A Suggestion for Hollywood

Noticed that Stop Loss didn't do so great at the box office, even with a less than wide release (1291 screens), it pulled in a per screen average of $3,505 its opening weekend. Meanwhile, Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns managed to still make $3,849 per screen in its second week of release.

So I'm thinking, if they want to make a profitable Iraq War oriented film, they could do worse than Medea Joins the Marines! (Ooh-Rah!!)


(and Tyler, if you do make this film, I want an Executive Producer Credit, or at least a "Story By" credit, I'll help you flesh out the script, couldn't be too hard)

What He Lacks in Coherence, He More Than Makes Up For in Insanity . . .

Ahhh, Steven Weber, how do I love thee, let me count the ways . . .

Here's some highlights of his most recent missive entitled, "Getting It Off My Chest (or Channeling Andy Rooney On Peyote)"

I hate these fucks, with their secret agendas and insatiable thirsts to control all the energy and all the money and all the people. I loathe them for not being able to cope with inadequate genitalia. If I can, you can! Jesus, get over it!

My take-away from that paragraph is that Steven Weber will never be doing a 'full frontal' scene. Personally, I'm relieved, and not at all disappointed.

It's strange to me how it's all come to this. It would be as if the affable owner of a general store where everyone in the neighborhood bought their goods and sundries, this guy who knew you by your first name and patted kids on the head and didn't crap a flat tire if you needed some credit, all of a sudden felt that it was utter anathema to have such a calling and shifted from avuncular to nucular overnight, charging exorbitant fees for bubble gum and isopropyl alcohol and taking it upon himself to torch the competing establishment a block away. And then somehow blame his customers for it.

My take-away from that paragraph is, 'Huhh?!?'. It's really like that? I'd buy myself some land in Costa Rica, stock it with Bond-Villain style concubine/bodyguards and leave Ameruhkkka to the fundanutters if I believed as Steven Weber seems to believe.

And why are all the assholes in charge? Why do they have all the guns and conscripted armies and get to go to summits and fund weapons research? How about developing a music gun? Or a fruit bomb? Drop some fucking fruit bombs on pissed off radicals and get 'em all hopped up on vitamin c and anti-oxidents or whatever the hell and just call it a day? And if the douchebags really want to they can wear crowns or sashes or tiny flag lapel pins if it makes 'em feel like big men.

In the Weberverse, the draft is clearly still on, and aging passive-aggressive comedic character actors have the highest lottery numbers. Uncle Jam wants you Steven Weber, he wants you to Funk With Him.

I realise Weber is low hanging fruit (or given his inadequate genitalia, not so low hanging), but sometimes it's fun to examine just what is coming out of the fevered swamp of 'progressive-land'.

If somehow the Democrats keep hold the legislative and win the executive branch of government in 2008, I can gaurantee I'll have some pointed comments to make about the legislation they're likely to pass, but I can't imagine every spewing this sort of sputtery nonsense, or display a hatred towards the people that elected them.

This is mainly here as a reminder to all those in "fly-over" land, that the folks that surround me in La-La Land and work in the Dream Factory really hate you, deeply, passionately, and would ignore you completely if they didn't want your money so damn bad. If films that only played on the coasts could gross $250M instead of struggling to make $5M then you'd never see a 'crowd-pleasing' blockbuster again. But they'll sneak as much America-hating rhetoric into the margins of those films as they can get away with. Ex-military always have PTSD and are a little too gun crazy. There's always corruption at the top. Hot chicks always work for 'progressive' causes. And it's always about THE OIL.

They can't comprehend why all you 'non-coastals' haven't embraced every 'progressive' position and whim over the past few decades (they've implanted those concepts in every conceivable media, yet you still resist, why?), and they really can't understand how you could find Jeff Foxworthy entertaining (OK, I'm with my La-La brethren on that one, but that doesn't mean I hate y'all).

Photos That the Ahmadinejad Administration (and Their Mad Mullah Enablers) Show With Pride . . .

The state run news agency in Iran posted a bunch of photos showing how they treat folks they deem not Islamic enough.

Michelle Malkin puts together the photos along with many links, YouTube footage and commentary. She can be strident and shrill, but in this case her target deserves all the anger she can generate.

