Remember when Hank Williams Jr. was a horrible human being because he analogized Obama’s golf game with John Boehner to a golf game between Adolf Hitler and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?  Of course you do; it resulted in his ‘Monday Night Football’ opener being pulled by ESPN.

That, of course, was their right, although they didn’t use similar discretion when some of their local radio hosts allowed Mike Tyson to fantasize about Sarah Palin being raped.

Where’s the reaction to Susan Sarandon calling the pope a Nazi? Perhaps you didn’t hear about that one, because she’s a Hollywood celebrity rather than a conservative country singer – and because Hollywood celebrities are usually granted full leeway to say idiotic things. In fact, Benedict served in the Hitler Youth unwillingly and was never a Nazi Party member. He deserted before the end of World War II and turned himself over to the Americans.

Now, I disagree with the Pope on a wide variety of issues: he received anti-Semitic priest Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk in 2007, he made a rather rotten speech at Auschwitz in May 2006, he was slow to respond to a British-born bishop who denied the Holocaust, and his perspective on the Middle East conflict is problematic.

Nonetheless, he has stood tall against terror on many occasions, and he has criticized in strong terms both moral relativism and radical Islam.

So what prompted the Nazi reference by Sarandon?

(more…)

Not only is Sarandon’s “Nazi” remark driven by hate and factually wrong, it is the very opposite of what we all know to be true about Pope Benedict. Sarandon is lying, she’s doing so intentionally, and if ESPN is going to fire a Hank Williams Jr. for making a Nazi reference, will anyone anywhere in the industry of entertainment do anything with someone who utters this kind of obscenity?

That was a rhetorical question.

Via THR:

“Susan Sarandon’s ignorance is willful: those who have hatred in their veins are not interested in the truth. The fact is that Joseph Ratzinger [the Pope] was conscripted at the age of 14 into the Hitler Youth, along with every other young German boy,” says the president of the Catholic League of America, William Donohue, in a  statement.

“Unlike most of the other teenagers, Ratzinger refused to go to meetings, bringing economic hardship to his family. Moreover, unlike most of the others, he deserted at the first opportunity. Sarandon’s comment is obscene. Sadly, it’s what we’ve come to expect from her,” Donohue added.

(more…)

Via THR:

On Monday, the Anti Defamation League also called for an apology from the actress.

Abraham H. Foxman told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement, “We hope that Susan Sarandon will have the good sense to apologize to the Catholic community and all those she may have offended with this disturbing, deeply offensive and completely uncalled for attack on the good name of Pope Benedict XVI.

“Ms. Sarandon may have her differences with the Catholic Church, but that is no excuse for throwing around Nazi analogies. Such words are hateful, vindictive and only serve to diminish the true history and meaning of the Holocaust.”

(more…)

THR:

Sarandon was interviewed by Bob Balaban at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Saturday. She said she sent the pope a copy of the anti death penalty book, Dead Man Walking, authored by Sister Helen Prejean. Sarandon starred in the 1995 big-screen adaptation.

“The last one,” she said, “not this Nazi one we have now.”

Balaban tried to dance around the comment, but Sarandon just made it again, Newsday reports. The audience also laughed.

(more…)

One year ago today John Nolte reported in this space that “Captain America: The First Avenger” director Joe Johnston said the film based on the legendary comic book hero is “not about America,” and I can finally confirm that he spoke the truth.  The $140 million blockbuster, which opens at midnight, is not anti-American–it’s even kinda pro-American–but if you’re looking for that rare film that surrenders itself to the reality of American exceptionalism, don’t let the title fool you.  Johnston describes the latest from the summer movie factory that is Marvel Studios best: “It’s an international cast and an international story. It’s about what makes America great and what make the rest of the world great too.”   Now, I’m very much relieved that it’s now okay to call America “great” in Hollywood, but as far as “Captain America: The First Avenger” is concerned, self-conscious pandering to multi-cultural feel-goodism combined with some unambitious storytelling makes for an unsatisfying movie-going experience.

