There’s nothing pretty about Liam Neeson.

The Irish actor sports a disheveled nose and an accent that sounds like it belongs in a pub where the bar stools date back to the Second World War. And when Neeson puts up his dukes on screen, there’s no “Matrix”-style effects to give him cover. It’s all loping jabs and hay makers.

It’s why audiences are responding to his latest action film, “The Grey.” The film came in first over the just-wrapped weekend, earning $20 million without any big stars beyond Neeson and no existing brand to bank on. Neeson stars as a depressed sharpshooter who must survive the elements, and a hungry pack of nearby wolves, when his plane goes down in freezing terrain.

Compare the box office results for “The Grey” to the opening weekend haul of Taylor Lautner’s “Abduction” from late last year:

“The Grey” – $20 million

“Abduction” – $10.9 million

Lautner’s got Neeson by 40-odd years, and you just know Neeson doesn’t have six-pack abs like Mr. “Twilight.” Audiences didn’t care. They responded to the way Neeson goes about his business on screen. It’s never smooth or calculated, but Neeson’s characters settle scores and survive in a way that hearkens back to how male movie stars used to behave on screen.

He’s a man’s man, and that makes him a rarity in today’s Hollywood.

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Like many of you, I started off 2012 with a new year’s resolution to work out.  And, hopefully unlike many of you, two weeks into the new year … I’ve yet to do a single push-up. (sigh)

“Where to find a little workout inspiration?,” I wondered. “Ah, yes, Rocky IV.”  Watching it for the 5,849,948th time, I am compelled to share with you my thoughts on… the greatest film ever made.  Yes, that is not mere opinion but fact.  Rate it on a sheer entertainment, emotions-evoking, never-goes-stale standard and surely you’ll agree.

To be fair, “Rocky IV” is not an overly political film, nor was it intended to be.  But it nonetheless encapsulates several key conservative points, so much so that it was, and still is, slammed by leftist critics as right-wing propaganda.  Behold, the top 10 conservative lessons of “Rocky IV”:

1) Communism… (let me be succinct and find the right word here…) sucks.

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Thou shalt not work with children, animals – or an unleashed Ruth Gordon.

Clint Eastwood disobeyed two of those three movie commandments with 1978’s “Every Which Way But Loose,” arguably the most eccentric film in the movie star’s canon.

The action comedy, Eastwood’s first, should have been the equivalent of Sylvester Stallone’s “Oscar” … or “Rhinestone” or “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.” An unmitigated disaster.

Instead, “Loose” became a surprise hit and one of Eastwood’s most popular films. Credit Gordon, blistering the screen as Eastwood’s scrappy Ma, or Clyde, the scene-stealing orangutan. Either way, Eastwood looked right at home letting his cast snare the laughs.

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Did you hear the news? Chuck Woolery came out of the closet! No, not that closet. Coming out of that closet in Hollywood gets you applause for your bravery. Instead, Woolery came out recently to admit that he is a … wait for it … conservative!

If you have not read “Primetime Propaganda” by Ben Shapiro or Andrew Breitbart’s “Righteous Indignation,” I suggest adding both of them to your fall reading list. Both books do a great job of explaining how we got to this point in, supposedly, the most tolerant and accepting nation in the history of the planet, where the one thing that will not be tolerated in Hollywood is admitting you are a conservative. As someone hoping to one day make a living as a working actor, I know I have a difficult road in front of me due to my political views.

So why is it newsworthy when someone in Hollywood admits they are, indeed, a conservative? Everyone knows that Kelsey Grammer is a conservative, yet he still works regularly. His former co-star, Patricia Heaton, also has another hit series despite her apparent drawback. It is news because, at least until now, they have been the exception. It is news because the Hollywood power brokers have set up a system that, until now, has kept conservatives too afraid to admit their true political views for fear of being ostracized from any future work in “the business.”

There’s also the fact that conservatives do not feel the need to spout their political views at every opportunity the way liberals in Hollywood do. I’ve never understood why someone who relies on reaching the largest audience possible to view their work would alienate half of their potential fan base. Granted, not every Hollywood liberal has called Tea Partiers racists, but enough of them have to affect their box office numbers. According to Box Office Mojo, the 2011 box office take is down 4.2 percent compared to the same point last year. That is hundreds of millions of dollars. Sure, the down economy is having some effect on movie going, but it is not the only reason people aren’t going. I, for one, have stopped going because I don’t want to give my hard earned money to someone who thinks so little of me.

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It’s been 14 years since ‘Cop Land’ first hit movie theaters, but director James Mangold distinctly remembers his first reaction to casting Sylvester Stallone as the film’s heroic sheriff.

