You would think Piers Morgan would follow up with a question about Sean Penn’s admiration and support of Hugo Chavez, but instead, Morgan ignores this glaring opening and uses the opportunity to attack Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper.

Obama’s Palace Guards are … everywhere.

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How old do you think Sean Penn is in drug years?

Via Fox News:

If Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum ends up in the White House, Sean Penn won’t be happy about it.

“I don’t want to see Rick Santorum be president because I would like to see people in trouble in this country getting out of it,” the actor and liberal activist said on CNN  Monday night. “I don’t want to see a narrow-minded leadership encourage a narrow-minded Congress.”

(more…)

TV talker Regis Philbin isn’t as politically chatty as, say, Sean Penn or Tim Robbins. But Philbin opens up about one particular politician in his new book, “How I Got This Way.”

Seems a future politician named Ronald Reagan made quite an impression on Philbin. The former “Live! With Regis and Kelly” star devotes 12 pages in his new book to the conservative icon.

Philbin was hosting a live post-news talk show at the time – 1962 – and he was hungry for guests. So when he learned that the star of “Knute Rockne All American” was available, the affable Philbin jumped at the chance to book him.

The two talked a little about life in general and sports in particular given Reagan’s background as both an athlete and sports broadcaster. They avoided politics all together.

“It was unthinkable back then that he would go on to become the governor of California and, eventually, the president of the United States!” Philbin writes in his typically breathless style.

The talk show host recalls the reaction Reagan had on not just him but the studio audience.

(more…)

The new Showtime series ‘Homeland’ is a CIA thriller based on the Israeli television series ‘Hatufim’ (Prisoners of War). The Israeli version follows two IDF reservists after they are released from 17 years of captivity in Syria and how their lives are different after returning home.

The American version, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m., centers on Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a strong but flawed CIA officer trying not to repeat mistakes that led to the 9/11 attacks. She learns from a condemned Iraqi informant that “an American prisoner of war has been turned.”

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As far as she knows, there are no American prisoners of war. Ten months later, U.S. Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, presumed dead for the past eight years, is recovered from Baghdad during a raid on a militant compound. Despite all of the pride flowing through the CIA and military circles regarding his recovery, Carrie immediately suspects Sgt. Brody is the “turned” American she had been warned about and begins an illegal surveillance of his home. The viewer is left to wonder who the villain really is.

Growing up in the 1980s, Hollywood never left you wondering who the bad guys were going to be. It was the Russians. The Americans were always the good guys, fighting against Communists to preserve the American way of life. In the years after 9/11 this is not the case.

(more…)

A couple of weeks ago, we brought your attention to anti-Tea Party remarks made by Morgan Freeman and a subsequent invite to attend an actual Tea Party from African-American organizer Ali Akbar.  Now this, via Entertainment Weekly:

Sean Penn may have a bigger foe than Mr. Hand in the Tea Party, but, still, a rep for the conservative movement is still willing to sit down and share a pizza (or, let’s face it, more likely tea) with the man who was Jeff Spicoli. After the actor appeared on Piers Morgan Tonight Friday and called the Tea Party the “Get the N-Word Out of the White House Party,” the co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots released a statement to EW, inviting Penn to meet with members of the movement.

Said Mark Meckler: “I’m fairly certain that Sean Penn has never been to a tea party or met anyone who belongs to a local tea party. I’d be happy to sit down and speak with him if he’s ever interested in really speaking with one of us and learning what we are about instead of just slandering millions of his fellow American citizens with racist hatred. This kind of rhetoric, while protected by the First Amendment, has no place in reasonable discourse in America. Then again, no one has ever accused Sean Penn of ‘reasonable discourse.’” (more…)

Seth Green doesn’t have the activist cred like fellow actors Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Danny Glover. But Green is trying to catch up in a hurry via his Twitter page.

The diminutive actor from ‘The Italian Job’ and the ‘Austin Powers’ franchise has been giving as much social media love as possible to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Via Seth Green’s Authorized Twitter Account:

(more…)

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Politico:

The video stars Kevin Spacey, Matt Damon, Sean Penn, Kristen Wiig, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen as part of the foundation’s celebrity division, pumping out ideas like not breathing to save the environment. There’s even a cameo from Bubba at the end.