—–

“Captain America: The First Avenger” is set in the latter half of World War II.  The action begins with a scrawny Steve Rogers (a digitally depreciated Chris Evans) doing everything he can to enlist in the U.S. Army.  Rogers has all kinds of heart, but he’s gaunt and is thus 4-F.  The plot turns when an impassioned speech to a friend (“There are men laying down their lives.  I have no right to do any less than them.”) catches the ear of Dr. Abraham Erskine (a very Stanley Tucci Stanley Tucci).  Erskine is a German scientist who is working with the U.S. Army to develop a Super Solider Serum–the ultimate performance enhancing drug–and is on the lookout for a test subject.  The serum amplifies what’s inside of you, so someone of Rogers’ size and character makes him the perfect candidate for this breakthrough procedure.  Erskine and engineer Howard Stark (father of Tony) put Rogers in what looks like a retro-50s refrigerator, crank up the dials until all the power in the building short-circuits, and out comes this guy: (more…)

From AFP:

Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn said on Friday he was ‘repulsed’ by remarks by fellow Danish director Lars von Trier, who was banned from the Cannes film festival for saying he had “sympathy” for Adolf Hitler. Nicolas Winding Refn is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Drive”, the story of a Hollywood stunt driver who drives getaway cars in the LA underworld by night.

***UPDATE: This article has been corrected to fix a factual error.

The Cannes Film Festival Board of Directors is unwilling to lay out a set of excuses for director Lars von Trier’s pro-Nazi comments yesterday. If memory serves this is the first time Cannes has ever declared “persona non grata” a director of astonishingly dull and pretentious films only liars and masochists claim to have watched all the way through*:

CANNES, France – Danish director Lars Von Trier was expelled from the Cannes film festival on Thursday after remarks he made at a news conference, apparently in jest, in which he declared himself a Nazi and Hitler sympathizer.

“The festival’s board of directors … profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars Von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the festival,” the festival said in a statement.

“The board of directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars Von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.”

(more…)

***UPDATE: An emailer just alerted me to the fact that the article referenced here that was published at “Roger Ebert’s Journal” was written by Chaz Ebert, not Roger Ebert. I’ve updated the headline and post to reflect the correction.

If you remember, on Sunday night, film critic Roger Ebert was all excited after Salon’s Joan Walsh and NBC’s David Gregory (two people with racial issues of their own) called Newt Gingrich out for the hideous crime of labeling our failed food stamp president the “Food Stamp President.”

Here’s his tweet:

So “food stamp President” is “coded racism,” but when you fast-forward a mere couple of days to today you’ll find Roger Ebert publishing at his Chicago Sun-Times Journal a report written by Chaz Ebert that contains a lot of excuse-making for a famous director of pretentious films trashing Israel and proudly declaring he’s a Nazi:

[Von Trier] said he grew up thinking he was a Jew, and he was very happy to be a Jew. Then he discovered he was a Nazi, and that also gave him some pleasure. “Yes, I am a Nazi!”, he declared.

While his cast (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Udo Kier and John Hurt) looked on in horror, Kirsten Dunst tapped him on the shoulder and whispered to him to moderate his comments. He looked at her in confusion and said, “But this has a point, it will be okay.”

Then he proceeded to dig himself in deeper, saying that he understood Hitler, and that he could sympathize with his being down in that bunker toward the end. He continued, “Well that doesn’t mean I have anything against Jews, except Susanne Bier (Danish filmmaker, “In a Better World”).

“Well, Israel is a pain in the ass …

“Okay, I am a Nazi…

(more…)

UPDATE: Welcome to all the readers sent here by our left-wing friends over at Mediaite.

There’s a terrific debate going on in this earlier post defending Democratic Congressman Cohen’s right to call us Republicans Nazis without a bunch of media Speech Policers publicly shaming him into shutting up. It’s fine to criticize his hypocrisy and argue that he’s wrong on the facts, but to criticize his speech… That’s something else entirely.

So while that debate’s rocking and rolling, let’s move part of the discussion back onto the grounds of hypocrisy. While we’re being told the use of the word “crosshairs” is wrong, the term “job-killing” is verboten, and Nazi references unacceptable, we’re currently left wondering if an exception we’re unaware of has been granted to Stephen Colbert.

Unless we missed it, there was no media criticism or Jon Stewart humiliation-logues after Mr. Colbert launched this profane, insulting and objectively non-New Tonish attack on Governor Sarah Palin:

In a recent appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, Roseanne Barr unintentionally proved the validity of Forrest Gump’s maxim, “stupid is as stupid does.”

She did so initially by accusing Sarah Palin of being “a traitor to this country.” This ridiculous statement caught my attention not because it had any foundation in facts, but because it was being made by Barr: a woman who made headlines in 1990 for mocking America by grabbing her crotch and spitting while singing the National Anthem for a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds.

Barr next accused Palin of being “a dupe” and an opportunist who’s capitalizing on the “anti-intellectualism” of Americans. And while there’s something inherently laughable about Barr speaking derisively of “anti-intellectualism,” it’s somewhat offensive that she doesn’t guard against throwing the word “dupe” around so recklessly. After all, she is the dupe who once donned a Nazi uniform and wore it in pictures that showed her taking “burnt Jew cookies” out of an oven.

