Hollywood has learned something effective about conservative women: If you play them convincingly enough to left-wing stereotypes, people will believe that the caricature is the real deal. We saw this with Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin where so many young people actually seem to believe Palin said she could see Russia from her house.

Expect to see a similar nasty portrayal by Julianne Moore in HBO’s “Game Change.” Moore confesses that it was hard to find a good side to Palin, and the miniseries is candid that her ambition outstrips her capacity. Hollywood knows well that you only get one opportunity to introduce these figures of national or international import, and they intend to make it bad impression on their behalf.

So it is with Lady Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” whose creators have ridiculously compared Meryl Streep’s Thatcher to a modern-day King Lear in their disgusting attempt to dance on Thatcherism’s memory.

“Iron Lady” producer Harvey Weinstein, director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan are engaged in a caricature of conservatism, through a caricature of Lady Thatcher and all those around her. Weinstein has even claimed that Thatcher is a “social progressive,” as if being pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-national health service were all there were to Thatcherism.

Alas Weinstein and Streep never show us Thatcher’s considerable economic and political successes, preferring to spend two-thirds of the film luxuriating on her old age. This is as fictional as it is slanderous. We simply do not know how Lady Thatcher is doing because she has lived a life far removed from the press.

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If you, like me, think Meryl Streep is an incredibly gifted actress, “The Iron Lady” will not disappoint you. But if you have any rational recollection of Margaret Thatcher, well, I can’t recommend you watch this negative, extremely biased production. If you do, get ready for some invented, manipulative drama.

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Most of the film annoyingly examines Demented Thatcher in her later years. Oh, the lingering, gratuitous shots of Streep in her confused wanderings! Why should we gaze inside this (completely fabricated) frail, crazy character? It’s the only way to tear her down. The filmmakers, seemingly confused about her actual, incredible successes, focus on her dementia and femininity while categorically denying her capability.

The grand economic prosperity Britain experienced during her service is covered briefly as flashing newspaper headlines, which strangely look damning from the liberal viewpoint–“Maggie’s Millionaires” and the like (what the liberal philosophy fails to recognize is that when the rich get richer, the poor get richer, too). There is no Reagan, save for a brief hallucination of dancing with him. There is a passing shot of Gorbachev. And the Falklands incident is dealt with as a tragic piece of history that she somehow managed to emerge from well. Predictably, the Armed Service personnel were for a war, while everyone else, including the United States, advised her not to escalate.

In her miasma, Demented Thatcher recollects her past as a series of political triumphs that simply serve to emphasize her failure as a human being. Maggie was reviled by most everyone who came into contact with her, including family and cabinet members. Her husband, (the love of her life), was affectionately civil to her – but only in her hallucinations. In real life he often called her “MT,” a not so veiled reference (by the filmmakers) to her presumed emotional state. How else could a woman break the backs of the unions in Britain but by reckless conceit and a complete absence of sympathy? Through all her accomplishments, her family is not depicted as being proud of her for a moment. Even her own daughter screams that everything is always about Mum’s political aspirations. Her husband leaves for South Africa, and the hallucination later asks how long it took her to notice he was missing. It is an extremely poignant scene when her son calls from South Africa to say he won’t be coming to visit. She seems only mildly fraught by his rejection. She’s the Iron Lady, after all. She must be a cold, heartless b*tch. (more…)

For lefty movie reviewers already bitter that Margaret Thatcher even existed – and especially bitter because her three terms as Britain’s prime minister utterly repudiated their most sacred beliefs – the new Thatcher biography The Iron Lady offers them a chance for some quality ankle biting.  Of course, this living legend will survive both the film and the wailing of these liberal pipsqueaks.  The problem is that we still can’t be sure whether we ought to see it or not.

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.

