Director Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” was supposed to be a key Oscar contender this awards season.

Instead, withering reviews and audience indifference have all but killed its chances at significant honors. That hasn’t stopped critics from soft-pedaling their critiques to support the film’s gay agenda, according to Andrew Klavan.

The film more than suggests J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) had a gay relationship with a fellow agent via clumsy dialogue and cliched confrontations. It’s precisely the kind of ham-fisted storytelling critics are supposed to call out. Klavan says critics like Manohla Dargis of the leftist New York Times instead chose to ignore such obvious flaws in their reviews:

“The tenderness of the love story in “J. Edgar” comes as a shock.” “Mr. Eastwood, working from a smart script by Dustin Lance Black… takes a dynamic approach to history (even as it speaks to contemporary times…)” “[Eastwood's] handling of Hoover and Tolson’s relationship… lifts the film from the usual biopic blahs.”

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A New York Post article title reads, “Box Office: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ collapses, even without a NY Times review.’ However, it is possible that the movie’s limited success and the lack of a Times review are linked. Cynthia Haven, an affiliate at Stanford University, points out that at least in the case of obscure books, negative reviews “can dramatically boost sales for obscure and up-and-coming writers.” This trend—of negative reviews boosting sales—can be observed again and again.

The NY Post article linked above asks the question: “Why didn’t The New York Times, which deploys a small army of critics to handle even the most obscure releases, bother to review this particularly newsworthy movie?” A worthy question. The Post goes on:

The Culture Desk, as its [sic] known over there, hasn’t even run a feature on the movie since 2007 (though a couple of Op Ed columnists mentioned it recently). The Times didn’t respond to my e-mailed query, but a commentor [sic] named Stu Freeman posted an intriguing theory at the movie’s page on the newspaper’s website:

“Has anyone else been wondering why The Times- which never lets a new movie go unreviewed (even when no critics’ screenings have been arranged)- has decided to break precedent with this one? My understanding is that the film’s producers actually did hold a press screening but decided not to issue an invite to this paper. If so, the failure to publish a review here is a matter of pure pique and comes across as a disservice to the paper’s readers. I have no personal connection to the film and nothing good to say on its behalf. My argument is that every film that opens commercially in NYC deserves to be critiqued by its paper of record. The decision not to do so is even more deplorable than that taken by the distributing company to withhold an invitation to its opening for reasons of editorial politics, operating policy or anything else. Who knows? The Times critics might have actually liked the thing…”

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The New York Times:

Elizabeth Taylor, the actress who dazzled generations of moviegoers with her stunning beauty and whose name was synonymous with Hollywood glamour, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 79.

The cause was congestive heart failure, her publicist, Sally Morrison, told The Associated Press.

In a world of flickering images, Ms. Taylor was a constant star. First appearing onscreen at age 9, she grew up there, never passing through an awkward age. It was one quick leap from “National Velvet” to “A Place in the Sun” and from there to “Cleopatra” as she was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen.

In a career of more than 70 years and more than 50 films, she won two Academy Awards as best actress, for her performances as a call girl in “Butterfield 8” (in 1960) and as the acid-tongued Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (in 1966). Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Virginia Woolf,” said he considered her “one of the greatest cinema actresses.”

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A Los Angeles Times article I read recently made me chuckle. It began by wearily tossing an exhausted barb at the 3-D phenomenon sweeping Hollywood: “With sighs of relief, critics last week took off their Polaroid glasses and looked at a couple of old-fashioned, two-dimensional films.” The big-screen photography of one of those pictures drew particular attention, with one critic noting that “It gives reality a true third dimension. . . the kind of 3-D you cannot get with mechanical tricks or by any other means except a rich comprehension and ingenious mastery of the visual storyteller’s art.”

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz. (more…)

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Over the last few years, the Left has become increasingly bold with the type of teaching material it brings into classrooms.  While biased information was once common.  Now, blatantly false information cloaked with good intentions is the norm.