“I was dead set against it. I was horrified by the idea,” says Mangold, who would later go on to direct Oscar-winning films like ‘Walk the Line’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted.’ “He played a superhero so often. I didn’t want to make a movie about Judge Dredd.”

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Mangold graciously went to dinner with Stallone all the same and laid out his vision for the role.

“You have to let your body go. I mean let it go … gain at least 40 pounds” the director told the erstwhile Rocky Balboa.

‘He agreed immediately,” Mangold recalls. “He took the leap, and he delivered.”

Stallone’s sensitive performance in the tale of a New Jersey town teeming with dirty cops reminded us he’s more than just a slab of muscle for hire. The film, out this week in a Director’s Cut Blu-ray edition, also proved Mangold could handle a veteran cast led by Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta.

“I have a memory of being a young man with this ridiculously heady cast all around me… it’s like pretty big boots to be strapping on in your second movie,” he says. “It demystified working with really important actors.”

The film also taught him that his complete vision won’t always make it to the big screen.

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At times, it seems Hollywood is but a caricature of all things Left: an image created by the most flagrantly non-patriotic and anti-military celebrities imaginable. It seems the mainstream media flocks to stars that fit such criteria, and those stars, in turn, are given an open microphone with which to spew their opinions on the supposedly naïve and uneducated masses in this country (i.e., you and me and the salt-of-the-earth folks who live their lives in flyover country).

Occasionally, however, Hollywood gives us something else: something so far out of the norm for the Left coast, so utterly pro-American and purely patriotic, that we have to pause and take note. We saw this with comedian Vince Vaughn, who launched Chicago’s 52^nd annual Air and Water Show by parachuting out of an airplane over the city with one of the Army’s elite parachute teams.  We saw this with Sylvester Stallone, who refused to apologize for his pro-American film “The Expendables,” and who told his antagonizers that “America apologizes too much,” just for good measure.

And to give credit where credit is due, we’ve also seen this kind of grit from Robert Duvall, Larry the Cable Guy, and Nick DiPaolo, among others.

Now we’re seeing it with comedian Rob Riggle (from the movie “The Hangover”). What few know is that Riggle is not only an accomplished actor but also a Marine Corps Reservist who holds the rank of Lt. Colonel. And he recently told Marines Magazine that one of his proudest accomplishments is of “serving his country” as a Marine. (more…)

Recently, FOX NEWS’ Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sylvester Stallone about his immensely popular movie, “The Expendables.” As I watched the interaction between O’Reilly and Stallone, it was readily apparent that Stallone was cut from a different cloth than many inside Hollywood: he loves this country and he’s proud to be an American.

The interview took place because the L.A. Times took a critical stance against “The Expendables,” reporting that Stallone created it to promote “apple-pie patriotism” among movie-goers. When O’Reilly asked Stallone if exploiting such patriotism was the intention behind the film, Stallone laughed and said no. He said it was a movie where “good guys…take out the trash.” After pausing he then said: “It’s pretty simple, [if] you’re bad you’ve got to go.” Other than this, Stallone said the move emphasizes a redemption of sorts, inasmuch as “The Expendables” ultimately risk their own lives (on screen) to do something good for somebody, and by so doing, get “their morality back.”

As O’Reilly reiterated other criticisms that have been aimed at “The Expendables,” Stallone said he didn’t mind people focusing on the fact that the characters in the movie “are patriots” and “are proud to be Americans.”  Stallone did say he had read some criticisms where people tried to say the movie communicated a veiled disapproval of our military and CIA actions abroad, and that it put the “focal point on our intrusion into other countries around the world” and how “we tend to over-extend our boundaries.” But Stallone shot all that blather down by saying “I don’t believe that at all.” (i.e., he doesn’t believe our armed forces and intelligence ops are running around the world making things worse rather than better.) (more…)

Rumor has it that Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables marks a return to the glory days of 1980s action mayhem and pro-American machismo. Its appearance on the cultural horizon has certainly stirred up memories of my mid-Eighties, Midwestern suburban adolescence.

It also brings to mind an excellent documentary I saw a few years back called Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008 — the asterisk leads to a footnote: “*The Side Effects of Being American”). You can check out the spectacularly funny, rousing, and nostalgic first ten minutes (and then the whole movie, if so inclined) at YouTube:

YouTube -- click here to watch full-screen

Stallone, Schwarzenegger, the Hulkster — all are members of a category of celebrity I described in a previous BH article as “silly video-game tough guys.” The walls of countless Reagan-era boys, myself among them, were papered over with posters and photos of these oversized he-men. Throughout our teen years we read their exercise books and magazine interviews, followed their advice, and strove to live up to their examples.