Yet as stupid as all these things were, perhaps Barr’s most stupid statement was her assertion that Dick Cheney has never “[earned] one damn thing. [The] guy’s never worked an honest day in his life.” Where has she been for the last 10 years? A period of time in which Cheney was relentlessly criticized for his ties to Big Oil, via his past working relationship with Halliburton. To this day, Cheney continues to be vilified for his work with that company. (more…)

I want to preface this by saying that I do enjoy listening to a Lady Gaga song now and again. But her attempts to push the limits on what is acceptable are dragging her down to the level of a prettier version of Beavis and Butthead. 

Call me old school but I like music videos that at least loosely match their song. If you’ve got a song about love and your music video is about war, there’s something wrong – unless that song is Jordin Sparks’ “Battlefield.” For this reason, I’ve got a problem with Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro.” 

Lady Gaga is a fad for people who thrive on thinking they don’t thrive on fads. Actually they all do. To prove this I submit the fact that the music video for “Bad Romance” is the most viewed YouTube video ever (haven’t seen it because “rah-rah-ah-ah-ah / Roma, Roma-ma / GaGa, ooh la la” is artless). Lady Gaga’s latest, “Alejandro,” seems to follow a girl trying to break free from a controlling Mexican boyfriend or series of boyfriends. 

There’s really not much to the song. In the first verse there’s a good girl that is controlling (“halo around her finger around you”), and in the second verse there’s a guy that is controlling (“her boyfriend’s like a dad”). I think he’s supposed to be good too, because he’s “gonna fool the bad.” Whatever. As long as we know he’s got a Spanish/Mexican name and Lady Gaga is sick of him, we’re on the same page.  (more…)

Lady Gaga’s Alejandro is mesmerizing in its decadence, shamelessly in debt to Christopher Isherwood’s Cabaret, Rudolf Valentino, any number of tales about Latin Lovers, Alexander the Great and, finally, that unbeatably hypnotic premonition: the triumphal return of Nazism.

Gaga’s eternal return to the garb of a Nun … The Nun … is a backhanded tribute to her Catholic role model, Madonna.

The key, however, to her triumph over the World’s Music Empires, and The World Media That Makes Them, lies in the unshakably blasé expression on her face.

Obviously nothing about success could faze a Disciple of Madonna who has clearly fantasized how boring it might be to spend the night in bed with Genghis Kahn.  (more…)

So as you know, I often end my Gregalogues with the phrase, “if you disagree with me, then you’re worse than Hitler.” At times I’ve changed it to “You’re probably a racist,” “You’re probably a homophobe,” and my favorite “you’re probably a racist homophobe who wears denim cutoffs.”

A lot of people get it, some don’t. Especially clueless – those lefties outraged that I would compare people to Hitler, amazingly ignorant that I was mocking them for doing the same thing with Bush or Cheney.

Anyway, I assumed that by now, the left would finally stop with this crap, now that they’ve got their Prog-God in charge.

But no.

Check out TheRoot.com, a blog owned by the Washington Post, which, in its list “Black Folks We’d Like To Remove From Black History” includes Clarence Thomas and Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele alongside Idi Amin, the “DC Sniper” John Allen Muhammad, Zimbabwe thug Robert Mugabe and Haitian dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. (more…)

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
 
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.  (more…)

Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” has all the trappings of a Tarantino film – from the rich cinematography and soundtrack to the unpredictable action and character development. Tarantino has directed and written another effort that, as usual, is in a class of its own. 

“Basterds,” misspelled the way Brad Pitt’s moonshining Lt. Aldo Raine character carved it into his rifle, takes place in German-occupied France from 1941 to 1944.  Tarantino makes a point of specifying “Nazi-occupied France,” justifying to the film watcher the extreme measures needed to deal with this particular type of human evil.  That National Socialist German Workers’ Party membership never numbered more than about 20 percent of the adult German population is beside the point; the Nazi Party in the guise of Hitler (played by Martin Wuttke) controlled the Wehrmacht from the top.  