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The overrated Meryl Streep (whose acting meter broke decades ago) proves once again that this current crop of actors the world is saddled with is about as classless a bunch as we’ll ever see (hopefully). Not content to enjoy the the accolades she’s receiving for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, the Academy Award-winner not only ripped the former prime minister’s actions as sub-human (monstrous!) but then propped herself up on a piece of non-existent moral high ground and sanctimoniously insulted an entire country.

The New York Times: [emphasis added]

Ms. Streep said, laughing: “We’re not interested in King Lear’s politics. We’re not saying we would have voted for him.” She added: “What interested me was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from? How do those formulations begin, how do they solidify, calcify, become deficits? How do a person’s strengths become weaknesses? Look at me. I tend to go on too long. I’m a little dogmatic, and that could get really awful over time. If you are self-aware, as actors are, you let these things go into your pores, including criticism. I hate being criticized.”

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Meryl Streep doesn’t simply play Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she exudes her. With an intense concentration, Streep captures both the chipper intransigence of Britain’s first female prime minister (from 1979 to 1990), and—with the aid of uncannily realistic old-age makeup and prosthetics—the lonely dementia of her dotage, into which we are told she is sunk today, at the age of 86.

Streep is brilliant, fully validating the decision by director Phyllidia Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) to go with an American actress in portraying an Englishwoman of such long familiarity. So it’s odd to find this technically complex and naturalistic performance encased in such a resolutely old-fashioned, Hollywood-style biopic. I half expected to see Thatcher bumping into Greer Garson’s Madame Curie in one of the film’s many dream-world reveries.

The movie dutifully ticks off the highlights of Thatcher’s career: the rise of the provincial grocer’s daughter through the Conservative Party ranks to the top of the political order; her facing down of the powerful trade unions whose strikes were threatening to paralyze the country in the early 1980s; her condemnations of socialism and unflinching defense of free markets in the face of hooting derision in the House of Commons; her handling of the 1982 Falklands war, in which Britain controversially prevailed; and her unyielding condemnation of bomb-planting IRA terrorism. (“We have always lived alongside evil,” the PM says. “But it has never been so impatient, so avid for carnage, so eager to carry innocence along with it into oblivion.”)

Read the full review at Reason.com

The upcoming biopic “The Iron Lady” depicts former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a doddering old woman looking back on her life. That’s hardly the kind of image her admirers imagined when the notion of a biopic first hit the news.

Yet a historian says the film is already causing Brits to reconsider Thatcher’s legacy – both as a feminist icon and a ruler of consequence – weeks before its U.S. release. Could it do the same stateside?

Historian Amanda Foreman has already seen Meryl Streep’s work as Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” and Foreman wrote a Newsweek article about the film’s potential impact. She shared her thoughts with C-SPAN host Peter Slen earlier this week:

SLEN: What’s the current opinion of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain? What’s the current mood about her?
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Isn’t it just grand when self-proclaimed Hollywood feminists gang up on conservative female heavyweights? As entry #5,849,948 in my Profiles of Liberal Hypocrisy we have Ellen Barkin, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep: three award-winning actresses who fancy themselves feminists with a love of strong, powerful women.

Yet, not surprisingly, these three gals conveniently chuck feminism aside in regards to three others gals (Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Margaret Thatcher, respectively) whose political views differ from their own. Somehow, I must’ve missed the asterisk providing an exception to the feminist cause:  ‘Thou must support thy sisters – unless, of course, said sisters disagree with you politically.”

Barkin v. Bachmann: Barkin’s Twitter feed (which rivals that of Alec Baldwin’s in its unrestrained slamming of the right) repeatedly attacks conservative female figures. During the December 15th GOP debate, her vicious tweets revealed this actress is a feminist in name only. Blasting even Fox News’ gorgeous Megyn Kelly, a superstar network anchor and successful working mom (“This Megyn Kelley has more Botox in her f*ckin face than a 57 year old actress, Just sayin.”), Barkin saved her best sneer for Bachmann: “Don’t u just love when Bachmann says “When I am president…”? That’s like me saying… “When I am performing my next heart transplant….”  Odd, one would think Ms. Barkin, political-views aside, would have more respect for a woman who:  is a sitting member of Congress and presidential candidate, successfully raised 5 children and fostered a whopping 23 children. If Bachmann isn’t a poster girl for strong female women, I don’t know who is.