I would love to see Hollywood make a picture about a dystopian big brother government running rough shod over the lives of their citizenry and not set it in the United States or Great Britain.

Here we have a real life 1984 society that has exhibited many of the Freedom is Slavery and War is Peace virtues that so many like to accuse our society of having.

That picture won't ever get made, instead we get the Flood tale turned into a eco-friendly bumper-sticker message movie. Or you get the beheading of a journalist turned into a moral-relativist tale about how we just need to understand each other better.

I can enjoy pictures where the politics don't match my own. The current run of Dr. Who throws in digs against the U.S from time to time and I'll let it slide cause it's entertaining. Listening to the director's commentary of Pan's Labryinth and while watching it completely passed me by that it was all really about Boooosh and the evils he unleashed since 9/11. I still love that show, and the director's personal political idiocy won't prevent me from thinking or saying that Pan's Labryinth was the best film of 2006 by far. Where I take exception with the politically correct nonsense and groupthink endemic in Hollywood is when it leads them to make bad narrative and artistic decisions in the service of making a stupid political point, or worse yet, where they forget that they are primarily artist and just pound home their stupid politics without offering any entertaiment in exchange.

We've got everything Orwell ever warned about in Iran, and they're pursuing nuclear weapons on top of that, but it will be a snowy day at Hollywood and Vine (and not just a few flakes which happens once or twice a century, but I'm talking a foot of snow in a day) before they make a dystopian picture set in any of the modern day countries that see 1984 as a blueprint for governance.

Hollywood Rediscovers Faith . . .

Sorry, wrong Faith. Though, does seem like Eliza Dushku should work more, I mean look at her (and she's not a bad actress, either).

The LA Times has an article, not really an article more an unpaid press release, today regarding Evan Almighty. It's aimed at assuaging fears that the picture is anti-religion, or that the picture is too religious.

But the message I take away is that the film isn't a celebration of a Christian God or Christian Theology, but it's pure, unadulterated Gaiaist Worship wrapped in a flimsy gauzy pretext of being semi-christian. The article doesn't address that issue at all, instead they end the piece with a warm and fuzzy anecdote about some viewer in Kansas who was thankful for this picture (but for all we know her reaction was more for the 'green' message of the film and not the religiosity)

Somehow I doubt they ever address the promise from God to Noah in the Old Testament that He would never visit a global flood upon the Earth again. Seems like the whole 'covenant with God' part of Genesis should be the take away from that part of the bible, and not, 'gee, wouldn't it be cool if God did something to help fix the environment, like wipe almost everybody out with a flood again'. Guess little plot inconveniences like that aren't worth worrying about. Not like anyone really ever reads that text all that closely, anyway, right? I'm no bible scholar, not even faithful, but even I know that there's an explicit mention in Genesis that there wouldn't be another global flood (presumably they address this somehow in the picture).

The main message of the film based on the press and the ad campaign seems to be about environmentalism. Caring about the planet and being Christian aren't antithetical, many would argue that being a good steward of the environment is a basic tenant of faith, but based on that article, I don't get the sense that beyond having God in the picture, or having Evan pray, or mentioning a few biblical passages, that this film has anything to do with Christianity as it is practiced. Instead this film feels like an extended Goracle approved Gaiaist revenge fantasy about how our wicked and wasteful ways will loose upon the Earth unbridled destruction unless we all buy twisty compact fluorescent light bulbs and insist that everyone else ditch their SUVs, set their thermostats to 80 during the summer, and downsize their lives.

My impression that this is primarily a Gaiaist picture and not a Christian or Jewish picture (Genesis is Old Testament after all, should give the tribes some love, even though they've been trying to sell this pictures to Christian groups, haven't seen anything in the publicity or press that precludes the Evan character from being Jewish), isn't helped by the official website. An "Act of Random Kindness" link is there (so hippie dippie), and a prominent link to another website http://www.getonboardnow.org/, which is nothing but the usual crunchy granola enviro-action recommendations and blather. To suggest that this film is somehow a kindred spirit to all those sword and sandal, fishes and loaves pictures of the 50s and 60s seems like a far, far stretch.



