“We need to tax the trees. They can easily afford it. Right?”

With all the industry developments we saw in last weekend’s results, look for family audiences to once again rule the marketplace. That, and you’ll find The Blind Side connections to a couple of films releasing this weekend.

This weekend’s prediction and revenue results go as follows:

1. The Lion King 3-D (20 million) - The run may be extended, but as of right now, Disney only has Lion King slated for a two week release (which would end this weekend). Knowing that, families will fill theaters believing it will be their last chance to do so.

2. A Dolphin Tale (17 million) – The film comes to us from Blind Side producers.  Can it beat Lion King 3-D this weekend? It can but not if Lion King has an “event” feel to it, which it currently does.  Still, look for the film to do very well.

3. Moneyball (16 million) - Brad Pitt is hoping to channel Sandra Bullock’s success from The Blind Side as he headlines this baseball film. Already with Oscar buzz, the film can hold well if it can make the sports formula interesting much like Blind Side, Glory Road, and The Rookie. The key difference is those had a much more family-friendly tone in their narratives while Moneyball is somewhat more off-beat. That tone does fit Brad Pitt’s acting ability well and may even give fans a small reminder of his performance in 12 Monkeys. (more…)

When the story of last month’s raid on the Gibson Guitar factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville broke, the first thought that hit me was…”Were the drawn weapons really necessary?  Is this still America?”  Imagine my complete surprise when I learned Gibson’s Chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, is a staunch Republican who does not bow at the altar of Obama; Gibson is the only major guitar manufacturer in a non-blue (read non-union) state; one of his company’s leading competitors, C.F. Martin & Company, uses the same materials in their products with impunity; and Martin’s CEO, Chris Martin IV, is a long-time Democratic supporter.

Sarcasm off.

This incident has vintage guitar owners left wondering…”What next?”  Will the Feds be busting down the doors of musicians, guns drawn, to inspect our guitars to see if we have any contraband they can confiscate?  I have a hunch if that were to happen, they’d target musicians who are openly…dare I say…conservative.

And guess where they would start.

Nathan Picard

It just so happens that our featured artist, conservative singer/songwriter Nathan Picard, makes his own guitars.  Here is what he had to say about the latest display of thuggery by this Administration:

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“In the more modern progressive Hollywood “Lion King” version: all characters are oppressed, seeking social justice, and victimized by the jungle’s search for big bananas…” – Master Iron Fist

If most of this fall’s film offerings have left you unexcited, we’ve put together a list of our seven favorite action trailers to help ease your pain.

This weekend’s box office will be fun since there is no clear favorite to win. Our predicted box-office and revenue rankings for the weekend goes as follows:

1. The Lion King 3-D ($15 million): The re-release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 together in 3-D did produce a very surprising $12.4 million opening in October of 2009. The overall effect of 3-D has gone down considerably since then but Lion King has another advantage in that it’s old enough to inspire previous generations to want to see it in a different light. Combine that with how kids haven’t had much to watch these last few weeks and you have is a surprise finish.

It’s well known Hollywood is a liberal town so I went into all of their 9/11 specials with caution. I was expecting jabs at President Bush, Republicans, or even sympathy for radical Islam. I’m shocked, literally shocked. The majority of the specials managed to put politics aside and concentrate on truth and the celebration of those who survived and died on September 11, 2001. The people came first, which is how it should be. There were many specials, but I’ll pick the best of the best.

My personal favorite was President George W. Bush’s interview on NatGeo. It was handled beautifully. We couldn’t hear the questions, but I’m going to safely assume National Geographic just asked him vague questions to allow him to tell us what he went through — his thoughts on 9/11 and the days after. It also gave gave Bush an opportunity to explain why he stayed with the kids that day in the classroom. He explained that as a leader he needed to show calm and strength during the crisis.

