Director Michael Moore has a new movie coming soon – “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

It could only mean one thing – OK, many, many things:

• Rave reviews from at least 80 percent of film critics. And I’m being conservative.
• More press coverage than any documentary filmmaker could ever dream of.
• Few, if any, labels associated with him in the press. Liberal? Nah, he’s a muckraker, an iconoclast, a rebel, a truth teller…
• Oscar buzz aplenty. Feel badly for any other documentary filmmaker who did great work this year. Chances are you won’t be taking home the Oscar for your troubles. Better luck next year.
• More softball questions thrown his way by alleged journalists – this time, Oprah herself will get in on the action.

Moore, who won the Best Documentary Oscar for “Bowling for Columbine” and gave us the factually challenged “Fahrenheit 9/11,” has helped shape the film industry for better and worse.

He’s single handedly given the documentary genre more exposure than it’s ever had. And his films, even if they make a conservative’s teeth hurt, are often entertaining.

Too bad the press in toto will roll over and play publicist for Moore once more.

Recently the film’s British director Danny Boyle, serving as jury president of the 12th Shanghai Film Festival, confided during a panel discussion that on “Slumdog” he had shed the patronizing, “imperialist” mentality, relying heavily on a local Indian crew. Boyle also observed that while it was “regrettable” that Beijing imposed censorship restrictions on its filmmakers, he’d nonetheless love to work in China, as it would be a “challenge learning Mandarin.” Boyle neglected to mention that on “Slumdog” he’d skipped the challenge of learning Hindi, necessitating an Indian co-director, and also skipped the patronizing practice of paying Western wages, and the low pay for local child actors would fuel most of the subsequent controversies.

After its national US release in January 2009, “Slumdog” received a positive critical reception in the West, with a 94% rating by Rotten Tomatoes, though some critics raised what would become ongoing issues, with “The Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw regarding it as “an outsider’s view” and “a product placement” for the very quiz show owned by Celador, the film’s producer. But on its release in India, including in a dubbed Hindi version of this mostly (2/3) English language film, “Slumdog” did only moderate box office, especially the English version, which one trade analyst found “not ideally suited for Indian sentiment.” Indian critics mostly bought the film’s energetic ride, while others puzzled over the mix of languages and the key issue of authenticity, questioning whether the film was “a white man’s imagined India,” a superficial “poverty porn.” Even novelist Salman Rushdie was unhappy, objecting to the film’s slick yet improbable pop version of “magical realism.”

Then the issue of pay for the child actors began to make news, with the Times of India claiming Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played Salim as a child, was paid £700 and Rubina Ali, who played Latika, £500, with both still living in makeshift shacks in the slums of Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. Distributor Fox Searchlight replied that for their month of work the kids were paid three times the average annual adult Bandran salary. Boyle and producer Christian Colson added that they had “paid painstaking and considered attention to how Azhar and Rubina’s involvement in the film could be of lasting benefit to them over and above the payment they received for their work.” This attention included trust funds to cover education, transportation, and expenses for the next eight years. Boyle declined to reveal the amounts of these trust funds, as this could make them “vulnerable and a target,” but according to the India Times Azhar got £17,500 in trust until age 18. His father, Mohammed Ismail, responded, “My son has taken on the world and won. I am so proud of him, but I want more money now.” Both Azhar and Rubina attended the Oscar ceremony in February, Azhar accompanied by his mother and Latika by her uncle, and soon after the Maharashtra Housing Authority announced that both kids would be given “free houses.”

In April the filmmakers responded to further charges of exploitation by donating $747,500 to a charity for the welfare of Mumbai street children, a modest amount for a film brandishing the moral authority of these destitute kids, made for only $15 million while grossing $350 million.

In May Azhar was awakened by unannounced bulldozers demolishing his Mumbai slum home as part of a drive against illegal shanties, and the next week Rubina’s shanty home was razed to make way for an overpass. Rubina and her father were briefly hospitalized, and “Slumdog” director Boyle and producer Colson then announced that in addition to the education trust and grant to charity, they were raising the amount, revealed to have been $30,000, now to $50,000, for Azhar and Rubin to purchase new apartments, as well as giving each family a lump sum of $3,000 and $130 a month stipend.

Then in June it was announced Azhar finally got his new house, a tiny 250 square foot apartment, all that $50,000 would buy in Mumbai’s hot real estate market, casting a new light on the “post-imperialist” filmmakers’ claim of munificent reward according to local standards. Crystallizing the paternalism of this whole sideshow, the ownership of the home is to be transferred from a trust to Azhar when he turns 18, provided he completes school. As if to promise the sideshow would continue, it was announced that Rubina has signed on with Random House to publish her life story, Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. Boyle is reportedly reassembling his “Slumdog” team for a future project, adapting Maximun City: Bombay Lost and Found.

Back of all this noisy fallout, it’s still the film “Slumdog” Millionaire and the novel from which it is adapted, Q & A by Vikas Swarup, that raise the deeper issues. Like director Boyle wooing the Chinese, both film and novel adopt fundamentally anti-Western postures. The book’s hero, Ram Mohammad Thomas, suffers much at the hands of Catholic priests (some gay), malevolent Australian diplomats, English-speaking tourists, and Westernized figures like gangsters and movie stars (some also gay). In the film most of hero Jamal’s antagonists – police, beggar-chiefs, gangsters, the TV host (none gay), are visual figures out of Western media, a motif wickedly established when the child Jamal dunks in outhouse sewage for a photo autograph by a helicopter-borne Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan. For novelist Swarup, a diplomat from a line of distinguished Indian lawyers, there is some irony here, as he is beneficiary of the two great Britannic legacies, the English language in which he writes and which most of the film speaks and the common law.

Moreover, the very narrative hook of the novel, the improbable quiz show leading to the fulfillment of dreams of wealth and love, constructs a state of mind: what you know that is most important is simply the inscription of the injustices you have suffered. It is the epistemology of victimhood, the right answers magically accessible to the wretched, or so “it is written.”

At the heart of any current look at India is the key issue of economic development, and both the film and book display related views. Globalization in India, while bringing slick modern media and flashy urban nightlife, is viewed as little different from the old imperialism, with slums and beggars replaced by ugly concrete construction and chai wallahs in phone call centers, an extremely discontented, leftist view of globalization as simply a worldwide extension of the old exploitative gangster/hooker relationships of capitalism, enforced by oppressive police. Such is “Slumdog’s” facile, distorted view of modern India.

This year 700 million Indians voted in month-long elections that returned the secular Congress party to power, an endorsement of religious toleration in a complex land with a Hindu majority plus a minority of the world’s second largest Muslim population. Since moving away from Soviet-style socialism and protectionism, India has been growing almost as fast as China, and now contains a middle class of about 200 million people. To suggest that this enduringly secular, agonizingly multicultural, authentically democratic, free market miracle is little more than a corrupted media show is delusional. As if to repudiate the film’s facile view, the entire subsequent saga of Azhar and Rubina’s pay and housing can stand as a case study of the vulnerability of those at the bottom in the third world, not without luck but without legally recorded and capitalized property as described by economist Hernando de Soto.

Regarding the film as an “outsider’s view” of India, the filmmakers have trumpeted their veneration of Bollywood films, especially the masala genre, and “Slumdog” is full of many of its elements and conventions, notably veteran actors, the score, and the final musical production number, as a kind of assertion of authenticity. This hardly proves a “post-imperialist” mindset. Hollywood films have been voracious appropriators of international trends, notably any avant-garde style, especially since WWII, when their audience increasingly became a youth audience and their business increasingly the sale of figures and tales of rebellion, like the “New Wave” Bonnie and Clyde, to the young. Director Boyle is an accomplished contemporary film stylist, comfortable with post-modern irony and pastiche, as in his successful “Trainspotting,” a breathless pixilation of charming young lowlife junkies.

