James Gandolfini and his wife Deborah Lin at the LA premiere of Zero Dark Thirty on December 10, 2012. Gandolfini portrayed Leon Panetta. Photo by Featureflash / Shutterstock.com.

Multiple sources, including the New York Times and the New York Daily News are reporting the death of James Gandolfini, who achieved iconic status as America’s favorite television mobster in HBO’s popular series, The Sopranos, which aired from 1999 through 2007. The Daily News reports that the 51 year old New Jersey-born actor “died following a massive heart attack in Italy,” according to a source close to the actor.

Deadline Hollywood adds:

Overweight, balding, rough around the edges with a thick New Jersey accent, Gandolfini was the opposite of a marquee leading man, destined to be a character actor, and yet he proved through his masterful acting that he could make Tony Soprano sexy and smart, towering and powerful. his portrayal was one of TV’s largest-looming TV anti-heroes — the schlub we loved, the cruel monster we hated, the anxiety-ridden husband and father we wanted to hug when he bemoaned, “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my family. Like I lost the ducks.” In the most maddening series finale in recent history – an episode chock full of references to mortality (life, death, a William Butler Yeats reference to the apocalypse, a bathroom reference to a “Godfather” bloodbath) — his was the show’s last image, seen just as the words “Don’t stop” were being sung on the jukebox. It generated such extreme reaction that the series’ fans crashed HBO’s website for a time that night trying to register their outrage that it ended with a black screen, leaving them not knowing whether Tony Soprano had been whacked. In large part to Gandolfini’s charisma (“Jimmy was the spiritual core of our Sopranos family,” Chris Albright noted today), that Season 5 of The Sopranos in 2004 remains the most watched series in HBO history with 14.4 million viewers on average.

As the New York Times reports, Gandolfini “had an impressive list of character-acting credits but he was largely unknown to the general public when David Chase cast him in ‘The Sopranos’ in 1999:”

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

Fortunately for both HBO and us, Gandolfini got the part, and will live on in Hollywood mobster immortality, an apt successor to the gangster roles that made legends of Edward G. Robinson, Brando, Pacino and the ensemble cast of Goodfellas, which inspired The Sopranos.

Comments

At the risk of invading my friend Steve Green’s terrain, some thoughts on a pair of booze ads seen on this past Sunday’s episode of Mad Men. First, Christina Hendricks of Mad Men posits the notion that a glass of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks would be an exceptional idea:

Despite the late Christopher Hitchens insisting on numerous occasions that it’s his “Breakfast of Champions,” I’ve never tried Johnnie Walker Black. But when Christina Hendricks says it’s a good idea – and looks and sounds that good while cooing the notion into a microphone, with swingin’ Vegas-style lounge music underneath that adds to the swank of the whole Rat Pack/ Mad Men-era vibe, who am I to argue?

It also helps that there’s no guy in the ad. So if you’re a guy watching the ad, you’re free to picture yourself however you want – presumably a cross between Sinatra, Cary Grant and Don Draper based on the music and the ad’s overall atmosphere. With Christina Hendricks about to hand you a Johnnie Walker. Life is Good.

In contrast, Southern Comfort takes a different approach. A very different approach. If you’re a middle-aged guy with a porn ‘stache and aviator frames who likes to drop by the beauty parlor to have your Gregg Allman ponytail shampooed while being photographed Instagram-style in washed-out vintage film stock for the complete 1973 vibe, well, Eat a Peach and break out the Southern Comfort; have I got the hooch for you:

You can trace the decline of western civilization by the man who immediately comes to mind in any given era when the words “Southern gentleman” are spoken. From the 1930s through the 1950s, it was Clark Gable. In the 1970s, it was Burt Reynolds. In the ‘80s, it was Don Johnson. At least the fellow in the above Southern Comfort commercial getting his ponytail washed has a certain low rent sense of style. Another Southern Comfort ad in the same series jettisons that notion entirely, letting it all – far, far too much of it, to be precise – hang out for the world to see:

Incidentally, I love the “Drink Responsibly” reminder underneath this poor sod’s protruding belly.

The Johnnie Walker Black commercial harkens back to an earlier, swankier era, JFK’s New Frontier, when the future appeared both stylish and limitless. Today is that future, and Southern Comfort says it’s as bleak, ugly, and as nihilistic as how it envisions its ideal customer.

Good night America, it’s been fun!

1 Comment

Even on Father’s Day, dad can’t catch a break from “liberal” Hollywood, whether it’s TV commercials, story plots, or even the Internet Movie Database homepage today. While the article’s headline gets it right, the IMDB homepage screencapped above sure didn’t.

It’s enough to make a man want to go on strike to protest a society that’s so stacked against him; watch the space for our interview with Dr. Helen on her new book in the not-too-distant future.

2 Comments

How seriously does CNN take the important events of the day? As seriously as the above screencap from Twitter illustrates. As a commenter at William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog quips, “in a hundred thousand years, an alien archeologist digging through ancient Earth civilization will come to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian was Queen of our planet at this time.”