(more…)

Be sure to head go listen to this week’s HomeVideodrome podcast!  This week Jim and I discuss Morgan Spurlock’s desperate need for attention, movies about eating, the turd that is Green Lantern, and how rad Jet Li movies are.  So head on over and give it a listen!

The week we have one of the best movies of the year coming to Blu-ray, Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life.’ I was hoping for a Criterion release of this, but I’ll take what I can get (rumor has it a longer cut is on the way). The only special feature to speak of is a making-of that features appreciations of Malick’s work from great filmmakers like David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, which should be worth checking out for that alone. Seeing ‘Tree of Life’ on the big screen was damn near a religious experience, I have a hard time imagining that it has the same effect at home, depending on the set-up you’re watching it on.

‘Tree of Life’ divided audiences; I went to see it twice in the theater, and both times I saw a handful of people walk out, usually during the bit with the dinosaurs. Friends who went to the theater to watch it reported seeing the same thing. Malick has become far less conventional as a filmmaker as his career has progressed, getting more and more abstract with each film. In ‘Life,’ it appears the man has almost abandoned narrative altogether, making for a film that is far less accessible than, say, ‘Badlands.’ Also, having names like Brad Pitt and Sean Penn on the poster may given some people the wrong idea as to what sort of a movie ‘Tree of Life’ is instead of having a cast simply made up of unknowns.

Regardless, it’s audacious filmmaking that hits on massive themes and deals with small, everyday events on the most enormous scale imaginable. The story of the movie has a small coming-of-age tale at its heart, but it places the theme of personal loss in the context of the very miracle of life itself. It’s a film that tugs out deep emotions in the most gentle manner possible, never resorting to cheaply manipulating the audience. If you connect with it, it’s a film that will haunt you long after you see it.

(more…)

In an interview, Penn said of his supporting role in “Terence Malick’s “Tree of Life”:

I didn’t at all find on the screen the emotion of the script, which is the most magnificent one that I’ve ever read. A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

The quote can be found in the New Yorker, where writer Richard Brody attempts to defend Malick with what can only be described as nonsense: “Penn brings an acid yellow to the glass-and-metal grays of his scenes”.

Whatever.

As a fan of Malick’s “Badlands” and “The New World,” I was eager to see “Tree,” and did so in Hollywood at the ArcLight Theatre, which might be THE premiere place on the planet for upscale movie-lovers to ply their trade. After 139 confusing, frustrating minutes the credits finally rolled, the tension in the audience broke, and more than a few people broke out laughing — and not in a good way.

“Tree of Life” has its moments, but for the most part is a pretentious mess. For what seems like a half-hour, you witness Creation — from the Big Bang to dinosaurs to Brad Pitt — and then the narrative settles down into the story of a boy’s complicated relationships with his father (Pitt) in the idyllic rural ‘burbs of 1950’s America. The only problem is that this part of the movie is told in a way that’s obviously supposed to represent the jumbled way in which we all remember our childhoods. It’s all flashes and snips and bits and pieces, and after a while you just stop caring.

(more…)

For some reason, some liberals in Hollywood like to give dictators the benefit of the doubt. Their five-decade support for Fidel Castro’s iron rule over 11 million voiceless Cubans is inexplicable. Their “Blame America First” philosophy has brought them into relationships with some of the worlds most nefarious people – like Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein.

This shouldn’t surprise us, Hollywood is a fantasy factory – so it seems that the foreign policy experience of these folks reflects more their career than it does any true understanding of the reality of the governments they so enthusiastically defend. Recently, Hollywood liberals have found a new group of dictators to support. They now heedlessly defend the nouveau authoritarians of South America, like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales.