Adaptation of a novel to film is usually a process of reduction and activation, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy did a skillful job on “Slumdog,” eliminating characters, simplifying events, constructing the romance, and setting a ticking clock for the last act. There is, however, one change that involves more than streamlining. The novel’s protagonist is named Ram Mohammad Thomas because he is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest named Thomas in a religiously mixed community of Hindus (Ram) and Muslims (Mohammad), a personification of religious toleration appropriate to anyone with hope for India. The film changes this, with Ram, now Jamal, and his friend Salim now brothers in parallel lives, a trope of Indian gangster films, but both Muslim victims of Hindu mob violence, no less than the murder of their mother. As Jamal captains the triumphant main plot of the quiz show and romance, Salim works the parallel gangster/success subplot until its end in renunciation, when aspiring gangster Salim explodes against his false compatriots. Reminiscent of the classic film gangster’s moment of tragic recognition, the martyred Salim, now bathed in cash (millions?), goes out declaring “God is great.”

In Boyle’s flashy, fragmented, rhythmic style this renders an aspect of the film’s resolution a jihadi music video. Why would these “post-imperialist” Western filmmakers give this film such an Islamist twist? Perhaps it is just the same savvy recognition of their young audience that leads A-list Hollywood types to wear keffiyeh scarves as markers of hip transgressive style.

Perhaps it’s akin to what Michael J. Totten has called the “Orientalism of fools,” maybe even an expression of a suicidal self-loathing, an endgame for Western radicalism, which has been an attitude of the leftist cultural elite for some time.

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.

Even then I had to look. But HRW called it on the 13th based on international law. I called it the same day from knowing Iran too goddamn well. Why not test Obama? See what he’s made of? They’ve tested every other US president since Carter, and let’s face it. Obama ain’t scarin’ nobody right now.

Fortunately, this particular but not totally unexpected production of Iranian political theater has now ended with Iran’s magnanimous ‘gift’ of Roxana Saberi’s freedom. You know. Like the British getting their Easter ‘gift’ of their own sailors back. My heroes. The Easter Bunny’s got nothin’ on them, huh?

Though President Obama called Iran’s merciful end to this sordid and cruel international affront ‘a humanitarian gesture’, it has been anything but from the beginning. If anything, this tormenting episode of international injustice and flouting of the law should prove just how unworthy a diplomatic partner Iran is. See, diplomacy requires both sides to be civilized to work, and the backstory on Iran’s regime, as with Roxana’s story there, is as uncivilized as it gets.

And let’s be clear here. I am not advocating war with Iran, though what they’ve done and continue to do makes me feel very warlike. But I am advocating that the ugly truths about Islamist extremist Iran be put on display for all to see. Nobody else seems to be interested in covering Iran’s abominable human rights situation. Is that too much to ask from Your Most Humble and Obedient Critic? Despite the nightmare we, Roxana and her parents had to endure, Roxana’s one of the lucky ones.

In order to understand RATS in toto, we must look at the whole backstory of Islamist Iran since 1979 to put Roxana Saberi’s ordeal into its proper context today. I’ve been following Islamist extremist Iran for thirty long years, starting with the US Embassy Hostage Crisis on November 4th, 1979.  See, I knew that date because I was due by legal contract to head for boot camp on November 13th, which I did. You remember things like that. You know. Heading for boot camp, heading for war.

Especially when it was peacetime when you signed up.

It sure looked like war at the time. Yet strangely, war didn’t happen. President Carter was too busy gnawing his nails down to the knuckles for 444 days, with one abortive rescue mission in between gnawings. If I were President back then, I would have at least started taking out Iran’s military facilities with B-52s if we didn’t get the hostages back. Ronnie got ‘em back right away after he became President on January 20th, 1981. I think they knew The Gipper would have bombed them to Hell to free our hostage citizens. He was that kinda guy.

A smart move on Iran’s part. But even Reagan suffered greatly from the Iranian thugocracy’s proxy terror attacks from Hezbollah, like the Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed 241 US servicemen on an international peacekeeping mission there. See, Iran just moved their terrorization of Americans and others into the shadows, letting their Brownshirt Hamas and Hezbollah goons do all the dirty work outside Iran. You know. Like Hitler’s used to do.

In fact, every president since Carter has been tormented by Iran, Obama no less. Clinton had the Khobar Tower bombings in 1995. For W, it was Iran-paid and trained militias and EFP IEDs in Iraq, killing and wounding hundreds of American soldiers. No Hope For Change with Obama on that score either, it would seem. Or with Iran’s supplying the Taliban with weapons.

And we are far from alone in the category of Iranian death and devastation. Iran’s thugocracy is currently being held accountable for the worst terror attacks in Argentina’s history, including one former Iranian ‘diplomat’ now running for high office and wanted by Interpol for his involvement in the bombing. See, that’s the reform candidate for president in Iran.

Welcome to Extreme Politics in Islamist Iran. Al Capone and The Joker would fit right in.

But why Argentina? I can understand the whole Great Satan thing, but what did Argentina ever do to Iran? Was the Iranian thugocracy pissed about Argentina no longer supplying WMD components and nuclear supplies, which Argentina cut off in 1992, the year the terror attacks began?

Or was it because of Argentine-born Jews? And all Jews everywhere deserve to die, and in the greatest numbers possible? Maybe it was a twofer. You know. Like Death To America and Death To Israel. They love that stuff, at least enough to paint it on all their missiles.

It’s right up there with “Death To The Jews!” Or partying with their BFF O-Bash.

Then again, do terrorists REALLY need a reason? I think they’re more than content to watch the world burn. Look what Iran’s Islamist Nazi thugs do to their own people! Seventeen-year-old Nazanin Fatehi, sentenced to death for stabbing and killing her and her niece’s would-be rapist in a park in Tehran. One thirteen-year-old girl stoned to death for being raped! Gays hunted down and exterminated. As bad as we, Israel, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the rest of the world have had it from Iran’s terror-loving regime and its proxies, we’re the lucky ones.

Ahmadinejad was right about gays in Iran, you know. Just like Hitler was right when he said there were no Jews in Germany. The discussion’s pretty much moot. And Iran has now successfully exported their own Gay Holocaust to Iraq, which Bush should have stopped and Obama must.

Thus ends the prequel, and leads us straight to Roxana Saberi and today. I have a full recap of Roxana’s story from Day One here, in my BH piece bashing AMPAS and Hollywood over their dead silence and total absence in championing Roxana’s cause. Hell, Team Oscar was IN Iran when Clinton demanded Roxana’s release! You hear a peep out of any of them?

Roxana was BBC and NPR, not FOX! Wait, Mr. Snerdley tells me Roxana DID work for FOX on occasion. Okay, got it. The Hollywood blackout on Roxana all makes sense now. But Roxana is free, and that is all that matters. The rest, lessons learned. And that brings us to a few loose story ends.

What are we and the world now to think of the Iranian thugocracy’s brilliant facade of justice, showing us how merciful they can really be, and that they are truly nice guys after all if only we will be nice to them? Were Roxana the only story here? Maybe. But she isn’t. Not by a damn sight.

Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni still faces her own kangaroo court tribunal for celluloid slanders, for her a women’s rights documentary. And former FBI agent Robert Levinson is nowhere to be found after two years The Iranian government even blocked efforts by the Swiss to track him down at our request. Wouldn’t even let them go to Kish Island to investigate. Hmm. Curious.

Most important of all, Islamist extremist Iran was, is and remains a human rights horrorshow, one of the worst in the world. Even bloggers pay for the wrong words with their lives, like Omid Reza Mir Sayaf, who died in Evin during Roxana’s unlawful detention there. And they seem just a bit too antsy to get nukes. That bothers me greatly. It’s one thing for Israel to have an arsenal. Would you want Hamas or Al Qaeda with a warhead? See, when it comes to nukes, Sanity Matters, okay?

My fear is, the world will look at the merciful end of this obscene miscarriage of justice, and cat-and-mouse toying with Roxana Saberi and us by Iran’s thugocracy, as the light at the end of a dark tunnel, whereas I see a freight train coming at us at full speed. Yet I have no power over those events. I can only report on them to the best of my abilities with what information I have.

Am I biased against Iran? You bet!

But not Iran’s freedom-loving people, who are suffering the most of anyone. The freedom-crushing and terror-sponsoring Shiite Islamist thugocracy is the real problem here. Just as it was with Hitler and his thugocracy of terror.