YouTube

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Another great special aired on the Discovery Channel and covered the building of the new towers and the memorial. This special took us behind the scenes. The most significant part would be the tridents from the original building going into the new building. It just slipped right into place and one of the men said, “It wanted to be home.” We also learned that vehicles damaged on 9/11 have been inside a hangar at JFK for the past 10 years and they’ll finally see the sun again when unveiled at the memorial.

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It is always amusing to hear actors and actresses venture into the unfamiliar territory of politics when interviewers are cruel enough to broach such issues. Sadly, actress Mila Kunis is no exception to that Hollyweird tendency toward guffaw inducing political bloviating. Naturally and in keeping with most of the rest of the industry, in a new interview she’s disgorging that prosaic, ill-conceived, left-wing trope that she heard somewhere or another that serves as the basis of her “opinion.”

Of course she’s all a-gush over The One. “I love Barack Obama, I voted for him and I will forever be proud of my vote,” she is reported as saying to Britain’s Stylist magazine.

Kunis, it appears, considers herself highly informed about politics and most especially on how wonderfully she thinks Obama is doing in office. Conversely, she seems blissfully unaware of the zero job growth we just experienced not to mention the highest unemployment this country has experienced since The Great Depression. She seems also completely ignorant of the trillions of dollars of debt that Obama has piled up.

Still, she is sure that the compromises that she thinks Obama made in recent economic policies are going to hurt us.

“I think America is in a very temperamental state, and the decision that was made and the compromises made mean, in my opinion, that people are going to pay for a very long time,” she said.

Well, if she means the mess that is ObamaCare, we most certainly will be paying “for a very long time.” But I doubt that is what she’s on about.

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Hello again, Big Hollywood. First a brief recap to get you up to speed…

The favorite part of our weekly box office predictions is Sensei White Lotus choosing which film will open at #1. That skill might seem simple enough, but over time you discover how difficult it can be to keep a streak alive. With that in mind, Sensei’s streak of calling the correct #1 film currently sits at 17 straight weeks.

“Shootings will continue until morale and box office numbers improve…”

Every Monday (after weekend box office actuals have been determined) we score how Sensei’s predictions did in what we call the “Box Office Fallout.” You’ll find a record of Sensei’s “fallouts” in the prediction archive here. Sensei also writes various essays on film topics while building his streaks. You’ll find all such essays in the archive here.

Furthermore, if Sensei calls the correct #1 film this weekend, he’ll match his longest streak ever (18 weeks). So no pressure.

Nevertheless, enjoy Sensei’s inaugural weekend predictions.

1. The Help (16 million)  — Wins but will be close. The film enjoys very strong audience word-of-mouth like a certain other box office over- performer called The Blind Side (remember that success story, Hollywood?). The Help will continue in the same trajectory to another weekend win.

2. Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (13.5 million)  – The problem is that the film’s screen count and genre are in line with similar films like Insidious and The Messengers, which opened in a similar range of $12-14 million. Sub-par reviews won’t help.

3. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes  (10.6 million) — Other films are not performing well  in the August box office doldrums. This bodes well for Rise to post another higher than expected weekend gross.

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A year ago us, like many of you, we grew frustrated with the constant bias often exercised in the entertainment industry. Constantly, talent we know and love would be subjected to character assassination because of their personal beliefs (this shout out’s to you, Angie Harmon). All this done under the guise’ of “objective.” “Objective?” Nothing could be further from the truth.

To influence change we decided to not only play their game, but to play it better.

So we started our own site MovieCriticAssassins.com. We created our own pseudonymous Sensei White Lotus and Master Iron Fist. Through our anonymity we deprived anyone of using personal attacks, while also holding the ability to “tell like it is” in the industry we love so much.

Since that time we’ve developed a following through Sensei’s unique essays and box office predictions, as well as Master Iron Fist’s unfiltered commentary on the aforementioned biases (more often referred to as “verbal executions”). We aspire to be muckrakers and to offer sound, firm analysis while also joining in on Big Hollywood’s mission to provide accountability within the entertainment industry.

We are honored and thrilled to join this community at long last.

