Vicki: Mom, I just did a Tea Party speech in Washington, D.C.  I sang my song, “There’s a Communist Living in the White House!” 

Mom: Oh No!  I don’t want you to get shot! 

Vicki: You see what you just said?  That’s the problem.  “When the people fear the Government it’s Tyranny.  When the Government fears the people, it’s Liberty.”  Thomas Jefferson             

Mom: What?! 

Vicki: When Bush was President they called him horrible names, every day on TV; they even made a movie about him getting shot.  No one was afraid.  That was America; a rude, disrespectful, mean America, but a Free one.  Now, we are actually afraid of the Government, and… 

Mom: Let me get your Dad on the phone…JJJIIIMMM!!  (more…)

A sudden revival of appreciating my European filmmaking roots was curiously prompted when the game between the Saints and the Cardinals abruptly intensified in the second half. The Pig and Whistle restaurant on Hollywood Blvd.—where I was watching the game with my friend Ryan, an unconscious Cardinals fan—became so loud and erratic that I and everyone in Ryan’s radius decided to get out for a breath of fresh air not contaminated, yet, by Ryan’s gradual collapse into drunken insanity.

The Pig and Whistle is an old Hollywood joint right next to one of the oldest American theatres, Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, the home of the American Cinematique.  As Hollywood Blvd. has become safer and relatively less bizarre over the past several years, the Egyptian has become a more frequent host of various film events.                                                                

That day, it was hosting a Q&A with directors of foreign films nominated for Golden Globes. By the kitchen exit of the Pig and Whistle, Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore was giving an interview just a few steps away from Austrian director Michael Haneke, who was talking to enthusiastic film buffs (and was generally ignored by the Cardinals’ fans).  Among the directors were also the young Chilean director of “The Maid,” Sebastian Silva, and a French director of a prison saga “The Prophet,” Jacques Audiard. (more…)

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Smoking Gun:

The video, which can be viewed above, was the brainchild of Aaron Melcher, a married 24-year-old soldier who graduated in 2004 from North Carolina’s Gramercy Christian School. Melcher opens the video in a pas de deux, of sorts, with fellow enlistee Justin Baker, who is not nearly as enthusiastic a dancer as the gyrating Melcher, who incorporated elements of the original video’s choreography in his desert remake. On the following pages, you’ll find video stills of Melcher’s co-stars, along with photos of most of the soldiers in their normal work clothes.

(more…)

Stu VanAirsdale of the left-wing filmsite Movieline interviewed “Fair Game” director Doug Liman. Check out this biting, insightful follow-up question to the director’s absurd claim that his film isn’t committed to politics:

MOVIELINE: It’s kind of a weird climate for this film. There was Nothing But the Truth, which was kind of mishandled. Then there was Green Zone, which audiences were very cool toward. Where will Fair Game fall in this political intrigue/spy thriller spectrum?

LIMAN: I think it’s in the spectrum of “It’s a really great movie.” And a lot of other movies that have been about the war or dealt with the war have not been great movies. In fact, they’ve been motivated more by politics than by story, and that’s been a turn-off to audiences. This is sort of the first political movie that’s been made where I feel like the commitment was there from the first moment to story and character, and not to politics.

MOVIELINE: I overheard you a moment ago mentioning Naomi Watts is outstanding in this. Can you elaborate?

Translation: After I carried a little water for the embarrassment that was “Nothing But the Truth,” you made the wildly outrageous statement that your movie about Valerie Plame and starring Sean Penn isn’t committed to politics. My follow up, however, will ignore all of that — will let that spin stand – and instead I’ll give you the opportunity to gush over your leading lady for two reasons: We’re on the same ideological team and I really, really want you to like me. (more…)

“It’s China, it’s India Anywhere the middle-class is exploding, everyone’s sucking up more power. Population’s continuing to grow, you know we’re going to have to do something about it.”

There it is folks. Straight from the mouth of James Cameron himself. When caught off-guard without his DNC talking points, he admits that the much talked about middle-class is “booming” in America, not shrinking. Also through his comparison to modern China and India, he even acknowledges that the class gap is closing because of –gasp– capitalism! Something must be done about it, and lil’ Jimmy is just the wimp for the job. Somebody call Sean Penn, just in case he needs a sidekick on this one.