Our alien archeologist might also conclude that this gentleman was enough of an expert on data mining, the War on Terror, and American national security as to warrant the following description on his Chyron:

Click to enlarge.

Finally, never let it be said that CNN doesn’t take seriously the notion of freedom, liberty, and the First Amendment:

On Sunday’s edition of Global Public Square, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria invited Mona Eltahawy to offer her perspective on the anti-government protests in Turkey and the rights of women in the Muslim world. It is unclear what qualifies Eltahawy as an authority on rights of any kind, since she is currently being prosecuted for defacing a poster on the New York City subway that she happened to dislike–a crime of which she is proud.

The poster, sponsored by Pam Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Eltahawy took offense and attempted to spray-paint the word “racist” on the poster–in the process spray-painting a photographer who attempted to guard the poster. As she was being arrested, she complained: “This is non-violent protest.”

Something very strange has gotten into the water at CNN — and American viewers know it.

3 Comments

Big Hollywood links to an article by Lynda Obst, the producer of Contact, Sleepless in Seattle, and TV’s Hot in Cleveland (among many other projects) in Salon, setting up her quotes by first noting that “For consumers, the decline of the DVD market has meant switching over to both Blu-ray and, more recently, streaming options for their viewing pleasure.  The end of the DVD format’s dominance meant something much more, and far worse, for Hollywood.”

In Salon, Obst writes:

“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” [20th Century Fox executive Peter Chernin] went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”

For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.

This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?

This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”

* * * * *

“When did the collapse begin?”

“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”

It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.

“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.

But it was in 2010 that James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):

It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …

And the following year, many in Hollywood went all-in with Occupy Wall Street, which was obsessed with the “obscene” profits made by gigantic multinational corporations. You know, like movie studios.

Presumably, losing the cushion of DVD sales is part of the reason why Steven Spielberg recently told a USC audience that, as the Hollywood Reporter paraphrased, “an ‘implosion’ in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever.”

But it’s not like Hollywood has much respect for the audience who pays the tickets to see those $250 million products during their initial run in theaters. Obst’s article on the collapse of her industry appears in Salon, which isn’t exactly sympathetic to Hollywood’s core audience in flyover country, when its editor at large has a new book titled, What’s the Matter with White People?: Finding Our Way in the Next America.

Similarly, in 2008, the late Nora Ephron, who in the previous decade had written and directed the Obst-produced Sleepless in Seattle, wrote in the Huffington Post, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men.” Incidentally those people in Pennsylvania that Ephron was writing off as troglodytic racists were her fellow Democrats, who were about to decide between Obama and Hillary in the PA Democrat primary — the same primary voters that Obama wrote off at the time as bitter, gun and God-obsessed clingers.

Pages: 1 2 | 23 Comments

“Nikki Finke has been fired from the blog she founded, Deadline Hollywood, and will be leaving the company as soon as this week, multiple individuals with knowledge of the situation have told The Wrap, in an article that’s also linked by the Internet Movie Database tonight: 

The scourge of Hollywood media has clashed repeatedly with her boss, who apparently has had enough.

Jay Penske, the CEO of Penske Media, which bought Deadline in 2009, told several top Hollywood executives last week that he was firing Finke, complaining she had crossed the line one too many times in sending poison-pen emails berating sources over scoops she lost to competitors.

“She’s been sending emails saying, ‘I’m going to f— you,’ and Jay says he’s had it,” said one top executive.

UPDATE: Penske emailed TheWrap to say: “Sharon, your story isn’t true and all of the “facts” that you mention are completely erroneous.”

When asked if Finke was in fact leaving Deadline, he did not respond.

Finke did not return an email or call seeking comment.

One individual said Finke has been telling executives in Hollywood that she is leaving.

The other issue that brought things to a head is a new contract. Finke’s five-year contract is up next year, and the two have not come to an agreement.

The prospect of a defanged Deadline Hollywood without its Viper-in-Chief is an interesting one. Finke has both terrorized and riveted Hollywood by shredding the reputations of executives she dislikes and heaping praise on those she does.

But recently her writing has tended to be limited to analyzing box office on the weekends. The blog has come to resemble a less-spicy trade, with industry casting scoops by Mike Fleming and Nellie Andreeva dominating the coverage.

Deadline Hollywood’s Mike Fleming strongly denies the story:

As for me, I can only say this: Nikki convinced me to leave Daily Variety after 20 years, and it was the right move and I have never enjoyed collaborating with a journalist more than I have with her. I love what the reporters and editors here have built here with her guidance, it feels memorable and important, and I think we have a lot more to say and do together. Internal stuff happens from time to time and it gets worked out, despite the sensationalized reporting that amounts to wishful thinking on the part of The Wrap, which couldn’t carry Deadline’s jockstrap.