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Ever since I saw “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” as a kid, I knew I wanted to make movies. Ever since I dated a liberal as an adult, I knew I wanted to fight for liberty. Growing up, I was never interested in politics. My imagination was too big to worry about trivial matters such as real life. I had too many movie ideas waiting to be shot in my backyard.

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But during the height of the 2008 election it was impossible to ignore politics, especially while I was in film school and living in Seattle (where I reside). I knew I disagreed with my instructors and girlfriend at the time, but I couldn’t quite articulate why. I was always proud to be an American, but it wasn’t until I educated myself in America’s founding that I realized just how badass America really is. This knowledge gave me the ammo I needed to fight back.

I always knew the power of film as a medium, but it wasn’t until I became politically active that I became aware of just how important this tool really is. The left have become masters at utilizing liberal subtext in their work to influence their audience. The problem is that our side doesn’t utilize this medium as effectively as they can. We don’t have Hollywood, but we do have the internet. Yet simply producing a video about conservatism does not a captivating video make. It’s not just about the content of the video, or the information written on the screen. It’s about connecting emotionally with your audience. There is only one real way to do this: storytelling. (more…)

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Someone needs to take away Matt Damon’s “word of the day” handbook before he hurts himself.

And what is this nonsense about teachers getting a “shitty salary.” GOOD teachers should be (and are) paid very well, especially when you factor in their lucrative benefits and the fact that they receive summers off. This has been documented time and again. The problem is that bad teachers are paid just as well and the damage they do to our schools and children is impossible to overstate.

My family is packed with teachers, and very good ones. What they do is important and to say that they’ve made a difference in the lives of their students doesn’t begin to cover it. But this “preciousness” attached to teaching is nothing more than a political ploy. The Left is using the teaching profession as a way to strengthen corrupt pubic unions and increase the government payroll — two ways to capture political power and create more Democrats.

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Ed. Note: Please make Deanna feel welcome here at Big Hollywood . Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship. –JN

When you discover you just spent more than $10 to see pretty much the worst movie EVER made, can anything give you comfort?
I didn’t think so … especially when my mind started wandering about 15 minutes into ‘Cowboys and Aliens’ and the thrill of seeing Daniel Craig in chaps had worn off …

Then, I had one of those moments. It was the moment I realized that greatness could arise from the ashes of a ridiculously dumb movie plot … the hope came in the person of Harrison Ford.

Because seriously, no matter how old he gets, Harrison Ford can still work it …(kinda like Sean Connery … always sexy) … But a bad movie is still a bad movie … so, I slipped into stupid-movie, nap mode … then … it happened AGAIN. …

This ridiculously asinine excuse for a movie (thank you, Stephan Spielberg) about aliens stealing town folk from an old west mining town to ‘see how they tick’ so they could annihilate the human race, started to become a perfectly normal paradigm of how the left is infiltrating every aspect of our lives. And in case you hadn’t figured it out yet … the left are the aliens and us red-blooded conservatives are the cowboys.

Basically, in the sandstone hills and mountains of what looks like Texas or New Mexico, the aliens have imbedded this colossally large space ship underground and it sticks up out of the ground like a tower (and totally doesn’t blend in, btw).

The aliens, on occasion, swoop into town in their metal spaceships and throw out these rope lassos from the sky and round up people, pulling them bungee cord style behind their spaceships.

Once aboard the mothership, the townspeople are forced to stare into the light for some sort of brainwashing before being dissected by the brutally disgusting aliens whose hands come out of their chests in this terriblby grotesque manner.

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Most of our work on this site involves pointing out the shocking bias, political and economic ignorance, and general bad behavior of Hollywood movers and shakers.  Imagine my shock, surprise and glee to run across this excerpt from a recent GQ interview with the Marine Corps’ favorite actress…

…Mila Kunis:

GQ: Your new movie is called Friends with Benefits. Ever been in one of those relationships?

