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Posts Tagged ‘Matt Damon’

John Nolte

‘Green Zone’ Trailer: Matt Damon Goes to Iraq to Fight…Americans?

by John Nolte

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Nobody liked this movie when it was called “Body of Lies.” 

This is the most revealing trailer yet and thankfully we’re given a heads up as to what the story might really be about. Hollywood will look for cover with the excuse that “Green Zone” is based on a true story, but we all know which “true stories” Leftist Hollywood cherry picks in order to fulfill the demands of an anti-American narrative. For example, the true story of 100,000-plus Americans risking their lives to liberate and protect from terrorists people they’ve  never met is one “true story” we’ll see in hell first.

Everything you’d expect from director Paul Greengrass and Damon is here, including that goddamn shaky-cam (it’s not saying the Lord’s name in vain if you mean it). Damon’s character is the protagonist and he’s there to do good but it’s not the terrorists who are the antagonists getting in his way … no, it’s The United States of America personified by the Greg Kinnear character. (more…)

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Posted Nov 17th 2009 at 12:32 pm in Film, Military, Politics | 137 Comments

Michael van der Galien

Matt Damon, State Dept. Create Global Warming Propaganda PSA

by Michael van der Galien

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Recently, actor Matt Damon narrated a video for the State Department, addressing the problem of chronic  worldwide hunger. The video is extremely well made; those who watch it can’t help but be touched by it.

This first minute of the three-minute video revolves around one problem: Hunger. Poor children are seen dying of starvation, others are lying on the streets of third-world countries, not able to walk. Damon explains that six million children die of hunger every year – needless to say, a shocking statistic.

Even the most egotistical viewer cannot help but get angry at and upset by so much suffering, most of which is needless.

But then, one minute into the video, the subject suddenly changes. We move from dying children to tornadoes and tsunamis. Damon forgets about the children for a while to focus on … you knew it was coming … global warming. (more…)

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Posted Nov 6th 2009 at 6:51 am in Celebrity News, Politics | 98 Comments

Schizoid Mann

The Boggy Nature of Fear

by Schizoid Mann

Halloween is a time of fright and fear. It’s a favorite time of year for many kids. Of course the candy helps, but that’s not all of it. It’s really about the feeling. The leaves are falling, the skies are darker, the weather is getting colder and there’s still more cold to come. It’s a time for spookiness, mystery and the unknown. So, as I write this, on a dark and stormy night, well, actually,  it’s the afternoon, but it is very dark and very stormy outside. My mind turns to this season, to Halloween, to fear.

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There are a lot of films that scared us as kids, and still scare us. Many of the films today are far too graphic for my tastes. Heck, most of television is, too, for that matter. So, I should say right at the outset that I’m not a fan of gore, not in any way shape or form. I know some folks out there are big on the stuff, but not me. Sure, I’ve seen some, the classic Herschell Gordon Lewis, Romero and Savini works, but none of the modern multi-sequel films that grace our theaters with single word titles. I don’t mind being scared. As most would agree, we all need a good scare every now and then. It’s good for you. It’s thrilling. But gore isn’t thrilling for me. It’s sickening. I like to be thrilled, I don’t wish to be sick. Besides, I’ve seen enough of the footage and descriptions of films like “Saw” and “Hostel,” which I rebel against, regardless of how “intelligent” or “clever” they are reported to be. (more…)

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Posted Oct 31st 2009 at 5:42 pm in Film | 48 Comments

Carl Kozlowski

‘Informant!’ Refreshingly Apolitical, Highly Entertaining

by Carl Kozlowski

Mark Whitacre had a boring job as a scientist and executive at Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest food-processing companies. Trapped in small-town Illinois hell with his wife and kids after previously living with them in the capitals of Europe, he still loved to drive fast cars and pursue as much luxury as his rural life could afford, all the while reading Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels that he believed were all too realistic in their depictions of corporate and governmental intrigue and malfeasance. 