However, as the first comment to his post asks:

No offense but that letter leaves out the key issue here. Will Nikki be writing anymore here, or, will she be on “gardening leave” while the time runs out on her contract? The text above just says she wasn’t fired, which can often be a mere technicality when someone is pushed out of a position in other ways.

Somewhere, Cathy Seipp is enjoying every minute of this kerfuffle involving her bête noire, whom she excoriated at length in a classic National Review Online article in 2004; Hedda Hopper versus Louella Parsons updated for the Internet age.

However, if the report from The Wrap does turn out to be true, I’ll be curious to see where Finke goes next, as I have enjoyed many of her posts at Deadline Hollywood.

Comments

Sex can extend a man’s life, Men’s Journal claims…

“For men, the more the better,” he says. “The typical man who has 350 orgasms a year, versus the national average of around a quarter of that, lives about four years longer.” And more than those extra four years, Roizen says, the men will feel eight years younger than their contemporaries. Is there an optimal number of orgasms for the average man? Roizen suggests, with a straight face, that 700 a year could add up to eight years to your life. This is an ambitious prescription: The average American adult male has sex just 81 times a year.

Roizen’s formula may be new, but the benefits of sex and orgasms have been tracked for years, and there’s some compelling hard evidence to back Roizen’s claims. A Swedish study done in the ’80s found that 70-year-olds who made it to 75 were the ones still having sex, and a Duke University study that followed 252 people over 25 years concluded that “frequency of intercourse was a significant predictor of longevity.”

But the big kahuna of longevity studies was completed just 10 years ago in Wales. British scientists interviewed nearly 1,000 men in six small villages about their sexual frequency, then arranged for all death records to be forwarded so the scientists could record their life spans. Ten years later they determined that men who had two or more orgasms a week had died at a rate half that of the men who had orgasms less than once a month. “Sexual activity seems to have a protective effect on men’s health,” the researchers concluded.

…Unless you’re Michael Douglas, apparently:

Michael Douglas – the star of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex.

In a surprisingly frank interview with the Guardian, the actor, now winning plaudits in the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, explained the background to a condition that was thought to be nearly fatal when diagnosed three years ago. Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and drinking, usually thought to be the cause of the disease, Douglas replied: “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Umm, ooooooooooooooohhhhhkaaaaaaaay. But if it’s actually true, Joe Jackson didn’t know the half of it when he wrote in 1982 that everything gives you cancer:

*****

Cross-posted at PJ Lifestyle with the headline “More Orgasms = Longer Life Expectancy?”

1 Comment

The typographic blog Tenth Letter of the Alphabet explores the “Anatomy of a Logo: Star Wars” in rather complete detail; fans of the original movie will see many familiar icons from those heady days in 1977 when Star Wars conquered Hollywood due to its freshness, sense of kinetic energy, and brilliant production design. And graphic design: the Tenth Letter of the Alphabet post begins with the initial attempts by George Lucas and company to envision a logo for the original Star Wars (or as it was first known, “The Star Wars”), before finally hitting upon the logo that’s been associated with the film for 36 years now. This passage describing how a graphic artist finally captured Lucas’ intent certainly has a sense of deja vu about it for me:

Lucas turned to Suzi Race to design a new Star Wars logo. She wrote about her involvement in a two-part post on her site: part one and part two. The Star Wars Poster Book (Chronicle Books, 2005) had a short account of her role:

…Though the poster contained no painted imagery, it did introduce a new logo to the campaign, one that had been designed originally for the cover of a Fox brochure sent to theater owners….Suzy Rice, who had just been hired as an art director, remembers the job well. She recalls that the design directive given by Lucas was that the logo should look “very fascist.”

“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today—how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”

I sense something here. A presence I’ve not felt since 2010.  I hadn’t known of Lucas’ intent for his franchise’s logo when I reviewed the documentary titled Helvetica that year:

In a way, Helvetica is the font of liberal fascism; it’s certainly the font of corporatism. To this day, it’s on the side of every one of the airplanes owned by American Airlines, a private corporation. But it’s also the font of the New York Subway system, both the work of Italian designer Massimo Vignelli, now in his late ‘70s, and interviewed in the Helvetica film. And since Amtrak’s inception via Congress and President Nixon in 1971, the typeface on sides of its cars and locomotives is Helvetica as well. Helvetica symbolizes order and authority, but to borrow from one of the concluding memes of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, it’s the softer authoritarian nanny state of Brave New World, not the oppressiveness militarism of 1984. And it’s the font of IRS’s tax forms:

But one of the dangers of Starting from Zero is staying there permanently. In addition to the aforementioned institutions, public and private, the Helvetica film also documents designers who are still using (albeit often ironically) a 50 year old font, in much the same way that architects, interior designers and commercial photographers are still using Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair 80 years after Mies designed it. The Bauhaus banished the past, but in a sense, they freeze-dried the future as well.

Like Helvetica, it’s a good thing their best efforts still hold up pretty well. “Timeless” Modernism would look pretty antiquated, otherwise.