People need not to lose sight of what Iran’s Islamist thugocracy is really all about. And if you doubt my stern and brutal accusations, go look up the truth yourself. One Google search and you’ll be neck-deep in it. Then think of where this story is really going.

Now, on to the Heroes and Villains.

First up, the Good Guys and Roxana’s true BFF. Freeroxana.net, the North Dakota Legislature with their Free Roxana bill, the CPJ, The BBC, NPR and ABC with their 10,000-plus signature petition and strong words, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Iranian.com and too many others around the world to mention here. Roxana had, and has, no shortage of friends. I will even include the UK Guardian and Huffington Post, both of whom I’ve warred with, but which have long been on the Free Roxana Bandwagon with their peerless reporting on Iran and full support of Roxana.

I know, I know. But credit where credit is due.

Unfortunately, there was also no shortage of villains either, the greatest being the Iranian thugocracy itself, which unlawfully detained Roxana from the start, lied about Roxana’s release to SOS Clinton on March 6th, sent signals to Roxana’s parents as they left for Iran that Roxana’s release was being speeded up, only to land and see Roxana sentenced falsely to eight years for espionage, in closed session and without even a lawyer present. Broke everyone’s hearts.

Hitler had rigged courts like Iran’s that imprisoned and executed the innocent, and freed serial killers. How much further behind the curtain do you have to look to know the wizards are evil?

Yet I fully expect the Iranian thugocracy to use this ‘peace-seeking’ correction of an abomination of justice as a political and diplomatic club, or proof of their divine benevolence. Most likely both. And far too many will fall to their knees in gratitude over Roxana and agree. They don’t fool me. Then again, I’m not a fool when it comes to Iran. I’ve been watching their Islamist horrorshow for thirty long years. I’ll go by what history and my eyes and ears tell me, and not some clueless morons.

Speaking of which, Congress, The President, State, and the Invisible Press all pulled major disappearing acts on Roxana, when she should have stayed front and center after SOS Clinton’s demand for her release. Look at these unbelievable search results from March 20th, two weeks after Iran promised to release Roxana ’soon’. It’s like she was bad press the Obamamedia and government wanted swept under the rug.

No bill submitted to Congress in all that time in support of Roxana that I can find, only statements by Senators Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Roxana’s home state. Too busy cleaning our pockets, I guess. Or calling us racist redneck teabaggers. Roxana who?

This whole sordid production also revealed to me how mile-wide and micron-deep Hollywood’s support for human rights really is. And I don’t mean Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jim Carrey, George Clooney and the dozens of other real human rights and troop-supporting heroes of Hollywood.

I specifically mean the left-wing Looney Tunes Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which fancies itself as human rights champs. Name me one mention of Roxana Saberi from any prominent Academy member to date, even when Team Hollywood was in Tehran. Won’t find her anywhere in Team Oscar member William Horberg’s Iran blogging. No press releases. Yawn.

How about filmmaker Esha Momeni? Nope, no Esha. Or any mention of the Iranian regime’s hunting, party-raiding, online entrapping, torturing and slaughtering of gays that should have outraged them beyond measure but which they seem to have curiously overlooked, and not a week removed from their four-hour gay rights infomercial called the Oscars. They’re still silent about it!

It’s not like you really have to look for this stuff. And I know they know. I’ve told them. Repeatedly.

Wait a minute! Was Team Oscar on some super-secret Mission Impossible Thing for ObamaMan ? You know. “Should any member of Team Oscar be caught or killed, the President will disavow all knowledge.” Are they remaining silent and staying nice so they can infiltrate Iran again? If so, I apologize, guys. My only regret is that you all escaped unharmed. Maybe I should file an FOIA on that one. Why not? Shouldn’t be a problem. They seem to be just giving away secrets these days.

In summary, ‘Roxana: A True Story’ was a riveting, very uncomfortable and all too real life-and-death drama with plenty of ordinary citizen superheroes, Blofeld-like villains, Dr. Smith-like cowards and even a few Judases. Zeroes were Stars, and Stars were Zeroes. Yet this production should never have been staged in the first place. It should have ended after SOS Clinton’s demand. And Roxana’s happy ending is only one of far too few in today’s Iran. Too many play out like ‘Schindler’s List’.

On that note, how about we all start calling cruel, oppressive and violent nations for what they are, instead of what we wish them to be? It ain’t helping those who really need help. But a lot of people speaking up for Roxana helped save her. How about ‘Artists United Against Insanity’? Little Stevie’s still out there!

As to what the future brings, who can say? But Roxana is free now, so today I’m gonna have that symbolic piece of overdue birthday cake, and set aside my reporting for other endeavors. As to Iran, I will say Caveat Emptor to all. But I will spare you, in parting, one inevitable coming attraction to Thugocracy Studios already in production. It’s a sequel, actually. Or is it the third in a trilogy?

Stay Tuned!

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?

But let us start at the beginning. I first started dabbling in screenwriting about ten years ago. Had a couple successes with short stories in years before, but started getting some movie ideas. Lot less words, too. Way less typing. So I’m lazy, okay? I admit it! Anyway, I got my first real success in Hollywood out of the blue back in early 2005, with a script I’d been working on for five years. My first.

Did very well in amateur competitions all over. Even passed a gauntlet of judges comprised of some of the top talents in the industry. Made the Top Ten out of well over a thousand scripts submitted to that contest, and it was a Big One! Yahoo!

My first Hollywood Scream. From here in New Hampshire. Probably could have heard me in Hollywood, too! Anyway, it resulted in a couple jaunts to the Friendly Skies of A-List Red Carpet bashes at the WGA Theater as a screenwriting finalist. Open bar! Something else to Scream about! Rubbed elbows, did the whole Jed Clampett thing, you know? Total rube first trip out. Duh-h-h! But I thought I was a lock in Hollywood now.

Took me a year of grueling pitching and marketing to finally option my script. Have finished two since, one of which resulted in my own ill-advised tangling with my two coverage providers, with whom I strongly disagreed on their assessments of my Great American Screenplay.

Know better now. They’re in, I’m not. There’s a reason for that. Got it. Regardless of the difficulties, and the fact that my option has since lapsed (not unusual for this vicinity), my successes with amateur contests and an option had me feeling pretty good. Inspired me to go forward.

My coverage providers and I are now BFF. On the same page. They even say now my work is getting much better. Dialogue, in particular. And that’s okay. We seek progress, not perfection. And more open bars. By the way, as a conservative Republican, I was a little shaky heading into the Lair of the Beast. Though very excited over the Awards Galas, I somewhat feared that one wrong word could end my screenwriting career very quickly. In fact, I was ecstatic to discover a total disinterest in politics with all the people I met.

And they were ALL phenomenal people, especially all the ground-level types like me trying to take off. Actors and actresses, filmmakers, fellow writers. It was all about living life and the dream, all the time. Better than Viagra. I could have no higher opinion of the real worker bees in Hollywood. And a number of A-listers that were generous enough to give my Jed Clampett the time of day. And let us not forget the Open Bar. Screams all around!

Had even more Screams at the 2006 Screenwriting Expo, to which I got a great Gold Pass discount as a Semifinalist in their competition. Alas, no Open Bar. But a Human Circus Par Excellence!

So here I am in the present day, working on my fourth script, IMHO the best of the bunch, a contemporary, high-concept, low-to-medium budget screwball romantic comedy that is actually a loving tribute to the Oscars and the Academy itself. Really crazy stuff, but all in fun. Treated everyone special, the Academy in particular. And I could not have been more inspired by the story, the concept and the absolutely crazy characters I had populated it with.

See, what REALLY made the Academy special to me were board members like Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint, Producer Kathleen Kennedy, even the Great Fonz, Henry Winkler. Loved their work, loved their efforts for the Academy, and just loved who they all were, and are. Cream of the Crop. It broke my heart to have to use the instrument of my Hollywood dreams as a weapon of war against them.

I don’t want to rehash all that. It’s beating a dead horse now.