Mila Kunis: Oy. I haven’t, but I can give you my stance on it: It’s like communism — good in theory, in execution it fails. Friends of mine have done it, and it never ends well. Why do people put themselves through that torture?

Wait, did a young, on the rise actress just call Communism a great failure?  Did she just say that it may sound good in practice but never works?  By golly, I think she did!

And that’s pretty awesome.  From this quote can we determine that Ms. Kunis is a Randian Libertarian?  We know based on her selection of film work and various photo shoots that she most likely isn’t a member of the Family Leaders crowd.  Should we make a YouTube video and offer her a blog spot on Big Hollywood?

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Ed. Note:  Please welcome Mark to the Big Hollywood family. We want him to return.

It took forty years, but I’m finally on a roll. In writing fiction, that is.

Back in 1970, I was an eighteen year old, budding virtuoso on acoustic fingerstyle guitar, the kind of stuff Leo Kottke and John Fahey were doing. I was poor, and figured that in order to develop my music as I desired, I’d need a separate income. I was going to junior college, and fell in love with creative writing. Foolishly (hey, I was young!), I became convinced I could make a good living as a writer, and decided to pursue that parallel to my practice of music.

You can hear some of my music here and watch a few videos here:

Fast forward to 9/11/2001. I’d already caught on to reading early bloggers like Instapundit when the monsters struck the Twin Towers. I was shaken and infuriated to the core, and then discovered I had coronary disease after a heart attack three days later. I recovered with two implanted stents. I was not yet fifty, had yet to make a dime on either my music or prose, and now I was feeling mortal, yet patriotic like never before. So I got on the bandwagon and began blogging as Sunny Days in Heaven, a conservative Catholic blog that attracted 50 or 60 readers on a good day. Never had an Instalanche.

I blogged a few years with diminishing returns, and was going to quit when a start-up, Spero News, asked me to contribute. Just then, a Hollywood promo agency decided that bloggers could help sell a movie, and began inviting them to screenings. Free movies? Sign me up.

The first movie I reviewed was the delightful and fun, Serenity. I predicted it would be a smash hit. That was not to be, alas. 

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Thanks to Jack Webb’s inviting me to write for “Dragnet,” I became a proud member of the WGA back in the late 60s, but the honeymoon came to an unseemly end at a strike meeting a few years later.  Because the Guild had decided to try dividing the opposition by allowing independent production companies to keep their doors open during the strike, so long as they agreed to abide retroactively by the final contract, I, who was then employed by Talent Associates, found myself in the odd position of crossing a picket line in the morning and leaving my office to carry a picket sign from 3-4 in the afternoon.

At the strike meeting, someone had suggested that because a number of us would be gainfully employed for the duration of the work stoppage, we should have to kick in an additional 3% to the strike fund.  That seemed fair to me, so I raised my hand along with just about everyone else.

Then another writer suggested that because the networks would be using re-runs in order to keep product on the air, the same 3% levy should be placed on residual payments.  That seemed an equally fair notion.  This time, however, when I raised my hand, I found I was one of very few.

That was my initial wake-up call.  The second occurred during a strike meeting in the 80s, when our negotiating committee reported that we had come to terms on DVDs.  We were agreeing to accept 1.2% of producer’s gross.  Oh, and by the way, it would pertain only to movies produced after 1971.

When I saw Julius Epstein trudging up the aisle, it dawned on me that the Guild had just screwed him out of “Casablanca,” not to mention dozens of other Warner Brothers classics of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, that he’d co-scripted with his late brother, Phil.

Why, I wondered, hadn’t the Guild settled for, say, just 1% of producers gross, but insisted that the deal cover every movie going back to “The Great Train Robbery”?

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Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge, and here for part 4 on Breitbart’s righteous Gen-X indignation.

Generation Y’s great filmmakers have not yet arrived. And don’t expect too many of them.

William Strauss and Neil Howe argue in their fourth book of generational theory, Millennials Rising, that the babies born from 1982 through 2003 are part of a “Civic” generation. This is the same as the GI Generation (the accurately named “Greatest Generation”) born from 1901-1924 who went through World War II as young adults.

