From the Associated Press:

The world’s highest-grossing film and one of the most awarded TV shows are also some of the greenest productions around.

“Avatar” and “30 Rock” were among the winners of the 2010 Environmental Media Association awards on Saturday night, which recognized individuals, organizations and productions that help increase public awareness of environmental issues.

The awards were presented at an eco-friendly ceremony at Warner Bros. Studios that featured organic food and compostable dinnerware. Actors Olivia Munn and Jason Ritter hosted the event, which was sponsored by one of Hollywood’s favorite green-mobiles, Toyota Prius.

Other productions recognized for spreading a green message were the documentary “Gasland” and TV shows “Bones,” “Handy Manny,” “Living With Ed” and “Lights, Camera, Take Action! Backstage With Disney’s Friends for Change.” (more…)

Howard Zinn wants teachers to bring in whatever materials they want to your child’s class room. He wants them to use their own judgement to teach whatever they think is appropriate. He wants them to subvert the rules regarding the approved curriculum at the school you are paying for. Of course, if Zinn’s advice is followed, there is nothing keeping a teacher from bringing materials related to Holocaust denial, or 9/11 conspiracies or creationism into the class room, as well. Unless Zinn is recommending only HIS enlightened view of history should be secretly brought into the classroom.

There are some very important people in our country who have aligned themselves with Zinn. With his philosophy. With his view of history. With his view of the United States. And, with his strategy for getting his message into the public schools outside of the legal construct of School Boards and State Departments of Education.

They made a film of his book.  They walked the red carpet and they posed with the man they admired.  He was the inspiration for their film and they spoke of him glowingly, almost like he was a hero.  They began their film with him striding out alone onto a stage in a theatre full of admirers.  It was his way of taking a curtain call (a standing ovation, by the way) before the show even began. (more…)

Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.”

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (more…)

Something must be seriously wrong with “Killshot,” the straight-to-video flick starring the resurgent Mickey Rourke. The movie features not just Rourke, but rising star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Diane Lane, Rosario Dawson and Thomas Jane – reputable actors, all.

And it’s under the direction of John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”), working from an Elmore Leonard story. And it still rocketed past every movie theater save one in Arizona earlier this year, netting a measly $18,000?

The film, heading to DVD May 26, deserved a better fate. (more…)