So now that Arnold Schwarzenegger is no longer governor, I’d love to see him back on the big screen taking down bad guys.

In fact, I even have a script for him. The working title is “HARD VENGEANCE.” But I’m also toying with “BRUTAL JUSTICE,” “JUSTIFIED VENGEANCE,” VENGEFUL JUSTICE,” And my fave, “HARD VENGEFUL JUSTICE, INC.”

But I also like “THE LAST STRAW.”

But I think people might think it’s about hay.

Here’s the story: Arnold’s character is a hardworking joe (named Fred), whose son is in college having the time of this life. During a party at a frat house, Fred’s son gets into a fight with gang members, who stab Fred’s son to death.

The thugs are captured. To Fred’s dismay, a plea bargain is made to prevent his son’s killers from getting life – after the thugs taunt his family with accusations of guilt, and blaming their actions, mockingly, on gangsta rap.

But Fred gets on with his life.

Then, everything changes.

Yes, it turns out one of the killers had connections. His father was friends with the governor, a well-known celeb. In the final days of his term, the unthinkable happens: the governor commutes the killer’s sentence.

Fred is devastated. His family, distraught.

What does he do? Well in the spirit of all great Arnold flicks like Raw Deal, Commando and Junior, he takes matters into his own hands. (more…)

The Narnia films are extremely good. The silver screen renditions of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as Prince Caspian were faithful to the books.  The most encouraging aspect regarding the filmmaker’s approach was how they didn’t even try to supplant the openly Christian theme with Hollywood social values.  Somehow the movies would have lost their punch if the messianic nature of Aslan’s death and resurrection were turned into a scene from the Princess Bride where the hero was only “mostly dead.”  There would also have been something missing if, after defeating the evil Witch, the great Lion uttered “Suck on that” instead of “It is finished.”   The question with Narnia is how are they going to deal with the books in the series where the enemy is clearly Muslim in nature, rather than witches who look like they are from Eva Braun’s gene pool? 

The Horse and His Boy is the third book in the chronology of the series and falls right between the books, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.  In this book the antagonists are a belligerent people called Calormene, who are determined to invade Narnia, and take control of it.  The people of Calormene along with their society are described in a way that leaves the reader with no doubt that C.S. Lewis took his inspiration for these people from the Middle East.  While there are no suicide bombers crashing unwilling griffons into the castle Cair Paraval, the description of the Calormene’s physical appearance, speech, architecture, and attitudes are all things that are easily associated with Muslim nations.  

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is the second story in the timeline of the seven books written by C.S. Lewis.  It is also, without a doubt, the most popular of the books.  So the fact that this was the first novel in the series that was turned into a movie is absolutely no surprise. The order of the films mirrors the order that the books were published in.  So it is reasonable to believe that the film producers are following that order. (more…)

USA Today:

Hollywood coasted through the final weekend of the year, concluding the second-worst year since 1996.Studios sold 1.35 billion movie tickets in 2010, according to a study by Hollywood.com released Sunday. 

While inflation and pricey 3-D tickets drove revenues above $10 billion for only the second time, the number of tickets sold was the lowest since 1996, when 1.33 billion moviegoers clicked through turnstiles. 

Back then, a movie cost $4.42 a ticket.

That cost leaped from an average of $7.46 a ticket in 2009 to $7.85 last year, the largest single-year spike on record. 

Attendance saw a drop of 5.4% last year compared with 2009, the largest drop since attendance fell 8.1% in 2005, according to Hollywood.com.  (more…)

Last month I wrote about why conservatives embrace Turner Classic Movies over any current network that plays more contemporary films. The lack of graphic violence, abusive language while having sex and infidelity portrayed beautifully through metaphor plays a large role in growing audience interest in classic Hollywood. It was a different era, literally the polar opposite of what you see today. Sure, there were good and bad things during the Golden Age, but most dedicated movie buffs feel that films were superior before 1960 – because they were.

TCM recently aired a seven part documentary on the foundation of Hollywood through 1970 that covered about eighty years of film history. This impossible task was a nice change of pace for the network and hopefully will spark a follow up series. However, taking on so much history in such a short amount of time forced the show to grossly oversimplify certain elements and leave other crucial happenings completely out of the picture. Sure, there were more conservatives in Hollywood in 1940 than today, but the political landscape was different (conservatives and liberals joined against Fascism and Socialism, for starters).