From my May 2010 post titled “Liberal Fascism: The Font.”

Star Wars ends with the Rebels, whom George Lucas told interviewers he had modeled after Communist North Vietnam, tromping through a giant hall to pick up their awards. It’s a scene whose composition was straight out of Triumph of the Will. Given all that, and the similarities that exist back in the real world between national socialism and international socialism, perhaps his notion that his film’s logo should look “very fascist” is more appropriate than even Lucas knew at the time.

(Via James Lileks.)

2 Comments

GE takes the notion of human capital seriously.

Having bet the ranch on electing President Obama (twice) and supporting ObamaCare, not the least of which through its ownership until recently of NBC and MSNBC, General Electric is now running ads promoting its healthcare software starring Hugo Weaving as the sinister Agent Smith from The Matrix.

I know Agent Smith is a beloved baddie, much like Darth Vader from the Star Wars movies; as James Lileks once quipped, Smith, as portrayed by Weaving, is akin to the characters portrayed by Tony Roberts in Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier movies such as Annie Hall and Play it Again, Sam — the only non-neurotic in the film; the only character having any fun. But given how deeply GE is plugged into the Obama Gleichschaltung, that’s quite an…interesting choice for GE’s healthcare spokesman.

Beginning around 2007, strange messages started emerging from GE and the television networks it owned at the time. First GE, which makes it’s money selling, among other things, light bulbs, told us that we all needed to turn ours off, for the good of the planet. The following year, the large conglomerate got deeply into bed with first candidate and then President Obama; NBC and (particularly) MSNBC are essentially a de facto propaganda wing of the administration, to the point where the White House has emailed in “corrections,” which were read on the air by the latter network.

At the beginning of the Obama administration, GE CEO Jeff Immelt was appointed to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, presumably helping to see the administration’s now annual “Recovery Summer” debacle, leading near monthly “unexpected” bad economic news. Regarding Obama and Immelt, in January of 2011, Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner wrote:

Since his party’s November shellacking, President Obama has worked hard to show America that he is not anti-business, notably by picking General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and Chicago banker Bill Daley for prominent posts in his administration. But their selection does not mean Obama is “pro-business,” at least as the term is commonly understood. The president is no champion of open markets and free competition. His idea of being friendly to business means more government subsidies and corporate-government cooperation, both of which are mother’s milk to Immelt and Daley.

Obama joined Immelt on Friday at a GE plant in Schenectady, N.Y., to announce his appointment as chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Like Obama’s pick of Daley as White House chief of staff, the selection of Immelt sparked applause from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, in the eyes of the media, defused the Republican charge that Obama is anti-business.

But the anti-business charge against Obama was always off target. “Anti-free market” was — and is still — more accurate.

Immelt and Daley don’t represent a new side of Barack Obama — they represent the unhealthy collusion of Big Business and Big Government that has always been the essence of Obamanomics.

Around that time, the Clarion Advisory blog asked, “Remember the outrage over Haliburton & Cheney? So where’s the outrage over GE and the Obama Administration?”

I remember for much of the Bush Administration, hearing how evil it was for all the ties that Cheney had with Haliburton and how it was wrong for a company to have so much access in the White House so where did that outrage go when it comes to how cozy GE is with Obama?  It’s the same thing, actually even worse.  GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt was just named to chair new White House Economic Group after already having had a position in the White House when he served on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.  Funny it was evil for Cheney to have ties to Haliburton and not actually have a position at Haliburton but it’s O.K. to actually have a company chairman to chair a group in the White House and the MSM response is crickets chirping and a lot of nodding of heads?

GE has gained much with this administration.  The banning of incandescent lightbulbs?  GE has got you covered with their CFLs.  Wind turbines?  GE has got you covered.  High speed rail?  GE wants that action too.  Electronic health records?  Oh yeah, GE’s Health Division is all over that.  Clean coal technology?  Check.  GE has got that too.  Smart grid?  Another check.  GE is ass deep into that!

It also seems that now whenever Obama needs to highlight something economic, there’s GE always ready with some kind of news.  Just in time for China’s visit, GE announces a turbine deal, a Chinese railway deal, and a airplane deal with China.  That’s just this week.  Remember that trip to India in November?  Well looky here.  Another deal and guess who with?  GE of course!  India and GE sign power equipment deal.  The article even states that it was timed to coincide with Obama’s arrival.  How’s that for coordination?

More recently, when the Obama administration decided to punish those who support the Second Amendment (concurrent with, as we’re seeing now, the administration’s deep antipathy towards the First Amendment), GE was happy to lend a hand. In April of this year, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, “GE Capital Cuts Off Lending to Gun Shops:”

This month, Glenn Duncan, owner of Duncan’s Outdoor Store in Bay City, Mich., said he received a letter from GE Capital Retail Bank in which the lender said it had made “the difficult decision” to stop providing financing services to his store. Other gun dealers have received similar notices.