Now remember, James Cameron hates capitalism (rumor has it that the creature in “Alien” was based on his own mental interpretation of free enterprise). He believes that it’s destroying the world and needs to be dealt with accordingly. Unless of course it interferes with the production, promotion or distribution of the most expensive motion picture of all time. Then it ain’t no thang, baby!

No, the “thang” that really bothers Cameron is when middle-class Americans act as selfish, evil consumers in order to better their own lives. You heard Jimmy. They’re “sucking up more power,” acting as nothing more than bottom-feeders of Mother Earth’s resources. (more…)

I read kids’ books because the fun the author had writing shines through and drips from the pages. I think that’s the secret behind the Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Kids and adults enjoy reading what authors enjoy writing. 

I was reminded of this a couple months ago when I read author Andrew Klavan’s “The Long Way Home,” second book of his The Homelanders series. You can read the first chapter here on BH. The series centers on high school student Charlie West, who wakes up one morning to a world turned upside down. The last year of his life has been erased from memory, and he’s running from police for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s also running – for his life – from a terrorist group called the Homelanders, who claim he’s a former member and want to silence him. Faced with prison from one side and death from the other, Charlie must rely on his karate black belt, a few high school friends and his faith to maneuver the fog of uncertainty surrounding him and discover the truth. 

“The Long Way Home” is a fast-paced read that feels like you are watching the opening sequences of “Casino Royale” over and over again. For example, the book starts: “The man with the knife was a stranger. I never saw him before he tried to kill me.” It doesn’t let up from there.  (more…)

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How do you get a Hollywoodist to make a fool of himself? Ask an honest question and then let him keep right on talking until he completely bares his ass.

CNSNews brings us yet another chapter in the fall of the once mighty Harrison Ford.

Listen to the psychobabble…

Listen to the rank-hypocrisy…

Listen to the rationalizing coming from a man with seven aircraft (and a serious case of entitlement) who tells the rest of the world — including that part of the world desperate to develop – how to remain forever poor decrease their carbon footprint. (more…)

It’s getting worse people.

Last night I told you about the SF mayor banning city employees from traveling to Arizona. But now, in a move meant to bring the state to its knees, the Montreal pop band “stars” has tweeted that until its “racist new immigration law is repealed,” they will boycott the state.

Arizona’s reaction? One of devastation.

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Wow, they’re taking it harder than I thought.

Look, I love Canada for many reasons (it’s where I keep my winter clothes), but they don’t share a porous border with a troubled country with limited opportunities for its hardworking people. In 2008, do you know how many people illegally immigrated to Canada? I could count it on my hand, if I had 120,000 fingers.

There are almost five times as many already in Arizona. (more…)

It’s hard to go into a movie called “The Losers” with high expectations. The title is silly and likely turned some viewers off (who wants to go see a movie called “The Losers,” anyway?). Fortunately, the title does not do the movie justice as the film turns out to be a fun, light and enjoyable action adventure.

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The story begins with a unit of quirky individuals on a seemingly routine military mission in Bolivia. That mission becomes more complicated than expected when a group of kids becomes endangered and soon they’re (the “Losers”) all targeted for assassination by a mysterious man who goes by the name Max. After a failed assassination plot against the “Losers,” the team decides to seek vengeance against Max with the assistance of Aisha, an intense and seductive woman they meet while attempting to lay low. The movie focuses on the Losers and Aisha as they attempt to find Max and bring him to justice for betraying them. 

Although this sounds like a typical action adventure, events are spiced with comedic elements. The Losers never take themselves all that seriously and the story’s clever wit livens up the action sequences. In one particularly enjoyable sequence, one of the Losers has to break into an office to steal some files which leads to a woman catching him changing his clothes in the elevator and a smart ending to the escape operation all set to a terrific song. (more…)

CBS won’t comment, but the NY Times reports that on Tuesday night’s episode of the ”The Good Wife” the story revolved around an artist killed by a bomb after he drew a cartoon featuring Muhammad. It looks as though the episode used a number of camera dodges to ensure no one got a good clean look at Islam’s founder:

In a plot line on Tuesday’s episode of “The Good Wife,” the show’s law firm deals with a suit brought by the widow of a newspaper editor who was killed by a bomb after he published an editorial cartoon showing the Prophet Muhammad being searched by airport security officers. In scenes like the one above, the editorial cartoon is depicted only in small portions, obscured by shadows or pieces of paper, and never revealed in its entirety.

