Can a young FBI analyst catch a Soviet serial killer before becoming his next victim?

In “The Double,” out this week on DVD, a U.S. Senator is assassinated in a style unique to a Soviet Cold War-era serial killer dubbed “Cassius.” Paul Shepherdson (Richard Gere) was the premier authority on Cassius back in the day and insists that Cassius is dead. Gere’s character is teamed up with Ben Geary (Topher Grace), a novice FBI analyst who has spent his entire career studying Cassius and is convinced the cagey assassin has returned.

Together they set out to track Cassius, assuming he’s still alive, before the killer strikes again. Will Geary discover the secret Shepherdson is keeping before Cassius can escape or come after him?

“The Double” conjures up all sorts of questions considering the premise of the movie and its title: double agent? double cross? However “The Double” is more of a psychological thriller than a spy movie or suspenseful mystery. The major twist/reveal happens in the first 30 minutes, which was initially disappointing. But the suspense of whether or not Cassius will be caught is carried throughout the rest of the movie so well that the patient viewer doesn’t feel robbed of a denouement.

Gere and Grace make an excellent team, sharing the spotlight with balance and only trying to outshine the other in understatement. Gere in particular is very convincing as the steely-eyed Shepherdson and at times downright scary.

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Looks as though everyone in Hollywood received their talking points and that it’s no coincidence they dovetail perfectly with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The push is on to gin up the Left-wing vote by blaming the job creators the successful the wealthy for our current economic problems as opposed to President FailureTeleprompter and the wet dream of liberal policies that were passed during his first term … and failed so publicly.

Martin Sheen is right on message, as is the media, and you can bet that if Romney is our nominee he will be tarred and feathered as “The Wall Street Guy.”

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Brent Bozell:

In an interview on the Catholic cable channel EWTN, Estevez joked about the horror of making the pitch for this movie about a pilgrimage – no massive special effects, no parade of gore or bedroom scenes with nudity. It’s just an old man hiking across Spain with three people he meets along the way. It’s a small movie, made on a small budget. It’s about our humanity and our spirituality. It’s so easy to imagine Tinseltown’s eyes glazing over.

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But what Estevez said in that interview was still striking. “Hollywood is a very difficult place to be earnest and be heartfelt. And I am not interested in making films that are anything but. There’s a lot of vulgarity in films. There’s a lot of violence, casual sex – things that make me uncomfortable watching – and I’m not interested in perpetuating that message.”  …

Here’s how “The Way” unfolds. Sheen’s character, California ophthalmologist Tom Avery, is a widower who’s been angry at his son’s decision to forego a graduate degree to wander the world. While Avery’s out on the golf course, a French policeman calls to tell him his son has died in a storm in the Pyrenees. When Avery arrives to identify the body, the policeman tells him about the “camino,” and he resolves to travel the route with his son’s cremated remains. On this very long walk, he finds companionship with a burly Dutchman who wants to lose weight, an Irish writer with writer’s block, and a bitter Canadian woman trying to quit smoking – and ultimately rediscovers his lost faith.

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When Barack Obama campaigned on “hope and change,” Hollywood elites bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. They believed he really did find the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) “abhorrent,” as he said on the campaign trail and in his campaign fliers. (Caveat: The campaign flyers Obama distributed in places like Arkansas, Kansas, and Nebraska, didn’t contain the same pro-gay rhetoric found in the ones he dispersed along the West Coast.)

As a result of accepting candidate Obama at his word, they were among the first to be offended by the fact that President Obama voiced his support for DOMA just months after taking office.

But fortunately for Hollywood elites, Obama’s approval numbers are tanking and he is desperate for a way to win people back to his side. To that end, he has not only reached out to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community via the announcement that his administration will no longer argue the constitutionality of DOMA in court but also by letting it be known that his position on same-sex marriage is “evolving.” (Heretofore, he has always said he opposed same-sex marriage.)

How better to reach out to a bunch of Hollywood elites than by bashing traditional marriage while simultaneously suggesting that full blown support for gay marriage may be on the horizon?

(Pardon me for pointing out that this not only reminds us that liberal politicians will change their stated positions in a heartbeat to win the approval of elitists, but it also explains why no one in flyover country wants to see Hollywood movies anymore: because the elites in L.A. are at war with tradition and traditional values.)

