The Los Angeles Times has a sordid history of race baiting in its effort to pump up its progressive bonafides, despite a historic lack of diversity in their own staff. Their latest diatribe is a recent attack on Hollywood for “whitewashing” the Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender. They were quickly followed in lock step by the Huffington Post, publishing an AP article that seemed to be cribbed from the Times. And then the industry blog The Wrap took things a step further by calling this a “White Summer” for the “lack of diversity” in Hollywood films this season. Hear that Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, Common, Jaden Smith, Queen Latifah? You don’t have any movies this summer. Uh, wait.

Here’s the crux of their discontent. Prince of Persia and The Last Airbender have male leads played by white actors; Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia and Noah Ringer as Aang in ‘The Last Airbender. So, like the predictable hacks they are, they jumped on the racism argument. Dancing around the “R” word by reciting the industry’s history of casting white actors in non-white roles.

Yes, that did happen a lot in the past, and it does happen on occasion now. But here’s where the stupidity starts. Persians, aka Iranians, are ethnically white. In fact, most people of Eurasian stock are considered ethnically white. Casting a white actor as a Persian is hardly a racially insensitive move. And the Last Airbender is directed by Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan, who took exception to the criticisms his movie has gotten on this subject. (more…)

Double standards are often nothing of the sort, and charges of double standards are often dodges by the disingenuous designed to convince the sophomoric that adhering to any kind of standard is inherently unjust.  But then there are some actual double standards that are so shamelessly transparent that one should be embarrassed to even utter them.

Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood-Elsewhere.com does not seem to be embarrassed.  He recently unleashed the full power of his ire upon the Pope over the recent child abuse accusations.  And his ire is awesome to behold, as we can learn from the plugs and testimonials his website continuously flashes – plugs testifying to his influence from the very same Hollywoodoids whose toes he claims to be willing to tread upon with abandon.

In short, Wells supports the wacky idea that a couple of well-known atheists should somehow arrest Pope Benedict on his trip to England:

I for one would be impressed and delighted if author and noted biologist and author Richard Dawkins and author Christopher Hitchens could manage to actually arrest Pope Benedict for crimes against humanity during a planned visit to England in September. The Pope “is not above or outside the law,” Hitchens has said. “The institutionalized concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.”

Certainly, the spectacle of the doddering Dawkins and the perpetually pickled Hitchens (who is not a dumb guy, is a tireless advocate against dictators and thugs, and really ought to know better) trying to cuff and stuff the pontiff would be amusing – especially watching the Pope’s unforgiving security team go to town upon them.  Advantage Hitchens – he’d be unlikely to feel a thing.  (more…)

One of the greatest ironies of so called “progressive politics” is that it destroys what it’s supposed to save. California has been run by statist politicians for over 30 years now, and most of them would call themselves “progressive.” The alleged goals of progressives are to take care of “the little guy”; they’re supposed to make a society that’s more “open and fair.” In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Progressive politics have the net effect of doing the reverse of everything it claims to be about.

I’ll be getting into that in detail in another series of articles, but we’re here to talk about Hollywood. Hollywood was once a conservative town run by immigrants who believed in the American way. Many of the stars fought in WWII and acted in patriotic movies. But there was a labor struggle in Hollywood starting with the unions, which began to get infiltrated by communists and socialists in the 1930s. They made more and more demands of the studios that they didn’t like. In 1947, the studio bosses decided to take advantage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with which Senator Joseph McCarthy had no direct involvement despite misinformation to the contrary. The Hollywood studio bosses wanted to bust up the unions and the method they used was the HUAC investigations and the blacklist. (more…)

Oliver Stone’s latest desperate grasp at relevance is a new cable series that, among other things, promises to finally place der Furher into der context.  Now, this is where I’m supposed to be outraged, but I’m just not feeling it.  Ollie, I know you’d like us to believe that this isn’t just a pathetic stunt, that this brainstorm was inspired by some peyote-spawned fire demon’s whisperings inside your drug-addled cerebellum and that if we’re truly edgy we won’t dare ignore your remarkable vision.  But I think you’re once again just trying to freak out the squares and this square, for one, is mighty bored.

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense. (more…)

…NO FEAR!
“We The People” are here to take back our house!

IF YOU’RE A FEMINIST–MAKE UP
IF YOU’RE A CHAUVINIST–CATCH UP
IF YOU’RE A MODERATE–FESS UP
IF YOU LEAN RIGHT–STRAIGHTEN UP
IF YOU’R A LIBERAL/PROGRESSIVE…
WHATEVER-GIDDY UP & MOVE ON

Fear

When preaching to the choir, one directs one’s lessons to those who already agree.  Conversely, those who otherwise might listen and gain something useful get nothing.  More on that as this inter-connected series of observations comes to an end.

American Icon: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.”

Vast, determined, highly successful forces and superior technologies dominated the theaters of WWII prior to America’s entry into the conflict after Pearl Harbor in 1941.  The Manhattan Project began in August of 1942, a couple of months before General George Patton invaded North Africa.  Character, strategy, and tactics played as large a role in dealing with Panzer and Tiger tanks as did Patton’s Shermans, of course, because firepower alone was insufficient in itself.  But the defeat of one totalitarian threat by 1945 was not apt to make much difference in taking down another in a place where school children were being trained to fight to the death for the Empire— with sharpened sticks.  The Manhattan Project, through funding, research, experimentation, design, development and production, met the challenge and made the difference. (more…)