Examples that, as it turned out, were far too good to be true.

The director/narrator of Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, Chris Bell, kindly but thoroughly strips his beloved childhood icons of their mythic qualities, reducing them to a series of ordinary men who used tricks, illusion, and lots and lots of steroids to become larger than life to millions of youngsters. “It is kind of sad in a way,” Bell said in a Sundance interview at the time his movie was released, “how all of our heroes in America are now falling.” (more…)

Over the weekend at Townhall.com, Carl Horowitz took Big Hollywood and everyone else he sees as “reprehensible … dyspeptic … insufferably smug, moralizing antiquarians” to task for lacking the “elementary logic to understand” that “the ‘agenda’ of today’s American filmmakers, aside from making money, is storytelling.”

In the opening of his piece, Horowitz portrays himself as someone with a libertarian streak and because I tend to take people at their word, that’s what makes his column all the more troubling. Leftists carrying Hollywood’s water I can take. But those who should be sympathetic to our side choosing the blue pill — choosing not to see reality – choosing instead to rhetorically assault those of us who do… Well, let’s just say it’s awfully hard to defend yourself in an ideological war if your own troops haven’t figured out how hard they’re working for the other side.   

The lack of logic and depth of denial Horowitz must employ to see Hollywood as he so desperately wants to see it – as a place where the “Hollywood vs. America” charge is a “trope” –  is revealing. We’ll start with Horowitz’s own words and bio: (more…)

It’s hard to say this, but say it I must: one of the reasons that so many current conservative films don’t get distribution or gain success is that they stink.  You heard that right.  Many of them simply suck.

Yes, political bias is the main reason conservative films don’t get distribution; there are a ton of crappy liberal films that get distribution.  But that doesn’t change the fact that some of the most highly publicized conservative modern entrees into the field of film have been total artistic and popular bombs.

Filmmaker Michael Pack

When a conservative film gets made that is actually high quality, it’s a surprise.  So when I saw new documentary, The Last 600 Meters, I was shocked.  It’s gripping, engrossing, enthralling.  It’s a movie every American should see.

The Last 600 Meters tells the story of the two deadliest battles of the Iraq war — the Battles of Fallujah and Najaf — from the perspective of the soldiers who fought in them.  We see through their eyes – the footage and stills were taken during the actual battle.  We meet the strong, resilient, sensitive and brave men and women of the armed services who do the fighting and the killing and the dying that we won’t do. (more…)

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So another Rambo flick is on its grimy, sweaty way and this time the villains are human traffickers and drug lords. To make them even more despicable, they’ve kidnapped a young girl and are probably ignoring her strict vegan needs.

Look, I applaud Sylvester Stallone’s heroic stance against human traffickers and kidnappers – for I know there will be quite an outcry especially from the large and very influential human trafficking and kidnapper lobby.

Of course, this movie comes on the heels of two other edgy ventures: The G.I Joe flick – which turned a gritty American icon into an airbrushed Benneton ad, and “Inglourious Basterds” a fantasy that has average Jews hacking Nazi soldiers to pieces.

These three movies have two things in common:
1) They avoid present, real danger in the world and instead choose villains that are not just safe, but politically correct to hate. You’d think it would be easy for Quentin Tarantino to find a present day enemy for the Jews (like, say, a terrorist group that denies the Holocaust and wants to wipe Israel off the map), but maybe none exist! And what of those guys who flew planes into the World Trade Center? I suppose in the era of the “unclenched fist,” we must be more sensitive to “backlash” than barbarism. (more…)

So many big name stars, singers and sports legends have visited Washington over the years, the city is often referred to as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”  So, that’s the title of my new book (available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders) featuring over 200 photographs and stories that detail the fascination between Hollywood stars and Washington power-players — from Presidents Truman through Obama. 

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)

More like my top five available American moments on YouTube but still entertaining and not from the Golden Era. A reminder that the Hollywood we’re stuck with today can still throw a bone our way.

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1. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) – A beautifully crafted uniquely American movie where, for once, the antagonist isn’t “the system” or “the racist system.” Chris Gardner (a superb Will Smith) wants something from life. He believes in this country and understands the key to achieving the dream is simple: never, ever give up. A superb script, based on a true story (the real Gardner has a touching cameo in the closing scene) never once takes the grinding pressure off, but aided by genuinely decent people (white Wall Streeters, no less) and driven by a love for his son, rather than play victim, Gardner keeps moving forward long after most of us would’ve surrendered to self pity. Movies don’t get much more conservative than this. (more…)

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

New behind the scenes footage from Sylvester Stallone’s star-studded “The Expendables” has been posted on the film’s official blog. Pretty cool stuff.

