union-busting that dismantled Britain’s social safety net,” I expect that British subjects taxed into poverty to support the bloated behemoth of cradle-to-grave socialism on that sinking island would be shocked to hear about this alleged “dismantling.”

Cole Smithey (“The Smartest Film Critic in the World”) sugarcoats it by labeling Thatcher one “of the Right’s most reprehensible examples of absolute power corrupting absolutely,” raising the important questions, “Who is Cole Smithey, and why should I give a rat’s ass what some hipster doofus with a website and a subscription to The Nation thinks?”

He also asserts that “Thatcher contributed to the world’s current economic collapse with a cunning brand of daring cruelty that defies logic and reason,” forgetting that the lefty Labor Party had some small part in running Britain after Thatcher stepped down in 1990. I particularly enjoyed his characterization of how “Thatcher’s heavy-handed military response in the Falklands rightly paints her as a warmonger.”

He seems to have forgotten that Argentina invaded the Falklands, not vice versa, but then he seems to have grown up in an age where wussy school administrators suspend both the kid who starts the fight and the one who fights back. Smithey opines that “[h]istory will not be kind to Margaret Thatcher,” a threat I would find more chilling if Smithey’s comments betrayed any familiarity with history.

With all the hyperventilating about the subject of the film, it’s hard to get a straight answer to the only question we really want to hear these critics answer – should we pay to see the movie?  We still don’t really know.

But does it have to be that way? Imagine a sketch comedy show that pokes fun at clueless liberal mayors, politically correct feminists, and entitled hipster butt-inskys. Sound impossible in today’s climate? Surprisingly, the most politically incorrect comedy show out there right now might just be IFC’s “Portlandia.” All six episodes of the first season of the show are currently available for streaming on Netflix, and the second season starts January 21^st on IFC.

“Portlandia” is the brainchild of “Saturday Night Live”’s Fred Armisen and musician Carrie Brownstein. It’s a half-hour show set entirely in the left-wing magnet city of Portland, Oregon. In the very first episode, they say that Portland is a city where the 1990s never ended (it’s “a place where young people go to retire”) and sure enough, Armisen and Brownstein have created a cast of Portland-based characters with the requisite tribal piercings, chin beards, and indigenous pantsuits.

Make no mistake — this isn’t a show created by conservatives. It’s clear that Armisen and Brownstein love Portland for all its ’90s grungy counter-culture, but they also understand how goofy it is and they aren’t afraid to goof on it. The result is a show full of sketches that skew liberal icons in a good-natured way. The show makes a few sexual references throughout the episodes and a bit of cursing so if you’re a parent, you might watch to decide if it’s adults only. You get a high dose of snark without the bitter aftertaste. The closest they come to a right-wing attack is saying “it’s like the Bush administration never happened.”

Armisen is a fairly known quantity from his work on “SNL,” but the sketches on “Portlandia” are much better — they play with a more experimental palette and don’t have to fit into the familiar SNL frameworks of fake TV game shows or recurring characters doing the same catchphrase week after week. The looser format of “Portlandia” allows Armisen to spread his wings beyond his uninspired Barack Obama impersonation and show his smarter, geekier and goofier side.

The show’s revelation is Carrie Brownstein, formally with the Pacific Northwest riot grrl band Sleater Kinney and now fronting a new band called Wild Flags. I’d never seen Brownstein act before, and she immediately became one of my favorite sketch comedy actresses. She’s able to pull off characters ranging from dour woman’s studies types, self-important activists and overly happy hippies. She even does a couple of gender bending bits. She has a smile that lights up the screen and, as one of the show’s four credited writers, she seems to be inhabiting characters she knows well.

Even though I’m guessing that neither Armisen or Brownstein would be caught dead voting Republican, the comedy premises of “Portlandia” could have been written by a conservative cultural commentator pointing out the hypocrisies and foibles of the modern liberal. Rather than try to describe the sketches, just take a look for yourself.

Here, a couple of literary name-droppers compete to see who’s more well read:

A type of political commercial we’ve seen a million times offers a unique plan to end unemployment:

And a feminist bookstore owner lusts after a girl who just wants to write about how awesome her boyfriend Chad is:

Given the choice between getting silly and going for the jugular, the good-natured “Portlandia” always veers towards the absurd, and that’s one of the show’s many virtues. It manages to make some points about human nature without getting preachy or forgetting that comedy should be entertaining. The show’s guest appearances like Heather Graham, Steve Buscemi, Aimee Mann, and the wacked out Portland mayor played by Kyle MacLachlan add a surprise to every episode.

“Portlandia” is sure to make some people want to move to Oregon right away and sure to make other people avoid it like the plague. However you feel, if you like quick sketch comedy that doesn’t go after the usual targets, you’ll enjoy your visit to “Portlandia.”

This woman took very, very little in the way of ability and somehow provided a service – of a kind that frankly baffles me – that millions of people nevertheless want to spend their money on. Regardless, it’s none of your or my business, and it’s especially none of the government’s business.

But now, here comes “Occupy Hollywood,” a hilarious exercise in poetic justice in which the left proposes to chase its own tail by attacking the same cretinous celebrities who have been the first to parrot every commie slogan the bongo-playing degenerates of Occupy Wall Street have misspelled on their placards.

Jo Piazza, the author of some remainder bin perennial titled Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money, is leading the bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you-athon with an article in The Huffington Post called “Occupy Hollywood: Why It’s Time To Call Out High-Earning Celebrities.”

For some reason, she thinks what movie stars make is some sort of problem:

Yet, the middle class continues to prop up the .01 percent: Hollywood celebrities who make millions just for being themselves. When it comes to making money, celebrities are abnormal. Their enormous salaries make them outliers in the American economy, on a pay grade above most CEOs, surgeons and lawyers — the professions that typically come to mind when we think of the wealthy.