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Last year, I was horrified to learn from The New York Times that Annie Leonard’s video, “The Story of Stuff” was being shown to extremely young students in schools around the country.  In case you are unfamiliar with “The Story of Stuff,” imagine compiling every environmental and Marxian economic fallacy into one video with a smiley face.  Imagine teaching students that military spending is 50% of the budget (it isn’t), that 4% of our original forests are left in America (our forests are increasing) and we are using too much “stuff” (only if you ignore trivial economic concepts like efficiency and prices, and think our prosperity must be curtailed).

Consequently, I spent about a week combing through the video’s footnotes, and subsequently created the 4-part “Story of Stuff” critique debunking the entire video.  Since that time, I have received hundreds of emails telling me that my video critiques were used to get Leonard’s video out of the classroom.  I’ve also been on Glenn Beck’s television show and CNN to discuss some of the many problems with Leonard’s work. (more…)

So the big news this week? Charlie Sheen entering “prehab,” which I guess is like rehab, except for preteens. I don’t know…. if you ask me, it’s not Sheen who needs therapy for an addiction, it’s Eric Holder.

Fact is, he’s hooked on something far worse than coke or speed. It’s lawyers who defend terrorists.

This addiction – rooted in his bedrock belief that America is to blame for everything, including his mustache – would be fairly harmless if it were held by a nobody – like say, a Daily Kos blogger. I mean, that’s just a harmless sap stuck in the attic taking turns trying on grandma’s underwear. Nope, this junkie is in the White House, and by the looks of it, someone better call Dr. Drew because Holder’s using on the job. (more…)

“When’s the movie coming out?”

I have been asked that question repeatedly over the course of seven years of book-signings for Sparrowhawk at Colonial Williamsburg’s Booksellers by eager patrons who have read the series and wish to see it on the big screen.

“Not any time soon,” I usually answer. “If it is ever produced, it won’t be by Hollywood. And if Hollywood in some episode of hubris thought it could tackle it, it would attempt to maul and dismember it, just out of sheer, doctrinaire meanness, coupled with incompetence. I would likely disown the result. After all, Hollywood hates America.”

I borrow the title of film critic Michael Medved‘s book-long critique of Hollywood (Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Neither he nor his book is the subject here, but rather the culture that cannot produce Sparrowhawk or any other nominally pro-American, pro-freedom film — including the “traditional” ones which Medved has championed in his book and in various conservative and religious columns (promoting family, God, and other, non-intellectual, non-fundamental values — “Leave It to Beaver“ style, with Ward Cleaver taking questions from the audience). (more…)

The casting of Robert Montgomery (1904–1981) in They Were Expendable was uncommonly appropriate. The suave, handsome actor made his name in debonair romantic comedies throughout the 1930s, but like John Ford he didn’t wait until America was dragged into war before enlisting. In 1940, fired up by the life-and-death struggles raging in Europe, he abandoned his M-G-M contract, went to France, and volunteered as an ambulance driver. Only a few weeks went by before he had it shot out from under him — one film magazine of the era reported (or perhaps exaggerated) that he narrowly avoided capture with the help of a French priest, and escaped the country mere hours before it fell to the Germans.

Back in the states he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and over the next three years served in many capacities before finding his way to the Pacific theater, where he met John Bulkeley and became his executive officer. Montgomery commanded a PT boat in many battles, and eventually headed up to Normandy as an operations officer for a destroyer squadron. While preparing for D-Day, he remembered later, “I saw Bulkeley on his PT Boat and waved to him. There was another man on the bridge with him. I had no idea then it was Jack Ford.” (more…)

Everything you needed to know about the unorthodox roll out of the now-notorious ACORN sting videos was hidden in plain sight in my Sept. 7 column, “Katie Couric, Look in the Mirror.” ACORN was not the only target of those videos; so were Katie, Brian, Charlie and every other mainstream media pooh-bah.

They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.

I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand.  (more…)

This week’s Washington Times column:

Now that White House “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones has resigned, what’s next?

Inevitably, the American mainstream media – ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, et al – must be held to account for sitting on the sidelines as this major story kept building without them, went viral on YouTube, and then became so large that a key appointee of President Obama was forced to step down.

