Mark Steyn's Hollywierd....

[ChargerMike]

...if you can read at a 200 word per minute clip, it will take you 6 minutes :wink: ... if you want to know how fast you read go here.

http://mindbluff.com/askread2.htm

CLOONEY TUNES

In Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan, written just before the Great War, the central character, Diederich, is asked by Buck, “You do not know whom history will designate as the representative type of this era?”

“The Emperor,” says Diederich.

“No,” replies Buck. “The actor.”

And how. George Clooney’s triple Oscar nominations are said to be a significant moment in the life of the nation, and not just by George Clooney, though his effusions on his own “bravery” certainly set a high mark. “We jumped in on our own,” he said, discussing Good Night And Good Luck with Entertainment Weekly. “And there was no reason to think it was going to get any easier. But people in Hollywood do seem to be getting more comfortable with making these sorts of movies now. People are becoming braver.”

Wow. He was brave enough to make a movie about Islam’s treatment of women? Oh, no, wait. That was the Dutch director Theo van Gogh: he had his throat cut and half-a-dozen bullets pumped into him by an enraged Muslim who left an explanatory note pinned to the dagger he stuck in his chest. At last year’s Oscars, the Hollywood crowd were too busy championing the “right to dissent” in the Bushitler tyranny to find room even to namecheck Mr van Gogh in the montage of the deceased. Bad karma. Good night and good luck.

No, Mr Clooney was the fellow “brave” enough to make a movie about - cue drumroll as I open the envelope for Most Predictable Direction – the McCarthy era!

How about that? I don’t know about you but I was getting so sick of the sycophantic Joe McCarthy biopics churned out year in year out – Nathan Lane in McCarthy! The Musical was the final straw – that thank God someone finally had the “bravery” to exercise his “right to dissent”. I only hope George Clooney isn’t found dead in the street at the hands of some crazed nonagenarian HUAC member.

He’s got some tough competition, of course. This year’s five Best Picture nominees are all “films that broach the tough issues”, as USA Today puts it: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension; Night for its call for more watchdog journalism; and Munich for its take”. Whoops, my mistake. That should be “Munich for its take on terrorism”. In their combined take at the box-office, these Best Picture nominees have the lowest grosses since 1986. That means very few people have seen them. Which in turn means these Oscars are likely to have the lowest audience ever. Okay, maybe not ever. In 1929, they handed them out to an audience of 270 in the Blossom Room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, and no doubt by the time you add in overseas viewership from the many chapters of the Jon Stewart Fan Club this year’s audience will be up around 309.

The fact that hardly anybody has seen these films does not in and of itself mean that they’re not artistic masterpieces. That’s why the Oscars are important: they can shine a light on undeservedly neglected art-house jewels that might otherwise get overlooked. But you couldn’t exactly call Brokeback Mountain overlooked. It’s the Jungfrau, it’s the peak of cinematic achievement. It’s an Everest papered from base camp to the summit in rave reviews. And in the week the Oscar nominations were announced the world’s most ballyhooed art-house obscurity added another 435 theaters to its outlets – and business declined 13%.

Maybe it’s because Americans are homophobes. Or maybe it’s because these films are not as “controversial” as Hollywood thinks. The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it. Look at Tinky-Winky in the Teletubbies: those fundamentalist whack-jobs denounce him as an obvious fruit and the guy never looks back – he’s at his beach house in Malibu sipping margaritas and eyeing up the poolboy. But make a film that’s hailed as a gay masterpiece and Pat Robertson can’t even arrange a lousy multiplex in Dubuque that gets struck by lightning just for showing it.

Well, who knows? Perhaps next time they should make it two gay sheep herders in, say, Medina, or a gay Pushtun goatherd and a gay Uzbek warlord: The Mohammedans Go To The Mountain – that should light up the box-office. Or perhaps they could make Broke Back Toutin’, a film about an American media utterly exhausted by its frantic efforts to flog these movies to a general audience. As it is, Hollywood’s new reputation for “serious” “challenging” “works” seems merely the dinner-theatre production of the usual self-reinforcing Democrat-media bubble. A film-maker makes a film about a courageous pressman and the pressmen hail him as a courageous film-maker for doing so. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall have nothing on the romance between George Clooney and the world’s press. The “serious” press, that is, even though they sound like a cover story in Forty-Seventeen. Here’s The Observer in London:

How A Heart-Throb Became The Voice Of Liberal America: George Clooney was once famous for his party lifestyle and the beautiful women that he dated. Now it’s politics that increasingly sets his pulse racing.