Well, it sure is a problem, like global warming is a problem — that is, it isn’t. As Chet the Unicorn would say if he was here and not riding the magic rainbow to Happyland, that some people she envies are successful is apparently America’s greatest crisis; ergo, you should all be outraged! After all, to liberals, government’s primary function is catering to the worst impulses of jealous busybodies.

Piazza whines about Kardashian, Snooki, and Brangelina making money. For some reason, she is under the impression that what celebrities make is her business:

It is messed up! So what can we do about it?

Only a liberal sees other people being successful and finds it imperative to put a stop to it. Her solution?

So how about a movement to Occupy Hollywood?

Gimme a break. Here’s a better idea. How about you and the rest of the left-wing morons start a movement to shut the hell up?

We, as conservatives who love freedom – meaning of necessity that we love free enterprise and detest the idea of the kind of fascist nanny state these losers would impose in order to to make the world conform to their arbitrary and self-serving concepts of fairness – need to draw the battle line here, at the celebrities.

We need to defend the right of everyone – even stupid, useless, vapid nincompoops – to get rich.

Johnny Depp (by all accounts a good guy) made $50 million last year, Piazza complains. And we conservatives must say, “Awesome!”

Liberals see success as a problem – if people are able to live their own lives without the guidance of aspiring liberal fascists, the entire premise of liberalism is fatally undercut. So success is the target, and not a lot of people have been as successful as Johnny Depp has.

Yeah, he’s earned a lot of money. That’s great! The key word is “earned.” He has talent, he has skill, and he provides something that makes him worth $50 million a year to someone. That someone wants his services and considers it a good deal to fork over $50 mil, but Piazza, the liberal fascist, would prefer to substitute her arbitrary assessment of his value for the free choice of those who actually are paying him.

Hell no.

Depp’s time and talent belong to him — not to Piazza, not Michael Moore, not to any of those drumming idiots in Zuccotti Park.

It belongs to him, not her, and he owes no one – not me, not you, not Piazza, not Obama – any explanations, reasons or excuses. If he wishes to bathe nude in a swimming pool full of twenties, that’s his business and none of ours.

It’s his property. Taking it from him, as Piazza would love to do to satisfy her personal vision of justice, is theft.

It’s morally wrong.

And as a practical matter, it’s devastating. Piazza and the rest of her envious, thieving loser pals don’t really care about Depp’s millions. They care about our thousands. Hell, we all know how communism works; it’s the regular folks who get their property redistributed while the nomenklatura elite lives in luxury.

We can safely assume Piazza envisions herself a redistributer rather than a redistributee. It’s always like that with liberals; somehow we end up making the sacrifice while they sip champagne. Do you think Al Gore is going to take a seat on a biodiesel Greyhound bus or hop on a private jet to the next climate change scam confab?

Spreading hate for the successful, lying that their success is somehow illegitimate or “unearned” because it fails to meet some ever-shifting set of arbitrary standards, is simply a way to get their fascist footsies in the door to redistribute us.

Sure, it’s amusing to see a bunch of liberal Hollywood nitwits suddenly confronted by howling leftists who the stars thought they had been backing. As entertaining as poetic justice is, it’s still wrong to take people’s property just because they are stupid and embrace idiotic ideas – Alec Baldwin, I’m looking your way.

Sure, you have an elitist buffoon like Frank Rich figuratively – at least – sporting wood over the idea that this Occupy Wall Street nonsense will develop into a real class war. Limo leftists are always turned on by the thought of real live revolution – that’s why they don t-shirts silk-screened with the mug of that butcher Che Guevara (they forget how that coward died begging for his useless life before the CIA and Bolivian Army sent him on an eternal vacation to hell).

But dilettantes like Rich and the Hollywood left would soon find themselves against the bullet-pocked wall if a real revolution came. And they’d die wondering why, as so many other useful idiots have in the aftermath of previous leftist revolutions.

Of course, that won’t happen here, because there won’t be a leftist revolution, because too many of us will fight to the death before we ever let that happen. So there’s no real danger; the elite leftists from Hollywood to New York can keep on posing as the vanguard of the coming people’s struggle, kept safe and secure, as always, by the efforts of better men and women than themselves.

In the meantime, we can hold the line for freedom and free enterprise by defending the rights of clowns named Kardashian and malignant dwarfs named Snooki to sell whatever it is that people – for whatever unfathomable reason – choose to buy from them.

Maybe a few celebrities might learn a lesson from Occupy Hollywood.  Maybe some might not be so quick to reflexively adopt the latest tidbit of lefty received wisdom next time. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t defend their freedom because we like them. We do so because it is the right thing to do, and because when we defend their freedom, we are defending our own.

—–

Now, understand that it gives me no pleasure to report that Terra Nova is off to a crappy start.  None.  Anyone living in California knows lots of people who work in the Industry, from crew to talent, who rely on production to feed their families.  We want shows to be great, to be hits, to run for years.  And none of them got up and said “I want to take an interesting idea and turn it into a hackneyed, tedious death march.” Well, maybe the writers and producers did – the vicissitudes of chance do not account for how they managed to hit every tiresome cliché and make every bad choice available every time.

The conceit of Terra Nova is that a bunch of people from 2189 are sent back in time from a polluted, fascist Earth 85 million years to restart human civilization.  They face all sorts of ferocious dinosaurs, which is cool, and that have all sorts of bitchin’ guns, which is also cool.  Steven Spielberg is involved with it, and once upon a time he made movies I actually liked.  Fox is spending a fortune on it.  It should be kinda interesting and kinda fun.