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Stir all those factors together with his insider knowledge that ADM was colluding with overseas food companies in one of the planet’s biggest price-fixing schemes ever, and the fact that Whitacre became both one of the FBI’s best informants ever may not have seemed all that surprising. But the fact that he also hid a highly unstable tendency to lie or leak information as well also made him one of the Feds’ most nerve-wracking and unreliable head cases ever – and it’s this dichotomy that forms the center of director Steven Soderbergh’s head-spinning and comically offbeat take on the ADM scandal, “The Informant!”  (more…)

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Posted Sep 18th 2009 at 8:59 am in Featured Story, Reviews | 54 Comments

John Nolte

No Oscar For You: Matt Damon’s Iraq Critique Moved to March

by John Nolte

Why would a company interested in making money (so they say) make yet another film trashing the Iraq War? By my count (narratives and documentaries), 13 have already flopped miserably and yet Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass team up for number 14, this one a big-budget studio critique of a war that successfully liberated 25 million innocent people.

Companies truly interested in making a profit don’t behave this way, which is why there’s never been a New Coke 2, much less a New Coke 14. And yet, Universal doubles down on more anti-Americanism using the fig-leaf of “based on a true story” to hide their malicious intentions which — to anyone paying attention — are always exposed by which “true stories” they choose to drop in theaters all over the world.

Here’s the New Yorker description of the book “Green Zone” is based on: (more…)

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Posted Jul 31st 2009 at 11:11 am in Film, Politics | 188 Comments

Leo Grin

‘Taken’: The World’s Oldest Profession is Father

by Leo Grin

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

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Posted May 20th 2009 at 8:04 am in Entertainment, Featured Story | One Comment

Tom Tapp

First ‘Star Trek’ Reviews Roll In

by Tom Tapp

The first reviews of JJ Abrams’ “Star Trek” hit the web today and they should please fans of the series, if not fans of Matt Damon.

How did Damon weasel his way into this?

After denying it for months, Abrams revealed to Life magazine recently that Damon was his first choice for Captain Kirk:

“…it would have been great to work with Matt – but at the end of the day, it was such a better move to cast the movie with unknowns.” 

The reviewers agree. (more…)

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Posted Apr 21st 2009 at 6:41 am in Entertainment, Reviews | One Comment

John T. Simpson

Adventures in the Scream Trade, Take One

by John T. Simpson

If you’re wondering if I was about to opine on the craft of gut-twisting horror stories, you’d only be half right. I’m actually talking about real life here. As many of you may know from my earlier posts, I first flame-throwered onto the scene here at Big Hollywood about a month ago, on the occasion of Team Oscar’s could-not-be-more-ill-advised taking off for the unfriendly skies of Islamist Iran.

I knew they were going to get punked! They were going to Punkedville! In fact, I was so sure of it, I was the one who broke the story in the US off the French wires to Drudge and Nikki Finke.  One Hollywood Jihadi PR roadside bomb detonated. War Is Hell.

Look at their trip from my POV. I remember the whole balls-to-the-wall anti-Apartheid campaign from the mid-eighties. ‘I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City,’ remember? By the way, wasn’t Little Stevie great in that video? Love him! Point being, if the racist South African apartheid regime was unworthy of cultural exchange, why was the gay-hanging, women-stoning, child-executing, blogger-killing, hostage-taking fascist regime in Iran worthy of a gold-plated Academy PR kiss? (more…)

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Posted Apr 6th 2009 at 5:58 am in Celebrity News, Entertainment, News, Politics | 10 Comments

Schizoid Mann

The Bland Leading the Blind

by Schizoid Mann

Before the election, at a comfortable film festival in Spain, filmmaker Woody Allen told journalists abroad that it would be “a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win.”

“It would be a very, very terrible thing for the United States in many, many ways,” he said. Adding that Mr. Obama, “represents a huge step upward from (the) incompetence and misjudgment” of the Bush administration.”

You know, it’s a hard thing to watch your heroes fall. To see them as they really are, not as you thought they were, not as you wish they were.

