Baehrly Coherent

For those of you just catching up, Big Hollywood is a website that has gathered conservative douchebags from far and wide and formed a group blog to discuss show business. I should stress that when I say "conservative douchebags" I don't mean all conservatives. I'm not talking about they who think taxes are too high and that school choice vouchers would be a good idea. No, when I say "conservative douchebags", I'm talking about the people who debate amongst themselves whether it is the Mexicans or the Muslims who are secretly running the country or that they possess proof that the true father of Barack Obama's children is William Ayres. That's the type that writes for Big Hollywood and I keep reading them and writing about them because I find the way in which they filter show business through the narrow, distorted prism of an extreme right wing world view to be the height of hilarity. A normal person who disliked the movie Cloverfield might say, "I didn't care for the actors, it was too dark and the camera shook too much." A Big Hollywood writer, on the other hand, would say, "I couldn't stand Cloverfield because of its political correctness and liberal bias. The monster shouldn't have been a giant fish. It should have been a Muslim."

Today I'm going to talk about a topic you see covered a lot at Big Hollywood, that being the idea that Hollywood movies with an unabashedly liberal viewpoint will eventually drive the movie audience away and kill the entire industry. Such a viewpoint is expressed in this article by Dr. Ted Baehr. As is usual in cases like this, Baehr proves his case by embracing the evidence that fits his assertion while ignoring the evidence that says his assertion has the same credibility as the assertions made by the guy on the street corner who screams how the government is suppressing the perpetual motion machine.

Baehr starts talking about the same guy that everyone who writes for Big Hollywood mentions sooner or later, Sean Penn.

What Sean Penn and other Communist sympathizers in Hollywood refuse to recognize (at least publicly) is that American moviegoers usually reject movies that unabashedly promote a Communist or socialist viewpoint.

A quick scan of Sean Penn's IMDB profile failed to tell me which of Penn's films promote a Communist or socialist viewpoint. The only thing I can figure is that Baehr harked all the way back to 1982's Fast Times At Ridgemont High. When Penn's Jeff Spicoli character famously said, "Hey bud, let's party," Baehr must have thought he had said, "Let's party, and by that I mean THE COMMUNIST PARTY MUAHAHAHA!"

After this, Baehr gets really funny. Oh, not intentionally so. It starts getting funny when he tries to deceive us by using averages.

In fact, this year, MOVIEGUIDE® calculates that movies released in 2008 coming from a more liberal or leftist sensibility (including Steven Soderbergh’s movie honoring Che Guevara, “Mamma Mia!” and Bill Maher’s “Religulous”) averaged only $11.4 million at the box office...

HA HA HA HA HA! Oh Lordie, I've read that twenty times now and I still laugh. First, let's talk about his list of movies, "coming from a more liberal or leftist sensibility." He mentions Che, the life story of a Communist revolutionary, Religulous, Bill Maher's documentary promoting atheism and Mamma Mia, the story of and hey wait a minute WHAT THE FUCK? Mamma Mia? Mamma Mia is being used in the same example as movies about Communism and godlessness? When I saw Mamma Mia, I thought I was just watching a movie that pissed me off because, in addition to generally disliking ABBA, I thought the whole production was generally stupid and boring. I didn't realize I was looking at a Marxist screed. Ever since I read that, I've been racking my brain trying to remember the scene where Meryl Streep held up a red hammer-and-sickle flag or where Pierce Brosnan was reading Trotski's The Lessons of October. I think Baehr included this on the list because the movie is about a woman whose daughter is trying to discover which of the three men her mom had sex with around the same time period is her father. Have I mentioned before that Ted Baehr is a religious wackjob who thinks premarital sex makes the Baby Jesus cry? I guess if you see the world that way then yeah, sure, a woman who was briefly promiscuous in her youth is on par with, if not worse than, a political philosophy that violently oppresses the rights and dignity of the individual in favor of subservience to the State. Hell, I don't know why I didn't see it before now.

Anyway, I was going to talk about averages. Baehr took the grosses of the three movies he named and said that they averaged $11.4 million which makes me say: Dr. Baehr, how stupid are you? Or how stupid do you think we are? Averages can be loads of fun for people who like to make stuff up since you can simultaneously be telling the truth and a lie at the same time. To achieve his precious "average" Baehr took the $1.3 million gross of Che and averaged it in with the $13 million gross of Religulous and...wait for it...the FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETYSEVEN MILLION DOLLAR GROSS of Mamma Mia. To put that into perspective, if you take the net worth of me, Donald Trump and Warren Buffett, our average personal fortunes are around $10 billion dollars which means I can finally afford that iPod Touch I've been wanting. Baehr also showed us that he can't do math since the actual average gross of those three films is a over $197 million. This makes me think that Baehr got his PhD from some sort of program that gives out doctorates to retarded people who learn not to stick corn up their noses.

Baehr wasn't done with his one man show, Uncle Ted's Fun With Numbers.

...but that movies with more conservative content, including the new Indiana Jones movie where the villain is a spy from the Soviet Union, “Prince Caspian” and the Christian movie “Fireproof,” which attacked the porn industry, averaged $81.2 million.

Would you be surprised if I told you that one of those movies made less than half that? Fireproof is considered to be a hit only because it cost so little to make. Otherwise, its $35 million dollar gross wouldn't have been considered to be the least bit impressive. Since he's picking and choosing, I don't know why he didn't just knock out Fireproof and toss in The Dark Knight. Then his precious Jesus & Bush-friendly average would have been over $500 million.

Anyway, Hollywood had a record year in 2008 and, according to Big Hollywood's own reporting, is on its way to breaking that record in 2009. If Ted Baehr is right and they're all Communists under the Marxist mind control spell of Fearless Leader Sean Penn, then Penn is doing a lousy job because these people are the worst Communists ever.