But no.

No, the premiere was a ponderous nightmare composed of the same cookie-cutter, lazy choices that have been wrecking such shows and movies for years.  Like the mega-disappointing Walking Dead, which somehow made a zombie apocalypse boring, Terra Nova has somehow done the same for another cool idea – this one being carnivorous dinosaurs. 

Terra Nova has done a lot of things wrong, though it did do a few things right.  But the premiere’s meh ratings, despite months of hype, showed that the creators better get a grip before the show joins its main attractions in extinction.  Here are some key takeaways from the endless two-hour premiere:

1. Enough of the Manufactured Family Drama:   Surprise – our hero has a family, and they spend all of their time talking about their feelings toward one another.  The father, played by Jason Mara, was in prison because the family had an extra kid and he only rejoins the family (after the world’s simplest maximum security prison breakout) as they step back in time.  So he has issues.  With his wife.  And his teen son.  And his teen daughter.  And his other daughter.  And they talk about them.  All the time.  Then they hug.  It all makes me want to projectile vomit.

Now, screenwriters, I know they teach you at screenwriting seminars that you have to create a rooting interest for the audience.  Okay, here, rooting for them to win the gunfights with the rampaging velociraptors is plenty interesting.  Interminable discussions of emotions followed by cuddling, not so much.

Why …. why …  does every show seem to have to focus on bizarre daddy issues?  I want an exciting, interesting entertainment experience, not to sit there watching you work out your personal psychodrama.  Just show me a tyrannosaurus biting a tank.

Remember 2005’s War of the Worlds?  It sounded great on paper.  You got aliens and Spielberg and special effects…it should have been awesome.  And what did we get?  We get this idiotic domestic drama with Tom Cruise arguing with a couple of urchins as they drive around the Eastern Seaboard.  Sure, he beat on Tim Robbins, which was cool, but otherwise it was like Are We There Yet? with an older, duller Maverick taking the Ice Cube role. 

—–

And I bet Cube would have spent less time bickering with the shorties and more time going upside some alien head.  Yeah, now that would have been the mierda.

Look.  There’s this stupid notion floating around out there in Tinseltown, promulgated by self-appointed script gurus and enforced by Hollywood suits whose only flair for creativity is within the realm of their personal debaucheries, that the focus of every story needs to be a loving family that fights then hugs.  Give me a freaking break.  That’s the same thinking that turned Super 8 into Super Suck.

Someone needs to dare to speak truth to hackery and say, “How about the story focus on something cool, like running from dinosaurs, without taking momentum-halting stops to work through abandonment issues every time something interesting is about to go down?”  Which leads us to the next point:

2. Can the Characters Not Be Idiots?  Characters doing dumb things, like going for a naked swim while Hatchet Boy is running around the abandoned summer camp, has been a cliché for decades.  In Terra Nova, it’s even more frustrating because it usually revolves around the same insane need to stop the story  every two minutes in order for a couple characters to hash out their stupid feelings. 

Someone is missing and needs to be found before darkness falls and the dinos come out to dine…what do you do?  Do you grab your rifle and join other trained warriors, moving quickly to locate and rescue the lost people, or do you get into a lengthy argument with your wife who isn’t a trained warrior but wants to come along anyway because…well, I don’t know…because fighting off carnivorous reptiles isn’t hard enough without bringing along some unarmed civilian to slow you down. 

Oh, and when you do find an injured person in the middle of nowhere, do you: A) Secure the wounded person, load her in a vehicle, and move out before the monsters come back or B) spend some time out in the open in the dark, lizard-filled forest discussing your feelings.  Well, if the answer was “A”, it would be Terra Awesome.

3. The Concept Is More Interesting Than Any Character:  Sorry folks, but I know that your gurus tell you character is everything, but this isn’t freaking Ingmar Bergman.  I’m not tuning in to delve deep into the psyche of… geez, I watched two hours of that show and already forgot the main character’s name.  Whatev.  I don’t care about the characters.  The concept is cool; if I want a character study, I’ll seek out a story that doesn’t involve time travel to the Jurassic Age.  You feel me?

Now, the concept is not just dinosaurs.  The idea of starting a civilization over could be really interesting if they started exploring issues like how society was organized, whether they would try communal living or a market, dictatorship versus democracy.  The focus on feelings overwhelmed most of it, but there were interesting hints at how this new society was forming.  Contributions seem to be made according from the ability of the colonist, while resources appear to be distributed according to his needs.  We call that communism; Hollywood people called that “Awesome…for you peasants.”

I wonder if the producers will have the guts to confront the failure of non-market economics in a way that the super-lame – and overtly fascist/socialist Star Trek: The Next Generation (Yeah, I went there Trekboys) – never did.  Probably not – Terra Nova’s executive producer Brannon Braga is a Star Trek alum.  So we’ll probably hear lots about a wonderful new world without greed or capitalism or stuff.   It’ll be a paradise, just like the pilgrims (whose name the series appropriates for the colonists) experienced in New England prior to introducing free enterprise.  Communism worked really well there, just like it has everywhere it’s been attempted.  At least, that’s what Chet the Unicorn told me.

4. There Are Hints of a Mythology Which Must Be Ruthlessly Suppressed:  Ever since Chris Carter’s The X-Files started the trend by weaving its detailed, incoherent, stupid back story into its episodes, every sci-fi/fantasy show on TV now has to have some elaborate and pointless mythology.  Mythology episodes are always death – you can tell a terrible X-File episode because it starts off with some portentous Scully monologue and inevitably ends up raising more questions and bile than it answers. 