It contains some action sequences, including one where Steve Austin and Eric Roberts outrace an explosion, shots of Sly directing gunplay and a very low flyover from what looks like a disabled seaplane.

While the blog says Stallone has “lost 32 pounds since Rambo and currently weighs in at 180,” I don ‘t believe it.

The guy’s arms are still as big as my legs. And if you look at them closely you can see some of the faux tattoo work his character sports in the film poking out from underneath his sleeves. (more…)

After flirting with smaller, more squishy roles in recent pictures like “The Assassination of a High School President” and “What Just Happened,” Bruce Willis is returning to action. The 54-year-old actor is interested in a slew of projects that will have him playing a former CIA agent, an FBI informant out to bust up the mob, a detective and both funny and serious cops.

Based on the Wildstorm/DC comics series, “Red” could see Willis playing a retired CIA black-ops badass who is forced to take action when an assassin threatens both he and his girlfriend. The film is being produced by Summit Entertainment, the studio responsible for the “Twilight” series. Willis’s deal has not been finalized, but it could be a sweet one since, as Summit production chief Eric Feig told me a few weeks ago, he sees “Red” as another potential franchise.

Not many fifty-something actors get those kinds of offers. (more…)

Who will wreak greater havok on the enemies of America, Sylvester Stallone or Quentin Tarantino?

Each has written and is directing an action-laden ensemble piece about a group of misfits battling a foreign dictator.

Stallone flexes, fires and wreaks havok on a South American despot

In Stallone’s case, he has an all-star lineup of B-movie badasses – including Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lungren, Steve Austin and Eric Roberts – playing mercenaries on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator. 

The born-again Stallone has certainly earned his patriot’s stripes with the Rambo and Rocky films.

In a leaked character still from the film, he’s also looking more badass at 62 than most of us look at 22. (On set pics have also been released, one of which is above and the rest of which can be found at Empire.com.) (more…)

With 400,000 Americans showing up every year at the Indy 500 and 200,000 more buying tickets to see NASCAR’s premiere event The Daytona 500, you would think that the most creative minds in Hollywood would be looking for a way to cash in with more movies about car racing and car culture. NASCAR has an estimated 75 million fans, and it is second only to the National Football League in terms of television ratings, so where are all the good racing movies?

Jordana Brewster is reunited with Vin, Paul and Michelle in FAST & FURIOUS

Universal seems to have answered that question by getting its successful street racing franchise back into the fast lane this weekend with Fast & Furious. The movie, which reunites Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez for the first time since 2001’s original surprise blockbuster, has exploded to a high octane $30.11M or so on Friday and that could mean a $70M opening weekend. That would make it the all-time #1 opening for a car racing movie.

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Universal’s Fast & Furious will be “burning rubber” this weekend at America’s multiplexes as the original street-racing cast reunites after some sub-par chapters of the franchise.

The original The Fast & The Furious hit theatres in 2001 under the direction of Rob Cohen who had shown a knack for action with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story ($35M US cume) and Sly Stallone’s Daylight ($33M US cume) and a savvy feel for bigger-than-life characters in his Golden Globe winning biopic The Rat Pack (which, if you’ve never seen you should put in your Netflix cue and prepare to be amazed by Don Cheadle’s turn as Sammy Davis, Jr.). In tow, he had a 34-year-old Vin Diesel in only his second starring role following the surprise low budget hit Pitch Black ($39M cume) and 28-year-old Paul Walker, who had just starred in Cohen’s forgettable The Skulls. Also in the cast was Jordana Brewster (As the World Turns) and a pre-Lost Michelle Rodriguez, whose most notable credit was a gritty little indie called Girlfight.

Vin Diesel returns for FAST & FURIOUS

The result was box office jet fuel. Seemingly out of nowhere, The Fast & The Furious scored a scalding $40M opening weekend and reached $144.5M domestic and over $200M worldwide. But Diesel, whose signature line in the original movie is “I live my life one quarter of a mile at a time,” didn’t like the script for the sequel (or they wouldn’t pay his asking price depending on who you ask). That led to the 2003 sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious directed by Academy Award nominee John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) starring Walker along with rapper Tyrese Gibson and Eva Mendes. Despite Diesel’s conspicuous absence, 2 Fast still delivered $127M in the US. (more…)