And evidently the reporter’s too. That ran not in the entertainment section but on the news pages. “I’m an old-time liberal and I don’t apologize for it,” Clooney told Newsweek.

Good for him. And certainly, regardless of how liberal he is, he’s “old-time”. I don’t mean in the sense that he has the gloss of an old-time movie star, the nearest our age comes to the sheen of Cary Grant in a Stanley Donen picture, but that his politics is blessedly undisturbed by any developments on the global scene since circa 1974. Clooney’s other Oscar movie, Syriana, in which he stars and exec produces, reveals that behind a murky Middle East conspiracy lies …the CIA and Big Oil! In Good Night And Good Luck, he’s produced a film set in the McCarthy era that could have been made in the Jimmy Carter era. That’s to say, it takes into account absolutely nothing that has come to light in the last quarter-century – not least the relevant KGB files on Soviet penetration of America. To take one example that could stand for Clooney’s entire approach to the subject, Good Night includes shocking scenes of Senator McCarthy accusing Annie Moss, who worked in a highly sensitive decoding job in the Pentagon, of being a Communist, and the heroic Edward R Murrow then denouncing McCarthy’s behavior.

But we now know, from the party’s own files, that Miss Moss was, indeed, a Communist.

What should we conclude from the absence of this detail in the picture?

That Clooney, who goes around boasting that every moment in the screenplay has been “double-sourced” for accuracy, simply doesn’t know she’s a Commie?

Or that he does know but that he thinks it’s harmless? That she, like he and Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, is merely exercising her all-American “right to dissent”, in her case in the Pentagon Signals Corps’ code room. If so, that’s a subtly different argument than Murrow was making: it’s one thing to argue that it’s all a paranoid fantasy on the part of obsessed Red-baiters, quite another to shrug, hey, sure they were Commies, but what’s the big deal?

Or is it that Clooney doesn’t care either way? That what matters is the “meta-narrative” – the journalist as hero, “speaking truth to power”, no matter if the journalist is wrong and wields more power than most politicians. Even if one discounts the awkward fact that these days CBS News is better known for speaking twaddle to power – over the fake National Guard memos to which Dan Rather remains so attached – the reality is that the idea of the big media crusader simply doesn’t resonate with any section of the American public other than the big media themselves. Indeed, if you wanted to create a film designed to elicit rave reviews from the critics, you could hardly do better than a McCarthy era story built around a Watergate-style heroic reporter, unless you made the reporter gay. The media seem to have fallen for it, with the splendid exception of Armand White in The New York Press who said Clooney was far more hagiographic of his subject than Mel Gibson was in The Passion Of The Christ.

This is the Platonic reductio of political art. Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Thirties but they were serious about their leftism. Say what you like about those Hollywood guys in the Seventies but they were serious about their outrage at what was done to the lefties in the McCarthy era – though they might have been better directing their anger at the movie-industry muscle that enforced the blacklist. By comparison, Clooney’s is no more than a pose – he’s acting at activism, new Hollywood mimicking old Hollywood’s robust defense of even older Hollywood. He’s more taken by the idea of “speaking truth to power” than the footling question of whether the truth he’s speaking to power is actually true.

That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension…” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his own homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pin-up: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

These films are “transgressive” mostly in the sense that Transamerica is transsexual. I like Felicity Huffman and all, and I’m not up to speed with the latest strictures on identity-group casting but isn’t it a bit condescending to get a lifelong woman (or whatever the expression is) to play a transsexual? If Hollywood announced Al Jolson would be playing Martin Luther King, I’m sure Denzel Washington and co would have something to say about it. Were no transsexual actresses available for this role? I know at least one of my acquaintance, and there was a transsexual Bond girl in the late Roger Moore era who looked incredibly hot, albeit with a voice several octaves below Paul Robeson. What about that cutie with the very fetching Adam’s apple from The Crying Game? And, just as Transamerica’s allegedly unconventional woman is a perfectly conventional woman underneath, so the entire slate of Oscar nominees is, in a broader sense, a phalanx of Felicity Huffmans. They’re dressing up daringly and flouncing around as controversy, but underneath they’re simply the conventional wisdom. Indeed, “Transamerica” would make a good name for Hollywood’s view of its domestic market – a bizarro United States run by racists and homophobes and a poodle media in thrall to the Administration.