Please don’t think we need that here.  You have man-eating dinos.  You don’t need an all-encompassing conspiracy by powerful forces that come together in a terrifying effort to occupy the imaginations of lonely 35-year old virgins with nothing better to do than think about TV shows.

5. There Are Some Good Things:  There are some things that deserve praise.  First, Stephen Lang as the dictator of the place is pretty awesome.  And his character is not what you expect – though he is on the cusp not only of a mythology plot line but one that involves his lost son.  Don’t.  Go.  There.

The dinosaurs are pretty cool, as are the rest of the special effects.  They’re not perfect, but who cares?  The set design and props are really good.  It would be nice, though, if those neat-o guns seemed to have any effect on the dinosaurs.  The characters get all Scarface on the  lizards, firing off long bursts of rounds that have about as much effect as a multi-billion Obama stimulus package.

And the politics do not (yet) make me sick.  I was busy complaining to my Hot Wife, so I missed what somebody told me was the shot showing that 2189 money had Obama’s face on the bills – that’s amusing.  I just wonder who gets his mug on the higher denomination, him or Jimmy Carter?

It’s so far not as eco-stupid as I expected.  The producers mention that “we” somehow ruined the planet, but they don’t mention or attribute it to the global warming scam, which was nice since I grilled some really tasty cheeseburgers right before and it would have been a shame to puke them up. 

Also, the fascist government that arrests people who have too many kids cannot be considered right wing – in fact, famed Chinese family planning fan and liberal fave Thomas Friedman would have approved.  So, at least for now, there was no liberal sucker punch. 

Perhaps Terra Nova will improve.  I hope so.  No one wants to see a show fail.  It certainly could be interesting.  For the viewers, it’s a cool concept and might be a fun diversion.  For the many folks on and off camera, it’s their livelihood.  This is not just a beat down for the sake of beating down an easy target.  This is a plea… to give us a fresh, exciting program that doesn’t spout the same hopeless clichés that have wrecked so many other movies and shows.  So, guys, get it together and cut the mierda.

Not content with achieving Father of the Year Emeritus status for his unique, outside-the-box parenting skills, Alec Baldwin spent yesterday evening on Twitter to once again offer his nuanced, carefully researched insights into a variety of important topics.  In doing so, he offered a powerful challenge to such innovators as Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and even Hanoi Jane for the coveted title of “Hollywood’s Biggest Idiot.”

In the past, I’ve even taken to these pages to defend Alec as a performer.  But as amusing as he is on screen, the fact is that he is a moral illiterate who refuses to let his manifest ignorance hinder his desire to have himself taken seriously as something more than an actor. 

Alec wants to be just like Ronald Reagan, except he’s handicapped by some challenges the Gipper didn’t face – like being a leftist, a jerk and a fool.

The bloviating buffoon apparently got agitated because Georgia decided to execute a cop killer who had spent 22 years failing to convince any jury or judge that the overwhelming evidence against him was inadequate.  Ironically, the police officer Troy Davis finished off with a bullet to the head was an Army veteran – and judging from Alec’s attitude toward our warriors as manifested in his subsequent tweets, he probably thought that fact supported sparing the killer of Officer Mark MacPhail, Sr.

Here’s a selection of some of his inane tweets from his Twitter timeline.  Let’s see who fails to live up to Alec’s exacting standards!

Well, Michelle Malkin certainly does:

C’mon!! Let’s go all Town Hall on that supreme thinker @michellemalkin. A world class, crypto fascist hater!

Davis is dead Does that make you happier, @michellemalkin?

@macandroo @michellemalkin @michellemalkin… Like Palin, but even mire (sic) of a hater.

The ferocious Malkin doesn’t need any help defending herself from this hack’s semi-coherent ranting – though I did jump in through my Twitter account (feel free to review and follow) during the skirmishing to assist by kicking the trembling, twitching carcass Malkin had left behind. 

On the plus side, Malkin can now say she knows what it’s like to be treated like a movie star.  Unfortunately, that star is Kim Bassinger.

Alec doesn’t limit himself to new outrages either – he spices things up with some classics.  For example, he’s one guy who won’t let us forget the nightmare of the Bu$HitlerCheneyHaliburton regime no matter how many years President Obama has been in office:

When do Cheney and Rumsfeld go on trial for murder? Will that trial be in Texas? Georgia?

That’s a great question!  Their crimes include waging war in Iraq, waging war in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo open, and other wars in Somalia, Yemen and Libya!  Oh, wait….

Proving himself totally immune to irony, he also tweeted:

Obama….2012

But it’s not just a few Americans who don’t measure up to Alec’s standards – it’s all of us!

Troy Davis is still dead. The gulf is still contaminated. Fukushima is still radioactive. #wecraveignorancesowecanshoplikeamericans

Wait, I thought that a new day dawned in January 2009 where America was respected and loved again?

US death penalty humiliates us in the eyes of much of the world

Alec leaves unsaid the obvious question – who gives half a damn what the motley collection of corrupt, genocidal losers who make up much of the world think?

And Alec reserved special contempt for our troops:

Right-wingers always hide the shameful policies of their nutbag policies behind “supporting the troops.”

Gee, to the extent that I can decipher what it means to “hide the shameful policies of their nutbag policies,” from my vantage point as someone who did more than play one of the troops, I think right-wingers have been pretty damn supportive.  But why should Alec just limit himself to yapping about things he knows anything about – he must allow his mind to run free so he can provide us with the full benefit of his ignorance!

Then there are these gems:

..soldiers are doing their sacred duty at the direction of maniacs like Cheney. We struggle the longer you won’t face that.

You can support the troops and still face the fact that Cheney and Rumsfeld betrayed their country.