But any Hollywood illusions I had about some of the top names in Show Biz being the human rights champions they claimed to be have been thoroughly shattered. Dustin Lance Black has been dead silent on Iran’s Gay Holocaust, Penn even worse. Not only was Mr. Penn sending flowery Mad Mullah PR dispatches from Tehran, the epicenter of today’s Auschwitz for Gays, back in 2005, he now pals around with Hugo Chavez even as gays are persecuted in Venezuela. Some hero. Like this article states correctly, Sean Penn may not be a gay rights advocate, but he plays one on TV.

Like Annette Bening praising women’s rights in Iran, both have done extraordinary damage to the cause of gay and women’s rights there. Not only did they completely overlook or ignore the real horrors of modern-day Islamist Iran for women and gays, they gave that extremist Hitlerite regime its PR blessings with not one word of condemnation. And Team Oscar is just as guilty as they are, giving theirs and the Academy’s PR blessing to today’s Third Reich. None could deserve it less.

They may say they separated politics from art (and have), but in an all-powerful Hitlerite regime, there is no separation of anything from ideology. Not only does Iran have a film industry worthy of Goebbels, they’ve even sentenced filmmakers to death for celluloid slanders!  Iranian-American filmmaker Esha Momeni is now awaiting trial in Iran on the same charges.

What makes Iran worthy of cultural exchange and South Africa not? South Africa wasn’t sentencing filmmakers to death or exterminating anyone. Certainly not the gays Hollywood Heroes like Penn and Black so profess to represent.

And I said I wasn’t going to beat a dead horse. I’m a writer! Whattaya want?

All that said, I do want to praise, rather than bury, some top-shelf Hollywood players who could not be more honorable in their outspoken, and out-of-pocket, humanitarian efforts to help the helpless and make the world a truly better place, at least for some.

Jim Carrey. Angelina Jolie. Brad Pitt. Matt Damon. Don Cheadle. Jerry Weintraub. George Clooney (though I am upset that he didn’t slam Team Oscar for staying in Iran during this) and father Nick. Mia Farrow. The list in Hollywood really is a long one.

And all that doesn’t even take into account all the Hollywood heroes to our heroes in uniform: Bruce Willis, Gary Sinise, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Davi, Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black. Again, far too many to mention. But I thank them all. Cream of the Crop Every One!

But boy, are the bad apples really stinking up the joint! And you can tell who they are. They visit dictatorships to fawn over strongmen like stooges once fawned over Hitler. They praise systems or heroes that are abject failures or worse while denying or deriding our own worthy heroes and endeavors. They talk a great story, like Penn and Black, but all it takes is a few Google searches to sniff out the BS.

By the way, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez kicked Human Rights Watch out of the country, but still welcomes with open arms Sean Penn, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte. Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical statement. Although I do believe now Mr. Penn will make a great Stooge. Practice makes perfect. You can call it the Stalinovsky Method.

So there it all is. This officially wraps Adventures in the Scream Trade. Tired of the bad screaming. Wishing for a lot more good. All things considered, I’m expecting a lot more of the former than the latter. I can only say Thank You to John Nolte and Andrew Breitbart et al here at Big Hollywood for giving me this forum to address you, My Dear Hollywood Readers and Fine Human Beings Everywhere, on the important issues of our day.

And how to know BS when you smell it. Hell, I’m choking on it. Stinks to the Hollywood Hills!

Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams!

Congratulations on the fine work you did with the recent Hollywood hoopla thing.  What are those golden statues called again…Arthurs?  Oscars?  Ollivers?  No matter.  The fine art of idolatry is becoming your forte, my dear nephew.  With the powers of a willing media and the brilliance of commercialism prevalent, it’s no wonder the masses turn to your town for direction and meaning.  I chuckle with delight to see how real meaning and substance is more and more becoming passé, and overlooked for the sizzle and bling of the ephemeral.  You make your uncle proud to see that you are once again the year’s big producer for thirty years running…and gaining even more new customers every month.

Your work on the special interest groups is particularly impressive.  You are keenly aware that, pound for pound of effort, this is where we gain the most purchase in our clawing scramble over the human psyche.  Continue to stress their inherent oppression and victimization, so that our aims may be met.  Nothing makes a poor soul feel more empowered than believing itself to be a part of a large, aggrieved and neglected group.  Build on their individual sense of outrage and anger, along with their helpless sense of futility.  Remind them that they are being victimized, and must demand their rights!  I know you are laughing right now, as am I.  But drive the seriousness of their indignant and violated pride, and demand restitution for the wrongs perpetrated upon them.  (As for the specific nature of these ‘wrongs’, either real or imagined, simply fill in the blank; a group is a group, and we can use any and all of them for our purposes.) And good that you can work the golden idols into so many hands that help legitimize our work. That Penn character is an excellent poster boy.  In fact, increase the irreverence, step up the hatred of our Enemy and brighten the public celebration of him, as his flippant outrageousness masquerades as gravitas.    We can trade on his magnetic popularity, and draw the proverbial moth to the flame.  Continue your brilliant work in framing his disrespect and hatred of Judeo-Christian ethics and traditional values as hip and ‘progressive’.   

I’m laughing again too, my dear nephew, as one muses upon what it is exactly that they are progressing towards.   I join you in salivating over the exquisite moment of discovery as the poor scums awaken to the wretched fate that awaits them.  

In fact, I must commend you in the highest for your skillful sleight-of-hand with regards to the English language.  The catch-phrase taken to high art.  Love those words, and all like it: Hope…Change…Believe….that you have artfully injected into the American lexicon.  And my favorite, ‘Economic Justice’.  Oh, my heart swells with pride over the millions of souls now residing with us, all brought in with that simple, sweet fabrication.   Your dazzling virtuosity at somehow applying honor and dignity to a base concept previously held by murderers and highwaymen has enthralled all of us on the Lower Council.  You’ve done your uncle proud.  Keep it up, as it affects my reputation if you falter.  And trust me, you wouldn’t want that. 

At the endless award shows in your town, I commend you that fewer and fewer award winners are thanking the Enemy for their success.   Your relentless work at making that whole thing appear as a ‘fad’ is paying off.  Fads come into fashion, and they leave just as quickly.  Religion as a fad is one of our greatest tricks, and you seem to be a master at the joystick. 

So kudo’s on your work in Hollywood. And even better, your push on bringing Islam to popularity amongst the minorities is noteworthy.  This is where you should throw most of your energies, as this movement has the greatest possibility of bearing much fruit in the near term.  Placing it on a parity with Christianity is brilliant;  as to the latter, we must be stalwart and obsessive in our drive to make it seem like ‘just another religion’…and it’s center point as ‘just another great prophet’.   Remove the deity and relegate him to just another man with some pretty good ideas.  Like Buddha, and Mohammad and Gandhi and Moses.  I like your innovation in that Kabbalah thing, and the celebrities’ devotion and publicizing.  Let it be seen as the ‘fun’ religion, like (as one comedienne was quoted) a cross between Judaism…and magic!    

And Scientology…well done!  However I fear you’ve let that fall into disrepute of late.  Watch that, as it had been rendering wonderful results.  I would pump up its respectability and emphasize the powerful successes of human achievement and empowerment.  (I mean, it has Cruise and Travolta, how bad could it be?) 

Continue to frame Muslims worldwide as victims, and let that drive their noble respectability.  See how they suffer, and yet their devotion allows them to struggle onward.  Pump the ‘unity’ factor to appeal to more Blacks in America.  Bring Farrakhan back into prominence; see if you can get that new president to hasten that.  Pull in some favors in the Hollywood community; you know Oprah’s good for it. 

In Hollywood, continue to slam the image of our Enemy.  His forbearance must be taken as weakness and ineffectuality.   Even better, as a sign that He isn’t there at all.  A ghost, a phantom, just some dreamed-up apparition of fantasy.  This is our ultimate hope – actualizing a prevalent accepted belief that both His world…and ours…are merely childish inventions of superstitious mystics and cretins; and have no place in the evolved ‘progressive’ world of material technology.

