That director Doug Liman’s “Fair Game” would shamelessly lie on the facts when it came to filming the story of “Plamegate” was never in doubt. Lying left-wing propagandists producing lying left-wing propaganda? Color me shocked. What did surprise me, however, was Liman’s decision to push the lies so far as to completely negate the only part of the story that might have actually worked — the central relationship between former Ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn)and his wife, CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts). This lie, which surrounds the infamous Vanity Fair spread, is so audacious and obvious that it destroys any investment one might have in the human drama –which might help to explain the thus far indifferent reception the film’s receiving at the box office. Even those looking for big screen affirmation of their Bush Derangement Syndrome can only suspend so much disbelief.

Liman introduces Plame as a Jack Ryanette, a CIA field agent undercover in the big bad Middle East muscling bad guys, recruiting spies, and at the center of much of the activity involving the pre-Iraq War intelligence gathering  with respect to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. Her husband, a former diplomat with extensive experience in Iraq and Africa, runs some sort of international business out of the couple’s lovely home with two young children constantly underfoot.

As part of the case for war, the CIA and the White House are both eager to verify a British intelligence report (that the British stand by to this day) that claims Saddam sought the purchase of enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Because of Wilson’s experience and contacts, Plame is asked by her superior to draft something up explaining why her husband would be qualified to go to Niger and report back on the lay of the land. She does, and in 2002 Wilson goes and finds no evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping.  Afterwards, in his State of the Union, President Bush uses those now famous 16 words that seem to contradict Wilson’s report and in turn Wilson decides to go public with a New York Times op-ed that essentially claims the president knowingly lied. (more…)

President Barack Obama is about to learn that Hollywood is the ultimate fair-weather friend, where one hit and especially one flop can change everything about the way a majority of the power in this town will publicly support and stand by you. There’s only one thing these people hate more than everyday Americans and that’s the stench that emanates from a loser. So insecure are they over their own status that when faced with a public failure, the very first instinct these Tinseltown paragons of narcissism summon is to immediately run away out of the selfish fear that some of that stench might get on them.  

Two examples:

In 1978, a young director named Michael Cimino ascended to the very tippity-top of Tinseltown adulation with his sophomore directing effort “The Deer Hunter,” which triumphed at the box office and that year’s Oscars. Subsequently, everyone in Hollywood wanted to be like Mike. And yet, a mere two years after his out-of-nowhere rise to the top and flushed with the power of his own invincibility, Cimono went on a then-unprecedented spending spree to produce the ill-conceived “Heaven’s Gate” which would not only become the biggest financial debacle in all of Hollywood history, but effectively destroy an entire studio, United Artists. 

And thus ended Hollywood’s love affair with Michael Cimino. Oh, he would go on to make a few more films but by most definitions, the toast of Hollywood’s career was all but dead and he would never truly receive a second chance.

Fast-forward to 2008 when a young Senator named Barack Obama ascended to the very tippity-top of Hollywood adulation and won the highest office in the land. Everyone in left-wing Hollywood wanted to be like Barack. And then, right after his out-of-nowhere rise to the top, while still flushed with the power of his own invincibility, President Obama went on an unprecedented spending spree to produce the ill-conceived Heaven’s Gate of economic plans which would become the biggest financial debacle in generations and the Waterworld of health care plans which would prove to be more unpopular than some diseases. Overnight, the net result of both would all but destroy the hard-earned gains of the Democrat Party in a single midterm election.

And thus ended Hollywood’s love affair with Barack Obama. (more…)

Am I the only one who feels like yanking my teeth out with needle nose pliers when he hears questions about what the ‘Tea Party’ is up to?  What candidate they’ll promote, which direction they’ll move next, and how the ‘Tea Party will influence upcoming election?  Am I the only one?   Okay, let’s clear this up – (unless of course I’ve taken too many rim shots to the head and have simply lost my mind, but)… there is no ‘Tea Party.’

It is not a political party.  Tea Parties are political gatherings in which concerned and outraged American citizens express their outrage at government spending and crippling legislation and reaffirm collectively their devotion to American Constitutional values.

But there is no Tea Party, there is no Conservative Party, and there is no Liberal Party.  We have basically a two-party political system, the Democrats and the Republicans.  All other ‘parties’ act as spoilers in political elections.  Third party candidates end up swaying election results as to hurt the very people they were hoping to help: themselves.  They split the vote.  Witness two past presidential election votes in which Ross Perot split the Republican vote, awarding both elections to the Democrat, Bill Clinton.  Ralph Nader has been a thorn in the Democrats’ side with his Green Party…or is it the Peace & Freedom Party…or was it the Nutjobs & Pudwhacks for Mindless Change Party, I don’t remember.  Anyway… There is no Tea ‘Party’.