Interesting.  So, by carrying out Cheney and Rumsfeld’s nefarious plots, the troops therefore also “betrayed their country,” right?  Or are the troops too dumb to know what they are doing and therefore get a pass?  Alec, I need to know – are our troops morally bankrupt or just stupid?

—–

Hey, are the ones still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan still betraying their county, or did that change at some point?  Alec, I must have your moral guidance!  I mean, when I need a moral leader with an unerring sense of right and wrong, my first instinct is to seek out the guidance of a Hollywood star like you. 

That, or consult Chet, my talking unicorn.

Well, apparently our generation’s greatest moral referee has come to his conclusion:

Wonder if the McPhail family will seek death penalty for US leaders who killed thousands of US soldiers and countless innocent Iraqis

Wow.  Bravo, Alec – you’ve managed to simultaneously label our troops killers of “countless innocent Iraqis” while also trashing the murdered cop’s family, all in just 140 characters!   Yeah, I suspect the MacPhail family would have happily stayed out of the limelight, except the murderer you coddled kind of drew them into it by finishing off their husband and father by shooting him in the head

Oh, here’s my personal favorite of his Deep Thoughts:

@admiralwaugh US soldiers r brave n true. Their leadership is, by n large, borderline sociopathic. If u don’t have guts to face that……

Well, Alec, save your public “US soldiers r brave n true” line for the rubes.  At least have the guts to go full-troop hater.  You know you want to.

But you try to evade having to take a position that even your stunted moral sense tells you will expose you to the unbridled contempt of every decent American.  You hedge.  You embrace the classic troop-hater dodge of only despising (at least in public) the troops’ “leadership.”

You punk. I’ve been part of that leadership you slander in war and peace.  The leaders of our military, from the newest corporal to the highest general, day and night struggle to accomplish their missions while taking care of their troops.  They spend years away from home.  Many of them get hurt; some get killed.  But they “have the guts to face” America’s enemies and they don’t back down.

On the other hand, you call little girls “pigs” over the telephone.

Alec, you are unworthy of further discussion.  You’re not a thinker, you’re not scholar, and you’re not a man.  You’re a privileged clown without the common sense or the common decency to shut your pie hole about better men and women than you’ll ever be. 

You are nothing.  You are dismissed.  Get out.

Hell, you not only have a right to do it, but you have a right to have it federally funded through the NEA by the very taxpayers whose collective mind you intend to blow by getting so darn real.   It’s right there in the Constitution, amid the emanations and adjacent to the penumbras.  Oh, but if you accurately depict the acts leading up to the murder of nearly 3000 Americans, you’ve got to be stopped.  After all, the artistic elite can’t let you upset the Krugman-esque party line that 9/11 was really about Bu$Hitler and Company’s wars for oil or something.

The artistic community is anti-censorship right up until the second it decides it wants something censored.  Then it piles on.

A little background.

Steve Reich is a Pulitzer-winning composer who lived a few blocks away from the World Trade Center when the planes hit on September 11, 2001.  He was out of town at the time, but his family was home.  They barely escaped, but the experience was so emotionally traumatic that it was only as the 10th anniversary of this monstrous crime approached that he was able to finally express his feelings through his art.  You would think the artistic community would praise him – well, you would think that if you had not been paying attention and still believe that it possessed the capacity for shame at its own rank hypocrisy.

Reich’s composition was called “WTC 9/11.”  As described by Terry Ponick at the Washington Times, it “is a short, three-part work that blends live music with the actual recorded sounds of the day’s events playing in background and foreground.”  The CD was originally scheduled to be released on 9/11/11, but a completely unexpected (if you don’t understand the Left) uproar occurred.

The uproar?  Take a look at the original cover photo above.

Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?  The sight of that jet being guided straight into the South Tower as hundreds burn alive in the North Tower makes you think about how 9/11 was not just some random tragedy that befell us, as if by mere misfortune or a twist of fate.

It makes you think about how it was a calculated act of murder by people who wanted to enslave or kill us, and who still want to enslave or kill us.  And the artistic elite can’t let that thought cross your mind.

Slate’s Seth Colter Walls is suitably mortified that the simple image is so…simple:

Given the piece’s complexity, it is surprising to see that the first studio recording of WTC 9/11, due to be released by the esteemed label Nonesuch Records just days before the 10^th anniversary of the attacks, is being marketed with cover art that looks like something swiped from Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign press shop circa January 2008.

Yeah, it’s surprising that was piece called “WTC 9/11” and inspired by the events at the World Trade Center on 9/11 might have a cover that actually depicts the World Trade Center on 9/11.  Sorry, Seth, if it’s a little on-the-nose for you.  Now go complain about poetry that rhymes.

The “controversy” – to the extent rank censorship by self-appointed guardians of the public consciousness constitutes a “controversy” – over Reich’s chosen cover art has delayed the CD’s release until the 20th.  That will give the informal Ministry of Truth time to scrub away the cover image that might give rise to unapproved thoughts.

Here is the new cover:

Wow.  Wispy grey clouds – it could be a thunderstorm or perhaps some other act of nature.  Maybe smoke billowing from the factories of one of those corporate polluters we hear so much about.  It could be anything.

Anything except the Twin Towers and the plane piloted by jihadi cowards intent on murdering us.

Ponick of the Washington Times does an excellent job of explaining why the Left demanded this ritual sacrifice:

The grievance was almost certainly generated by hyper-touchy liberal New Yorkers who’ve appointed themselves guardians of 9/11 imagery, aided and abetted by the media coverage (notably Slate and NPR) of reflexively leftist scolds who don’t want to be reminded that the U.S. is not always the bad guy in the arena of human events.  And it’s this latter group that really made the album cover an issue.