Our master’s flag is firmly planted atop the American media.  With our endless cultural seductions, and our more than willing political and media accomplices, we will drive the Enemy out of that country and out of the world.  Soon it won’t even be a memory…but a bad joke.  A punch line.  Like saying grace before a meal, or a nighttime prayer, the practitioners of such practices will be seen as demented…weak…deluded.  Simpletons who shun reality for fruitless conversations with their invisible and ‘imaginary friend’.  Run this theme around Hollywood enough and it will be the subject of the next Academy-Awarded film.

But most importantly, my dear nephew, congratulations on the wonderful work you are doing in the hearts of the filmmakers themselves.  The themes they are aggrandizing are truly inspired.  Infidelity, murder, incest…yes, all good themes, and our ‘marquis players’…but the new ones you are instilling – masterful.  Child rape.  Torture and sadism.  Psychological torment beyond my wildest dreams!  Oh, nephew, you should see your proud uncle beaming at your inventive resourcefulness.  Our little creatures celebrate such fare with nearly the same gushing gusto as we do.  Little do they know by repeatedly immersing themselves into the Great Darkness they grow closer and closer to it, to us…and eventually are absorbed by it.  Oh!  My heart sings for their painful future…and my laughter is gurgling up from my bowels, as I contemplate our inevitable union and the surprised looks on their poor pathetic little faces as it’s all over and they realize that their new home for eternity…is with us in the Great Black Void. 

Sorry for the delay in sending this, but I was so overcome with rapture that I had to lie down for several days just to calm myself.   But now I’m back, and I must tell you something sincerely…

Your mighty work, done in the interstitial spaces of time and matter, or what the little creatures call ‘the spiritual realm’… is indeed becoming epic.  The inroads you are carving into the society of creatures are staggering.  And you make it seems so easy!   The so called ‘pop culture’ is literally dismantling all the horrid goodness the Enemy has constructed almost faster than we can keep up to facilitate it!  It’s like a runaway train on steroids!  Oh the utter sad and sick, demented joy of it, my nephew…

I have heard that you are in line for promotion to the Supreme Sepulcher of Elders; for the rumors are that the things you are accomplishing down here in the movie capitol of the world…are the things of legend.  Our Dark Father has hinted at great things to come for you…and more importantly, for me.  For you wouldn’t be where you are if it wasn’t for my urging and discipling and counseling.  So don’t think for one second that you will descend without me, you ungrateful bastard, or I’ll cut off your pathetic little… 

Dear me, I apologize, I get so worked up when I muse about such things.  I have the utmost confidence you’ll take my best interests to heart, my dear nephew. 

Or else.

Your affectionate uncle, NEWSRAPE

If anyone wrote a script like this, no one would believe it.

But I already read the book.

That they even went to Iran in the first place was an abomination, especially given their three-hour gay rights infomercial called The Oscars just five days earlier.

And it only kept getting worse.

Or better, depending on your POV.

For this Most Humble DJ Contributor and Critic of Stage and Screen?

Definitely better!

So here’s the skinny to date on ‘MGGTT’ and this Most Humble Critic’s Zero Star Review:

First, President Obama himself must approve Team Hollywood’s visas, as Iran is under sanction from just about every nation on earth. Has been by the US ever since the Embassy and hostage seizures in 1979.

That’s the setup.

Now here are the punchlines!

After all that trouble Team AMPASS (the last S is for “stooge”) no sooner sets down in Tehran than they are welcomed by irate ‘culture ministers‘ demanding apologies for such celluloid affronts to Iranian civilization as “300′” and “The Wrestler” or they won’t be able to meet with their Iranian film counterparts.

See, these eminently cultured, erudite and most intellectual film elites of Iran were incensed by “The Wrestler” because in the film Mickey Rourke takes an Iranian flag from his ring opponent, The Ayatollah, breaks it over his knee and tosses it into the crowd. Deliciously ironic, considering desecration of the American flag is a national sport over there, even for kids.

Actually, especially for kids. Look familiar?

No word on if Mr. Ganis et al apologized. But they DID get to meet with their heel-ground Iranian film buddies shortly thereafter.

Curious. Loose end of the story so far.

Did they apologize or not?

So, not only does Team Hollywood no sooner land in Iran and get totally punked, President Obama has his one extended olive branch slapped out of his hand.

But wait! There’s more!

The apology-demanders were then officially called before Iran’s Parliament, the Majlis, to explain their own cultural slander on inviting the Ziono-Hollywoodist conspirators into their pure Islamist Paradise in the first place!

How great a story twist is THAT?

The demands for apologies just never end in totalitarian dictatorships. It’s par for the course.

No word yet on if the ministers’ contrite apologies were accepted by the Majlis’ Cultural Commission.

In fact, no word on them at all. Considering the culture ministers are Iran’s Hollywood Left, they could be in for it. Hell, they’re the liberals!

Curious. Another loose end.

Although it is rumored Mr. Ganis can’t find his ministerial escort anywhere.

One particularly laugh riot sidebar was an Open Letter To President Obama by Iranian filmmaker, domestic stooge and Team AMPASS’ new Best Friend Forever Alireza Davudnejad informing Mr. Obama that the only way to achieve peace, justice and freedom in the world was for the US to give up its UN veto power and dismantle all of its nuclear weapons.

Mr. Davudnejad also requested a schedule as to when Mr. Obama would implement these historic peace, freedom and justice-creating landmarks.

This, from a regime that foments war, writes injustice into its penal codes, crushes freedom with an iron boot and races to build nuclear weapons of its own.

Now THAT’S Comedy!

Even funnier?

AMPASS’ new BFF, Ali-Da, couldn’t resist one last Ziono-Hollywoodist Conspiracy backhand of his own:

“My last recommendation is not to follow your previous cultural policies and avoid your Hollywood friends from playing any tricks to dominate the cinemas of Iran. The United States once removed Iranian cinema from the Iranian life with the help of the former dictatorship; and sacrificed our industry with the import of foreign films. The fallen cinema of Iran has once again regained its footing with the Islamic Revolution and has been fighting to survive for thirty years.

“We will not forgive the enemies of this cinema wherever they are. By the way, which is harder, to relinquish the veto right, or to forbear the domination of Iran’s cinema again?”

How about neither, Ali-Duh?

Over my dead body!

But I digress.

“You have a hard path ahead. I pray for you. Only the right path has no deviation,” the letter ends.

Ya got all that, Sid?

No more Zionist tricks!

Or they won’t even let you apologize next time!

Q. What is the difference between Mr. Davudnejad and the AMPASS team?

A. He’s a domestic film industry stooge.

To this point, the AMPASS/IRAN road production was playing out in Joker-like blackly comic fashion and had this Humble Critic’s Five Gold Stars On The Forehead Stamp Of Approval.

But they lost me in the Final Act. And it wiped out all that good setup work.

See, yesterday, top Iranian government officials were highly upset with the ICC warrant for innocent genocide master and Dear Leader Gen. Omar Bashir of Sudan. So they took action, holding pep rallies in the streets with their Hamas and other Blackshirt Jew-slaughtering stooges for bloody brother Omar.

Then, led by Ali Larijani, the ‘moderate’ Speaker of the Iranian Parliament who once stated that 100 million Muslims killed in a nuclear exchange with Israel was acceptable (see, he’s a moderate in Iran like Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad’s the extremist) and the rest of Iran’s modern-day SS flew off to Khartoum to throw parades in support of their BFF O-Bash.

So in essence, Mr. Ganis et al have all remained in Tehran, schmoozing and teaching film seminars to Iran’s Goebbels-like propagandists that made these classics while top leaders of Iran’s government and their Brownshirt proxies not only celebrate genocide in the streets of Tehran, they then fly over to the streets of Khartoum where the genocide was committed to throw parades for the man who did it all and is now an international fugitive!

So now, not only is Mr. Ganis et al complicit by their gold-plated silence on the gay pogrom in Iran (which Iran’s culture experts are now trying to export to Iraq), they are now silent accomplices to Sudan’s genocide for remaining in Iran while all this is all going on around them instead of hightailing it out of Dodge as they should have when this obscene news broke.

Like I said, they had me till the Last Act.

One last curious loose end.