But there is a Libertarian Party. (more…)

When I read that 72-year old Jane Fonda was about to release two new workout DVDs “geared to the 100 million Baby Boomers and older adults,” two words kept popping into my head: “Hanoi Jane.” (I had a similar experience when she tried to re-emerge as a viable actress in Hollywood with the movie “Monster-in-Law” in 2005. Except the words that kept coming to mind then were “traitor” and “back-stabbing communist sympathizer.”)

What is Fonda’s deal? Doesn’t she know that real Americans have been sick of her since she took North Vietnam’s side during the Vietnam War? Does she really think she can pose for pictures in her workout clothes in 2010 and we’ll somehow forget about her posing for pictures with a North Vietnamese Anti-Aircraft gun in 1972?

Surely she knows we’ll never forget the radio broadcast she made to the North Vietnamese population in August 1972: a broadcast in which she referred to American fighting forces as “U.S. imperialists,” bragged that President Nixon would “never be able to break the spirit of [the North Vietnamese] people,” and then said Nixon “would do well to read…poetry written by Ho Chi Minh.” (It was during this same trip to North Vietnam that Fonda referred to our soldiers as “war criminals” and accused American POWs of lying when they alleged that the North Vietnamese had tortured them.) (more…)

Zen masters find that they are better able to focus their minds by mediating upon unanswerable questions.  What is the nature of existence?  Is there a God?  Why does Hollywood still consider John Cusack a movie star?”

You all know John Cusack– he’s that vaguely good-looking guy who, for about 25 years has turned his benign, angsty presence into a movie meal ticket.  He was kind of the Michael Cera of the 80’s, playing pretty much the same mildly amusing, smirky character in a series of films that are remembered more fondly for the nostalgia they provoke than for any intrinsic value.

Better Off Dead was okay, I guess – I was hammered when I saw it on dollar night in 1985. One Crazy Summer was okay, I guess – I was hammered when I saw it on dollar night in 1986.  Do you see a theme?

John Cusack is cinematic wallpaper.  Has anyone in recorded history ever said, “Dude, we MUST see this new flick.  It’s got CUSACK, man.  He’s EPIC!”  That’s as likely as saying, “I partied with Lindsay and Paris last night and this morning I didn’t itch!”

Cusack is most fondly remembered for his role as Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything (1989).  But not by me, since I found it unwatchably precious, a kind of manifesto designed to reassure terminally sensitive nonconformists that their inability to connect with normal people marked them as superior beings lesser mortals could never comprehend instead of marking them as the tiresome losers they usually are.  It does not hold up.  Also, that Peter Gabriel song he plays in the famous boombox-over-the-head scene sucks. (more…)

The brilliant Humberto Fontova tells a story in one of his books (I believe it’s Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him), about guitarist Carlos Santana being confronted once about wearing the iconic Che T-shirt. After deservedly getting an earful about what a murdering coward Che was, and how the counterculture’s favorite revolutionary icon despised musicians and artists like Santana himself, an irritated Santana reportedly sputtered, “You’re just hung up on the facts, man.”

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.” (more…)

With the release of  The Expendables, it seems that every self-respecting male has caught 80’s fever.  As a way to clear the palette from modern metro-sexual romps, my friends have resorted to re-visiting old B-movie beauties such as Cobra, Road House and Tango and Cash.  Sure they’re awful, but unlike the Kaiser-helmet wearing hipsters of the lower east side, those movies never tried to be anything that they weren’t.

When looking back at the 80s however, the one thing that strikes me the most are the cartoons.  I’ll admit it, I’m a cartoon junkie. To this day I can still be found in my pajamas with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, catching up on animated glory. Back in the 80s though, cartoons were still violent… and I liked it that way.

Of course, I’m discussing the cartoons aimed squarely at young boys.  You see, back then, before gender roles became considered hateful and being androgynous had been transformed into a virtue, boys actually watched different cartoons from girls, and they were proud of it. (more…)

As usual, Sean Penn just can’t say enough bad things about America — and could he be more humorless? The real story here, however, is Penn’s relentlessly brutal trashing of the Fugee’s Wyclef Jean as some kind of stooge for American corporate interests. In-between a ton of innuendo and phrases like “I don’t know,” and “allegedly,” Penn’s obviously attempting to strangle the rapper’s bid to be the next Haitian president in the cradle.