Yes, it’s the Left being the Left being the Left. Of course their reaction to 9/11 is just the opposite of “never forget.”  They want us to forget the truth and instead impose a false memory more conducive to their agenda.  They prefer, “always remember America is the villain.”  And the original cover reminds us that America is not.  So it must be suppressed.

In the Los Angeles Times, August Brown fretted, wondering if “the subtlety of the piece accurately conveyed by this incredibly blunt and literal cover?”  Not surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Anne Midgette agrees that the cover should be changed:

It’s the right decision. But the debate is, for me, a red flag that, in the well-meaning wish to guard everyone’s feelings, we risk losing sight of the inherent transformative process of a work of art.

Of course, the “transformative process” the truth might initiate is to transform people from couch-bound lumps thinking in the passive voice about “the tragedy that happened” into furious citizens roused to righteous anger – and their own defense – against the threat that still faces us.

Is one album cover going to turn American culture 180 degrees from the weepy, passivity our liberal elite, spearheaded by the artistic community, wants to keep us trapped in?  Of course not.  And is Reich himself a fire-breathing warrior urging on the American people for further feats of martial achievement?  Probably not.  According to Midgette, his statement read:

As a composer I want people to listen to my music without something distracting them. The present cover of WTC 9/11 will, for many, act as a distraction from listening and so  . . . the cover is being changed.

Regardless, it’s sad that Reich feels forced to constrain his artistic vision not because it is wrong but precisely because it is right.  The elite is not trying to suppress lies but to hide the truth – that a gang of fundamentalist Muslim jihadis murdered 3000 Americans and would do so again, and that we either fight and win, or choose enslavement and/or death.  The latter is what the original cover says, and what it says is the truth, and the truth is precisely what they want to censor.

The artistic community doesn’t stand against censorship – it embraces censorship.  Crying “wolf” about censorship is a useful weapon to protect its untalented hack members who make crappy art off the largess of Uncle Sucker.  And it will not hesitate for even a second to use censorship against its own members when they cross the party line.

Next, maybe Reich can write an album about this incident and the community or artists that has abandoned him.  His only problem will be finding a cover art image that suitably evokes the concept of hypocrisy.

Megan Fox adjusts her "talent" before their next scene.

1. Dear Hollywood: Stop The Age Discrimination

Age discrimination is a problem in Hollywood. Seriously, what is the fascination with jamming twenty-somethings into every role? It doesn’t work. These young girls simply don’t have the maturity or the depth to play the parts of women. It strains credibility beyond the breaking point when they cast some silicon enhanced girl to play the nuclear scientist or the head of a corporation or. . . well, any woman in a position of authority. I know powerful women, professional women, and women with a great deal of maturity, and none of them look or act anything like Hollywood seems to think.

And please stop casting girls as the wives of old, old, old male actors. It’s creepy. Teri Garr and Richard Dreyfuss worked in Close Encounters because they looked like a couple. Septuagenarian Harrison Ford married to Megan Fox doesn’t. Not only can we not see them getting together in the first place, but we can’t see them as a “normal, loving couple.” Instead, the words “gold digger” and “cradle robber” and even “grave robber” come to mind. And holy cow, stop casting “mothers” who are only a year or two older than their movie “daughters.” Was there a plague in Hollywood that wiped out all the women over 40?

2. Dear Hollywood: Stop Cloning Actresses

Hollywood also needs to end its cloning experiments. It needs to stop rejecting actresses if they have the slightest trace of individuality or if their bone structure is 1% off the model. Seriously, this makes it impossible to cast people who look the part. Forget the nuclear scientist mentioned above, what about the average waitress or the mother of three or the cop? Real women don’t look, act or dress like Malibu Strip Club Barbie™. This is the female equivalent of casting only musclemen as extras, and is again kinda creepy.

"We are the Borg. We are ready for our close up."

More importantly, by casting clones, Hollywood guarantees that few modern actresses will be memorable because it’s the distinct actors we remember. Indeed, few of the top male actors fall into the “pretty boy” category. Outside of a Redford, a DiCaprio, or a Cruise, few leading men look anything like male models. Bogart was a small man with a crooked face and a lisp. Stallone looks like he lost a fight with a blender. Bruce Willis beat the blender, but it took 12 rounds. Jack Nicholson is the blender. How about James Cagney, DeNiro, Bill Murray, Charles Bronson, Steven McQueen, Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Alan Rickman, Adrien Brody, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones, Richard Dreyfuss, etc. . . not a standard profile in the bunch. And when you get into character actors, the defects and distinctions multiply. . . Steve Buscemi anyone?

I’ll bet you could visualize each of these men as you read the names. Why? Because these men are memorable. They weren’t cast because they are pretty to look at, they were cast because they are distinct — they stand out both in looks and personality.

Believe it or not, the same thing has always been true with the great actresses as well. Look at the actresses we remember. Few of them can be called “classic beauties”: Lauren Bacall was rather butch, as was Katharine Hepburn, and is Sigourney Weaver. Lucille Ball was hardly a looker. Sophia Loren and Julie Andrews were beautiful, but not in a beauty queen sort of way. Loren was gorgeous and wild. Andrews had “girl next door” beauty. Betty Davis, Barbara Eden and Angela Lansbury all looked 60 the moment they were born. We remember these actresses because they stood out, i.e. because they were different. What’s more, we feel we know them because their personalities come across so strongly on the screen.