But with their decision to ignore the Jones story, they may have actually done Mr. Obama far more harm than good: Who vetted this guy? How did he get past the FBI? What did he say, and how did he answer the infamous seven-page questionnaire that all Obama appointees were required to fill out? Inquiring Freedom of Information Act minds want to know.

For most people in this country, the resignation was the first they had heard of Van Jones. For this sin of journalistic omission, there’s institutional media blame. Bias is too tame a word for the utter shamelessness on display: Only Republican scandals – real and imagined – matter. (more…)

The Federal Office of Trend Management announced today that “Obamania” has officially replaced “Europhoria” as the favorite new high of the far left. Europhoria is the absolute adoration of anything European over anything American. Until recently progressives in the United States preferred coveting things European when they needed a lift. For example, if you were considering buying a new car and said something about a Ford Explorer or F-150 pickup they would tell you all about their Saab or BMW. Then they would segue into how in Europe they have very expensive gasoline because the governments understand that high gas taxes are good for the environment and keep the hoi polloi off the highways.

A lot of their sentences would start, “You know, in Europe…” For example when talking with a progressive friend about the current debate about health care they might bring up the European model of social welfare and yap on about it greatness. Your progressive friend might say, “You know in Europe everyone has free health care, thirty weeks vacation a year and is eligible for retirement at 47.” You try to mention how you have to wait in line for five months to get a prostate exam but they are already recounting how great it was to ride the public transportation three blocks to the Opera House in Vienna. New Your Times Columnist Paul Krugman even managed to a plug for Euro socialism in a recent column when he said it was like an ongoing government stimulus package so great for the economy! (more…)

“This class struggle plays hell with your poetry,” John Reed, celebrated in Warren Beatty’s Reds, confessed to friends after jumping from the lighthearted literary Left of Greenwich Village into the world of hardcore Communists. Bono may be thinking the same thing about saving the world. U2’s much-hyped No Line on the Horizon, the band’s first album in nearly five years, might be interpreted by celebrities as a cautionary tale against mixing activism with their art. As I write in my American Spectator review of No Line on the Horizon, the album represents the transformation of U2 from relevant it band to greatest hits act. It is uninspired, leaving diehard fans to wonder if meetings with popes, presidents, and queens, fundraising for debt relief, human rights activists, and AIDS, and writing columns for The New York Times makes U2 an afterthought for Bono.

The disconnect between beauty and popularity in music has never been greater.  Where once America sang the Beatles or Motown (“The Sound of Young America”), today the music industry is severely fragmented.  Gangsta rap.  Speed metal.  Trip-hop.  The major recording companies whine about declining profits even as they pay Mariah Carey $18 million not to record.

Unanimity of public opinion over popular song has passed.  Music, which used to unite, now divides.  Eminem and Ludacris would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.  We live in an antinomian age where it’s hip to defy conventional wisdom long after every vestige of conventional wisdom lies in tatters.  Where Keats’ Grecian Urn once proclaimed, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” today’s antinomian consumer proclaims, “Whatever,” in a voice oozing ennui. (more…)

Poor Caroline Kennedy! All of her life she’s gotten anything she wanted and never had to work too hard for it. She has taken on some big projects, like editing a book of her mother’s poetry. Who knew? She has put on dazzling fund raisers for schools in New York City. No doubt, she was down there schlepping tables and putting up stage lights. Over the years she raised over six million dollars for her charity! Forget the fact she could have written a personal check for twice that amount without a change in lifestyle. Where’s the fun in that? When you’re writing a check in the privacy of a Long Island estate or in a 75 million square foot Manhattan apartment, you don’t get to wear a fancy designer gown or get your picture in the New York Times.

So one day Mrs. Schlossberg woke up and thought it would be a great service to America if she volunteered to be a United States Senator. Why not? She was extremely well qualified. Her dad and two uncles had both done it. One of them had served while drinking heavily most, so how hard could it be? She went to law school and had co-written a book about the right to privacy. You know the same murky constitutional right the Roe vs. Wade decision is founded on? Most of all she was a Kennedy and therefore entitled to be elevated to rule by divine right. (more…)