Beginning in June 2007, filmmaker Tim Hetherington and war correspondent Sebastian Junger embedded themselves with a U.S. Army platoon in the truly God-forsaken Korengal Valley of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. A companion piece to Junger’s new book War, Restrepo is their feature-length documentary centered on a fifteen-man outpost in one of the most remote and dangerous war zones on earth. 

Trailer is NSFW

Its cinema verité style, interspersed with commentary from soldiers interviewed after the deployment, puts you in the center of the action – and inaction – alongside a half dozen or so principal characters. It captures the chaos and the boredom, the courage and the fear, the tension and the playful abandon of their stretch in Outpost Restrepo, named after their young medic, a Korengal casualty.

In between IED attacks, firefights, digging in on a cliff-side, negotiating compensation with the villagers for a dead cow, mourning dead comrades, rooting out arms caches in the village, and general horsing around, these soldiers, painfully young but becoming men before our eyes, offer honest and revealing emotions about these experiences. One soldier says he can barely get his head around it all; he just hopes that “one day I’ll be able to process it differently.” (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…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see). (more…)

I must have missed the groundswell of support and the public clamor for the return of Rosie O’Donnell to the daytime airwaves.  It seemed that her time in the cultural spotlight had passed following her notorious 2008 variety show failure (It was hailed by one merciful critic as “dead on arrival”) and her exile to a daily Sirius XM radio show that caters to creepy shut-ins and those unlucky listeners who can’t figure out how to tune-in to Howard Stern.  But like some sort of loudmouthed, frumpy, left-wing vampire who just won’t stay in the ground, she is threatening to rise again with a terrifying plan to replace Oprah once the Queen of Daytime TV retires in 2011.  Someone in Hollywood, please – break out the garlic.

Of course, I’m hardly Rosie’s daily television show target demographic.  I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak.  And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O’Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

This is no longer the same country as it was back in 1999 when Rosie was honchoing her first daytime gabfest and hassling Tom Selleck over his support for the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  It’s not even the same country as it was in May 2007, when the former “Queen of Nice’s” anti-conservative bile culminated in her slandering American fighting men and women as terrorists on The View: (more…)

In the comments to Big Hollywood’s recent post about the box office catastrophe that is “The Green Zone,” one frequent poster, and noted leftist, gave us a “teachable moment.”

In a nutshell, this poster said that the antithesis to “The Green Zone,” and diatribes of that ilk, would be some dim witted, cheer leading, Michael Bay style action movie where the Arabs are sneering villains and the American G.I.’s are square jawed pretty boys out to save the world.

Where does one begin?

His post reinforces the primary myth that drives all debate in our country. The central conceit is that leftist ideology is “complex,” “educated,” “nuanced” etc. Conservative and libertarian ideology is “simplistic,” “black and white,” and often times driven by superstitious religious beliefs and not “hard facts and science.” To suppose that the “conservative” version of “The Green Zone” is a movie like 1986’s “Delta Force” misses the point…big time.

As a quick side note, Menahem Golan’s “Delta Force” kicks ass. I recommend it highly.

What is silly about this narrative, especially in the discussion of “The Green Zone” is that it not only knocks conservative ideas, principals, and factual evidence down a few pegs, but it elevates leftist ideas far beyond their merit. (more…)

The History Channel is “making history” by airing “The People Speak,” a film based on the book by historian – and Marxist – Howard Zinn. More on Zinn in a minute.

A number of actors who wish to be more than just pretty faces are behind this effort, including Wallace Shawn (“Inconceivable!“), Colin Firth and Marisa Tomei, all who serve on “The People Speak’s” board of advisers. Those enlightened thespians who are more active in bringing this project to life are:

Howard Zinn, Josh Brolin, Chris Moore and Matt Damon

Matt Damon: Serving  as producer, Damon is no stranger to political theatrics. An extremely vocal critic of former President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, he said that it’s “not fair that we have a fighting class in our country that’s comprised of people who have to go for…financial reasons” and suggested that the Bush twins should be shipped off to war because their daddy started it. Should we bring back the draft? Then actors like Damon, with cushy jobs and big salaries, could help out the poor suckers who have no choice. He also “let out a cheer” when Kanye West claimed that George Bush hates black people.

He proudly declared his support for John Kerry in 2004, and his stature as an actor means he knows more about running the country than some chick who “was the mayor of a really, really small town” and was “governor of Alaska for less than two years.” Surely Damon knows more than Sarah Palin. After all, he dropped out of Harvard, but then played a closet genius in his first big film (co-written by Ben Affleck) “Good Will Hunting.” Surprise, his “Good Will Hunting” character was a fan of Zinn’s book. (more…)

Nobody liked this movie when it was called “Body of Lies.” 

This is the most revealing trailer yet and thankfully we’re given a heads up as to what the story might really be about. Hollywood will look for cover with the excuse that “Green Zone” is based on a true story, but we all know which “true stories” Leftist Hollywood cherry picks in order to fulfill the demands of an anti-American narrative. For example, the true story of 100,000-plus Americans risking their lives to liberate and protect from terrorists people they’ve  never met is one “true story” we’ll see in hell first.

Everything you’d expect from director Paul Greengrass and Damon is here, including that goddamn shaky-cam (it’s not saying the Lord’s name in vain if you mean it). Damon’s character is the protagonist and he’s there to do good but it’s not the terrorists who are the antagonists getting in his way … no, it’s The United States of America personified by the Greg Kinnear character. (more…)