GE is at least the second big financial firm to retreat from the gun business following the school shootings, which claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six adults in December.

Days after the killings, private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP said it would try to sell the gun company it owns—Freedom Group Inc.— which makes brands including Remington, Bushmaster, Marlin and H&R.

The moves highlight how companies, closely attuned to the concerns of investors and employees, have reacted to public horror caused by the attacks, even as complicated political considerations doomed new gun-control legislation in the Congress.

GE is based in Fairfield, Conn., and many of the GE’s employees live around Newtown, and several have children in the Sandy Hook elementary school, where the shootings took place. Peter Lanza, the father of Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza, is an executive at GE Capital. GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt held a town hall meeting with affected employees after the shooting, and the board has been updated on efforts to help staff, a person familiar with the matter said.

“Industry changes, new legislation and tragic events” led GE Capital to reexamine its policies on financing firearms, spokesman Russell Wilkerson said.

I think Agent Smith would approve of all of GE’s actions during the past six years or so; no wonder he was chosen to be a spokesman for what is arguably America’s most corporatist conglomerate.

1 Comment

Will Smith’s After Earth is reviewed by Kurt Loder at Reason:

Not since John Travolta kicked the tires on Battlefield Earth and pronounced it good to go has there been a big-name sci-fi flameout quite as disastrous as Will Smith’s After Earth. The movie is dull and talky and fundamentally misconceived. The whole point of putting Will Smith in a picture is to light it up with his warmth and witty line readings — with his world-class charm. Here he plays a grim-lipped buzz-killer who never cracks a smile. And while the presence of director M. Night Shyamalan might once have promised saving grace, this film is just another sad token of the man’s decade-long artistic decline.

The story — hatched by Smith, co-scripted by Shyamalan — is set way in the future, a thousand years after the inhabitants of Earth fled their eco-ravaged home to set up shop on another planet. Here, Smith plays Cypher Raige (one of the movie’s several silly names), a space-fleet commander so focused on his job that he has neglected to bond with his son, Kitai (Jaden Smith, Will’s own son). So Cypher agrees to take the boy along on his next space mission. Unfortunately, their vessel is knocked out of the heavens by one of those pesky space storms and plummets down onto a hostile planet that we soon learn to be — yes, Earth.

Huh, yet another depopulated Shyamalan movie. Shyamalan’s 2008 film The Happening was described by James Kirchick — in the leftwing New Republic of all places — as “The Most Morally Abhorrent Film Ever Made:”

As with most of Shyamalan’s films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass — it’s never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City “The Happening” spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man’s nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can’t help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they’re going to pay.After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic “red tides.” The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we’re left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect — the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It’s eerily reminiscent of the film’s opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn’t just radical environemntalist fare; it’s perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It’s not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It’s us.

In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Rago reviewed The Happening and wrote, “We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die.”

Between The Happening and After Earth, given that Shyamalan apparently would like to see a world without people, should he really be disappointed that the theaters showing his movies are increasingly devoid of them?

2 Comments

“Mother of Benghazi Victim: ‘Everything I’ve Learned, I’ve Learned From The Media,’” as spotted (and transcribed) by Andrew Johnson at the Corner:

“No one from the State Department or from the White House has ever gotten back to me on anything, other than ‘it was the video,’” said Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, one of the four Americans killed in the 9/11 attack in Benghazi. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from the media and outside sources.”

“I was for her up until all this stuff happened,” she said of her support for Hillary Clinton should she choose to make a run for the presidency in 2016. “This is not who I want to be president, or any part of the government.”

Click over for the video. Speaking of which, isn’t the reason for Hillary’s unresponsiveness regarding Benghazi obvious? It’s not insouciance; it’s just that she’s got a new big budget Hollywood biopic in the works between now and  — oh, let’s wildly speculate — the summer of 2016, and Mrs. Clinton wants to avoid as many spoilers being released as possible.

Potentially starring  Scarlett Johansson or Reese Witherspoon in the role of young Hillary. And you thought Hollywood no longer made science fiction movies.

2 Comments

In the first half of the 20th century, the American Left frequently apologized for brutality of the Soviet Union as simply being “Liberals in a hurry.” (Which must have made many wonder what the New Deal would have resembled if it ever reached the end zone.) Apparently, the long-term project of Bill Ayers has been to transform how his former Weather Underground terrorist group is viewed amongst the current American Left as “merely progressives in a hurry,” Peter Collier writes in the latest edition of the Weekly Standard.

Robert Redford’s odious, but entirely predictable choice to lionize the Weathermen in his dotage led Collier, whose frequent writing partner, David Horowitz was associated with fellow radical chic travelers the Black Panthers in the late 196s and early ’70s, to explore “Progressives with Bombs:”

The group has profited greatly from the time-lapse atonement our culture offers free of charge to those who simply hang on. Weatherman has no doubt also benefited from the leftward drift of our political world over the last 40 years, especially the etymological waterboarding of the term “liberal” to make it describe the radicals who killed authentic liberalism in the ’60s and then inhabited its corpse and claimed that it had always been them anyhow.