You can certainly find new wrinkles on “racial tensions” – Abie’s Wahhabi Rose? – but Hollywood “controversy” seems more an evasion of controversy. If you want it in a single word, it’s the difference between the title of George Jonas’ original book – Vengeance – and the title of the film Steven Spielberg made of it – Munich. Vengeance is a point of view, Munich is a round of self-applause for the point of view that having no point of view is the most sophisticated point of view of all – a position whose empty smugness is most deftly summarized by the final shot of the movie, the Twin Towers on the New York skyline. For a serious film, it would be hard to end on a more fundamentally unserious note.

But then it’s hard to be serious when you’ve made a virtue of dodging the tough choices of the age. The BritLit blockbusters currently keeping Hollywood afloat – Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord Of The Rings – may be ghastly Multiplex crowd-pleasers unworthy of great artists like George Clooney but they’re not a retreat to the periphery in the way that Hollywood “seriousness” is. Spielberg’s lingering shot of the World Trade Center wasn’t even the most equisitely framed banality of the year. That honor goes to The Constant Gardener, which may yet win Rachel Weisz an Oscar for her role as a passionate anti-globalization activist who dies in mysterious circumstances. At one point Ralph Fiennes is doing his signature stare, peering elliptically into the distance, when the camera pulls back to show him as a little stick-figure dwarfed by the mega-multinational pharmaceutical company’s corporate headquarters he’s standing outside.

Oh, come off it. The Constant Gardener is distributed by Universal Pictures. Don’t they have a big office? If Kong Kong’s standing outside waiting to get past security to find out why his residuals check has bounced, then Universal might look like some little mom’n’pop operation. But stick any of the rest of us on the sidewalk and we’d be like Ralph Fiennes outside Big Pharma. That’s Hollywood: no-one lavishes more care and expense on saying nothing.

Three months after 9/11, George Clooney was asked what he wanted for Christmas. “I want,” he said, “one day when nobody is getting shot at. Call a truce for a day.” Our own Jay Nordlinger remarked at the time that this was “a child’s response”, correctly noting “the implied moral randomness… People are just shooting at each other, you know, and shooting at each other is bad.” If you want stories about journalists, nobody was shooting on the day The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl had his head sawed off. If you want stories about “racial tensions”, nobody was shooting on the day British expat Ken Bigley was similarly decapitated. Hollywood’s “bravery” is an almost pathological retreat: it’s against segregated drinking fountains in Alabama and blacklisting writers on 1950s variety shows. It’s in danger of becoming an oldies station with only three records.

I noticed the other day that Nigeria now has the third biggest film industry in the world, after Hollywood and Bollywood. In the showbiz capital of West Africa, you can make a feature for 40,000 bucks. What talk radio did to network news and the Internet is doing to monopoly newspapers, someone will eventually do to the big studios, and one day we may wind up with a Hollywood in which, as Clooney might say, nothing is getting shot. In the meantime, Danish cartoonists are in hiding for their lives but George Clooney will be televised around the world picking up an award for his bravery.

[BSmack]

On this board you attack McCarthy you get a dozen or so dittoheads inspecting the corn in your stool. So yea, Clooney has some guts.

[Mister Bushice]

Between 500-550 WPM.

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[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

On this board you attack McCarthy you get a dozen or so dittoheads inspecting the corn in your stool. So yea, Clooney has some guts.

You'd be surprised at the opinion on McCarthy from today's Right, or so-called Right.

Remember, the parents and grandparents of modern Neo-Conservatives were McCarthy's
targets.

They don't forget so easily.

[ChargerMike]

[Bizzarofelice]

ChargerMike,

Did you read that? If yes, did you follow the guy? Seems as if he either has a horrible case of ADD that leads him in 50 different directions at once, or he's just content to throw crap and linear logic be damned.

If you want to hate on people in Hollywood, that is fine. I just suggest that if you want to bring out the opinions of others (such as your most recent C & P) and expect the reaction to be anymore than "the writer is an idiot" I suggest you choose your reading materials a little more selectively.

[ChargerMike]

ChargerMike,

Did you read that? If yes, did you follow the guy? Seems as if he either has a horrible case of ADD that leads him in 50 different directions at once, or he's just content to throw crap and linear logic be damned.

If you want to hate on people in Hollywood, that is fine. I just suggest that if you want to bring out the opinions of others (such as your most recent C & P) and expect the reaction to be anymore than "the writer is an idiot" I suggest you choose your reading materials a little more selectively.