“Basterds” follows three characters.  ”Chapter 1″ introduces Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) a young Frenchwoman whose dairy farmer family is wiped out in 1941 by the Germans and Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who directs the killing.  Landa is a member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party, who considers himself a detective asked by his government to find every last Jewish person in France.  In “Chapter 2″ we meet U.S. Army Lt. Aldo Raine. Raine’s crossed arrows insignia on his collar identifies him as a member of the First Special Service Force, a U.S.-Canadian commando force called the Devil’s Brigade.  Lt. Raine leads a small band of soldiers, all of whom happen to be Jewish, on a mission of retribution, mayhem and terror behind enemy lines, the goal: take 100 “Nazi scalps” each.  (more…)

Take a ruthless Nazi leader who can order the deaths of a Jewish family with the same dispassion with which he requests a glass of milk. Mix his story with that of a Jewish woman who flees the slaughter of her family only to grow up and discover an opportunity to kill Hitler himself. Add in a cocky American Lieutenant named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who leads a secret mission in which each of his men are ordered to scalp 100 Nazi, and you’ve got the combustible mix of lead characters who cross paths with explosive results in Oscar-winning writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Inglourious Basterds.” 

Bringing together his usual strengths as a director of intense performances from sterling casts, an amazing score pasted together from classic scores of past films, incredibly sharp and catchy dialogue and a warped time frame that that will throw viewers through a satisfying series of loops, Tarantino has easily made his best film since “Pulp Fiction.” Coming off a humiliating misfire with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which was half of the box-office disaster known as “Grindhouse,” Tarantino has admitted that he felt the need to double down on his strengths and prove that he was just as relevant and inventive as ever.  (more…)

Our political leaders need a quick block of instruction in the concept of the chain of command. It goes like this, in descending order of rank:

#1: Us Citizens.

#2: You elected officials.

I really prefer writing long pieces on why Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin and Johnny Rotten rule. It’s more fun to talk about how everything in popular culture that everyone else likes actually sucks, and I’m even going to provide some inspirational music selections below. But duty calls. Right now, a bunch of people whose salaries you and I pay and who work for us are telling us to shut up and do as we’re told.

That’s just not gonna happen. (more…)

The crime is complete. Judgment has been passed. The killing stones are in hand. As per the harsh stoning penal code of Iran’s Islamist thugocracy (for however long that lasts) where the crime took place, my stones are not so big as to kill right away, not so small you can’t call them stones. And I’m winding up like Nolan Ryan. Feel free to pick up a stone of your own. But wait for it!

And let me make this perfectly clear, even if they do say Jehovah!

Sentence must be read before being carried out. And unlike Soraya M., the board members of the Asylum of Motion Picture Airheads and Stooges will deserve every rock that’s thrown their way. I also believe that, in light of events in Iran today, the following commentary will stand out in much starker prominence than it did when I first started reporting on them in early March, when Team Oscar first set off for the Unfriendly Skies of Islamist Iran. (more…)

Now that ‘Roxana: A True Story’ has come to a most satisfying and happy conclusion for Roxana Saberi, her parents, myself and millions of others around the globe (a conclusion not always assured, and which looked very grim in some scenes), it is now time for Your Most Humble and Obedient Critic to give you the full skinny on ‘Roxana: A True Story.’

Or, by its Hollywood acronym, RATS. Funny. I actually found that startling contraction fitting, not for Roxana (not hardly), but for all of the major black hats and clueless morons who populated this nerve-wracking Thugocracy Studios production, which had civilized people everywhere both riveted and outraged in its most grueling and suspenseful moments.

Not to mention for Roxana and her parents. But before we get to heroes and villains, let us look at the story to date with all its dramatic twists and underpinnings, many with significant international implications. Just like a good Hitchcock drama should. And I caught ‘em all!

By pure happenstance, Your Most Humble Critic and Boy Reporter was already hot on the job covering Iran (unlike some people) and hammering AMPAS for their tea and finger-cookie soirees with these guys, when I saw what Iran was pulling with Roxana and called it for what it was: a hostage crisis. And on the same day HRW called it the same in a press release on March 13th, which I didn’t find out until the 19th thanks to our on-the-ball Vein Stream Media. (more…)

Lest we forget, we are at war. 

Men and women at this very moment are fighting for their lives and for the lives of those they took an oath to protect and defend. 

There have been some recent films about war and what it means for the “average Joe” to be at war. A few of these are receiving deserving accolades for their realism. No, not the realism of blood and guts spilled, which is what war is, of course, but the realism of human behavior in adverse conditions, or as Hemingway put it, grace under pressure. This is the human condition that we all face, in one form or another, each and every day of our lives. Of course, most of us can face our pressures, make our decisions, get through our daily angst without wondering if a shell is going to go off five feet away, having the vehicle we’re riding in targeted for destruction or being exposed to combinations of chemicals not even named yet. No, we don’t have that extra worry. But some out there do.  (more…)