If you combine this with Comedy Central’s over-the-top censoring of a recent “South Park” episode, we’re really only left with two explanations, right? Either Hollywood’s had a massive change of heart and has suddenly decided to treat religion with respect or they’re terrified of becoming the next Theo Van Gogh.

Right?

We should all be rippling with anticipation over how one or both of these moral revelations will alter upcoming Tinseltown product. If The Former Religious Bigots Known As Hollywood have finally come around and changed their ways when it comes to insulting people of faith — just for starters, who will the new bad guys be on all four of those “Law & Order” series? Who will be the new whipping boys in the independent film world?  (more…)

Former Police frontman Gordon “Sting” Sumner has once again made news – this time with his insistence that “the people” are clamoring for big government (read: a socialist nanny state):

“Well, you can see the enthusiasm out there. And people are here to really tell big government that we want big government to make big decisions about the most important problems we face. And also to pressure our corporations to behave properly, as consumers, but we’re here to — we’re asking for big government, basically.”

First of all, who is this “we?” Don’t include me in that statement, bucko - or the readers of Big Hollywood, for that matter. And don’t include the millions of Tea Party attendees all across this still great nation of ours. Obviously someone’s too busy polishing the Grammys on his mantel to pay much attention to the news – except to watch videos of his own CNN appearances, natch.

And I have to ask the obvious question – is Mr. Sumner even an American citizen, or is he just here because the US (for now) taxes him at a lower rate than the UK? Either way, he’s a blowhard who doesn’t speak for me. (more…)

Dhimmitude: an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands.

South Park, equal opportunity satirists, have finally met their match.

No, not the Islamist barbarians who have issued an indirect fatwa against South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the unforgivable crime of satirizing the notion of Muhammed’s appearance.

The veiled threat posted on a jihadist website, is, I’m afraid, totally expected.

It is Hollywood itself that has betrayed Parker and Stone. 

In the episode—I viewed the original before it was censored—Muhammed was shown inside a U-haul, inside a mascot’s uniform, and finally as a child’s stick figure drawing.

It was hilarious.

And deadly. (more…)

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Tuesday morning Nikki Finke posted Andrew Klavan’s online interview (above) with CNSNews where the successful novelist and screenwriter (and my pal) – who just had his Homelander series optioned by Summit – discussed, among other things, the difficulties conservatives face working or looking to work in a very liberal Tinseltown. Finke’s opening comment pretty much confirm Klavan’s:

Sure, this has long been the complaint from Hollywood Republicans. But I’ve witnessed the atmosphere out here becoming far less toxic for politically conservative or religious right or other non-liberal Industry types.

“Less toxic.” What a relief.  Tolerant, open-minded Hollywood sure has come a long way.

Of course, Finke then goes out of her way to contribute to this admitted toxicity, closing her piece with the spreading of  the provably false claim that Klavan “characterizes his liberal biz counterparts as ‘Anti-American’.”

That’s a helluva charge to make against Klavan. But… (more…)

So San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom just announced a ban on official city travel to Arizona, because he claims the state’s new immigration law is “unacceptable.”

Which leads me to explore what Mr. Newsom finds acceptable:

Exhibit A. Turning the world’s most beautiful city, San Francisco, into a sprawling toilet with a half billion dollar deficit. Being S.F.’s mayor should be a dream job. It’s like being King of Gumdrop Village on Rainbow Island. It’s packed with great food, tourists, amazing scenery and fun people. But Gavin has left the city oilier than his own pompadour. If one block doesn’t smell of excrement, it’s because it smells of feces. And vice versa. Gavin has taken a jewel of a city and pooped all over it. Which leads me to:

Exhibit B. Letting panhandlers rule. I’m from the Bay Area, and spent a lot of time wandering SF’s streets, either working, or drunk. Now, no way. The last time I was there, my 85 year old mom was surrounded by the most aggressive panhandlers I’ve ever seen – as we walked over others, apparently napping. Instead of worrying about the potential ramifications of enforcing a law in another state, Gav should address the heaps of humanity that litter his very own streets. (more…)

“Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.” — Joni Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010 

Caterwauling Canuck “folk singer” Joni Mitchell got just about everybody riled up with that sweet morsel of self-serving insight, but the real shock is not that Mitchell is absolutely correct but that someone finally came out and said it. After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records, brain-dead rock critics and the slimy elite institution that elevated such barely able snake-oil salesmen as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to celestial heights, it’s high time to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony. 

