Johnny Depp made a name for himself in quirky fare like “Ed Wood,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” and “Dead Man.”

Today, he’s far more likely to be fronting a potential franchise than a little film to be seen at the Sundance Film Festival. Depp has made it big, and he’s a tad testy about it.

Depp recently bristled at the notion that he’s a sellout during an interview connected to his latest film, “The Rum Diary:”

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Hollywood isn’t an institution filled only with hypocrites, it’s an institution filled with scumbag hypocrites. Annually we are showered with Leftist films created by morally superior beings who lecture us on human rights, civil rights, feminism, lookism, racism and any other “ism” they can conceive, when in real life they’re the very worst in all of these departments.

Hollywood isn’t just an industry that preaches in practice and on film against tax cuts for the wealthy as they themselves use their lobbying power to secure every scrap of corporate welfare they can get their hands on; this isn’t just an industry that celebrated its own “progressivism” for finally awarding an Oscar to a black man and woman in leading roles decades after mainstream Americans had made black men and women wealthy movie stars by fully embracing them; this also is an industry that produces sanctimonious feminist crap like “North Country” while behaving like the worst kind of sexist pigs imaginable behind the scenes:

Disney is searching for real treasure chests for its upcoming shoot of the next “Pirates of the Caribbean” swashbuckler — that is, women with natural breasts.

The movie studio has banned actresses with artificial enhancements for the fourth installment, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” directed by Rob Marshall and starring Johnny Depp as the drunken buccaneer Jack Sparrow.

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Using reader scores, IMDB ranked their top 15 films produced since 2000. Other than “The Departed,” which along with “Mystic River,” “Crash,” “Crash,” and “Crash,” ranks in the top 5 over-rated films of ever, there’s little to quibble over. Taste is a subjective thing.

My personal Top 15 are ranked as my favorites always are — based on nothing more than re-watchability. “Rocky Balboa” might not be better written, photographed or acted than any number of films not on this list, but I’m going to watch it a helluva lot more, that’s for sure.  

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) – Ever since the lights came up after that first screening, like a drug this lyrical, gorgeously photographed piece of myth-making has tugged me back for another taste. This isn’t easy to admit, but I think I admire Andrew Dominik’s directorial debut even more than John Ford’s “Young Mister Lincoln” (1939), which it resembles in so many ways. Were this also a listing of the greatest performances of the new millennium, Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Robert Ford would rank #1, as well.

2. The Passion of the Christ (2004) – Easily, the purest and rawest emotional cinematic experience I’ve ever had. The Left’s bigoted, venomous attacks combined with the film’s eventual blockbuster success were almost as satisfying as the re-election of George W. Bush. (more…)