The Greatest provided us with many cinematic giants but none made a deeper footprint on the 20^th century than Walt Disney. The Disney Effect came not just in the artistry of his films but his technological innovations and capitalist ventures. He constructed a billion-dollar corporation which has changed our lives. That’s what leaders of Civic generations do: build transformative institutions.

The Millennial Generation has already seen our Walt Disney emerge and release his equivalent of “Steamboat Willie.” It’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook is only the primitive beginning of what he’ll build in the coming decades. Today because of our saturation in cartoons we fail to appreciate how groundbreaking “Steamboat Willie” and “Snow White” were to a world that had never seen such creatures. And so it shall go with Facebook in a few decades’ time.

Narrative films and television programs were America’s unifying, transformative cultural experience of the 20^th century. Computers, the internet, and technology are their equivalent for the 21^st. (more…)

Click here for Part 1 on Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda, here for Part 2 on Roger L. Simon’s Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine and here for part 3 on David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge.

A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too. (more…)

Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975. (more…)

A common refrain used by progressives against conservatives is a deconstructionist war against the concept that there even is such a thing as the Left: “There’s so much diversity and disagreement in ‘the Left’ that you can’t just call it ‘the Left.’”

This is just a defense mechanism the leftist employs to avoid having to actually examine their movement. Cult members need to have criticism of their cult obscured. It’s the equivalent of “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club…”

There’s a grain of truth here, though. All leftists share core ideas – particularly hatred of conservatives and an infinite faith in big government – but there is a range of thought, not unlike denominations within religions. There are variations in doctrine and tactics between Marxists, Alinskyites, Mother Jones populist progressives, Nation socialists, Daily Kos Democrats, Counterpunch communists, and Dissent social democrats. Grouping them all together under the label “the Left” is no more inaccurate than describing Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans as Christian.

Today, thanks to the extraordinary journalism and research of Ben Shapiro for his must-read book Primetime Propaganda, the focus is on one “church” in particular: the Hollywood Left. (more…)

X-Men: First Class had virtually everything going against it in pre-production– series fatigue (it’s the fifth entry in Fox’s X-Men saga), none of the original actors in starring roles, 1960s period costumes–on paper, it seemed like the ultimate studio cash-in, only to be outdone by the inevitable X-Men in Space: Electric Space Boogaloo from Space (in 3D!). Fortunately, it’s nothing of the sort.

Despite many flaws common to the superhero genre, First Class is quite possibly the best film in the series, not because it’s chock full of impressive special effects and action, but because broiling beneath its main characters’ performances are ideas–not just any ideas, but the central political and philosophical questions of the film’s time period whose minutiae our modern pundits still grapple over. This is not so much a review as a jumping-off point for discussion, so beware of spoilers ahead.

First Class focuses on young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor X (James McAvoy), at this point known as Erik Lehnshnerr and Charles Xavier, framing their worldviews through their respective experiences of World War II. Magneto is a Holocaust survivor forced to watch his own mother gunned down by Sebastian Shaw (a scenery-chewing Kevin Bacon), while X, though British, lives untouched by the war in New York, comfortable and affluent. As such, Magneto manifests the deep cynicism of Europeans, who decades before the first world war prophesied that civilization would make war a thing of the past, and X embodies the optimism of his young, victorious, prosperous nation.