Most Dylan fans would be stunned to realize that his vocal style (for lack of a better term) was high-jacked, in its entirety, from long-dead bluegrass-country singer Carter Stanley. We’re not talking about an influence, like Lefty Frizzell for Merle Haggard, but a total appropriation of  Stanley’s highly idiosyncratic approach. A counterfeit from the get-go, once Dylan realized what an advantage his audience’s innate ignorance was, he’s exploited it ever since. 

Just type “Bob Dylan plagiarism” into your friendly search engine, and a plethora of questionable circumstances pop up, enrobing the singer almost as completely as his years of reflexive media fawning have. Documented from his teenage start, when he submitted a hand written, thinly revised version of country star Hank Snow’s “Little Buddy” for publication as an original poem, to his 1963 pilferage of Irish poet Dominic Behan’s “Patriot Game”’s melody for the similarly slanted Dylan tune “With God on Our Side” to songwriter James Damiano’s ongoing multimillion dollar copyright infringement suit (alleging Dylan’s Grammy-nominated “Dignity” is nothing but an altered version of Damiano’s “Steel Guitars”) to the naked “Red Sails in the Sunset” melody heist for the song “Beyond The Horizon” on his Modern Times album, up through the recent Confessions of a Yakuza-Love & Theft plagiarism charges (Love & Theft? Calling Dr. Freud!), the Timrod controversy, even the numerous passages of Proust and Jack London that (re) appear in the text of Dylan’s autobiography, it’s a deep, dark thicket of thoroughly damning and apparently chronic bootlegging. Naturally, Dylan has said nothing publicly about any of these, but he already spent over three million dollars defending himself against one-time affiliate Damiano–the classic delay-to-destroy court room technique.  (more…)

I saw Fools Face open for John Hiatt in Madison, WI in 1982. I had their two vinyl LPs, Tell America and Public Places on the Talk label. Fools Face did not disappoint, putting on a galvanizing fifty minute show.

They have now released a live record, Fools Face Live at Last (Talk, 2005) that is among the greatest rock recordings ever made. The recording is superb, the audience is electric, and the music itself is timeless fist-pumping power pop, song after song after song.

I have seen the Rolling Stones, McCartney and Wings, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Santana to name a few, and I have sought live recordings of all of them. Live At Last ranks with the very best, apart from the reasons stated above, precisely because they are a relatively unknown band from the heartland. The record’s unexpected nature only enhances its greatness.  (more…)

**** This post was updated for clarity

The list of films I’m literally counting down the days to see each summer gets shorter every year. This is either due to my advancing middle age or Hollywood’s advancing suckery. Regardless, few films were as pure pleasure of a surprise as the original “Iron Man,” which seemed to come out of nowhere in 2007 and knock us all out. Part of the thrill was watching Robert Downey Jr. become an icon before our very eyes. Not since Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow effortlessly stepped from his sinking ship and onto that pier had a film character created such a reservoir of a goodwill that a franchise was both inevitable and welcome.

So, likes “Pirates 2,” we eagerly anticipate “Iron Man 2.” As news dribbled out, a big plus was the return of the main players and the casting of Mickey Rourke as the villain, Whiplash; the big who cares was Don Cheadle stepping into the role originated by Terence Howard; the big minus was the casting of Scarlett Johansson and not just because she’s Scarlett Johansson. What she represents is the film’s second villain Black Widow (UPDATE: this may be incorrect. I was going by BW’s comic origin story. Sam Rockwell’s Hammer is either villain #2 or #3, depending on how the film uses Black Widow) and the whole idea of a second villain brings back unpleasant memories of Batman Returns and Spider-Man 3. Meaning, overstuffed plots with too much going on resulting in the lack of a focused story impossible to lose yourself in. 

Unless the film critic mentions the dreaded shaky-cam, reviews don’t normally have much of an effect on me. It’s just one person’s opinion, no less or more valid than the neighborhood mailman, crossing guard or the illegal aliens who take care of my yard. But when a review makes sense, when it locks a piece into place that was already floating ’round my mind, that’s when it gets my attention. And today’s review in the Hollywood Reporter diminished my expectations … some — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing:  (more…)