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Actress Alexandra Roach plays the formidable Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the upcoming biopic “The Iron Lady.”

Roach’s Thatcher is the awkward but determined young woman who first enters the political system, while Oscar-winner Meryl Streep conveys Thatcher as the leader who rattled England’s political system during the 1980s.

Neither Streep nor Roach appear to be fans of Thatcher’s political career, but Roach says starring in the movie opened her eyes to a part of Thatcher’s legacy she can’t help but admire.

Asked whether she sympathized with Thatcher, Roach said, “I’m an actress so I wanted to play her as truthfully and as fully as possible. I was definitely not judging her. We don’t agree on a lot of things, but when I was filming at the Houses of Parliament and I had all these older men around me in dark suits, it kind of struck me what she did for women, what she did as a woman. She came from a humble background. To come from that and have ambition and drive, just knowing what she wanted out of life, you cant help but admire that.”

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Two different viewpoints below. Here’s our review of a draft of the script.

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Daily Mail:

Many feared the worst when they heard Meryl Streep was to play Margaret Thatcher in a new film.

Not only was Baroness Thatcher to be cast as a rather befuddled, elderly woman looking back on the triumphs and disappointments of her life, but Streep is also of a very different political hue from Maggie.

It was commonly agreed that our greatest Prime Minister since Churchill would be vilified.

Such fears are misplaced. Having just seen the film in a London preview before its release in January, and then having spoken at length to Meryl Streep about her role in The Iron Lady, I can state categorically that the doomsayers were wrong.

Streep’s portrayal will, I have no doubt, come to be seen as magnificent portrait of Lady Thatcher.

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Conservatives have been mighty suspicious of the upcoming Margaret Thatcher biopic ‘The Iron Lady.’

The film stars liberal actress Meryl Streep as the iconic British Prime Minister, and it’s coming from an industry which regularly wears its disdain for the right on its cinematic sleeve. Big Hollywood’s peek at the film’s script did nothing to quell fears the film would diminish Thatcher’s accomplishments. And associates of the now-ailing ex-leader who have seen the film have called it “insulting.”

Now, ‘The Iron Lady’ screenwriter Abi Morgan is speaking out about the film to IndieWire – sight unseen.

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Below is the recently released teaser-trailer for the Margaret Thatcher biopic, “The Iron Lady.”  The Weinstein Co’s film comes out in January 2012 and has Oscar-bait written all over it.

We don’t see Meryl Streep (as Thatcher) for over half of this minute-long clip, but when we do, we learn that Streep’s Thatcher will be funny and good-natured but capable of having the upper hand in a confrontation with men who are trying to coach (manipulate?) her.  Based on this teaser, we can assume Streep will be portraying the former U.K. Prime Minister as an amiable leader, but potentially an intellectual light-weight.

Streep does a bit of her signature over-acting here, even employing the canine head tilt that reminds me of Michael Myers in “Halloween,” but she certainly looks the part.

Nonetheless, the trailer is intriguing.  Now if only the fact that the script smells like a hit job didn’t ruin it.

The write-up from YouTube got me thinkin’…

The Iron Lady: Tells the story of a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world. The story concerns power and the price that is paid for power, and is a surprising and insightful portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman.

Can you think of an American politician who might one day fit this description...? Can you…? (more…)

Here’s the photo, which means we can expect yet another horribly self-conscious accent from the single most over-rated actress in the history of film. Below the photo is a link to Big Hollywood’s review of the bio-pic’s screenplay, which was leaked to us late last year.

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Streep’s quote that came with the release of the photo:

“I am trying to approach the role with as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses – I can only hope my stamina will begin to approach her own.”

