1. Worst of all: now we won’t get to hear Eddie Murphy’s joke about this
Just to review:
BRETT RATNER is no longer producing the next Oscar telecast because he:
a) more or less quoted a line from a movie that, er won “Best Picture” in 1970
b) said he’d had LINDSAY LOHAN checked for STDs before he slept with her
In other words, one of the last men in Hollywood who’s seen a movie older than Star Wars and demonstrates a modicum of common sense is now out of a job.
"Visitors are greeted by a nearly life-size cardboard cutout of John Wayne"!
2. Don’t bring a film critic to a gun museum
If you’re a fan of trash culture, B-movies, “incredibly strange” music and other esoterica – and you happen to be conservative – you’ve had this experience: you discover a beautifully designed, competently written website run by people who magically share your passion for old vinyl, half-forgotten TV shows and garish vintage illustrations – in other words, you’re JAMES LILEKS – then your stomach curdles as the “curators” enthuse about “Occupy” and Obama.
(Although visiting these sites is much less dejecting than it was during the Bush is a stupid Hitler monkey administration.)
So I read Bright Lights Film Journal despite its (sexual) politics, not because of it. In their latest “issue,” they feature an essay entitled “Pseudo-Innocence and Encased Fantasies: Inside the Unconscious of the National Rifle Association.”
Now, I didn’t go to university, so I’ve never grown accustomed to ponderous, pretentious prose that’s been de riguer in academia since the late 1980s. I can only pray that critic ANDREW GROSSMAN is a supremely talented mimic in the Iowahawk mode who is pulling a Sokal hoax.
The alternative – that this essay isn’t a joke — is too horrible to contemplate.
It begins:
“Were we to believe the reactionary lingo of the American derriere-garde, the National Rifle Association should be housed in a cabin hewn from native pine, cemented with the semen of woodland patriots, baptized with the sweat of select Protestant frontiersmen, and perched loftily upon Reagan’s apocryphal peak. In truth, the NRA is headquartered just outside Washington, D.C. in a big glassy cube, stylistically a squatter version of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s corporate hegemons, and merely miles from the feared jackboots of centralized governance.”
Paragraphs chosen at random confirm the widespread belief that 21st century life has rendered satire impossible:
“An exhibit entitled ‘The Romance of the Long Rifle’ requires no Freudian exegesis, while private collections of guns donated by billionaires, celebrities (e.g., ROBERT STACK), and lusty hunters of big game bequeath to the hoi polloi unimagined icons of masculinity and obsolete legacies of white colonial privilege.” (…)
“The Quality Venison Cookbook resides nearby, reminding us that a meaty diet and righteous indignation are interchangeable lifestyle choices.”
“My own reveries were interrupted by an aging Protestant couple…”
My suggestion: get drunk with some like-minded people and sit around reading bits of this essay out loud, preferably using funny voices. MST3K style.
You “cool nerds” know what I mean.
3. Liberals hire rapist to play Republican
Hey, I know: let’s deconstruct the new Funny Or Die! video just like a “media literate” progressive know-it-all would!
Of the hundreds of performers they could have cast in the role, the show biz liberals at Funny or Die! got MIKE TYSON (a convicted rapist who got famous by beating people up) to portray HERMAN CAIN (a law-abiding, self-made millionaire and Presidential hopeful, now accused of sexual harrassment).
So — again, using the same criteria liberals use to “analyze” every conservative creation — what exactly IS the subtext of this Funny or Die! video (language warning)?
“Look, we’re edgy, cuz we work with famous felons”?
“Get it? They’re both sexually incontinent racial stereotypes”?
“’Crazy’ is the new ‘black’”?
“They all look alike to me”?
Discuss.
4. The first thing we do, let’s take all the lawyers to the movies
Headline of the day:
Top British solicitor leaps into river and drowns after watching Schindler’s List
If only my least favorite sitcom character had had the same response…
“…the making of Schindler’s List was understandably difficult for members of the cast and crew. SPIELBERG himself purportedly said that he ‘cried all the time’ during filming; in fact, there was little humor on the set for obvious reasons. So, to temper the depressive feelings engendered by the reenactment of tragic events, Spielberg reportedly had episodes of Seinfeld delivered to his hotel for viewing after long, arduous days of shooting.”
Obviously future skinheads!
5. Next up: Casper the Ghost really a Klansman
Real racism has been criminalized and otherwise rendered socially unacceptable across the Western world.
This is great news for everyone — except those folks author MARK SHEA calls “human toothaches,” who are left scrounging for fresh villains to boo.
In fact, racism has taken such a beating it’s lost an entire dimension. Old and tired? Flesh and blood bigots. New hotness? 2-D, four-color cartoons of dooooooooommmmm!
It started, of course, with the Mohammed cartoons. You may be sick of that story but, as TROTSKY might have put it, that story is very interested in you.
Case in point: this week a French satire magazine (one that is no stranger to Muslim-related controversy) was firebombed for sticking a drawing of the so-called “Prophet” on its cover.
(They quickly put out a follow up issue, depicting a bearded Muslim tongue-kissing a male cartoonist and declaring “Love is Stronger Than Hate.”)
Also this week, we’ve seen TinTin storybooks condemned as racist.
This led the Vatican newspaper to defend the (bafflingly popular) children’s character as a “Catholic hero.”
The latest volley comes from a German theologian, who believes the Pippy Longstocking books “contain outdated colonial stereotypes” that parents may want to “skip over” when reading the books to their children.
Being Canadian, I’m naturally concerned that our own spunky, red-pigtailed fictional gal will find herself in the anti-racist cross hairs, especially since she almost single-handledly accounts for the GDP of an entire province.
Anne of Green Gables, report for sensitivity training!
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