Bace...to you the writer is an idiot, to others he is spot-on. So the idear is to glean some jewels from the rather lengthy article and fire up a discussion, nothing more. I learn much from hearing the other side. Being the old fart I am, I've forgotten more than I know :wink:

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

A guy named Mark Steyn trashes McCarthy...



What chutzpah.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Calm down, twinkletoes.

You're running Jew-baiting smack on me?

[Mister Bushice]

Bace...to you the writer is an idiot, to others he is spot-on. So the idear is to glean some jewels from the rather lengthy article and fire up a discussion, nothing more. I learn much from hearing the other side. Being the old fart I am, I've forgotten more than I know :wink:

One point. The Brokeback Mountain craze. In reality it's nothing more interesting than a car wreck. It's a sappy love story with a twist. Make them hetero and the movie is an entirely forgettable piece of hollywood garbage. Toss in the gay factor and everyone yells "oscar" and "cinematic masterpiece". Bullshit. TV and film have become gay for gays. people are just jumping on the bandwagon and riding it till it breaks down. I look forward to the day when I can tune into a show and not have them shove some gay issue up in my face as the most important aspect of the story.

[BSmack]

ChargerMike,

Did you read that? If yes, did you follow the guy? Seems as if he either has a horrible case of ADD that leads him in 50 different directions at once, or he's just content to throw crap and linear logic be damned.

If you want to hate on people in Hollywood, that is fine. I just suggest that if you want to bring out the opinions of others (such as your most recent C & P) and expect the reaction to be anymore than "the writer is an idiot" I suggest you choose your reading materials a little more selectively.

Mike thinks Michael (Wiener) Savage is worth listening to.

That should tell you all you need to know about his selectiveness.

[ChargerMike]

ChargerMike,

Did you read that? If yes, did you follow the guy? Seems as if he either has a horrible case of ADD that leads him in 50 different directions at once, or he's just content to throw crap and linear logic be damned.

If you want to hate on people in Hollywood, that is fine. I just suggest that if you want to bring out the opinions of others (such as your most recent C & P) and expect the reaction to be anymore than "the writer is an idiot" I suggest you choose your reading materials a little more selectively.

Mike thinks Michael (Wiener) Savage is worth listening to.

That should tell you all you need to know about his selectiveness.

...Bri. yes I listen to Wiener faithfully, he's the only voice I know of whose commentary isn't tempered by political correctness or lock-step party affilitation.

Example..all week he's ravaged Bush. Called him inept, loony tunes, and yesterday called him a "blithering idiot". He said the Bush administration is far more corrupt than Clinton at his worst!

Maybe you should tune in now and again :wink:

[BSmack]

...Bri. yes I listen to Wiener faithfully, he's the only voice I know of whose commentary isn't tempered by political correctness or lock-step party affilitation.

Example..all week he's ravaged Bush. Called him inept, loony tunes, and yesterday called him a "blithering idiot". He said the Bush administration is far more corrupt than Clinton at his worst!

Maybe you should tune in now and again :wink:

I can only stand the jackbooted Woody Allen routine for short periods of time.

[ChargerMike]

...Bri. yes I listen to Wiener faithfully, he's the only voice I know of whose commentary isn't tempered by political correctness or lock-step party affilitation.

Example..all week he's ravaged Bush. Called him inept, loony tunes, and yesterday called him a "blithering idiot". He said the Bush administration is far more corrupt than Clinton at his worst!

Maybe you should tune in now and again :wink:

I can only stand the jackbooted Woody Allen routine for short periods of time.

...then how the hell did you get through college?

[BSmack]

...Bri. yes I listen to Wiener faithfully, he's the only voice I know of whose commentary isn't tempered by political correctness or lock-step party affilitation.

Example..all week he's ravaged Bush. Called him inept, loony tunes, and yesterday called him a "blithering idiot". He said the Bush administration is far more corrupt than Clinton at his worst!

Maybe you should tune in now and again :wink:

I can only stand the jackbooted Woody Allen routine for short periods of time.

...then how the hell did you get through college?

Because my professors didn't whine like little bitches about the service at San Francisco bistros, or scream about Hillary Clinton being the focus of all evil in the world.

[Bizzarofelice]

I didn't think of Michael Savage.

The initial writing in this thread reminds me of Michael Savage. The guy seems to be railing against something, but he doesn't have enough facts to back up all the angst he's built. All this bluster and no real target.

Calling out Hollywood for not recognizing the death of Theo van Gogh? Theo van Gogh made art films. I don't mean art films like Brokeback mountain, I mean like Andy Warhol staring down a person with a camera for 15 minutes.