But it is also true that this sect, which was about nothing if not the triumph of the will, has created its own redemptive myth. Forty years ago, it might have been expected that the central architect of Weather revisionism would have been Bernardine Dohrn, the sensual face of the group from the moment it became news; the queen bee who maintained internal power by adroitly dispensing her royal jelly among all the jostling males of the group; the group’s sayer of the unsayable, as in her infamous reaction to the Manson murders: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate their dinner in the same room with them, then they even stuck a fork into the pig Tate’s stomach. Wild!”

But today, while Bernardine is the lawyer, it’s her husband Bill Ayers who has successfully constructed, over time, the brief accepted by Redford and others that argues, all facts to the contrary, that Weatherman was not a terror group at all, but the last of the just.

Ayers was the first to understand that the universities, dominated in the 1980s by those who had failed to burn them down in the 1960s, could provide a rat line back to the real world. Weatherman had already pioneered the ideology about race, class, gender, and national evil that was finally taking over the academy, and when he surfaced in 1980 (unprosecuted because of irregularities in federal surveillance), he saw that someone like him could use that ideology as protective coloration when resuming the long march.

Briefly a teacher in a Summerhill-like school in his early radical years, Ayers enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984 and embraced the “critical pedagogy” that was just then taking over the formation of teachers. This movement, as Sol Stern has pointed out in City Journal, charges that public schools reinforce the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist order, creating a sinister ideological tape loop that can only be destroyed by a “transformative” curriculum of “social justice.” With gurus such as Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire urging on a radicalism that “does not conceal but proclaims its own political character,” critical pedagogy slowly infiltrated leftist ideas into every aspect of classroom teaching, including science and math, and created a prime hitchhiking opportunity for someone like Ayers, who already spoke the lingo.

He got his Ed.D., peewee version of the Ph.D., which led to a teaching job at the University of Illinois, where he began to pursue his old ideas by other means. He began writing and became general editor of a series of teaching-for-social-justice texts (a couple of them bestsellers) that were regarded as cutting edge by his new colleagues. By the mid-1990s he had established himself as an “education reformer” whose academic credibility, combined with his family connections, helped root him in the rich political humus of Chicago’s bien-pensant left.

No wonder post-1960s academia, which was willing to toss a lifeline to Ayers and his colleagues, now seems like it’s collectively running on fumes. Or as James Taranto writes in “See You in the Funny Papers: A tribute to an anti-mentor:”

That, it seems to us, is the central story of our time. The left-liberal elite that attained cultural dominance between the 1960s and the 1980s–and that since 2008 has seen itself as being on the cusp of political dominance as well–is undergoing a crisis of authority, and its defenses are increasingly ferocious and unprincipled. Journalists lie or ignore important but politically uncongenial stories. Scientists suppress alternative hypotheses. Political organizations bully apolitical charities. The Internal Revenue Service persecutes dissenters. And campus censorship goes on still.

Not to mention other forms of academic Orwellianisms. At Power Line, Steve Hayward explores “When ‘Diversity’ = Hate.” Today the D-word “has become a term meaning the opposite of its dictionary meaning, and is a vehicle for racial division and resentment,” Hayward writes:

If you needed fresh evidence, check out this story out of Northwestern University, where a white student was rejected for a diversity appointment because “he is a white heterosexual male.”  The student’s name, incidentally, is Stephen Piotrkowski.  Just a hunch here, but he sounds like someone with immigrant roots that don’t trace back to the Anglosphere, and as such would represent what ought to be meant by “diversity” if it was meant seriously.  (Turns out his sister is gay, but that’s apparently not enough.)  But pigment is everything for the diversity-haters.

Finally, as Andrew Malcolm of Investor’s Business Daily tweets, Jay Leno has been goofing that “Obama tells Morehouse Coll grads their future is great. Unless, of course, they want jobs. Then, they are totally screwed.”

But how can that be? College kids in the 1960s and ’70s en masse, along with “progressives in a hurry” such as Ayers and their academic mentors all assured themselves that their goal was to “change the world” — and they succeeded. Surely, having hit the CTL-ALT-DLT keys on the society they inherited from their parents, they’ve succeeded at rebooting mankind into the best of all possible worlds.

Haven’t they?

Related: Via Maggie’s Farm, A black Bronx seventh grade Spanish language teacher “has filed a lawsuit claiming she was fired for using the word ‘negro’ in class. ‘Negro’ is the Spanish word for the color black.”

Comments

Step One: Read Jim Treacher’s description of the latest adventures of the original lead singer for America’s premiere fun lovin’, hard-rockin’ rock band. “David Lee Roth made a ‘trailer’ for a Japanese gangster movie that may or may not ever exist, because he can,” Treach writes:

It’s been another grueling week for anybody trying to follow the news, and you need a break from all that insanity.