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If Jean, who was born in Haiti, is smart, he’ll rip a page from the Barack Obama playbook, not answer any of Penn’s charges and simply write the actor off as a racist.

Oh, wait, maybe that’s not so smart.

Who knows, Penn might be  right about Jean. Then again, Penn might just be an elitist, socialist, narcissist, busybody who sees himself as the Great White Liberal Hope of Haiti which somehow makes it okay for him to poke his ignorant movie star nose into the domestic politics of a country other than his own (not that he’s a whole lot of help here).

I think you all know where my money is. (more…)

So a new survey reports that one in five Californians need help for a mental or emotional issue.

Seems low, if you ask me. I mean – this is California, home to Sean Penn, Mel Gibson and the Oakland Raiders.

But more important, you can reduce this report to a cavalcade of cliches.

So, did they group all emotional and mental “issues” together – so we get millions of sufferers?

Yep.

Did they expand the distress to include things like “feeling sad, anxious or nervous?”

You bet. (In the old days we called that “life,” but now it’s an injustice if you aren’t snorting rainbows 24/7.) (more…)

They call the early half of the twentieth century the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it might more aptly be called the American Age.  In those days, the American people had a great love for Hollywood.  On an average week, three quarters of the population turned out to the local theater.

Contrast that with today when, according to a recent poll, fewer than 40 percent of Americans approve of Hollywood, and only ten percent of the population shows up at the theater each week.

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Like many of the readers and contributors at Big Hollywood, Declaration Entertainment is interested in why this change, this sharp reduction in approval and attendance, took place.  Undoubtedly it is a complex issue with many variables over a long period of time.  The advent of television and home video, digital downloads and piracy are all factors.  So too is the explosion of other forms of media entertainment, from video games to the Internet.  But while these changes in landscape have unquestionably cut into the dominance of the Hollywood theatrical experience in terms of the sheer numbers of viewers, they do not seem to explain the reduction in affinity.

To understand Hollywood’s dismal approval ratings – better than Congress, of course, but horrid none-the-less – other factors must be considered. (more…)

[Ed. Note: There's been a lot of attention in the entertainment media lately about the death of the movie star. But because the entertainment media is just as out of touch with reality as any movie stars we felt they were the least qualified to discuss this subject, and so we've asked our contributors to weigh in. And who better to kick this series off on a Friday than Mr. Crowder?]

“You’ll never work in this town again!” – Thank God that nobody will ever have to hear those words again (my recent internship at MSNBC notwithstanding). As the iconic “movie star” begins to die, so does the gate-keeping Hollywood machine. No longer do mere peasants have to acquiesce to the all-powerful Tinseltown establishment… And that pisses them off something awful. 

Back in the day, if you wanted to get the kind of exposure that would propel you into movie stardom, you needed to head out to Hollywood. Plain and simple. Once there, you’d have to put yourself under the thumb of industry higher-ups (more commonly referred to as “dirtbags”) if you so much as wanted a chance of seeing any kind of screen time. A few walk-on roles and uncomfortable back-room “casting couch” auditions later, you might find yourself actually getting some serious screen-time. Once arrived, you’d have to carefully walk the Hollywood tightrope if you wanted to sustain a viable career. If you drew outside the Tinseltown lines, you were going to get shut down. 

All of a sudden, new media enters stage-right. In the information age, the ability to directly reach a target audience (combined with rapidly evolving and more affordable technology) is rendering Hollywood more and more irrelevant.  Thanks to free-market competition, nearly anybody can purchase a high-quality D-SLR camera and create a motion picture virtually indistinguishable from their expensive film counterparts. 

…Hollywood no like.  (more…)

Seeing that George Soros and Sting are working together to “end the drug war” puts me in mind of a story an Army buddy who works in the DEA told me about busting in the door of a drug house only to find three occupants – the oldest four years old, having been left in charge while his “parents” went out to score meth.  Yeah, drug use is a victimless crime – if you ignore the victims.

Apparently not content to subsidize the whining of the nonentities at Media Matters, Soros is taking a break from his adventures in currency manipulation and general scuzziness to enlist entertainment celebrities like Sting in his newest quest.  The Drug Policy Alliance is the result, a group whose members, as its founder puts it, “come from across the drug use spectrum.”  Yes, the junkies, stoners, hopheads, dope fiends, pill-poppers, and Lindsay Lohan are unanimous:  Drug laws are bad, and it’s probably BusHitler’s fault.