His rant about how few people will watch the Oscars... who cares? He seems to be insulting them about something, but is it really applicable?

"He’s more taken by the idea of “speaking truth to power” than the footling question of whether the truth he’s speaking to power is actually true." So this guy is reading George Clooney's mind?


This whole Hollywood hates America talking point is insane. Please, anyone with a mind that leans right, stop giving it any validity.

[Bizzarofelice]

does the fact that he makes his living in entertainment make him a pinhead?

[ChargerMike]

Bace...to you the writer is an idiot, to others he is spot-on. So the idear is to glean some jewels from the rather lengthy article and fire up a discussion, nothing more. I learn much from hearing the other side. Being the old fart I am, I've forgotten more than I know :wink:

One point. The Brokeback Mountain craze. In reality it's nothing more interesting than a car wreck. It's a sappy love story with a twist. Make them hetero and the movie is an entirely forgettable piece of hollywood garbage. Toss in the gay factor and everyone yells "oscar" and "cinematic masterpiece". Bullshit. TV and film have become gay for gays. people are just jumping on the bandwagon and riding it till it breaks down. I look forward to the day when I can tune into a show and not have them shove some gay issue up in my face as the most important aspect of the story.

said another way...

"Well, who knows? Perhaps next time they should make it two gay sheep herders in, say, Medina, or a gay Pushtun goatherd and a gay Uzbek warlord: The Mohammedans Go To The Mountain – that should light up the box-office. Or perhaps they could make Broke Back Toutin’, a film about an American media utterly exhausted by its frantic efforts to flog these movies to a general audience"

[Bizzarofelice]

"Hey, what do I know? I'm just an actor."

He is also someone who could possibly be very well versed in political topics. Does his profession automatically make him shuttered from the world?

Are political talking heads anything more than entertainers? George Clooney may have an advantage over Robert Novak because Clooney isn't dependent upon the jizz dribblings of politicians for his livelihood.

[ChargerMike]

I can only stand the jackbooted Woody Allen routine for short periods of time.

...then how the hell did you get through college?

Because my professors didn't whine like little bitches about the service at San Francisco bistros, or scream about Hillary Clinton being the focus of all evil in the world.

...no, they bitched about the cold pasta at Green Peppers and labeled George W. as the great satan.

[ChargerMike]

He is also someone who could possibly be very well versed in political topics. Does his profession automatically make him shuttered from the world?

Then again he could also be someone who is almost certainly a gibbering tard. Take Tim Robbins for example....orJTR.

Does his profession automatically make him somebody intelligently informed on world events?

OMG..spewing over here..

[Mister Bushice]

Bace...to you the writer is an idiot, to others he is spot-on. So the idear is to glean some jewels from the rather lengthy article and fire up a discussion, nothing more. I learn much from hearing the other side. Being the old fart I am, I've forgotten more than I know :wink:

One point. The Brokeback Mountain craze. In reality it's nothing more interesting than a car wreck. It's a sappy love story with a twist. Make them hetero and the movie is an entirely forgettable piece of hollywood garbage. Toss in the gay factor and everyone yells "oscar" and "cinematic masterpiece". Bullshit. TV and film have become gay for gays. people are just jumping on the bandwagon and riding it till it breaks down. I look forward to the day when I can tune into a show and not have them shove some gay issue up in my face as the most important aspect of the story.

said another way...

"Well, who knows? Perhaps next time they should make it two gay sheep herders in, say, Medina, or a gay Pushtun goatherd and a gay Uzbek warlord: The Mohammedans Go To The Mountain – that should light up the box-office. Or perhaps they could make Broke Back Toutin’, a film about an American media utterly exhausted by its frantic efforts to flog these movies to a general audience"

Not exactly what I meant. Look at TV today. Nearly every shitcom has a gay character, and if not has gay themed shows. All the dramas either have gay characters, or one of the focal points is the struggles a gay character has to go through. It's pathetic.

Same stories as before but with a gay twist. It'll run its course but for now it's on overload, like the reality TV craze.

[ChargerMike]

...absolutely concur!

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Catholic League president William Donohue thinks that Hollywood doesn’t like The Passion of the Christ—get ready for it—
because the industry is run by Christ-hating Jews:

“Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.
It’s not a secret, okay? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ.”[…]

While Donohue said he likes “families” and “nativity scenes,” “Hollywood likes anal sex.”