If the film has one fatal flaw, it’s that McAvoy’s Professor X is a monstrously one-dimensional good guy–perfectly empathetic, perfectly charismatic, perfectly humble. He’s given a few humanizing moments of triviality in the first act, but once the central conflict kicks in, he merely serves as the angelic foil to the deeply tormented, deeply human, and deeply moving Magneto. Michael Fassbender, best known for his brief turn in Inglourious Basterds, deserves an Oscar nomination for his work here. He takes charge of the role with intimidating physicality, harnessing intense emotions into subtle shifts in Magneto’s inevitable path to top-hat-and-cape-wearing, mustache-tweaking evil. Yes, though we know exactly where he’s going, Fassbender injects suspense into the actual mechanics of the transformation; we care about him, sitting mortified but silently cheering when he gets his moment of revenge. (more…)

There’s a theory that in order to ensure you never get hassled again, you walk up to the biggest guy in the room and knock him on his butt.  If you win, no one will ever mess with you because you knocked the biggest guy in the room on his butt.  And even if he gets up and pounds you into the ground, people will still avoid messing with you because you were crazy enough to try to knock the biggest guy in the room on his butt.

In the battle for the soul of our country, popular culture is the biggest guy in the room.  And it’s time that conservatives took a swing.  The Powerline Prize contest is a potential haymaker in one of the most important battles of our campaign.

Here’s how it describes itself:

The Power Line Prize of $100,000 will be awarded to whoever can most effectively and creatively dramatize the significance of the federal debt crisis. Prizes will also be awarded to the runner-up and two third-place finishers. Anyone can enter the contest—individuals, companies (e.g., advertising agencies) or any other entity, as long as the contest rules are followed. Any creative product is eligible: videos, songs, paintings, screenplays, Power Point presentations, essays, performance art, or anything else, as long as the product is unique to the contest and has not previously been published or otherwise entered the public domain. Entries may address the federal debt crisis in its entirety, or a specific aspect of the debt crisis, such as: the impact of the debt crisis on the young; the role played by the “stimulus” (Where did the money go? Why didn’t it stimulate?); how entitlements drive the debt crisis; the current federal deficit; how the debt crisis impacts the economy; or any other aspect of the debt crisis. The contest is non-partisan. Its purpose is to inform the public about the federal debt crisis.

Conservatives often dismiss the world of art as a milieu of posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.  This is because an enormous amount of what is today labeled as “art” is manufactured by   posing half-wits seeking government subsidies for the unsellable, ridiculous and boring crap they churn out for the benefit of goateed posers and other suckers.

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One of the reliable joys in entertainment during the Bush years was knowing that despite the relentless, insipid hate passed off as comedy about our President, every week South Park would serve up truly independent, politically incorrect satire which skewered actual sacred cows. When virtually all players in the film and TV industry were brown nosing Al Gore as though they were born without lungs, Trey Parker and Matt Stone mercilessly mocked him. When Hurrican Katrina was the cause du’jour for leftist hatemongers, fictional 4th graders Kyle and Stan called them out for exploiting the tragedy. And, even early on in the show, the hyperventilating, totalitarian dark side of the green movement and multicultural “tolerance” received scathing send ups.

L'homme s'accroche amèrement.

Yet since Obama’s election, their aim has tilted right. While they revisited the nonpartisan issue of censorship over fear of jihadist violence in their 200th episode, the only overtly political targets of the past two seasons have been Glenn Beck in “Dances with Smurfs” and the Tea Party in last week’s episode, “TMI.” In “Smurfs,” Cartman starts to do the school’s morning announcements, quickly transforming into a conspiratorial nut who accuses the school president of murdering the titular cartoon characters. Now, Glenn Beck’s TV show is certainly ripe for parody (not a fan myself), but the episode plays as though Parker & Stone have only seen second-hand accounts of the program (which they’ve admitted regarding other episodes’ source material), and the satire, because it’s only mocking a straw man version of Beck, lacks the bite of their previous work.

In the same way, on “TMI” (spoilers ahead), South Park rips on the Tea Party– which, again, could be a source of truly funny jokes, even mean-spirited ones– with recycled second-hand stereotypes.  Cartman’s principal sends him to a counselor when he measures his and his classmates’ penis sizes. Eventually, the counselor recommends an anger management session, wherein a Tea Party member complains about “stupid-ass blind liberals” while wearing tea bags draped over a tri-corner hat. The counselor quickly surmises that all the anger management attendees act out because of insecurity over their penis sizes. (more…)