The threshold problem with comments by Sting such as, “The war on drugs represents an extraordinary violation of human rights,” is that Sting presumably not only believes this piffle, but further believes that he can put down his bass and offer meaningful input into the discussion.  This assumption of competence is a common delusion among celebrities, and here it has more potential for damage than most mindless celebribabble.

Now, Sting is not alone – no one in that clip says anything worthwhile.  One woman, who is bald for no apparent reason, states that “The War on Drugs is a war on people of color,” as if Americans decided they would outlaw crack because they fear that black people might enjoy themselves.  Montel Williams shows up to explain that drug laws prevent him from making choices about his own body, but the awful tie and ridiculous earring he chose to wear make a powerful argument against allowing him to make any kind of choices at all. (more…)

So what gives? Are these areas just not glamorous enough? Do celebs not want to further highlight The One’s pathetic response?

Celebrities love causes. They love them for a couple of reasons: one, it makes them seem like “serious” people despite making a non-serious living as entertainers – or, as in the case of “professional reality show stars,” making a living by leeching off the system. Two, it’s free publicity. After all, you aren’t a celebrity if you aren’t being “celebrated” by an adoring public.

As such, celebrities often embrace “feel good causes” that enhance their PR value and their egos. Take “green living,” for instance. Why all the Hollywood hooh hah about carbon footprints and other such nonsense? Christopher Grey of WND has a theory:

Celebrities want attention, but they also want credibility because they typically don’t have any. Environmentalism is an easy cause for them to promote to get attention and at the same time appear somehow thoughtful and even educated because it is allegedly based on science. Of course none of this has anything do with reality, but this is the entertainment business. Reality is not important at all. Image is everything. Talking about recycling, stopping offshore drilling, solar power, and electric cars is a lot easier than really trying to do something for people in the world like feeding the hungry, helping abused children, or building houses for the homeless.

It also deflects attention from the obvious fact that celebrities are often some of the most wasteful, energy inefficient, materialistic, shallow, and superficial people in our society. A classic recent example was James Cameron, who talked about how his film, Avatar, was a shining example of environmentalism. Obama echoed this praise. This was the most expensive movie ever made about a war on an alien planet. What exactly about this movie helped to conserve resources or save our planet? The answer is absolutely nothing.

(more…)

Don’t you read books? It’s a scientific fact; “The entire Fox News Channel is a twenty-four-hour-a-day racism engine.” Thank God for Sarah Silverman because before her (and as a long-time Fox News contributor), I was completely unaware of their covert, racist agenda. We need more truth warriors out there, and I am forever grateful to Miss Silverman for spearheading the movement.

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In a recent interview, the author of “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee,” openly accused Tea Partiers of spewing veiled racism. See, the key word here is “veiled.” You rarely see leftists accusing conservatives of blatantly shouting racial epithets anymore. Sure, they’ve tried it a few times. However, realizing that the burden of proof rests squarely on the shoulders of the accuser (i.e. them), they’ve opted to take a different direction. They’ve instead decided to accuse conservatives of speaking in “coded” language.

Side note to Conservatives: Put your secret, racist lexicons and decoder rings away and lay low for a while. They’re on to us.

No, I’m not making this up. In the interview, Silverman went on to say, “… but it’s all coded, all implied.” (more…)

Summer hasn’t even begun and yet we here at Big Hollywood are already looking toward the fall for the big screen debut of Fair Game. Notice I say “looking toward,” not “looking forward to.” Believe me, there’s a big difference.

Marriage Encounter? Or propaganda?

Anyhoo, Sean Penn dusts off his acting chops — more like jowls these days — to play Joe Wilson, wannabe high rolling diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts), who claims her CIA cover was blown by the Bush White House in an attempt to make Joe Wilson look like a fool for his op-ed in the New York Times that claimed the Bush administration misled Congress and the public on the need for war with Iraq.

But you all know the story. Suffice it to say, there was no conspiracy to “out” her, and it was Richard Armitage, a State Department staffer and noted Bush critic – not Bush chief of staff Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, or Darth Cheney – who casually mentioned her name to the late Robert Novak. The whole incident, which should have been a big fat nothing, turned into a huge political bombshell that dominated the headlines for weeks and months, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, VP Dick Cheney’s assistant of national security, ended up being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. (more…)

The political thriller Fair Game premiered at Cannes today. (Pause for giant, collective yawn from Big Hollywood readers…)

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair. (more…)

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Ohmydeargawd the acting’s bad, which is the last thing you’d expect from these two. Of course this isn’t their fault. The scene is an embarrassing exposition-a-thon leaving a couple of otherwise solid actors with nothing to do but self-consciously emote conflict. Can’t be easy to pretend you’re listening and truly re-acting  when the dialogue is nothing more than a list of talking points. You do, however, have to admire the way in which director Doug Liman works that handheld camera. For a about half a second you can almost feel an artificial sense of energy and self-importance.