That old “admiration” spin, at least acording to the script we have, is just that — nothing more than Streep setting Thatcher admirers up for a Leftist sucker punch. From Pam Meister’s review of “The Iron Lady” screenplay:

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Editor’s note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there’s been an Internet. Therefore it’s no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product. 

Author’s note: There are a couple of spoilers in this review. If you are dying to watch this movie when it is released in 2011 don’t read any further. 

When BH editor extraordinaire John Nolte asked me if I wanted to do a Sucker Punch review of the script for The Iron Lady, the upcoming film featuring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, my response was (and I quote), “Yes!!!” After reading the script, however, I almost wish I had declined the offer.

Why? Well, when I think of Margaret Thatcher, I think of an extraordinary woman who defied the odds to become the UK’s first woman prime minister and who did her best to bring her nation, kicking and screaming, into a period of prosperity - a nation that was on the brink of financial collapse when she first came to office in 1979. Being human like the rest of us, she had triumphs, and also some failures. For a comprehensive look at both her successes and what she might have done differently, see this article at The Heritage Foundation.

Unfortunately, Thatcher (formally known as Baroness Thatcher, having had the lifetime peerage bestowed upon her by Queen Elizabeth II in 1992), after a lifetime of strength, courage and fortitude, is now known to be suffering from dementia, a terrible disease in which one begins to forget little things and slowly forgets more and more. I cannot imagine how frightening it must be to begin to forget one’s loved ones and, perhaps, oneself.

But it’s great fodder for a movie, especially if the subject is a strong conservative woman whose policies have always been loathed by the left. Who cares if she’s still alive but unable to defend herself against the film’s implications? (more…)

Miles Goslett of the Mail Online has read the script of the upcoming smear job of Lady Thatcher. Here’s the unsurprisingly ugly report:

Besmirching of a giant: How Meryl Streep’s ‘Maggie’ plumbs new depths by portraying her as destroyed by dementia and guilt about her record

The cameras have not even started rolling on a new film being made about Margaret Thatcher’s life in which she is expected to be played by Meryl Streep, but already the project has been tainted by controversy over the negative way it intends to portray the former Prime Minister.

On first hearing about the production last month, a member of Lady Thatcher’s family, who wishes to remain anonymous, said they were ‘appalled’ to learn that she will be depicted as a dementia sufferer looking back on her career with regret. (more…)

Why do we fear this will be a hit job? Because it’s a movie about a conservative icon and when it comes to conservative icons they’re either ignored by filmmakers or trashed by filmmakers. 

Do I sound cynical? Yes. But so does the film’s synopsis (click on the names of those involved for more information).

Hollywood Reporter:

Meryl Streep is in talks to reteam with her “Mamma Mia!” director for “Thatcher,” a biopic of the former British prime minister.’

Jim Broadbent would play Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis, for the British production.

The film, to be directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is set in 1982 and tracks Thatcher as she tries to save her career in the 17 days preceding the 1982 Falklands War. The 2 1/2-month war was a turning point for the prime minister, who, after the victory, saw her approval ratings double and went on to win a second term.

Producer Damien Jones (“Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll”) came up with the story with screenwriter Brian Fillis.

Hrm. Thatcher tries to save her re-election chances in the days just prior to a … war. (more…)

****UPDATE: Link to trailer has been fixed.

Most (good) history books correctly portray the collapse of communism as due to the efforts of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. But there were other subversive elements at work, not the least of which was rock and roll, which bled through the Iron Curtain at an unstoppable level. In Seven Events that Made America America, I examined rock’s part in not only providing a source of hope and optimism for those youth locked under communism’s grip, but also how it became a subversive force within the East Bloc. Through interviews with American rock and rollers of the “Golden Era” (1965-1990), I found an awareness on the part of the musicians of the oppressive nature of communism.