In the most recent episode, Sean Penn wrote an op-ed in Huffington Post condemning the State Department for economic sactions against Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA. Decrying the sanctions’ unfairness, Pennsays that ‘Venezuelans live in abject poverty’. On that we agree: the plight of the poor in Venezuela is stunning. Yet Mr. Penn it seems has not stopped to think of why so many Venezuelans are so poor in such a rich country. Under Chavez’s twelve-year rule alone, Venezuela has earned close to 1 trillion dollars in oil wealth. Yet the people remain desperately poor. Lets put this in perspective, this one thousand billion dollars translates to over $130,000 per average Venezuelan family. What did Chavez do with it? It is hard to believe that after 12 years of this kind of hard income Chavez – who Penn defends so wholeheartedly – has been unable to reduce poverty. This seems to be more a reason to call for new leadership than to defend the current one. If this were the case in the United States, of a President who after holding the equivalent of three terms, as Chavez has – Mr. Penn himself would probably be calling for a change in the White House – and rightly so.

(more…)

So the perfect narrative for any movie is “David vs. Goliath.”

The whistleblower vs. the evil corporation. the tough reporter vs the corrupt politician.

the half-naked talk show host vs. a team of rambunctious houseboys.

But for the narrative to be accepted, David must be a lib, and Goliath an evil Republican.

So when these roles are reversed, in real life, it confuses the crap out of the mainstream media.

Andrew Breitbart was accused of trying to destroy a Congressman, of fabricating a scandal, of hacking social networks.

These accusations were pushed by the left, and a carnal Congressman.

So when Breitbart took the stage at Anthony Weiner’s presser, it may have been one of the greatest, “speaking truth to power” moments ever: Breitbart vindicated himself, and Weiner imploded.

As I tweeted earlier, if Breitbart were a leftist, Sean Penn would die to play him. But since he’s not: I guess it’s Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Because this battle doesn’t fit one’s assumptions, just ignore it, or mock it.

And, as Jon Stewart says about Weiner, ‘We sometimes forget these people are human’.

Remember him saying that about Palin, Cheney and Bush?

No?

(more…)

From Agence France-Presse:

Actor Sean Penn on Friday described the killing of Osama bin Laden by US troops as an act of “vengeance”. Penn, famous for his political and social activism, was at the Cannes film festival to present a risk-taking road movie, “This Must Be The Place”, in which he plays an ageing 1980s pop star in search of his father’s Nazi tormentor.

(more…)

Sit back and take in a full year’s supply of empty-headed, self-important Hollywood narcissism (is there any other kind?) courtesy of Sean Penn, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore… aka  The Usual Empty-Headed, Self-Important Suspects. 

It is good to know, though, that someone in Hollywood opposes children being forced into sex slavery. Love to hear their thoughts on ACORN, wouldn’t you? And what about Roman Polanski? Do real men forcibly rape thirteen year-old girls in Jack Nicholson’s hot tub?

Anyone?

Anyone?

Thought so.

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(more…)

Imagine my surprise upon hearing that AOL/Huffpo’s editorial policy is the following: 

Andrew Brietbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones in The Daily Caller — right down to calling him a “commie punk” and “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak” — violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched. As a result, we will no longer feature his posts on the front page.

He is welcome to continue publishing his work on HuffPost provided it adheres to our editorial guidelines, as the two posts he published on HuffPost did — guidelines that include a strict prohibition on ad hominem attacks. Our decision today recognizes that placing posts on the front page is an editorial call that elevates some posts over others, and is an indication of how seriously we take these judgment calls.

Good enough. As a website editor myself, I appreciate the idea of wanting to elevate the debate. Admittedly, I do find it more than a little creepy and totalitarian for AOL to include in that “ad hominem standard” what someone says or does elsewhere. But when you’ve been studying the Left for as long as I have, you come to expect the default setting of them wanting to control what people say. (See: Jon Stewart.) What I don’t understand, however, is what Arianna Huffington and AOL are going to do now. I can’t imagine AOL intends to take the actionable position of singling out Andrew Breitbart — discriminating against him because he’s Andrew Breitbart or conservative or something.

