Charlton Heston as Judah Ben Hur, the Jewish hero—notice the Star of David necklace—of Ben Hur, 1959.

The Los Angeles Times is, like the NY Times, a reliably anti-Israel newspaper whose liberal/progressive/leftist slant often veers into  support for the Jew-hatred that is the foundation of Palestinian terror.

Even their entertainment articles frequently marinate in a radical ideology that extends to an ignorant and vile denial of Jewish, not to mention literary history.

In this brief announcement of an anniversary release of a Ben Hur DVD, the Charlton Heston character, Judah Ben Hur, is referred to as a “Palestinian nobleman.”

In the book and in all the movies Judah Ben Hur is a Jewish merchant.

This charade of so-called Palestinian history is a replacement ideology, Jewish history erased by faux Palestinians, a post-modern construct with zero historical basis.

I might add that this is also a fabrication of movie history.

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The artistic community is always ready to stand against censorship – and we know that because it constantly tells us so.  If you want to drape an American flag across a walkway to make a statement by letting goateed hipster art aficionados traipse across it, you’re a bold visionary.  If you want to write a novel about shooting a Republican president, you’re courageously speaking truth to power.  If you want to smear pachyderm dung on a painting of the Virgin Mary, you’re bravely facing down the forces of religious bigotry.

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.

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To understand if a person or group is on the left or the right, look no further than what outrages them.  If you’re offended by how much tax revenue is squandered year after year, you’re probably on the right; if you are ticked off at the “rich” for not paying their “fair share,” you lean left.  If you have a strong urge to kill or capture evildoers around the world, you’re likely conservative; but if you’re irate that detainees might be water-boarded, safe money is you’re lefty.  If you drive home in your Toyota Prius to pop a Big Pharma-produced Lexapro that gives you just enough vitality to take your ungrateful kids to the Starbucks for a Java Chip Frappuccino®… only to lecture them on the evils of the corporations once you get there, there’s a good chance you’re left-wing.  But if you love capitalism… you get my point.

What inspires your ire tips your hand–politically speaking–and a sanctimonious editorial on Tracy Morgan in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times tells you all you need to know about the staff of SoCal’s leading paper.

For those of you who dropped out of society for the past week, the synopsis is that during a stand-up comedy routine in Nashville, Morgan, of “SNL” and “30 Rock” fame, joked that he would stab his son if he used a “gay voice.”  Word got out and all hell broke loose.  The twitterverse was outraged, celebrities clamored to condemn the comment, and Morgan eventually delivered the obligatory pandering over-apology replete with a commitment to partner with America’s most ironically named advocacy organization: GLAAD.

The story is a social justice cliché.

The courageous editors at the Los Angeles Times joined the fray yesterday, unloading a bold op-ed stating Morgan had crossed the line: (more…)

About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School.  An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet.  The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts.  Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.

Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times.  Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist.  Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.

How did he do this?

First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:

As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years.  To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes.  An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs.  Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.

And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)

One of the things that I find most unpleasant about the current movie-going experience are the trailers. They’ve become slicker and louder than ever, but nevertheless a relentless homogenization has set in. The reason that a spoof video called A Trailer for Every Academy Award-Winning Movie Ever Made went viral earlier this year was because it deftly mocked a great number of the tired conventions used by modern-day Hollywood’s editors and marketers. See for yourself:

YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen

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

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

A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at a couple of old-fashioned, two-dimensional films.” The big-screen photography of one of those pictures drew particular attention, with one critic noting that “It gives reality a true third dimension. . . the kind of 3-D you cannot get with mechanical tricks or by any other means except a rich comprehension and ingenious mastery of the visual storyteller’s art.”

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz. (more…)

Dear Los Angeles Times Editor,

In a report published on July 21, 2010, the Los Angeles Times incorrectly claimed that an article that I wrote on an August 10, 2009 National Endowment for the Arts conference call was somehow “misleading” and advanced by using a “fragmentary” portion of the conference call.

The Los Angeles Times should make it clear that the White House did not react to my article until AFTER the ENTIRE transcript and audio of the conference call was released. Only after reviewing the ENTIRE transcript and audio did the White House react by conducting new training sessions and issuing a memorandum containing new conduct guidelines for grant making agencies to prevent such a call, as reported by ABC News, “from ever happening again.”

Only after the ENTIRE transcript and audio was released, not a “fragmentary” portion, did the NEA official involved in the conference call fully resign from the agency and the chairman of the NEA issue a statement admitting that some of the comments made during the conference call were “unfortunately, not appropriate.” Also after the entire audio was released, the NEA submitted to a congressional inquiry new actions that it was taking to strengthen its ethics training. (more…)

After S.T. VanAirsdale of the hard-left film site Movieline wondered aloud who Big Hollywood would choose to “smear” with respect to the upcoming documentary “The Tillman Story,” I responded that when a leftist propagandist launches that kind of near-hysterical preemptive tactical strike, it can only make you wonder what all the defensiveness is about. 