England’s Savoy Brown and me (in the “Jaws” t-shirt)

After I had sent the book off, Marc Leif, a documentary director and superb editor, and I got together to discuss a documentary film based on the rock chapter. As a professor, I’d never raised any money in my life, but now I had to raise a considerable sum to make a movie about rock and roll! We began filming in January 2010, with one of our first interviews being Leslie Mandoki, a Hungarian student leader who crawled through a sewer to escape communism. “We ALL wanted to be Americans!” he insisted. (Mandoki has become quite successful, not only in mainstream European rock, but as the music director for Audi and Volkswagen). As he thrived in the West, Mandoki soon traveled in circles with some well known people, including Bill Clinton and Mikhael Gorbachev, and was surprised to hear Gorby tell him that “we couldn’t keep out rock and roll.” (more…)

A curious aspect of the Bond legend is that Ian Fleming’s socialite wife despised the character. She went so far as to host upper-crust parties at which she and her lettered friends — literary giants such as Cyril Connolly, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh — cattily disparaged her husband’s popular creation as embarrassingly lowbrow, the English equivalent of American pulp fiction (and thus the modern heir to the “Boy’s Weeklies” of Orwell’s famous essay). “Utterly despicable,” was Muggeridge’s quoted verdict in Time magazine soon after Fleming’s death. “[Bond is] obsequious to his superiors, pretentious in his tastes, callous and brutal in his ways, with strong undertones of sadism, and an unspeakable cad in his relations with women, towards whom sexual appetite represents the only approach.”

During the same period, various Leftist writers began penning spy stories of their own in reaction to Fleming’s potent brew of unapologetic clubhouse masculinity (smoking, drinking, gambling, golfing, seducing) and unqualified patriotism, favoring a more, shall we say, morally nuanced look at the Cold War. Author John “The United States of America has gone mad” le Carré, then finding fame with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963 — good guys die, bad guys win, yay!), considered Fleming’s books “cultural pornography,” and mused that in the real world Bond’s “misty, patriotic ideas” would hardly prevent him from betraying his country at the first opportunity. “Because if the money was better,” le Carré snickered with certainty, “the booze freer, and women easier in Moscow, he’d be off like a shot.”

Into this maelstrom of anti-Fleming derision came a little volume called The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned by a more notorious member of the English literati, academic-cum-novelist Kingsley Amis. A savagely witty writer, a world-class drunkard, and a conflicted serial adulterer (all qualities shared, you may recall from our previous installment, with Bond’s creator), the overarching critical statement of his book was simple enough: “Inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hard-earned double-o prefix there lurks an intruder from another age,” a “Byronic hero,” who “is lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique, which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.” (more…)

A missile is fired from the a distant nation, heading for your city; in only 33 minutes or less, that missile will find its target.  Such is the premise of the Heritage Foundation’s aptly named documentary, “33 Minutes.”  The film covers the history missile defense and more importantly discusses the nuclear threats that face our nation today.

With the news of Iran’s nuclear research being more widespread than previously thought, as well as the Obama administration’s retreat on the missile defense system; a documentary like “33 minutes” is more timely than ever.  Too often, Americans think of nuclear threats in the abstract, and this film does much to move the hard truths of the current state of our defense into the concrete.  Featuring interviews with numerous political luminaries such as Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General from 1985-1988, Ed Meese III, and the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher, the film will leave you understanding why missile defense is arguably the most important issue facing our nation today. (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

John Mackey – the founder, CEO and marketing genius behind Whole Foods – finds himself in an organic, unsustainable mess with his carefully cultivated affluent, liberal customer base after penning an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare.”

For starters, Mr. Mackey opens with a line from known-liberal-allergen Margaret Thatcher that features the dreaded “S” word: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Then he goes on to provide eight sensible free-market solutions gleaned from his company’s well-regarded employee health care program.

Mr. Mackey, a free-market libertarian, is now at the mercy of an unforgiving grass-roots mob intent on destroying his company. More than 25,000 people have signed on to a Whole Foods boycott on Facebook.

“Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives,” the online petition reads. “Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.”

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