I grew up loving Woody Allen movies, ranking “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” as three of my favorite all-time films. With “Radio Days” and “Sleeper” not too far behind.  (more…)

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Posted Mar 30th 2009 at 5:21 pm in Celebrity News, Featured Story, Media Criticism, News | 4 Comments

Steve Mason

Photos surface from Clint Eastwood’s new movie THE HUMAN FACTOR – A solid bet to be in the Best Picture race?

by Steve Mason

If I was forced today to guess which 2009 release will win the Academy Award for Best Picture, I would first complain that it’s impossible to guess right. Then I would put my money on Clint Eastwood’s The Human Factor (Warner Bros). In mid-March, it’s silly to start discussing which upcoming movies will be Academy Award contenders, but there are some films, still in production, that seem to have the pedigree to “go all the way.” Eastwood’s next movie as a director, based on John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela & the Game That Changed a Nation, seems like a decent bet.


Academy Award winner Morgan Freeman acquired the film rights to the book, and he will play a post-prison Nelson Mandela with friend Eastwood directing. The Human Factor will tell the story of how the 1995 World Cup Rugby Final between heavily-favored New Zealand and underdog South Africa helped to heal the post-Apartheid racial divide. Matt Damon, sporting blonde hair, has reportedly trained hard in order to credibly play South African captain Francois Pienaar. Some photos have begun to show up from the current production.

(more…)

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Posted Mar 14th 2009 at 9:26 pm in Entertainment, Featured Story, Steve Mason's Box Office | 60 Comments

Ben Shapiro

Another Look at the 25 Best Conservative Movies

by Ben Shapiro

Over at National Review Online, they just finished going through their top 25 conservative movies of the last 25 years.  Overall, it’s a decent list. Still, there were many films left off and several that would not have made my cut. Here’s their full list, with brief comment:

25. Gran Torino: Fair enough. 

24. Team America: World Police: This should rank higher, if only for Hans Blix being eaten by a shark and a parody of Matt Damon that will forever wreck his political future – a service for which we should all be grateful. 

23. United 93: Again, this should rank higher, but the truth is that the story itself is conservative. Americans didn’t apologize for foreign entanglements or the American way of life on Flight 93 – they just rolled. The movie is almost a documentary.   (more…)

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Posted Feb 16th 2009 at 6:19 pm in Entertainment | 247 Comments

Andrew Breitbart

Iraq War Showdown: Bill Kristol Agrees to Debate Matt Damon After Actor’s “Idiot” Slam

by Andrew Breitbart

On Sunday afternoon Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist Bill Kristol — in an email exchange with Big Hollywood — agreed to debate Matt Damon on his Hollywood home turf after being informed the 38-year old actor ridiculed Kristol in an interview in the Miami Herald.

“He’s an idiot — he wrote that we should be grateful to George Bush because he won the Iraq war. We! Won! The! War!”

As the sponsor of the event, Big Hollywood is offering $100,000 to Damon (or to the charity or carbon credit of his choice) to publicly debate Kristol at a mutually agreed upon time, date and venue.

During the last election cycle the liberal activist Damon — who briefly attended Harvard University — also heaped scorn on John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin:

“You do the actuary tables, there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term, and it’ll be President Palin…. It’s like a really bad Disney movie, ‘The Hockey Mom.’ Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska, and she’s president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.”

Damon is no stranger to left-wing politics. His Oscar-nominated screenplay, “Good Will Hunting,” co-written with Ben Affleck, was inspired by anarchist Boston University historian, Howard Zinn.

According to Wikipedia:

Damon included a reference to A People’s History in his film Good Will Hunting. In a confrontation with his psychologist, played by Robin Williams, Damon’s character tells him: “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass.” Damon also read the latter half of People’s History for an audiobook released February 1, 2003.

If Damon agrees to participate, Big Hollywood will work with both parties to secure mutually agreed upon parameters for the debate (e.g., Did We Win the War in Iraq?)

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Posted Jan 26th 2009 at 9:04 am in Celebrity News, Entertainment, Featured Story, News, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized, Video | 683 Comments