So, his typical lunch comes from either McDonald’s or Popeye’s.

He binges on Big Macs or ribs, and desperately tries to hide it from his wife, who’s an ardent vegetarian [aren't they all].

He weighs close to 350 lbs.

In short, he’s a big fat guy…whose probably miserable – telling you how to eat.

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Welcome to the world of New York City Councilman Leroy Comrie, the portly pol who seeks a ban on McDonald’s Happy Meals – because he thinks the cute little prizes that accompany the food causes bad eating habits.

As opposed to say, human weakness.

Now, I’m not going to knock this guy for his weight, or for being a hypocrite.

Because, in a way he’s not.

I mean, it’s not like he’s hiding his flab. Well – he can’t – but I’m sure he’s aware that by attacking McDonald’s, he’s going to look foolish.

And he does.

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Over the last year I watched an interesting mini-social experiment play out: my sixty-something parents trying out Netflix.

The company’s now-famous little red envelopes first gained fame around the time the dot-com boom went bust in early 2000. Video rental behemoth Blockbuster, reeling from a catastrophic bleeding of market share to this wily challenger, entered the rent-by-mail fray in 2004, but it soon became apparent that they were going to get their hats handed to them. An even younger upstart, Redbox, began as a subsidiary of McDonald’s, and by 2007 its kiosks has spread across the fruited plains of America like wildfire, in the process putting the final nails in Blockbuster’s coffin.

My folks watch a lot of flicks, either at the theater or at home, so there’s always opportunities for improving the experience — the Great TiVo Immersion Program of 2005, masterminded and forced upon them by moi in the face of strenuous objections, turned out to be life changing. So after years of watching them drive out in the early evening to various video stores, I bought them a year-long Netflix subscription in Christmas 2009, and waited to see how it played out.

To my surprise, they hated it. For a year they bemoaned that Netflix never seemed to have the newest titles already available at the local rental shops. Even when using the service to queue older titles, they never got used to having to wait a day or two for DVDs that they could have in fifteen minutes by driving down the street. Eventually they settled in to using Netflix only for older or obscure films, things they otherwise wouldn’t have rented at all, and of course taking chances on such films was more of a hit-or-miss proposition than using Redbox to rent new movies they were jazzed to see. Meanwhile Netflix’s newest innovation, streaming to computers and TV, went entirely unused. (more…)

The Michael Moore era appears to be over – or at least needs to prepare for its Last Rites. And the Oscar winning filmmaker seems to know it.

It’s one thing that his last two films (“Capitalism: A Love Story” and “Slacker Uprising”) failed to haul in big bucks or the critical raves usually afforded his propaganda films. Some critics even started to call him out on his shaky grasp of reality – better late than never, gang!

Now, it appears Moore will say just about anything to generate press – assuming it will get him back in the public eye.

This week on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Moore told the HBO show’s crowd that the McDonald’s restaurant near Ground Zero had killed more people than the 9/11 terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center.

Did he really say something that stupid? Yawn.

The filmmaker also went on record recently in support of the mosque planned for a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Moore would rather the mosque be built ON Ground Zero. Nothing else will do for him, and the failure to build said mosque means America as he knows it is no more. He even offered to put up as much as $10,000 of his own money to support the mosque project. (more…)

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If there is one overriding theme coursing through reviews of Smokey and the Bandit, it is superficiality. Read through the mountain of pieces out there, and you’ll continually be assaulted with adjectives like “silly,” “mindless,” “breezy,” “fun,” and “stupid.” Taken together, they blend into a gargantuan wall of polite derision. Even those who genuinely adore the movie scoff at efforts to peek under the film’s thematic hood. Burt Reynolds himself has stated that “Anybody who would take that picture seriously needs a psychiatrist.”

Well, I disagree. A movie’s effect on the culture is often independent of intellectual considerations. The passage of years highlights a film’s vintage regardless of pedigree or awards. Father Time has a sneaky way of giving even erstwhile pop-culture artifacts a rich patina of nostalgia and meaning. And so it happens that light-footed entertainments like Smokey sometimes have lessons to teach, if only we can muster the wisdom to listen.

Let’s return for a moment to the film critic Gary Arnold, who in the summer of 1977 penned a lengthy appreciation of Smokey for The Washington Post. Along with Star Wars, Hal Needham’s film was dominating the domestic box office, especially at the drive-in theaters that were still fairly common in rural America. Given the movie’s success and the CB phenomenon, an article about the picture was a no-brainer. But what’s interesting about Arnold’s essay is how he goes beyond mere cinematic merit and expands his analysis into the realms of culture and politics: (more…)

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NewsBusters:

Cameron claims “Great wealth makes me uncomfortable,” and he has a track record of producing “quasi-Marxist epic[s],” as Newsweek described Titanic. Cameron himself said that Titanic was “holding just short of Marxist dogma.”

Critic James Kendrick pointed out Titanic, Aliens and The Abyss as three Cameron films that include Marxist overtones.

Certainly Avatar can be added to that list. Along with the global warming message—Popular Science calls it “every militant global warming supporter’s dream come true”—it has also been described as “blatant anti-military” and “anti-American.” (more…)

I’ve noticed a lot of my brothers and sisters on the right are up in arms at Law & Order: SVU after last week’s episode. I did not see the whole episode in question but did see a clip where a character played by John Larroquette mentions three well know conservative talk show hosts and calls them a cancer on the land.

Before I get rolling, in the spirit of full disclosure I will admit to being a Law & Order junkie. My DVR is full of my favorite Law & Order: Criminal Intent episodes, which is by far the strongest of the three series. I will also admit that in my mind Law & Order: SVU is to the Law & Order brand what Deep Space Nine was to the Star Trek brand. It is a weak cousin that may have been spreading the brand a little too thin. (more…)

So President Obama’s nominee for surgeon general has a dirty past – one so lurid it has many concerned experts wringing their hands in typical hand-wringing fashion.

What might this skeleton in Dr. Regina Benjamin’s closet be? Did she run a meth lab out of her camper? Were the children running the meth lab doing so without health insurance? Did she use the proceeds from this meth lab to fund the world’s largest puppy mill? And was the puppy mill actually a puppy buffet for a puppy-devouring white power group? No, no, no, and uh, no.

Nope, what she did was far worse: she worked part-time for Burger King, as a scientific adviser.

Predictably, nutritional experts claim that nominating a doctor who worked for Burger King is a horrible conflict of interest – that someone in charge of public health should not be in the business of selling evil fast food. It’s like hiring the shoe bomber to manage a Footlocker. (more…)