Now tell me how many of these you can visualize: Scarlet Johansson, Kate Hudson, Rosie Whitely, Cate Blanchett, Elisha Cuthbert, Rachel McAdams, Kristen Stewart, Jessica Biel, and Elizabeth Shue Banks. I doubt most people could pick them out of a line up and none of them have memorable personalities. In fact, most actresses today are so interchangeable that I wonder if anyone would notice if you swapped a couple out in the middle of the film. . . “hey, weren’t you blonder before?” And even when they do stand out, it’s usually for the wrong reasons: Megan Fox. . . idiot, Lindsay Lohan. . . train wreck, Anne Hathaway. . . bleached by aliens.

Unfortunately, because Hollywood is looking purely for beauty, they aren’t finding great actresses anymore. To me, the test of a great actor/actress is whether or not they could have taken on a great role. For example, could any of the actor/actresses listed above replace any of the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross? The male actors listed above could have done it. Hepburn, Bacall, Weaver, Davis, Eden and Lansbury could have done it. . . Julie Andrews, probably not. But what about the modern actresses just listed? Don’t make me laugh. Nor could any of them have taken over for Bacall in To Have and Have Not or Hepburn in The African Queen. Sure, they can all take over Megan Fox’s role in Transformers or whoever’s role in the next romantic comedy, but that’s about it.

3. Dear Hollywood: Stop Lying About Strong Roles

Finally, we come to the issue of strong roles. Hollywood actresses have complained for some time about a lack of strong roles for women in Hollywood. I think their complaints are valid. But Hollywood doesn’t know how to fix the problem. So instead, they try to redefine the problem. Now we’re told about an El Guapo-like plethora of strong roles involving action heroines. But this is nothing but el toro kaka public relations.

Imagine you are a director and you want your daughter to have a “strong role” in your film. Here you are describing the role: “Basically, you put on a tight leather cat suit and some S&M gear. Then you run around shooting at people and flashing your chest and your butt. I will collect money from men who will reeeally enjoy watching you jiggle and bounce across the screen. Sound good pumpkin?”

"For an extra $10, I'll do an empowerment table dance."

Hollywood apparently sees no problem with this, as that pretty much describes most roles given to female action stars. But how is this a strong role? These women are acting out an adolescent male sexual fantasy. They might as well be in Hustler.

A strong role is one you would be proud to let people watch. It involves playing a character that either brings out strong emotions in the audience or it involves being the kind of person people respect. That means using your wits and maintaining your moral code in the face of adversity and pressure to surrender. It means overcoming the obstacles you face through strength of character. The leather-clad dominatrixes and slinky spies are not demonstrating some strength of character within themselves, they’re selling sex.

Mommas don’t let your daughters grow up to be actresses. . .

Am I right? What actresses would you say are great? And don’t you find it a little bit strange that a place as liberal as Hollywood would be so openly sexist and ageist? Hmmm.

—–

Yeah, it kind of did that, I suppose.  Except I was too busy wondering why the central premise somehow had to be that American military personnel are sadistic, bloodthirsty, cold-blooded murderers.  Then I remembered that this is Hollywood.

Now, to talk about Super 8, I will have to reveal what some might call “spoilers.”  Except, they aren’t really “spoilers” because to be that the plot points I reveal would have to be unexpected and surprising.  Sadly, Super 8 adopts the same tiresome clichés that have been wrecking Hollywood films for the last 40 years.  The only surprise was the total lack of any surprise.

What do we have? Crazy, evil military officer as the baddie?  Check!  Kid with daddy issues?  Check!  Climax where the hero rescues the girl from monster’s lair?  Check!  Monster that is the real victim even though he’s freaking killing US military people and eating civilians left and right?  Check?

Let me throw something out there.  The premise here is the space monster crash lands on Earth, then the Air Force gets him and won’t let him leave, and the monster gets mad, then escapes, and it’s all the fault of the mean colonel who was keeping him that the monster is devouring people.  Maybe I’m biased after two deployments, but a character kills an American soldier onscreen and my sympathy meter drops into the red – Avatar, I am looking at you too.  Maybe the cinematic deaths of some American military folk might be no biggie in Tinseltown, but some of us take it personally.  Perhaps I’ll drop J.J. Abrams a line and invite him to the next memorial I have to attend.

Am I overreacting?  Maybe.  I can see the misdirection of the counterargument – “Crazy Conservative Says ‘Super 8’ Promotes Killing Soldiers!”  What you won’t see is a good explanation of why our own troops almost always end up as the bad guys.  Perhaps the Hollywoodoids don’t see anything wrong with making US military people the villain so often.  After all, most of them have nothing but contempt for soldiers despite their poses to the contrary, and US military people won’t send a suicide bomber into your Beverly Hills offices – unlike certain real villains who liberals won’t dare name.

Hollywood can make the movies it wants – the First Amendment is one of the things I made a miniscule contribution to protecting.  But I can refuse to waste my money on a movie that depicts American servicemembers as psychos who literally murder American citizens in cold blood.  And so can you.

Look at the far superior Close Encounters.  The American military is an obstacle to the hero, not a malignant enemy.  There, the military (and other agencies) are trying to make contact with the aliens; the military is benignly keeping folks away from Devil’s Tower.  But in Super 8, they murder them – and that’s not an off-hand, one-time event but a key plot point.  The American military have somehow become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys (though there are welcome exceptions like Battle: Los Angeles and even Speilberg’s own Saving Private Ryan), but we don’t have to sit back in our seats like zombies and take it.

Disgusting slander of our folks in uniform aside, Super 8 has some other significant problems.  First, it’s slow.  Way too slow.  There’s a lot of talking and most of it is about feelings.  I don’t go to summer movies to be babbled at about people’s ungovernable emotions.  I go to escape people babbling at me about their stupid feelings.