No word on if the AMPASS team generated any roar of support for missing American reporter and former Miss North Dakota Roxana Saberi. After their rough landing, I’m sure they didn’t want to have to apologize for any more impudence.

One charming and heartwarming story twist?

The only one, in fact?

Ms. Saberi will soon be released from her Tehran hellhole. It seems Secretary of State Clinton demanded it. Now THERE’S someone the Iranians can fear!

I know I would. Wisely, they seem to also.

At least her. I’m sure Mr. Ganis et al aren’t throwing too many scares into them.

Damn shame those kind of happy endings can’t happen to ALL the women in Iran.

They sure as hell won’t with hopelessly duped Stooges like Ganis, Bening and the rest of the AMPASS team giving Imadinnerjacket, Larijani, Rafsanjani and all of the other Mad Mullahs of Iran their gold-plated, boot-licking, butt-kissing stamp of approval.

But maybe if more people spoke out alongside Secretary of State Clinton on these heinous crimes against humanity on just about every person in Iran by today’s Islamist Third Reich, things might change.

The silence from Hollywood’s gay and women’s rights “activists,” who seem to be the loudest in condemning we here in America as misogynist and Hitlerite vis-a-vis gay and women’s rights, is deafening.

Where’s Sean Penn?

Where’s Dustin Lance Black?

They’re the tearful advocates.

And I’m the one that has to be “Damn The Torpedoes and Full Speed Ahead”?

Disgraceful!

Don’t wanna rock the boat?

Screw that! I’m sinking it!

Where’s the press, which can’t condemn ordinary Americans enough over glass ceilings for women and Prop 8? The ceiling for women and gays in Iran is Hell!

Where is Darfur Champion George Clooney’s raised-to-the-roof outrage over Iran’s state-sanctioned Dear Leader Bashir rallies while AMPASS is still sharing tea and pleasantries with the human vampires doing it?

Nothing but crickets.

Oh, well.

I guess the Dirty Jobs fall in my lap once again.

But they shouldn’t.

By the way, this stellar AMPASS/IRAN road production isn’t wrapped yet, people. May still get a star or two yet from this Critic and Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant. But it better be a spectacular ending to save this naively idealistic, incredibly flawed and ill-advised production.

Still, the AMPASS/IRAN Roadkill Show has had some surprising developments to date.

One ending is for sure, though.

After all the bad PR I’ve generated (yeah, that PUNK’D byline was mine), I’ll never eat lunch as a screenwriter in THAT town again!

But like Georgie Patton famously stated, ‘Sometimes you have to shame cowards in order to give them back their self-respect.”

And if there’s one thing people don’t like, it’s being shamed.

But the root question here is, shouldn’t they be?

Damn. I sure wish Hollywood made films like PATTON again instead of films that portray US as the Dark Side. Don’t you?

Forget it, Jake. It’s Hollywood.

Oh well.

At least some of them DO pay a price at the box office.

And if there’s one I’ve learned from Hollywood, it’s that Box Office Talks And Bullshite Walks.

One last tragically ironic twist on that subject?

I have a couple of GREAT film ideas like that!

Had, anyway.

Oh well. I can always write novels and nonfiction under a pen name.

Wouldn’t want to eat lunch there now anyway. Not after this cultural Hollywood abomination no apology can paper over. This whole fiasco goes WAY beyond film!

Hell, I’m madder than the Iranians right now!

In fact, I’m so upset, I’m boycotting Hollywood for the duration.

As long as Sid Ganis and his Motley Stooge Road Crew are not ejected off the Academy Board and into the Pacific for this egregious affront to civilized people everywhere (particularly in Iran and Sudan), my wallet is officially Closed For Business. No DVDs, no Blu-Rays, no downloads, no box office receipts at their MacDonald’s-like fast-film franchise cinemaplexes.

Damn shame too. Lot of upcoming movies I wanted to see.

So It Goes in War. Some sacrifices must be made.

But they sure don’t compare to the sacrifices Iranian gays betrayed by Ganis et al make every day at the hands of our modern-day Totenkopfverbande.

In closing, let it be known far and wide that I love film, I love Hollywood, and I even love and respect the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Just not today.

Because I just happen to love freedom, justice and human rights a little bit more.

Toodles, all!

Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams!

PS: I’m on the War Front now, people.

Give me a vote and strike a blow for Liberty!

All that said, Peace.

I hope.

Best to all, J.

The brand new film adaptation of the classic graphic comic Watchmen is a hit of monstrous proportions on its opening weekend, but not everyone loves it. In fact, not only is there a prominent character named Rohrschach (played by Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley), the film itself is serving as a Rohrschach Test for critics, fanboys and the broader public.

The Zack Snyder-directed $120M epic started with $4.5M in Thursday midnight business which is outstanding. There was no way for Watchmen to approach the $18.5M midnight start for lat summer’s The Dark Knight. First off, it is March and not the middle of summer blockbuster season. Kids have school. People are working. These are not the lazy days of July when it is easier for many to see a movie at midnight on Thursday, and hit the office late on Friday. The other factor is the movie’s rating. This is an R-rated movie, not PG-13 like The Dark Knight.

Jackie Earle Haley, who played Kelly Leak in the original Bad News Bears, is wearing the Rorschach mask in Watchmen

The Thursday night start for Watchmen was 44% better than the $2.5M midnight shows for director Snyder’s last epic 300 (also rated R). It was also virtually double the $2.3M midnight start for November’s Quantum of Solace (PG-13). Those are much better comparables than The Dark Knight or say last year’s PG-13 rated Twilight, which grabbed a reported $7M midnight preview gross.

Watchmen was spectacular at the box office Friday, and, after consulting with multiple sources, I am projecting a staggering $25.2M (that does include midnight previews) for Friday. That is approximately the 32nd-best opening day in modern box office history, but it is the all-time #12 opening day for a non-sequel.

ALL-TIME TOP 15 OPENING DAYS FOR A NON-SEQUEL
1. Spider-Man – $39.4M
2. Twilight – $35.9M
3. Iron Man – $35.2M
4. Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone – $32.3M
5. The Simpsons Movie – $30.7M
6. I Am Legend – $30M
7. The Da Vinci Code – $28.6M
8. 300 - $28.1M
9. Transformers – $27.8M
10. Sex & The City – $26.7M
11. The Passion of the Christ – $26.5M
12. Watchmen – $25.2M (projected)
13. Planet of the Apes – $24.6M
14. Hulk – $24.2M
15. The Day After Tomorrow – $23.5M

When the numbers get this big, and the movie is this front-loaded, 3-day projections are problematic, and I am revising downward from the $62.5M I published Friday night (my final prediction on published Wednesday was $63M). It’s looking more like $57M as of Saturday morning. Running time is killing this movie. If the number holds, it would still give Watchmen the all-time #5 opening weekend for an R-rated movie, trailing only Matrix Reloaded, Passion of the Christ (which had better source material contrary to what fanboys may believe), Snyder’s 300 and Hannibal.

Still the all-time biggest opening for an R-rated movie

ALL-TIME TOP 10 OPENINGS FOR AN R-RATED MOVIE
1. The Matrix Reloaded – $91.7M
2. The Passion of the Christ – $83.8M
3. 300 – $70.8M
4. Hannibal – $58M
5. Watchmen – $57M (projected)
6. Sex & The City – $57M
7. 8 Mile – $51.2M
8. Wanted – $50.9M
9. The Matrix Revolutions – $48.5M
10. Troy – $46.8M

One interesting facet of this movie is the fact that three different major studios have a piece of the action. Warner Bros owns domestic distribution rights, Paramount has the foreign and Fox, which won a very public battle over the rights to the movie, is getting 5%-8.5% of gross participation that will be set by the film’s worldwide revenue success. That puts an awful lot of powerful Hollywood types on the same team, working to ensure Warchmen’s success.

Critics are divided about Watchmen as a movie. The movie has a 65% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the most established critics – what Rotten Tomatoes classifies as the Cream of the Crop – has generated a lower 43% positive reviews. Here’s a sampling from writers that I know and like.

Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal –
“The reverence is inert, the violence noxious, the mythology murky, the tone grandiose, the texture glutinous. It’s an alternate version of The Incredibles minus the delight.”