Then, as if to thicken the plot, that same day, Jeff –The Latino Lover– Wells was so righteously piqued by my response to VanAirsdale that in a post titled “Lock and Load” he found it so necessary to rush to the film’s defense he reran his entire review. (Which gave Glenn – The Lawyer Callerer – Kenny an opportunity to slam us…again — which I’d be happy to respond to if not for fear of lawyer-callering.)

Obviously all this interest only increased my curiosity, so over the weekend I took a look around the Web and read everything I could find written by those who (unlike us) have seen the film. Interestingly enough, every review and/or write up I came across shared two common characteristics: The first is glowing, effusive praise; the second is that not a single write up questions the validity of even a single frame of the film.  (more…)

Beginning in June 2007, filmmaker Tim Hetherington and war correspondent Sebastian Junger embedded themselves with a U.S. Army platoon in the truly God-forsaken Korengal Valley of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. A companion piece to Junger’s new book War, Restrepo is their feature-length documentary centered on a fifteen-man outpost in one of the most remote and dangerous war zones on earth. 

Trailer is NSFW

Its cinema verité style, interspersed with commentary from soldiers interviewed after the deployment, puts you in the center of the action – and inaction – alongside a half dozen or so principal characters. It captures the chaos and the boredom, the courage and the fear, the tension and the playful abandon of their stretch in Outpost Restrepo, named after their young medic, a Korengal casualty.

In between IED attacks, firefights, digging in on a cliff-side, negotiating compensation with the villagers for a dead cow, mourning dead comrades, rooting out arms caches in the village, and general horsing around, these soldiers, painfully young but becoming men before our eyes, offer honest and revealing emotions about these experiences. One soldier says he can barely get his head around it all; he just hopes that “one day I’ll be able to process it differently.” (more…)

The Los Angeles Times has a sordid history of race baiting in its effort to pump up its progressive bonafides, despite a historic lack of diversity in their own staff. Their latest diatribe is a recent attack on Hollywood for “whitewashing” the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender. They were quickly followed in lock step by the Huffington Post, publishing an AP article that seemed to be cribbed from the Times. And then the industry blog The Wrap took things a step further by calling this a “White Summer” for the “lack of diversity” in Hollywood films this season. Hear that Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, Common, Jaden Smith, Queen Latifah? You don’t have any movies this summer. Uh, wait.

Here’s the crux of their discontent. Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have male leads played by white actors; Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia and Noah Ringer as Aang in ‘The Last Airbender. So, like the predictable hacks they are, they jumped on the racism argument. Dancing around the “R” word by reciting the industry’s history of casting white actors in non-white roles.

Yes, that did happen a lot in the past, and it does happen on occasion now. But here’s where the stupidity starts. Persians, aka Iranians, are ethnically white. In fact, most people of Eurasian stock are considered ethnically white. Casting a white actor as a Persian is hardly a racially insensitive move. And the Last Airbender is directed by Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan, who took exception to the criticisms his movie has gotten on this subject. (more…)

The political thriller Fair Game premiered at Cannes today. (Pause for giant, collective yawn from Big Hollywood readers…)

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair. (more…)

The liberal reactionaries are in full hissy-fit mode at Big Hollywood for its latest heresy, calling out Glee for its gratuitous – and worse, unfunny – slam on Sarah Palin as “stupid.”  Apparently, pointing out hackneyed liberal sucker punches lurking within tiresome TV shows is yet another cruel assault upon the helpless Hollywood community of visionary artists who only seek to help enlighten and uplift us unedu-makated, tea-partying, gun n’ religion-clingers dwelling in that small, backward portion of America located east of I-5.

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

For good reason, Big Hollywood’s normally critical of the Los Angeles Times. But writer Scott Collins deserves kudos for mentioning our Retracto post that caught Roger Ebert trying to feign ignorance of what the term “teabagger” meant. Collins could’ve easily ignored that part of BH’s dispute with the once universally beloved and respected film critic, chose not to, and his decision adds an important layer of context.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

Andrew Breitbart, publisher of several influential conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that Ebert’s Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents that serves as a “caricature of the liberal mind-set” and that the critic brims with “raw contempt for Middle America.”

What especially irked some conservatives was that Ebert used a nickname for tea party followers that has also long been slang for a sexual act. When Ebert tweeted that he was unaware of the term’s pornographic connotation, Big Hollywood countered that he had referred to such a context in past movie reviews.

But Breitbart adds that the current fracas ultimately proves how much power has tilted to new media and away from mainstream outlets such as newspapers, where Ebert has reviewed movies for more than 40 years.

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Nidal “Gary” Hassan – All-American boy was haunted by memories of Gitmo, ‘Nam, Hiroshima INEVITABLY, ANOTHER SOLDIER SNAPS Distraught pacifist conscientious objector tormented by horrors of war, as far as you know Newsroom experts: stress, violence, stupidity, tragedy a way of life for GIs Former M*A*S*H stars say it’s finally time to disarm the military Hollywood insiders: Sean Penn early favorite for lead in planned Oliver Stone biopic

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The first rule of getting out of a hole you have dug yourself into is to stop digging.  But at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday, they handed out shovels at the door.