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“Never get out of the boat.” Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin’ all the way…

Why it’s a left-wing film

With a script loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness,” co-writer/director Francis Ford Coppola moves Conrad’s existential tale from the 19th Century African Congo to the 20th Century Vietnam War and portrays America’s involvement there, and our military men in particular,  in the harshest and most disturbing ways imaginable. At best, we are forever indifferent to everything and everyone, most especially human suffering. At worst we are murderers of women and children and our government is involved in the kind of secret Black Ops the Left was sure Wikileaks would finally reveal when the just the opposite turned out to be true.

We also epitomize the term Ugly American, treating our South Vietnamese allies like children or as though they don’t exist, and there is no amount of brutality we won’t rain down on our enemies in the North.  We are borderline terrorists willing to indiscriminately lay down intense air-strikes on villages where children scramble for cover just so we can surf. We use the dead in ways to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy and casually toss around racial slurs to describe anyone who doesn’t look like us.

Coppola’s monstrous vision of the American military has never been equaled, not even by Oliver Stone. In the realized vision of this great director’s cinematic nightmare, the most terrifying boogeyman of all is The American Presence.

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I think that Charlie Sheen, the uber-talented actor — as he’s described by many in Hollywood — who leaped on to the scene as an money-hungry, woman carousing, cocktail drinking young lad in the movie Wall Street and then went on be one of the highest paid sitcom stars today portraying a millionaire (fast-forward to money earned), woman carousing, cocktail drinking older lad, has been given a lifetime pass of deplorable behavior that boggles my mind every time I see his updated mug shot. Being a sitcom star used to require a certain amount of decorum. Most stars tried to keep the arrests down to minimum. Can you imagine if Bill Cosby, Tony Danza, Henry Winkler or my favorite Ed O’Neill, had the kind of rap sheet that Carlos Irwin Estevez has? I guarantee that they would have never been hired.

In 2000, when Michael J. Fox was forced to depart from the sitcom “Spin City,” his replacement was Charlie Sheen. I remember thinking to myself,  Charlie Sheen in a sitcom? Since when is he even remotely funny, and wasn’t he arrested for breaking his girlfriend’s nose — not to mention a spending spree at Heidi Fleiss’ house, shooting Kelly Preston in the arm, and trips in and out of rehab for hard drugs and alcohol? (more…)

Stop the servers!  Jackson Williams at the Huffington Post has a newsflash:  Actor Matthew Marsden Hides His Right-Wing Political Views.

This raises a couple of questions.  The first is, “Who is Mathew Marsden?”  Well, he was an up-and-coming young English singer and actor with athletic roles in Rambo and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.  Which leads to the second question – why would writer Jackson Williams be so giddy about the revelation that Marsden apparently does not hew obediently to the Hollywood left’s party line?

Well, it sure isn’t because he’s interested in giving Marsden’s career a boost.  Like the grinning little snot in every elementary school class who gets off on the high of narc-ing out the other kids to the schoolmarm, Jackson’s purpose was to tattle to every producer, agent, actor and other Hollywoodoid that Marsden had been a bad, bad boy.  He exercised his right to think for himself. Maybe Jackson should wear a sash:  “Political Hall Monitor.”  But it’s clear that his article is simply a nomination of Marsden for a spot on the New Hollywood Blacklist. (more…)

The Echelon Conspiracy could spin off a veritable global economy of work in the form of books, magazine articles, documentaries and parodies to investigate and explain the dissonance between the picture’s pre-production pedigree and the post-production fiasco. There are surely a lot of fascinating stories here: How such a rancid wreck got made in the first place; how it didn’t end up going directly to DVD; how so many A-list actors such as Ving Rhames, Jonathan Pryce, Ed Burns and Martin Sheen got involved; why screenwriters Michael Nitsberg and Kevin Elders figured they could rip off the end of War Games—at times, nearly line-by-line—and that no one would notice; and how a movie with a reasonably interesting premise, at least one notable idea at its heart, and enough Bush-bashing to please every liberal film critic in America could end up (as of this writing) with a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. (more…)