Pete Hammond, Hollywood.com -
“A stunning, mind-bending, breathtaking densely-packed motion picture experience.”

David Poland, Movie City News -
“The problem with Watchmen is, in the end, that it is a bit of a big stiff bore for two acts with an improved, but mostly uninspired third act. Look at Watchmen from the back to the front. Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times -
“After the revelation of The Dark Knight here is Watchmen, another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. It’s a compelling visceral film.”

Watchmen author Alan Moore

Obviously, the reviews are all over the board. Although, there’s no question that the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, the enigmatic Alan Moore, hates the movie, it’s just as certain that he has not and will never see it. In fact, he put a curse on the whole project.

Watchmen director Zack Snyder

Director Zack Snyder signed on for a gig that proved too tough and too problematic for the likes of brilliant filmmakers like Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Fountain) and Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum). Perhaps Alan Moore is right. His book is “inherently unfilmable.” There’s no way to pack the dense details of the brilliant 1986 landmark into a movie – even when it’s 2 hours, 43 minutes long.

I am a huge fan of the graphic novel having read it in college. I deliberately didn’t re-read Watchmen in advance of the movie because I think it needs to be judged as its own individual piece of work. Snyder’s problem all along has been, “How do you make a movie that both satisfies hardcore fans and is accessible enough for people who have never even heard of Watchmen?”

For the time being, the spectacle, the buzz, the fanboy fervor and a pitch-perfect marketing campaign have set the stage for an historic 3-day opening. Once the mainstream audience discovers that Watchmen is more about ideas than it is about heroes with capes, it will be interesting to see how it holds up. For comparison’s sake, 300 fell 53% from its opening weekend of $70.8M, but the drop-off will almost certainly be bigger here.

300 ended up at $210.6M domestic and $456M worldwide, but Watchmen is likely to fall short of those numbers. In fact, whereas 300 finished with a 2.97 multiple (2.97 X $70.8M = total domestic box), Watchmen is more likely to be in the 2.4-2.6 range. That would translate to a, still impressive, final US gross of $137M-$148M. Given that spring break is coming for high schoolers and college kids, I think the movie can reach the upper end of that range.

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY FRIDAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW – Watchmen (Warner Bros) – $25.2M, $6,979 PTA, $25.2M cume
2. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) – $2.5M, $1,162 PTA, $70.2M cume
3. Taken (Fox) – $2.3M, $763 PTA, $112.9M cume
4. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $2.05M, $709 PTA, $120.56M cume
5. He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) – $1.3M, $532 PTA, $81.92M cume
6. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) – $1.1M, $430 PTA, $130.5M cume
7. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) – $1M, $437 PTA, $36.2M cume
8. Fired Up (Sony) – $920,000, $512 PTA, $11.68M cume
9. Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience (Disney) – $850,000, $666 PTA, $14.85M cume
10. Coraline (Focus) – $800,000, $408 PTA, $63.1M cume

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY 3-DAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW - Watchmen (Warner Bros) – $57M, $15,785 PTA, $57M cume
2. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) – $9M, $4,184 PTA, $76.7M cume
3. Taken (Fox) – $7.75M, $2,570 PTA, $118.04M cume
4. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $7.58M, $2,625 PTA, $126.1M cume
5. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) – $4.5M, $1,759 PTA, $133.5M cume
6. He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) – $4.05M, $1,659 PTA, $84.68M cume
7. Coraline (Focus) – $3.5M, $1,787 PTA, $66M cume
8. Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience (Disney) – $3.1M, $2,380 PTA, $17M cume
9. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) – $3M, $1,310 PTA, $38.5M cume
10. Fired Up (Sony) – $2.75M, $1,520 PTA, $13.5M cume

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter.

The film industry in Hollywood is the most rewarded vocational field in the world. Having been a part of the “Big Hollywood” launch team, I followed roughly forty-eight award shows this year. Generally, I would characterize them as slightly self-aggrandizing. By the way, I’m not confused; awards are nice (consult my bio), but why are there so many award shows? The people who win awards are rarely underappreciated.  Take Kate Winslet for example, one of Hollywood’s most overrated actresses.  I always feel I’m watching her act. Peter Mayhew was more organic as Chewbacca than Winslet as a suburban housewife in the off-putting “Revolutionary Road.” But Hollywood seemingly invents awards to celebrate Winslet and her ubiquitous bare breasts.

What irritates most is that while the shows may differ, the awards are roughly the same.  In sports, there’s only one MVP, one Rookie of the Year.  Yet every year, we are bombarded with the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, and the BAFTAs.  Not to mention all those snooty little film festivals in upscale ski towns.

But as I always say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  So, if we’re going to resign ourselves to watching three months of awards galas, let’s introduce some new awards that could electrify a show more than a Melissa Etheridge/Beyoncé duet:

Best-in-Show: This would be awarded to the best animal appearance in a film this year.   We see eight or ten lovable movie animals each year, and they don’t get the praise they deserve.  Who wouldn’t want to see the dog from “Marley and Me” bound onto the stage to claim the Golden Dog Biscuit?

Best Non-Sexual Nudity Award: Nothing puzzles and inspires me like incidental nakedness on film.  On second thought, it would come down to Harvey Keitel vs. Kate Winslet every year, so this one may not be as interesting as it sounds.

The Daniel Day-Lewis Award for Acting Performance: Thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis, I can no longer take seriously any award that claims to honor the “Best Actor.” There is one unequivocal “Best Actor” in Hollywood and it is he, so it is foolish to pretend Tom Hanks or Sean Penn or Ashton Kutcher or any other leading man can equate.  There are years Daniel Day-Lewis acts and there are years he doesn’t–either way, he is the best actor.  Let’s rename the annual award for excellent acting to reflect this reality.  The only thing that changes from year to year is best performance, not “best actor.”

The Morgan Freeman Award For Best Performance as an Omniscient Narrator

Best Best-Friend Award: Every romantic comedy has a quirky best-friend role for the purpose of plot development—the “best-friend” grants the audience insight into Kate Hudson’s character.  Picture this all-too-common date night debacle: I treat my girlfriend to an order of General Tsao’s Chicken at P.F. Chang’s (medium/spicy) and we head over to the multiplex in the mall with high hopes for the romantic comedy du jour we are about to watch from the front row of a theatre packed with eighth graders.  And BAM!  Much to our chagrin, the entire night is ruined by a poor performance by the quirky best-friend character.  A competent performance here can slightly enhance my Friday night, so let’s celebrate the best.

Evil-est Corporation Award: Lazy Hollywood’s default bad guys are those big, bad multi-national corporations that make our food, our cars, our medicines, send us our paychecks, etc.  Let’s reward the most heinous onscreen company of this year!

Most Disappointing Picture of the Year: This is an excuse for me to mention that “Quantum of Solace” was beyond terrible.

The Helena Bonham Carter Award: You can use the comments to debate what this one should actually celebrate, but I think we can all agree that there needs to be one every year.

What additional awards would you suggest?

This year was different. My friends and I wanted to see two things. I wanted to see Jerry Lewis get his award in the hopes he’d come out with thick glasses, buck teeth, and make a “Why didn’t I win for THE PATSY, you putzes!” speech. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Instead, they treated Lewis like a Great-Aunt at a wedding nobody knows but is allowed to make a toast anyway.  I guess today’s egomaniacs don’t respect their elder egomaniacs. 

I was ready to turn it off right then, but my friend insisted we see Mickey Rourke’s speech.  I knew this was never going to happen, that the Academy would never vote for a guy who said he was “not one of those who blames Bush for everything,” and that they vote for Sean Penn BECAUSE of his political stances, not in spite of them, as Penn likes to pretend. But since “The Wrestler” is one of my personal all-time favorites (for obvious reasons), and since Mickey Rourke had created the best portrait of a professional wrestler since Henry Winkler in “The One and Only“  — OK,  best portrait of a professional wrestler EVER — I allowed myself to get my hopes up a little and struggle through to the end.  Maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have to listen to The Smug Little Prince’s sermon this year.