Instead, check out this insanity. If you’ve been wondering what DLR has been doing since the reunited Van Halen cut short their world tour last year, here ya go.

There’s no violence in this “trailer,” but be warned that a 57-year old man strips down to a towel for no apparent reason and tries to speak Japanese.

Step Two: Watch video at top of post.

Step Three: Mind blown. (And more than a little amused by DLR’s hip-swaying sashay at the end of the clip…)

Also: Above clip should serve as unassailable proof that Diamond Dave must wear copious amount of Mandom, particularly when he’s preparing for a hit.

Comments

In his introduction to The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, the 1999 update of Ayn Rand’s early 1970s anthology originally titled The New Left, Peter Schwartz, the editor of the new edition, wrote:

Primitive, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means: “Of or belonging to the first age, period or stage; pertaining to early times …” With respect to human development, primitivism is a pre-rational stage. It is a stage in which man lives in fearful awe of a universe he cannot understand. The primitive man does not grasp the law of causality. He does not comprehend the fact that the world is governed by natural laws and that nature can be ruled by any man who discovers those laws. To a primitive, there is only a mysterious supernatural. Sunshine, darkness, rainfall, drought, the clap of thunder, the hooting of a spotted owl— all are inexplicable, portentous, and sacrosanct to him. To this non-conceptual mentality, man is metaphysically subordinate to nature, which is never to be commanded, only meekly obeyed.

This is the state of mind to which the environmentalists want us to revert.

If primitive man regards the world as unknowable, how does he decide what to believe and how to act? Since such knowledge is not innate, where does primitive man turn for guidance? To his tribe. It is membership in a collective that infuses such a person with his sole sense of identity. The tribe’s edicts thus become his unquestioned absolutes, and the tribe’s welfare becomes his fundamental value.

This is the state of mind to which the multiculturalists want us to revert. They hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western— i.e., individualistic— civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.

Both environmentalism and multiculturalism wish to destroy the values of a rational, industrial age. Both are scions of the New Left, zealously carrying on its campaign of sacrificing progress to primitivism.

In addition to the shocking Islamic terrorist attack yesterday in London, a troika of pop culture-related stories making the rounds today reminds us that reprimitivization is well on its way.

First up,  “Movement to Normalize Pedophilia Finds Its Poster Girl,” Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator:

In January, Rush Limbaugh warned that there was “an effort under way to normalize pedophilia,” and was ridiculed by liberals (including CNN’s Soledad O’Brien) for saying so. But now liberals have joined a crusade that, if successful, would effectively legalize sex with 14-year-olds in Florida.

The case involves Kaitlyn Ashley Hunt, an 18-year-old in Sebastian, Florida, who was arrested in February after admitting that she had a lesbian affair with a 14-year high-school freshman. (Click here to read the affidavit in Hunt’s arrest.) It is a felony in Florida to have sex with 14-year-olds. Hunt was expelled from Sebastian High School — where she and the younger girl had sex in a restroom stall — and charged with two counts of “felony lewd and lascivious battery on a child.” The charges could put Hunt in prison for up to 15 years. Prosecutors have offered Hunt a plea bargain that would spare her jail time, but her supporters have organized an online crusade to have her let off scot-free — in effect, nullifying Florida’s law, which sets the age of consent at 16.

Using the slogan “Stop the Hate, Free Kate” (the Twitter hashtag is #FreeKate) this social-media campaign has attracted the support of liberals including Chris Hayes of MSNBC, Daily Kos, Think Progress and the gay-rights group Equality Florida. Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of the case is that Hunt is a petite attractive green-eyed blonde. One critic wondered on Twitter how long activists have “been waiting for a properly photogenic poster child of the correct gender to come along?”

Portraying Hunt as the victim of prejudice, her supporters claim she was only prosecuted because she is homosexual and because the parents of the unnamed 14-year-old are “bigoted religious zealots,” as Hunt’s mother said in a poorly written Facebook post. The apparent public-relations strategy was described by Matthew Philbin of Newsbusters: “If you can play the gay card, you immediately trigger knee-jerk support from the liberal media and homosexual activists anxious to topple any and all rules regarding sex.”

Meanwhile, giant cable television conglomerate Viacom must be especially proud of MTV today, as we’ll discuss right after the page break.

Pages: 1 2 | 21 Comments

Once again, another hurricane or tornado, another member of the left politicizing it. This time around, it’s comedienne Lizz Winstead, the co-creator, back in the 1990s, of Viacom’s The Daily Show, before its current incarnation with Jon Stewart:

She thought she was making a topical political joke, but a co-creator of ‘The Daily Show’ managed to enrage many of her followers after tweeting joke about the Oklahoma tornado’s political motivations.

‘This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives,’ wrote comedian Lizz Winstead, in a tweet, around 3:30 Monday afternoon.

The tweet was an apparent attempt at using the occasion of the May 20 twister to comment on the scandal currently plaguing the IRS and Obama administration.