Big Hollywood’s John Nolte, who certainly knows a thing or two about classic Hollywood, recently caught up on Moguls and Movie Stars and was not happy. His criticism was that the series dwelled on the idea that the Studio System, complete with a self-censoring office, held back the full potential of the film industry. Nolte makes a great point in telling us that this doesn’t mean that Hollywood’s full potential is necessarily better. The same reason I argued that conservatives love TCM is why so many people prefer classic films over the new garbage spewing from Tinsel Town. Nolte notes that the series constantly reminds us of why the moguls and their politics were in the way, which is far from the truth: (more…)

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After you’re done watching….

(more…)

Are we buying this? People don’t want to see Christmas movies?

Steven Zeitchik of the L.A. Times:

Studios don’t usually take sides in culture-wars debates. They do, however, pay attention to the shifting winds. And as Joe Roth, the former Disney executive who once shepherded holiday hits like “Home Alone” and “Santa Clause,” says, holiday pictures just aren’t where the creative or monetary Zeitgeist is circa 2010.

“The way to do a big-budget film these days is to take stories that everyone in the world knows and take them in a new direction,”  Roth told us. “But no one’s come up with a fresh way to do a holiday movie, so we’re all doing it with other kinds of stories.” (Roth is doing just that with “Snow White” and “The Wizard of Oz.”)

In past years there have been scads of movies playing off the holidays. In fact, as recently as 2006 we had a sack full of them, from a Danny DeVito comedy (“Deck the Halls”) to a Queen Latifah heartwarmer (“The Holiday”), to a horror movie (“Black Christmas”).  That glut has turned, just four years later, into a scarcity. (Whether any of the ‘06 movies were any good is another matter.)

But don’t be quick to blame Hollywood. Most of the movies from that fertile year of 2006 flopped. So right now, Hollywood executives’ assumption is that Americans would rather come to theaters to see stories about pretty much anything other than Christmas. Are they right? (more…)

While surfing Facebook at work a couple weeks ago (ye who’s without that sin can cast the first stone), I found a status update from my 15 year old niece in Alabama that took me right back to my own awkward high school days. She had just experienced a particularly awful day on the school bus with her classmates, and I wished that I could find a way to help her.

But I was stuck at my desk at a newspaper in Los Angeles, and as I contemplated the moment I realized that, as a guy who defines big and tall (I’m 6 foot 3 and 300 pounds, but I carry it well! Or so I tell myself…), I was kind of like her “Uncle Buck.” So after making her feel better by writing that I’d bust some heads for her if I was in the same town, I asked her if she’d ever seen that John Candy/John Hughes comedy classic. To my amazement, she hadn’t, so I resolved to head down to Target and get her a copy.

It was while I was standing amid the video aisle that I remembered my own rough days as a 15-year-old suffering in an all-boys Catholic school in Little Rock, a small city I constantly yearned to get away from. And I remembered that while moping through a particularly tortuous unrequited love for a girl at the Catholic girls’ school a couple miles away, a different movie helped me feel better back then, like I wasn’t alone in the world.

That film was another John Hughes classic, “Pretty in Pink,” and in it the character of Duckie felt the awful pangs of love and rejection in such a direct and powerful way that I felt that Hughes r, had been secretly filming my life. I just couldn’t believe that a filmmaker could so thoroughly understand what I and other teens were going through.

I wrote Tina a note off my smartphone and asked her if she’d ever seen “Uncle Buck” or “Pretty in Pink.” She’d only “Ferris Bueller” out of all of Hughes’ iconic films, so I threw both those flicks in the basket and picked up “Sixteen Candles” and “Some Kind of Wonderful” to boot. I figured I’d save “Breakfast Club” until she was officially 17 so that my sister, her mom, wouldn’t shoot me for sending her an R-rated movie too early. (more…)

The award-winning GI Film Festival announced today that it has established a ground- breaking new partnership with The Military Channel, the nation’s only cable network dedicated to military programming, which will provide unprecedented exposure for films that honor American warriors. Beginning on November 12th, the Military Channel, which is currently available in more than 57 million homes, will begin featuring weekend blocks of the festival’s award-winning productions. (See opening weekend schedule below.)

Actor Kerri Turner attends the GI Film Festival

“This effort between the GI Film Festival and the Military Channel will be invaluable in putting the heroism and the sacrifice of the nation’s bravest men and women on full display for all of America to witness. This has been the Festival’s core mission from day one,” said GI Film Festival Chairman Stephen K. Bannon.

The G.I. Film Festival is the first and only film festival in the country dedicated to honoring the successes and sacrifices of American GIs. The festival’s documentary and narrative films showcase themes ranging from the courage and ingenuity on battlefields throughout history to the struggles of homelessness and post-traumatic stress on the home front.