Ten things I know about this picture without seeing it or reading much press about it:

1. Other primates are always funny.
2. Beards are always funny.
3. No matter how bad the inevitable flood scene looks, somehow nobody will be killed.
4. Lauren Graham is a cutie (see, being 40 can be fabulous!)
5. There will be at least 4 scenes in this picture where various people step in various animal droppings.
6. This movie cost an arkload of money to make.
7. You could do worse than Morgan Freeman for casting "God".
8. I like lamp (sorry wrong, Steve Carell character).
9. Get Smart won't be funny, either (sorry, already getting a head start on dismissing Steve Carell's picture for next summer).
10. Shouldn't this film have disqualified Tom Shadyac from ever directing a feature again?

UPDATE: Decided if I'm going to mention Steve Carell should at least spell his name right.

I Know It Might Make Me Sound A Touch Homophobic, But I Really Hope Not Too Many Fans Are Inspired to Dress Like the Characters From the Film

A pack of tourists and a museum docent fanned out in front of "Leonidas at Thermopylae" in the Louvre a few months ago. Spotting Jacques-Louis David's 1814 oil painting of a buff, naked warrior king preparing to lead 300 Spartan troops into battle, a cheerful young American said: "Awesome. I just made a movie of this."

"Really?" said the docent. "… what does it look like?"

The young man shrugged and smiled. "It basically looks like this."

"Well, those men are all naked," the docent said after a long pause.

"Yeah," the man replied. "That's kind of what the Spartans were all about."

Seriously? Doesn't sound like he's joking. Won't stop me from seeing this film it looks interesting enough. Even the latest breathless bit from Drudge about possible political messages embedded within the picture won't keep me away.

300 looks like entertainment, pure and simple, if there's more, I'll survive, all I ask is that I'm entertained along the way.

The quote from the Drudge 'developing story' would seem to be at odds with the above linked LA Times article, here's the Drudge bit

Snyder, who said he intended neither analogy, suddenly knew he had the contemporary version of a water-cooler movie on his hands, the NY TIMES plans to report on Monday. "But the danger is that an accidental political overtone will alienate part of the potential audience for a film that needs broad appeal to succeed," reports the paper's Mike Cieply. Is the film a thinly veiled polemic against the Bush administration, or is it slyly supporting it?

Meanwhile in the LA Times article the politics of the story are framed this way

But reality did intrude slightly as the studio and filmmakers considered the contemporary resonance of the film. "There was a huge sensitivity about East versus West with the studio," Snyder said. "They said, 'Is there any way we could not call [the bad guys] Persians? Would that be cool if we called them Zoroastrians?' "In the seven years he worked on the film, he said, "the politics caught up with us. I've had people ask me if Xerxes or Leonidas is George W. Bush. I say, 'Great. Awesome. If it inspires you to think about the current geopolitical situation, cool.'

Those two quotes would seem to be at odds somewhat, and if they try too hard to be 'sensitive' about the East v West thing, then they've probably ruined the pictures. Hopefully they only pay lip service to that 'sensitivity'.

It's a comic book for crying out loud, the villains are supposed to be villainous and the heroes heroic, to play it any other way and you end up with a muddle along the lines of V for Vendetta.

Clearly, the USA is more easily morphed into the ovewhelmingly superior force of the Persians versus the gutty little (and doomed) Spartans. So to apply current geopolitical realities to that past would be to suggest that the doomed, but striving terrorists, dying but inspiring subsequent generations are the modern Spartans.

If this picture really goes there, then it will be a box office disaster.

I doubt it does, Frank Miller himself is semi-right wing, definitely pro-War on Terror and takes the current threats against our culture very seriously.

He's cooking up for release later this year, Holy Terror, Batman!, and to quote the Wiki,

According to Miller, the comic is a "piece of propaganda" in which Batman "kicks Al-Qaeda's ass."

Enough, said. So I don't think Miller intended 300 to be anti-American propaganda, but we'll see what message (if any) ends up on the screen. Listen to Frank Miller expand on his thoughts regarding patriotism and 9/11, and why he's inspired to show Batman kicking some Al-Qaeda ass. It's astounding that he's the unusual one in the artistic community for wanting to depict the bad guys as the bad guys.