But herein lies AOL’s problem…

(more…)

This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards. (more…)

[Editor's Note: This list is arranged in no particular order. Read Part I here.]

6.  “Being exploited is different from being empowered ” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Often too-easily dismissed as a raunchy teen sex comedy, Fast Time was a tremendously influential and important mirror on young America in the early 1980s.  The fact that it is gut-bustlingly funny – Sean Penn’s turn as surfer/stoner Jeff Spicoli remains his only role where he doesn’t annoy me – seems to overshadow the serious undercurrents, as does the ample nudity culminating in the unforgettable swimming pool scene starring the glorious Phoebe Cates.

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However, there is a very, very dark undercurrent to this movie that provides a serious lesson to young people.  Jennifer Jason-Leigh’s Stacy is a pretty but not-so-bright 15/16 year old who does not understand the difference between love and sex.  In a world of absolutely no parents (not a single one is ever seen), she tries to find love (or at least attention) by basically trying to have tacky sex with every guy she meets – and it’s heartbreaking.  She’s not “empowered” – she’s used.  The ugly scene where she loses her virginity to a guy in his 20s in a Little League dug-out staring at graffiti reading “Surf Nazis Must Die” is a better repudiation of the “hook-up” culture than a hundred lectures.

After scaring off the one guy who actually likes her for herself by trying to bed him too, she seeks comfort underneath his skanky pal.  A grim, humiliating encounter in a pool house leaves her pregnant and she immediately seeks an abortion.  Regardless of one’s stand on the life issue, one cannot be anything other than horrified at how the fact she sees herself as literally nothing but a mere receptacle leads her to feel nothing at all about her decision. (more…)

We conservatives spend a lot of time criticizing Hollywood’s failings, calling out its errors and pointing to its hypocrisies – and this is entirely appropriate since so much of the crap spewing out of the Tinseltown cookie cutter is borderline commie nitwittery masquerading as profundity.  But if nothing good ever came out of Hollywood – if everything it produced hewed to the same lame party-line pinkoism rejected everywhere except in Westside L.A., university faculty lounges, and Washington, D.C. – we all would have stopped paying attention long ago.

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And many conservatives have.  Many of us have thrown our hands in the air and opted out of popular culture completely, exhausted from enduring liberal sucker punches buried within crummy flicks about magic robots battling Dick Cheney vampire clones that we pay $12.50 to see in theaters maintained at the hygiene level of your average bus station men’s room.  You can hardly blame them for giving up.

But as tempting as it is to withdraw from the battlefield, to dig in and hope it somehow changes, surrender was never an option.  This is our culture, not theirs.  And they don’t get to control it. 

The fact is that among the detritus of American popular culture, there are voices of sanity.  Sure, they are nearly drowned out by over-praised hacks like Aaron Sorkin and over-indulged clowns like Oliver Stone.  Yet, occasionally, Hollywood has allowed positive, conservative messages to slip through. (more…)

I’ve never been called a son of God before.

Why it’s a left-wing film

Writer/director Tim Robbins has never made any secret of the fact that his masterpiece (and like every film in my Top 10, this is a masterpiece) “Dead Man Walking” was produced in the hopes of turning people against the death penalty, and the way he goes about it is ingenious. Combining two true stories involving Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun and anti-death penalty activist, Robbins makes his case from a strictly Christian point of view. But first he resolutely overcomes every possible objection those who disagree with him might have as far as how he presents his side of the argument.

Nothing in the story is manipulated. The man being executed, Matthew Poncelot (an amazing Sean Penn), is guilty as hell. For kicks, after finding them innocently necking in the woods, he and a buddy rape a teenage girl and then viciously murder both her and her boyfriend in cold blood. Covered in swastika tattoos, Poncelot rants about his love for Hitler, his desire to be an anti-American terrorist, and openly taunts the victims’ families. It’s hard to imagine a better candidate for execution.