The G.I. Film Festival block runs on Military Channel from 9-11 PM ET on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays throughout November starting on Friday, November 12, the day after Veterans Day. (more…)

[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.]

The good news first – there’s no pinko sucker punch in The American despite the presence of chatty progressive George Clooney in the title role.  Sure, there’s a tiny bit of the hackneyed “American learns about life from the earthy foreigners who truly know how to live” cliché, but not much.  Now the bad news:  Not only is there no sucker punch but there’s no punch at all.

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This is a technically well-written script by Rowan Joffe that tells a story that made me want to lick my finger and stick it in a socket to jump start my soul.  Stop me if you’ve heard this before, which pretty much means stop me now.  Clooney plays a hit man who “wants out” and hides in an Italian village while he puts together his One Last Job.  He interacts with a few locals, sips coffee, acts paranoid, and awaits the series of twists and betrayals everyone sees coming a mile away.  Arrivederchi, two hours of your life.

I almost wish that the script had empowered Clooney’s Hollywood lib instincts so I could have felt something while reading the script other than the same exhausted ennui that the main character is supposed to feel.  Yeah, he’s burned out and morally and emotionally bereft.  We get it.  I mean, we’ve only seen this movie and this character, what . . . 500 times?  Except this one is hiding out in the same soul-regenerating village Italian countryside we’ve seen in, what . . . 500 other movies? 

Call it Clash of the Cliches.  Too bad they never actually unleash the kraken.

Let’s catalog some of the other clichés: (more…)

They call the early half of the twentieth century the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it might more aptly be called the American Age.  In those days, the American people had a great love for Hollywood.  On an average week, three quarters of the population turned out to the local theater.

Contrast that with today when, according to a recent poll, fewer than 40 percent of Americans approve of Hollywood, and only ten percent of the population shows up at the theater each week.

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Like many of the readers and contributors at Big Hollywood, Declaration Entertainment is interested in why this change, this sharp reduction in approval and attendance, took place.  Undoubtedly it is a complex issue with many variables over a long period of time.  The advent of television and home video, digital downloads and piracy are all factors.  So too is the explosion of other forms of media entertainment, from video games to the Internet.  But while these changes in landscape have unquestionably cut into the dominance of the Hollywood theatrical experience in terms of the sheer numbers of viewers, they do not seem to explain the reduction in affinity.

To understand Hollywood’s dismal approval ratings – better than Congress, of course, but horrid none-the-less – other factors must be considered. (more…)

Internet piracy is the scourge of the earth – at least that’s what Hollywood and the MPAA would have us believe. According to them, internet piracy is responsible for babies going hungry, families splitting up and studios going under (MGM, I’m looking at you). In fact, the US – nay, the world, would not be in one of the worst recessions of the past few decades if it weren’t for Joe Downloader and his illegal viewing of movies online.

Hollywood thinks they can’t fight this scourge on their own; they need the mighty arm of the United States Government to reach in and slap the offenders for them. I guess suing the individual downloaders wasn’t really getting the results they expected (duh) so now they are going after the websites that make the movies accessible.

According to Variety:

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York launched Operation in Our Sites, a concerted effort with Hollywood, to take down dot coms that offer firstrun movies and TV shows for download.”

(more…)

I don’t know about you, but for me, the Fourth of July goes with war movies — you know, like Al Gore and happy endings.

Maybe it’s the “bombs bursting” in the Star Spangled Banner, or the evening fireworks, or simply that the smell of barbeque in the afternoon reminds me of napalm (actually, it’s either victory, or lighter fluid).

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So when the wiener hits the grill, I’m hankering for some Heartbreak Ridge.  I’m weak-kneed for a little Where Eagles Dare.  I’m jonesing for a piece o’ that… Johnny Tremain.  (You try and find a good war movie that starts with a “J.”)

Most of all, I pine for Patton.  Few celluloid moments can top that iconic opening scene for patriotic bliss.  First off, you’ve got that humongous American flag backdrop.  And you’ve got the general himself in full fruit-salad regalia, delivering the greatest pep talk since Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. (more…)

It’s pretty clear from the loud and explodey and awesome trailer of the upcoming A-Team remake that the script version the Sucker Punch Squad’s source obtained was a draft or two back from the final shooting script.  That’s a good thing, because the old script was a little slower, left out some treasured icons (Where’s the van!) and its B.A. Baracus had nowhere near the original show’s essential Mr. T-errificness.

So, all hail the new A-Team.  I just hope they’ve fixed the one hackey sucker punch aspect – the lame use of U.S. contractors as, once again, the villain du jour.