But as you know, that was not to be.

I don’t want to rehash Penn’s self-aggrandizing testament to his own bravery in being willing to stand in any room in Hollywood and say something that 99.9% of the people in the room agree with, as others have done that much better than I could.  But one thing occurred to me as my eyes rolled heavenward listening to him congratulate himself.

Does anyone at the Oscars ever thank God?

Now as I say, I haven’t watched in years, but I have watched sports and seen countless athletes receive trophies and thank God for their abilities. Kurt Warner recently did so after his team won the NFC Championship.  A lot of people poke fun at these athletes, claiming God has nothing to do with passing ability or a willingness to spend hours in the gym honing a skill, but as a former athlete (to a small degree), I’m sure most professional athletes know hard work doesn’t do it all. They’ve all shared locker rooms with guys who worked just as hard as they did, but didn’t grow to be 6′5″ with quick feet and a great arm. 

I was a great basketball player – for a 6′1″ shooting guard who could barely touch the rim.  I wish God had blessed me with another 8 inches of height and a decent 24″ vertical leap.  But He had other things in mind, and I appreciate the humility of athletes who acknowledge they’ve been blessed.

Members of the military who receive medals frequently thank God.  These men and women who receive little to no recognition in popular culture, who literally risk their lives in anonymity to preserve the freedom to make bad movies and obnoxious acceptance speeches, are the polar opposites of the “beautiful people” in Hollywood. 

I’m an actor who thanks God I’ve been fortunate enough to make a living in this business for twenty years. In my first film where I had a lead role, after looking at the first dailies the director called me and said, “Good news.  You look good on film. A lot of good actors don’t look good on film.  You’re lucky.” I’ve known countless actors over the years who were terrific, maybe even better than me (if such a thing can be imagined), but who never got anywhere.

Why do I have a career and they don’t?

Actors and actresses don’t give themselves the ability to empathize and project their imagination into the lives of others and they don’t make themselves beautiful (at least before they can afford plastic surgery, and even then, it doesn’t always work).  And yet, they thank their agents, writers, directors, dogs (which I understand completely, Mickey), wives, children and on and on — as if they created their own beauty, brains, physical grace and everything else required to be award-winning objects of public adoration. 

But they didn’t create themselves.  None of us did. And maybe by not watching all these years I missed all the Oscar winners who thanked God for the gifts with which they have been blessed. But somehow, I just don’t think that’s how this town works.

Because the choices are totally subjective, a lot of movies you might expect to find — movies such as “Gone With the Wind,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Dr. Zhivago,” “The Godfather II,” “Easy Rider,” “All That Jazz,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Bringing Up Baby” — aren’t included.  The reason is that I didn’t enjoy them. 

But before I got to it, along came the Oscars, and it would seem like a serious oversight not to comment. 

For openers, I had even less interest than usual because I thought 2008 was the worst movie year in history, but I did make my annual wager with my wife, and so I had a vested interest — 25 cents and bragging rights.  For the record, I won, but that’s because she tends to pick the candidates she’s pulling for, whereas I put sentiment aside and go for the gold. 

Having sat through Oscar shows hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman, I naturally assumed these things couldn’t get any worse.  I was mistaken.  The entire production was one big mishmash.  I could never quite figure out what film clips I was looking at.  Some of them seemed to be scenes from the nominated movies, some seemed to be from old classics and still others seemed to have been culled from my worst nightmares.  But even harder to take was listening to all those former Oscar-winners paying fulsome praise to the nominees seated in the audience.  The nominees kept clasping their hearts and mouthing “I love you” back at them.  I hadn’t seen so many kisses blown since Carol Burnett went off the air. 

Other loathsome moments included Bill Maher’s juvenile remarks about God and religion, and Dustin Lance Black’s acceptance speech upon receiving the Oscar for his mawkish “Milk” screenplay.  It struck me as he droned on that he was simultaneously propagandizing for same-sex marriages and trolling for a date for the next Gay Pride Parade. 

Once again, I was reminded that the Best Song category should have been retired decades ago when Hollywood stopped producing musicals.  In the old days, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers, Porter and Kern, competed for Oscars.  This year, two songs from “Slumdog Millionaire” duked it out with a song from “Wall-E.”  If you’re curious why three songs without a discernible melody between them would be competing, it’s because the folks in the music division of the Motion Picture Academy insist on retaining the category.  You would have thought that embarrassment would have trumped professional ego back in 2006 when the Oscar went to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” but that’s only because you don’t realize how impossible it is to embarrass Hollywood.

That brings us to Sean Penn, who picked up his second Oscar in six years.  His victory was viewed as a major upset.  Mickey Rourke was considered a heavy favorite to win even though Penn had portrayed Harvey Milk, a heroic figure in homosexual mythology.  The truth is, even I was slightly surprised by his victory.  However, I had told several people that I believed Rourke had shot himself in the foot a while back when he won the Golden Globe and took the occasion to say he refused to condemn George W. Bush, urging people to consider the pressure the president was under in the wake of 9/11.  Hollywood doesn’t forgive and Hollywood doesn’t forget. 

Without a comedian host, the laughs were even fewer than usual.  In fact, one of the few chuckles I had all evening was when Sean Penn, in collecting his Oscar, took a moment to pay homage to Barack Obama, calling him, of all things, elegant.  Naturally, the audience responded with great applause.  Apparently, neither Penn nor the trained seals at the Kodak Theatre considered it worth noting that the president is on record as being opposed to same-sex marriages! 

And now, my 10 favorite movies for every decade, except the 1940s, 80s and 90s, when the best I could do was cull my list down to 20 favorites. 

The 1930s:  “It Happened One Night,” “Alice Adams,” “The Gold Rush,” “Destry Rides Again,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Bachelor Mother,” “Make Way for Tomorrow,” “My Man Godfrey” and any one of these four Astaire-Rogers films, “Top Hat,” “Carefree,” “Gay Divorcee” or “Swing Time”

1940s: “My Favorite Wife,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” “The Thief of Baghdad,” “Citizen Kane,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Ball of Fire,” “The Lady Eve,” “The Major and the Minor,” “Casablanca,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “Apartment for Peggy,” “Mildred Pierce,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Great Expectations,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Farmer’s Daughter,” “I Remember Mama” and “Force of Evil”

1950s:  “All About Eve,” “The African Queen,” “The Ladykillers,” “People Will Talk,” “High Noon,” “7 Brides for 7 Brothers,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “On the Waterfront” and “Sweet Smell of Success”

1960s:  “The Apartment,” “School for Scoundrels,” “The Hustler,” “A Cold Wind in August,” “Charade,” “Support Your Local Sheriff,” “My Fair Lady,” “The Pumpkin Eater,” “36 Hours” and “Divorce, American Style”

1970s:  “The Godfather,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Paper Moon,” “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “Rocky,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “House Calls,” “Time After Time” and “Breaking Away”

1980s:  “Atlantic City,” “Diner,” “Ordinary People,” “A Christmas Story,” “Terms of Endearment,” “The Natural,” “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Midnight Run,” “Die Hard,” “Field of Dreams,” “The Tall Guy,” “Witness,” “Murphy’s Romance,” “Lost in America,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Hoosiers,” “The Princess Bride,” “Tin Men,” “Roxanne” and “The Untouchables”

1990s:  “Green Card,” “Galaxy Quest,” “Cinema Paradiso,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Mumford,” “Dead Again,” “Defending Your Life,” “My Cousin Vinny,” “Peter’s Friends,” “Housesitter,” “Swingers,” “Sliding Doors,” “Enchanted April,” “Groundhog Day,” “Falling Down,” “Remains of the Day,” “The Fugitive,” “Fargo,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Nobody’s Fool”

2000s:  “The Dish,” “About a Boy,” “Chicago,” “The Matador,” “Love Actually,” “The Upside of Anger,” “The Lives of Others,” “Thank You for Smoking,” “Gran Torino” and “Taken” 

I just noticed that it adds up to a hundred movies, with roughly 40 of them being comedies or musicals.  So even if you think I have lousy taste, you should at least give me points for not trying to impress you with a lot of pretentious hooey.