Let’s review the state of American journalism.  Newspapers are teetering on the edge of collapse, with a savvy investor sooner scooping up a handful of Chrysler common stock then pumping cash into the Boston Globe.  The New York Times’ stock is so toxic it can only be stored inside the Yucca Mountain repository, and I can’t drive by the Los Angeles Times building without some laid-off lifestyle columnist offering to wash my windshield for a buck.  Some newspapers have gone entirely on-line, making them not even newspapers at all.  (more…)

Rebooting Bond with Daniel Craig was Bold. Christopher Nolan’s Reinvention of Batman was genius. But some thought it was overly-ambitious, even audacious, to attempt to restart the Star Trek franchise. It has begun to pay off already for Paramount Pictures, and there will dividends for years to come.

A shiny new Enterprise is luring in a new generation of STAR TREK fans

J.J. Abrams is officially the Lazarus of movie directors as his all-new Star Trek has gone “Boldly Gone Where No Star Trek Movie has Gone Before.” With a cast of relative unknowns, the 42-year-old has resurrected a franchise that had been killed by insular “nerdyness” and timid imagination. The Gene Rodenberry creation didn’t so much bomb as it died slowly over a period of years. First, the 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis starring the Next Generation cast disappointed with a meager $43.3M domestic. Then, the final TV series Enterprise, which starred Scott Bakula, was not embraced by core fans or broader audiences and was canceled after four seasons, ending May 13, 2005.

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Several sources at competing studios have told me that J.J. Abrams’ all-new reboot of Star Trek (Paramount), which debuted last night at 7pm at many of its 3,849 locations, may have grossed as much as $6.5M-$7.5M. Studio honchos are “locked down tight” about actual numbers, but that is in the same ballpark as Transformers (Dreamworks/Paramount), which grabbed $8.8M in its previews starting at 8pm on Monday, July 2 during the summer of 2007. (What portion of ticket sales fall into Thursday and what percentage fall into Friday will likely be an open question even after final numbers are in.)

William Shatner (left) with Captain Kirk 2.0 Chris Pine

Keep in mind that Paramount never changed its Star Trek marketing to promote the 7pm Thursday start, so the opening night audience was likely heavy on Trekkers or Trekkies (not sure which term is “politically correct” anymore). So this was a “soft” opening and what amounts to a night of word-of-mouth screenings. Keep in mind that Transformers premiered during the summer when kids are more available while Star Trek has made its premiere during the school year.

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The all-new J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek (Paramount) will win the second weekend of the Hollywood Summer Box Office season by at least a couple of light years over Fox’s fast-fading X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but some of the astronomical numbers I’ve seen floating around in the blogosphere are very over-heated. Make no mistake, this movie will open extraordinarily well, but it’s not going to play out as a typical front-loaded blockbuster. Moviegoers need time to shake off the disappointment of the final TV series Enterprise (starring Scott Bakula and canceled after four seasons) and the disastrous 2002 final film Star Trek: Nemesis ($43.3M domestic). It will take time for a new generation of fans to discover the magic of Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future through Abrams’ magical lens.

As of Wednesday night, Star Trek is cruising with 94% Fresh (positive) reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics are slinging some seriously glowing hyperbole.

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The Los Angeles Times tries hard to present different viewpoints on its Op-Ed page. But last week, they hit a new low with a column by a lawyer named Joseph Margulies, pleading for mercy on behalf of one of the three terrorists America has water-boarded since 9/11: Abu Zubaydah. Here’s some of what the column said: “Partly as a result of injuries he suffered while he was fighting the communists in Afghanistan, partly as a result of how those injuries were exacerbated by the CIA and partly as a result of his extended isolation, Abu Zubaydah’s mental grasp is slipping away.

“Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damaage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures.

“But physical pain is a passing thing. The enduring torment is the taunting reminder that darkness encroaches. Already he cannot picture his mother’s face or recall his father’s name. Gradually his past, like his future, eludes him.” (more…)

One of the great things about the election of Barack Obama is how it terminated the relevance of Bill Maher. Remember Maher? He was that “edgy” guy who crowned himself the King of all things politically incorrect. At times he could be really funny – but the more he fixated on easy targets, the less “incorrect” he became. His shtick is now little more than a smirk in a suit, a walking catalogue of jokes that could have been written by the most brain dead of Huffpo commenters.

So now that the Republicans are out of power – who’s Bill going after now? In his column in the Los Angeles Times … it`s the Republicans who aren’t in power.

And this shows what happens when your recent career has been little more than one easy Bush joke after another: when the target of that joke is gone – what’s left?

Oh yeah, a teabagging joke. (more…)