Which begs the question: Why release this scene? You usually put your best foot forward with early footage. Is this as good as it gets?  (more…)

On April 18, the Pew Research Center released the results of a recurring survey centered around people’s trust in government. In order to assess the results of several institutions, Pew asks the following question: “Is [insert item] having a positive or negative effect on the way things are going in the country these days.”

Only 33% said the entertainment industry was having a positive effect. 51% said it was having a negative effect. What I don’t understand is why the entertainment industry didn’t blow the lid off the survey on the positive side. It’s entertainment. Doesn’t everyone want to be entertained? Since Pew only asked a single question, we can’t effectively drill into this result to learn any hard and fast truths. However, by examining other studies, there are some inferences we may be able to draw.

The entertainment industry was but one of thirteen institutions the Pew survey mentioned, so it seems reasonable to conclude that respondents were very well aware what they were being asked. The question was not, “what is your opinion about the quality of entertainment you see from Hollywood?” The question was about the industry’s influence on the trajectory of the country, in the gestalt. Apparently, just over half the respondents think that Hollywood is, simply put, a bad influence. If the comments left for Big Hollywood articles are of any indication, people don’t feel Hollywood represents their values, morals, ethics, political views, religious views, or much of anything else. People fail to identify with the characters they see on the screen. They don’t care for dramatic or comedic situations presented. They don’t agree with what Tom Hanks or James Cameron or Sean Penn or Roger Ebert have to say about a wide variety of topics. (more…)

In Part One of this two-part series, I described the widely varying treatment of renowned directors Jafar Panahi and Roman Polanski by the leftist Hollywood establishment vis-a-vis their arrests and incarcerations, Polanski for child rape, Panahi for mere dissent. It is merely the latest chapter in a long and sickening history of the Hollywood Left’s willful blindness to and even profiting from the McCarthyite persecution and dire straits of creative film artists in Iran revolting over a stolen election, while child rapist Polanksi gets the Oscar treatment with regard to calls for his release and freedom.

But before I get into the stomach-churning details of the Hollywood Left’s shattered moral compass vis-a-vis directors Polanski and Panahi and other Iranian film artists, I would like to take a moment to honor more of the true heroes who have spoken out loudly on Mr. Panahi’s behalf and signed petitions for his release. The National Society of Film Critics. The Boston, L. A. and  Toronto Film Critics Associations. Arin Paul of the New York Times. Filmmaker Ken Loach. Rutger Wolfson, director of the Rotterdam Film Festival. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. Human Rights Watch. French Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterand. Iranhumanrights.org. The list really is long.

Of course, noticeably absent from those petitioning and publicly calling for the release of Mr. Panahi from his unjust tomb-like captivity in Tehran are all of the prominent Hollywood A-List petitioners for Polanski. So Mr. Polanski’s arrest for child rape is worthy of international pressure and outrage, but famed director Jafar Panahi being tossed into a crypt in Tehran on “unspecified charges” is not? Welcome to Lefty Hollywood. And it only gets worse. The most tragic case of Jafar Panahi is yet one more sorry, perplexing and infuriating chapter in leftist Hollywood’s incredible blind side to any human rights violations in Iran, never mind only those perpetrated against Iranian filmmakers today. (more…)

“Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned international artist now facing extradition. This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom. Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians – everyone involved in international filmmaking – want him to know that he has their support and friendship.” – From the petition to free director Roman Polanski.

Jafar Panahi

“Every possible way has been used for breaking his spirit. He is deprived of his basic and legal rights. Can all of this be called anything but torture? Does a regime have the right to treat one of its artistic elite so shamefully and inhumanely on the basis of a film that has not yet been made?”  -  Taherah Saeedi, wife of renowned Iranian New Wave filmmaker Jafar Panahi, on her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Tehran.

On September 27, 2009, famed Hollywood film director Roman Polanski was arrested on arrival at Zurich Airport by Swiss authorities on a 31-year-old L.A. warrant for the 1977 drugging and raping of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer, now 45. A huge swath of the liberal leftist Hollywood establishment wasted no time in leaping into action over the Swiss authorities’ dismaying breach of social justice and inhuman treatment vis-a-vis director/child rapist Polanski. Over 100 well-known filmmakers and A-list celebrities signed a petition of outrage demanding Mr. Polanski’s immediate release. (more…)