Robbins also doesn’t shy away from showing us the raw anguish, anger and personal fallout the parents of the two victims still live with a full six-years after the loss of their beloved children. All four want this man executed and the film gives them every opportunity they deserve to make intelligent, compassionate, and logical arguments for why capital punishment is just and necessary. This isn’t about bloodlust. This is about justice and knowing that the man who punched a permanent hole in their lives, a hole that will never heal, is no longer allowed to enjoy what he ruthlessly took from others — life. These decent, everyday people have also thought well beyond the notion of an eye for an eye. When Robbins allows Clyde Percy (R. Lee Ermey, in a small but memorable role), the father of the murdered girl, to make the irrefutable argument that giving a death row inmate life in prison puts other inmates and prison guards at risk, you know this isn’t Hollywood’s typical shallow, one-sided approach to the issue du jour. (more…)

How low can Sean Penn and his Hollywood helpers stoop when it comes to manufacturing convenient political fiction dressed up as fact for the tarnished silver screen? When you see an editorial in the Washington Post that’s this bad, this low, it would seem.

Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

Penn didn’t simply jump the shark with Fair Game, he looks to have gone full-Fonzi with a jacket and shades. Sadly, such a lack of integrity and appreciation for truth isn’t limited to Hollywood these days. Lies, like mistakes, reverberate and should have consequences when they are this dishonest and glaring. But don’t look for a currently mostly liberal Washington to hold Penn, or Hollywood, to account for what amounts to blatant dishonesty when it comes to America’s recent political history. (more…)

So over Thanksgiving I went to Berlin, which is in Germany. I went there strictly for fun, for it had nothing to do with hormonal treatments. Those ended years ago. Anyway, the high point was the DDR museum, otherwise known as The Museum of the German Democratic Republic.

There you could experience a sad moment in history – when East Germany existed (if you could call it an existence).

The museum offers the visitor a typical day in socialism, featuring real artifacts from clothes to coffee. You can sort through closets, walk through a concrete slab living room, fiddle with a lonely pressure cooker on a stove.

Imagine crawling through Sean Penn’s brain.

You can steer an actual Trabant, possibly the worst car ever made. Legend has it, that there was no such thing as a new Trabant. A dead one was just patched back up and sent out on the road. Like Joan Rivers.

And of course, there’s GDR’s first and only attempt at creating a microchip. It cost 100 times more than ours, which was already an antique by then. East German leaders beamed with pride over the prototype, while the actual chip NEVER got made.

The museum is worth the long flight, for it is not simply a wry commentary on life without aspirations, but a salute to capitalism, a salute to us. From every corner of the museum, the displays told the viewer why their economy failed, why nothing worked, and how a desperate people dreamed of western goods. (more…)

Some films end with revelations that strengthen the story and leave audiences impressed by a well-orchestrated twist. Other endings undercut the stories that preceded them and make audiences wonder why they even bothered paying attention. “Fair Game,” the new film that chronicles the conspiratorial story of former CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), features the second type of ending when, after focusing on a White House conspiracy, it reveals the truth about who leaked Plame’s identity to the media. 

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“Fair Game” is based on a book written by Plame and former ambassador Wilson. It begins by introducing Plame, a CIA operative, who is on a secret mission in Kuala Lampur. She eventually returns home to her husband and the two spend an evening out to dinner with their friends. Her friends don’t know that Plame is working for the CIA and the couple want to keep it that way.

According to the film, the Vice President’s office soon requests that someone should travel to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from that country. At the time, the Bush administration was reviewing intelligence reports about Iraq’s leader and the threat that he posed to the United States. Plame supports sending her husband to Niger to investigate the reports. After his trip, Wilson returns to the United States and reports that a sale of uranium didn’t occur.

To publicize his discovery and to undermine President Bush’s rhetoric about the threat that Hussein posed, Wilson submits a column to the New York Times. In the article, he notes that such a deal had not occurred. The publication of that article occurs halfway through “Fair Game” and the rest of the story focuses on the war that the Bush administration waged against Wilson and his wife, whose identity was eventually leaked to columnist Robert Novak. The filmmakers argue that the Bush administration orchestrated the leak and sought to undercut the credibility of Wilson and Plame. (more…)