It’s hard to improve on Ed Morrissey’s* take on this, so I won’t try. What we have is one of Hollywood’s most successful purveyors of wanton violence pledging to produce a film that he says will make the NRA “wish it weren’t alive.”
It’s not “alive,” as it’s not a living thing but a constitutional rights group. But you get his point.
Big-time movie producer Harvey Weinstein revealed Wednesday that he is making an anti-gun movie with actress Meryl Streep that is going to make the National Rifle Association “wish they weren’t alive.”
During an interview with Howard Stern on his radio show, Weinstein said the new full feature drama will take the NRA “head on.” He also said he’s never owned a gun and never will.
“I don’t think we need guns in this country. And I hate it. I think the NRA is a disaster area,” Weinstein said.
Well, I don’t think we need most of Weinstein’s hyperviolent movies in this country, but I don’t have a Hollywood name and massive bankroll that I can use to attack him. He also has the benefit of the First Amendment, while he pretends that the Second Amendment doesn’t exist. He has the financial, if not the moral or intellectual or historical, highground here.
Weinstein is to violent movies what Alfred Nobel is to explosives, more or less, as regards this movie that is sure to alienate the majority of Americans who support the NRA and its purpose. Nobel created the prizes that bear his name out of guilt that he created dynamite, which was quickly turned into a weapon of war. He also used the fortune he gained from dynamite to create those prizes, which have succeeded in ennobling his name. Weinstein is up to something similar here, plus creating a movie that the liberal set will love and nod at among themselves knowingly. It’s a self-centered attack on better, wiser people.
Dynamite at least has useful, civilized purposes. Its prime use has been to help create roads linking cities and countries together and quarry stone for construction. Many of Weinstein’s products can’t be argued to be as useful, or even useful at all. Through movies like Kill Bill and the Grindhouse flicks he tosses blood and bullets onscreen and into our brains to make himself rich and our culture more and more coarse. His products are mostly odious and destructive. Yet he keeps making them. And they keep making him richer and richer.
Rather than clean up his own act, which he could do at any time, Weinstein is set to produce a movie that in other times and places would be called by its rightful name: propaganda.
It’s likely to flop, but Weinstein isn’t likely to care. He’s of that Hollywood set that has more money than they need and want to use their fortunes to impose themselves and their narrow, parochial views and create statements once in a while, rather than go for a bankable story that appeals by elevating good and noble things. Losing money on it will probably help relieve his tax bill a bit too. Hollywood is nothing if not mindful of using any means necessary to avoid the taxman.
Weinstein is proposing another Redacted, the flop anti-military film bankrolled by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban that smeared better men than any of these entertainment titans will ever be. Weinstein joins the ranks of those Jason Mattera rightly dubs Hollywood hypocrites.
*I originally had Allahpundit as the author over at Hot Air. Turns out I should’ve read the byline before hitting the publish button.
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