Winstead, co-creator and former head writer for ‘The Daily Show,’ promptly received a stream of angry responses to her tweet.

User @swashamokc wrote, ‘As an Oklahoman, I don’t think this was something that would result in my continuing to follow you.’

An unrepentant Winstead responded, ‘If its not OK to YOU for me to combine news stories to point out hypocrisy AND Im not making fun of victims u shld Unfollow.’

But then gravity of the tornado’s impact became clear. Winstead’s joke suddenly wasn’t so humorous and the normally funny lady was all red.

Well, all blue, actually, as the far left has a long habit of making some of their nastiest, worst-timed attempts at “humor” as hurricanes and tornadoes are in the midst of wreking havoc:

(Sorry for the interruption in posts. There’s quite a story behind it, which I’ll upload in the next couple of days.)

Comments

Final Jeopardy question: This industrialist was named a “righteous gentile” after moving to Argentina in 1949. Contestant answer: Himmler.

— Kevin W. Glass (@KevinWGlass) May 15, 2013

I now declare Western Civilization officially concluded. Thank you, good night — drive safely!

Comments

The new film’s resident villain, that’s who:

Will the new Star Trek sequel boldly go where much of Hollywood has gone before–bashing President George W. Bush?

Benedict Cumberbatch, the British actor who plays the mysterious villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, told BBC America that the new film’s futuristic setting didn’t stop it from reflecting on recent global events.

In the film there’s a debate among Starfleet personnel over how best to extract an enemy in a distant part of the galaxy — and whether that enemy should be subjected to due process.

The British actor says: “It’s no spoiler I think to say that there’s a huge backbone in this film that’s a comment on recent U.S. interventionist overseas policy from the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era.”

Gee, wait’ll Cumberbatch finds out that James T. Kirk was inspired by John F. Kennedy, and the United Federation of Planets by JFK and LBJ’s New Frontier/Great Society interventionist overseas policy. Or that the Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld era of foreign policy flowed directly from the previous Clinton, Gore and Madeleine Albright era?

The trick to good sci-fi is to bury the politicization deep in the subtext, which is made much easier when the layer on top of that contains spaceships, phaser pistols, and the distaff half of the crew in miniskirts. The writers know that — even if the actors hired to speak their lines give the game away far too often.

1 Comment

The very definition of “Pop Psychologist,’ Brothers was a staple of network TV in the 1970s:

With a doctorate from Columbia University, she was a pioneer of the television advice show.

Her celebrity took off in 1955 after she entered a television quiz show called The $64,000 Question. She became the only woman to ever win the show’s top prize.

In a broadcasting career spanning four decades, Brothers hosted syndicated radio shows, dispensing advice to callers. She also appeared – usually as herself – on dozens of TV programs, from Saturday Night Live to CHiPs, and several movies.

Found via the Internet Movie Database, which has a page devoted to her over 160 TV and movie appearances over the years.

Comments

“Could Detroit Be the Next City to Go Bankrupt?“, Veronique de Rugy asks at the Corner:

Why is the city in such a terrible financial situation? Because it spends too much and it suffers from rampant corruption:

Orr, a Washington-based turnaround expert and bankruptcy attorney, was selected by Gov. Rick Snyder to oversee Detroit’s finances. In his report, Orr described the city’s operations as “dysfunctional and wasteful after years of budgetary restrictions, mismanagement, crippling operational practices and, in some cases, indifference or corruption.”

“Outdated policies, work practices, procedures and systems must be improved consistent with best practices of 21st century government,” Orr wrote. “A well-run city will promote cost savings and better customer service and will encourage private investment and a return of residents.”

As such, we shouldn’t be surprised that Detroit has lost almost 26 percent of its population between 2000 and 2011. But don’t despair Detroit, the Light Rail is coming to you:

In January, US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced a federal commitment of $25 million to the M-1 Rail project, thus tentatively setting construction to begin in the summer for the 3 mile stretch of rail between downtown and New Center. Gone will be the days when Detroit’s only rail transit is a glorified amusement park ride!

Ahh, the desire named streetcar; it’s particularly desirable, even in broke cities such as Detroit, because the potential to spread the graft around is so much more than simply buying new busses:

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

It looks like Detroit could also be getting a statue of Robocop, in much the same way that similarly exhausted Philadelphia has an iconic-slash-cheesy statue of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky character. But what’s fascinating is that judging by these headlines on today’s Drudge Report, real-life Detroit actually appears in far worse shape than the dystopian projections that 1987′s Robocop depicted for the city’s 21st century future:

• Too late to save Detroit?
• ‘Dysfunctional, wasteful’…
• 27% of Detroit Homes Vacant…

Comments

From those wonderful folks who brought you Walter Cronkite politicizing the Tet Offensive, Dan Rather and RatherGate, and Katie Couric writing Christmas poems in praise of ObamaCare comes this gem from CBS anchor Scott Pelley, speaking to Quinnipiac University:

1 Comment