Second, the movie makes no sense.  Zero.  Things happen not because they would happen but because they have to happen to facilitate the plot.  Here’s an example:  A key point is the heroine’s father missed a shift at work at the steel mill, which the hero’s mother took and where she was killed in an accident.  The heroine’s father comes to the wake and the hero’s father – a deputy – arrests him.  Huh?  Punch him maybe, but arrest him?  Well, it makes a good visual I guess, but it makes no sense.  The rest of the movie is similar – totally bizarre things just kind of occur and everyone just nods and moves on.  “All the dogs have left town, stuff’s exploding and a bunch of people are missing – yep, sounds like a good time to share our feelings!”

And the alien has all these powers – he scares all the dogs out of town, makes lights go on and off, and can dig enormous caverns without generating any huge piles of dirt.  I’m guessing he can also probably make the Earth cool, the oceans recede and keep unemployment under 8% by spending a trillion bucks.  Regardless, none of these magical abilities make sense.  Oh, he is the size of a Mac truck but he’s harder to spot than “Where’s Waldo” when he cruises around town – no one ever sees him as he steals entire auto engines, microwave ovens and whole junkyards.  I like how the hero constantly hears it loudly banging around town, the noise echoing across the burg, but no one else seems to notice.  And then, for some reason, the city water tower turns into a space ship.  Whatever.  I should have pounded a couple of my usual pre-movie Dos Equis – it may have made more sense.

Oh, and the alien eats the regular, hard-working citizens of Lillian, Ohio, which no one seems to think is a big problem.  See, the alien says he was oppressed, so whatever he does is excusable.  In this way, Super 8 is the ultimate liberal morality tale.  The alien says he was oppressed, the message goes, so you decent folk can just pick up the tab.  How dare you object to being used as cattle – didn’t you hear?  The alien said he was oppressed.  Shut up and take whatever happens to you.  Substitute getting munched by a space spider with being forced to pay ever higher taxes to support subsidies to the Democrats’ favored deadbeat constituencies and Super 8 becomes – quite unwittingly – a Tea Party manifesto.  To liberals, the devastation inflicted on normal people for the benefit of their chosen special interests is just well-deserved collateral damage.

Let me sound off on one other thing – I’m throwing my beer at the screen if I see one more scene where a character sneaks into the villian’s lair to rescue his girlfriend and, instead of getting the hell out, they stand there and hug and start babbling about  – yeah, you guessed it – their damn feelings.  Maybe your emotional breaktrhough can wait until you’re away from the intergalactic tarantula.  Oh, and the intergalactic tarantula looks kind of doofy; we could be reaching the limits of what CGI can do.  It also looks way too much like the Cloverfield creature, though, considering it is J.J. Abrams, that may not be unintentional.

All I wanted was to recapture some of the magic of those exciting, technically breathtaking movies I grew up with.  It sure looked like them – the cinematography was right out of the Spielbergian playbook.  The plucky youngsters were engaging too, though none are memorable except for Elle Fanning as the teen heroine.  She’s going to be a HUGE star, mark my words.

In the end, I could have gotten past the flaws and enjoyed Super 8 except for the relentless trashing of the men and women who, frankly, made it possible with their blood and sacrifice.  After 40 years of this nonsense, I’m bored and I’m disgusted with it.  I still haven’t seen Avatar because of how it slimes my fellow vets, and had we known what Super 8 would do (which the trailer carefully obscures) the Hot Wife and I wouldn’t have dropped $38.50 on it. 

You can make all the military-trashing films you want to, Hollywood – you’re welcome for the freedom to do so, by the way – but in the future you can count me and my money out.  And I bet I’m not the only one.

In the battle for the soul of our country, popular culture is the biggest guy in the room.  And it’s time that conservatives took a swing.  The Powerline Prize contest is a potential haymaker in one of the most important battles of our campaign.

Here’s how it describes itself:

The Power Line Prize of $100,000 will be awarded to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Prizes will also be awarded to the runner-up and two third-place finishers. Anyone can enter the contest—individuals, companies (e.g., advertising agencies) or any other entity, as long as the contest rules are followed. Any creative product is eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else, as long as the product is unique to the contest and has not previously been published or otherwise entered the public domain. Entries may address the federal debt crisis in its entirety, or a specific aspect of the debt crisis, such as: the impact of the debt crisis on the young; the role played by the “stimulus” (Where did the money go? Why didn’t it stimulate?); how entitlements drive the debt crisis; the current federal deficit; how the debt crisis impacts the economy; or any other aspect of the debt crisis. The contest is non-partisan. Its purpose is to inform the public about the federal debt crisis.

Conservatives often dismiss the world of art as a milieu of posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.  This is because an enormous amount of what is today labeled as “art” is manufactured by   posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.

However, mockery – while necessary and awesome – is not enough.  We need to get into that world – into all of the creative worlds – and compete.  That’s the lesson the ubiquitous Ben Shapiro teaches in his bestselling new book on TV, “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV,” and that seems to be the intent of the Powerline Prize contest.

But can conservatives make art?  I don’t know – maybe we should ask David Mamet.  But there is a problem with conservative art, which is the same with all art in general – most of it sucks.  Most art is bad.  Conservative art seems to be bad in its own unique way.  As my Twitter pal @Salty_Hollywood – a Hollywood graphic artist – remarked the other night over drinks, “Can we get some conservative art without flags and eagles?”  I agree – I like flags and eagles as much as the next right-wing knuckledragger, but frankly that well has gone dry.  As the old saying goes, we need some new clichés.

The Powerline Prize contest is one way we on the conservative side can start to look for an answer.  But it can’t be the final word – it needs to be only the first in a long process of creating art for our sake.