Now, anyone who at any point in the 1980s was unable to legally drive knows The A-Team and its mythology.  Basically, a bunch of Vietnam War commandos are falsely accused of a crime, escape from a stockade and dodge the military police while acting as soldiers of fortune.  George Peppard was their leader Hannibal Smith, Dirk Benedict was Face, the good-looking con man, Dwight Schultz was “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock, the resident wacko, and Mr. T portrayed, well, pretty much himself.

Every week they crashed a lot of cars, shot millions of bullets without ever hitting anything, made smartass remarks and issued memorable catchphrases.  This was all highly entertaining – particularly if you were a college student like me who enjoyed accepting creative drinking game challenges.  Here’s a hint – designate not just a driver but a stretcher-bearer if you dare join in a round of “Let’s Watch The A-Team and Down a Brew Whenever Something Explodes.”  (more…)

I finally had the opportunity to see James Cameron’s paean to nature, “Avatar.” It is definitely beautifully filmed and there is an edenic quality to the alien planet of Pandora that probably reflects the director’s image of the biblical garden. It is typical, however, of Hollywood denizens to find paradise in another realm than to look at what is already here without criticizing the negative human impact on our blue planet. 

The Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation prompted many apocalyptic films in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. As a child I watched films of giant tomatoes, giant alligators; giant frogs and rabbits and more all caused by mutations generated by nuclear accidents. Is it any wonder that the hippies and leftists protested, very effectively I might add, against the building of nuclear facilities and power plants? ‘The China Syndrome” was a movie that stuck in the minds of many in the movie industry even though nuclear accidents rarely occur here. Three Mile Island did not cause any injuries. Chernobyl’s disaster happened because the Russian reactor was built in an old military installation without the strict guidelines we use in the United States. 

The ‘60’s were fraught with cautionary tales of impending doom. One of my favorite films, La Dolce Vita, depicted the angst and melancholia of the intelligentsia over the threat of nuclear annihilation The brilliant Steiner worries so much about what the future holds for his two beautiful children; that “the end of the world could be announced with a phone call’; that he kills them and commits suicide. Honestly, nihilists have so few options, we must pity them.   (more…)

Fresh and innovative, Patrol Base Jaker  is a captivating retelling of the remarkable history of Afghanistan from the Russian invasion to the current U.S. counterinsurgency operation. Walk in the boots of the Marine combat and civil affairs teams in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as they fight to turn the tide against a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda. Travel to the front lines where U.S. Marines stand at a wicked intersection of war, radical Islam, international drug trade, reconstruction, and a counterinsurgency strategy designed to reestablish the rule of law in Afghanistan.

vimeo Patrol Base Jaker

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Did you ever hear Jimmy Carter sound like a war hawk? Neither had we. Until we saw Patrol Base Jaker. Seriously, check out the trailer and you won’t believe your ears. And this is no Michael Moore hatchet job either…piecing together sound bytes to create some sort of Franken-statement. It’s all authentic Jimmy.

But aside from the shockingly pro-military statements from Carter (and Obama, by the way) what we really loved about PBJ is the fact that it documents a tremendous US military success story in Afghanistan…the kind you’ll never find in the pages of the New York Times or on any of the so-called “mainstream” news networks. (more…)

In the winter of 1950, 15,000 U.S. troops were surrounded and trapped by 120,000 Chinese soldiers in the frozen mountains of North Korea. Refusing surrender, the men fought 78 miles to freedom while saving the lives of 98,000 civilian refugees. Chosin is the first documentary on the Chosin Reservoir Campaign. The survivors take us on an emotional and heart-pounding journey through one of the most savage battles in American history. These accounts, combined with footage never before seen by most Americans, create a visceral, emotionally-charged experience unlike that provided by any other war documentary. The upcoming major motion picture “17 Days of Winter” is based on these real-life heroes.

vimeo

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With approximately 600 film submissions over the last four years, we’ve seen a lot of historical war documentaries come across our flat screen. A LOT. But within the first few moments of reviewing Chosin, we knew we had something completely different. And it had nothing to do with the technical aspects of the film, which were impressive by any standard. Or even the incredible story itself, which will soon be seen on the big screen in narrative form.

No, what is extraordinary about this film is the depth emotion expressed by these heroes and the strikingly graphic nature of their descriptions. It’s been over a month since we reviewed the film and I still can’t shake the image expressed by one of the heroes who said when he shot one of the Chinese invaders at close range, the man’s “blood burned my eyes.” In other words, this was not a group of vets swapping war stories around a campfire. This was a great unburdening. A cleansing. (Check out the trailer above and you’ll see what I mean.) (more…)

The script of the upcoming remake of the infamous America-conquered-by-Commies movie Red Dawn (1984) raises an intriguing question – can Hollywood actually still produce a movie where it takes America’s side?  The answer is “Sort of.” 

“Wolverines!”

There are some welcome ideological surprises lurking within the script’s 104 pages.  Shockingly, Hollywood actually seems to accept the premise that if the Chinese and Russkies invade the United States we are justified in fighting back with hot lead instead of teach-ins and choruses of Kumbayah.  But the script also displays a bit of the moral illiteracy we’ve come to expect from the Hollywoodoids – naturally, the script has to imply that we kinda brought the invasion on ourselves and that resisting tyranny somehow means becoming just as bad as the tyrants.

The re-imagining of Red Dawn will be released later this year and does very little actual re-imagining of the original’s simple plot.  We first meet some all-American teenagers.  They play high school football, party, and talk and look like CW series cast members – not real bright, but pretty (the pretty part in the script).  For some reason, the Soviets (replaced here by the Chinese with a Russian assist) invade America and seize their hometown.  Their town’s tactical significance appears to be that invading it advances the plot.  Anyway, the teenagers go up into the mountains, score some of the firearms our prescient Founders ensured we’d always have the right to keep and bear despite the best efforts of those gun control-loving wusses, and launch a bloody guerrilla war against the invaders.  (more…)

Why do we at Big Hollywood and elsewhere in the conservative blogosphere even care about James Cameron and his stupid eco-dreck cartoon?  Or about Tom Hanks’ insights into the nature of American-Japanese relations World War II?  Or about the conclusions Matt Damon has drawn about the Iraq war that he’s derived as a result of his years of intense work at being a movie star?

Well, at one level, we don’t care.  James Cameron is another overpaid Hollywood petty tyrant with twin talents for shooting exciting action set pieces and for overtly and covertly serving up sophomoric lefty clichés.  Tom Hanks seems to be a nice enough guy, but I’d as soon head to him to diagnose a mysterious groin lump as I would to get a dissertation on the racial undertones of the War in the Pacific.  And Matt Damon is just a half-wit whose advocacy of gravity would be enough to make me oppose it.

But on another level, we do care because these folks and their antics provide proverbial “teaching moments” that help define the nature of the opposing sides in this cultural insurrection.  And it is an insurrection – in the case of Big Hollywood, a war between wily guerrillas with laptops, a few affiliated websites, a radio show and some busy Twitter accounts, and that unwieldy, lumbering cultural behemoth we call Hollywood. (more…)

The real fun of the Oscars isn’t the cut-throat competition for the little gold naked man but guessing who will make the biggest idiot of himself. 

The Academy Awards show has a fine tradition of pampered celebrities popping off with something stupid when they hit the stage.  It must be something about TV cameras and the opportunity to make damn fools of themselves before tens of millions of people around the world that the Hollywoodoids find irresistible.  Notice how you never hear any fallout from the “technical awards” ceremony?  You know, the non televised ceremony recognizing the boring technological stuff that actually makes movies possible that is usually held at the Beverly Hills Elks Lodge with hosts Steve Guttenberg, Charo and/or one of the lesser Sweathogs.

Some of the past magic moments are legendary.  Remember back in 1993, when Tim Robbins and his then-gal pal, tranny vomit insanity enthusiast Susan Sarandon, harangued the crowd about the detention of Haitian refugees?  Of course, right after that these stars led the way by opening up the grounds of their mansion to these huddled Haitian masses.

Roberto Benigni engaged in memorably tiresome antics after winning “Best Foreign Language Film of 1997” for the Worst Film of All Time, the insanely appalling Life Is Beautiful.  Life has certainly aged well, and Benigni’s shtick has only gotten fresher, contributing to the runaway freight train of success that his career has become since then. (more…)

As a columnist and blogger, I get sent a lot of books from authors who hope that I’ll write a review praising their stuff.  I try my best to read as many as possible, and I decline to review those that aren’t quite worthy of praise. 

One book I received recently was Burt Prelutsky’s hilarious take-no-prisoners compilation with intro by Bernard Goldberg, Liberals: America’s Termites or It’s a Shame That Liberals, Unlike Hamsters, Never Eat Their Young.  The title pretty much says it all – Prelutsky isn’t afraid to say what he thinks, and his short book is chock full of hysterical one-liners and RPG attacks on the left.  I don’t agree with all of it, but it sure makes for fun reading.  

Prelutsky on movies: “The 60s, the decade during which I did most of my reviewing, was notable for very young, very untalented, essentially illiterate British and American directors who gave new meaning to self-indulgence.”  Whew.   (more…)