Baby Hollywood's First Year

Regular readers know the delight that Big Hollywood has given me over the past year. It was this day, January 6, 2009, that they first went online. BH is a group blog that tries to show a conservative perspective on the happenings in show business. As a progressive, I have enjoyed it because it's often delightfully insane, or at least it was. When they first started they had prominent right wing names like Ben Shapiro truly bringing The Crazy with an article about rap music that would have been relevant he been a 60 year old man writing it in 1985. Unfortunately this early spirit was not to last as Big Hollywood started publishing one post after another from a group of nobodies talking about how the reason you'd never heard of them was because they were conservatives and Hollywood won't give a job to anyone who thinks tax cuts increase revenues. That theme started looking foolish after outspoken conservative Kelsey Grammer was given his second post-Frasier mediocre sitcom so instead they basically started abandoning their main theme and allowed around 40% of their content to have nothing to do with show business which is why I mostly stopped devoting two full posts a week to them and mostly just give them a paragraph per week, if that. Still, they seem to be on the upswing (check out Adam Baldwin's recent defense of Brit Hume's religious nuttery for the most recent example) so, without further ado, I shall present what I think are the best examples of the lightning and madness that has been Big Hollywood over the past year, breaking it down by their most commonly used themes.

SEEING THINGS THAT AREN'T THERE -- To many Big Hollywood writers, entertainment is like a pair of pants that don't fit. Some people won't admit their pants don't fit so they pull, yank, stretch and eventually cut holes in them so they'll fit then insist they look good. Likewise, these people want movies to be something they're not so they twist their meanings around to suit their agenda. This is how 300, a mindless, badass action film with no political axe to grind became the symbol of conservative toughness. It says a lot about an ideology that claims to hate gays yet lionizes men in loincloths wrestling on a battlefield. The finest example in the past year, however, belongs to a review of the movie Taken written by insane racist Debbie Schlussel. In her eyes, the movie's Albanian villains were "clearly" Arabs despite having been named several times as Albanians and having their speech translated by an Albanian dictionary. She also described their employer as a Sheik even though they worked for a tuxedo wearing French gangster. I assume the reason Big Hollywood published this is because it was so epically stupid that it made the rest of them look smarter as a result.

CONCERN TROLLING -- Big Hollywood loves to show how much they care about Real Hollywood by giving them helpful advice about which movies make the most money. Coincidentally, if this advice were taken, it would eliminate from the big screen movies that conservatives don't like. Big Hollywood is constantly advising actual professionals to stop making Iraq War films or movies with sex and violence not for the sake of conservatives who don't like those but because they care ever so much about movie studios' profit margins. I hold up the work of Dr. Ted Baehr as this year's finest example of concern trolling. Baehr is an evangelical Christian who likes to helpfully tell Hollywood that clean films makes so much more money than dirty, filthy ones. True, family films are usually the year's biggest hits but movies like Inglourious Basterds also make money while many clean family films lose money.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS -- To Big Hollywood writers, everything must be ideologically pure. They would fiercely reject that that they are practicing Political Correctness since that is supposedly a liberal term but the endless quest for purity can't be described any other way and there is no one on Big Hollywood more fiercely P.C. than their Editor-In-Chief John Nolte. His recent jihad against Avatar is a good example but I have a better one. The new Sandra Bullock film The Blind Side should have been lauded by BH and in fact did receive a good review from Pam Meister. Nolte, however, ignored the fact that the movie is about a white, Southern Republican NRA-loving family whose Christian decency causes them to open their home to a black street kid who has no one else. Instead, he focused on less than five seconds of the film devoted to a mild jab at George W. Bush. He also saw the new animated A Christmas Carol and ignored that this was probably one of the more pro-religious versions of this story ever made to, again, concentrate on a single line about religious hypocrisy. I can see why that so enraged him since the same sentiment was expressed by one of history's most infamous Socialist creeps.

BATSHIT INSANITY -- This was a tough one. I really wanted to give this to Dirk Benedict's rant against...well, to this day I don't know what the hell he was talking about. Something about Mickey Mouse not being immortal because he had surgery. You read the whole thing and try to figure it out if you can. In the end, though, Victoria Jackson really had no competition. She's the only person from Big Hollywood to actually rate her own label. I can't bring myself to choose from her body of work, though. It's like asking what sort of meat tastes best when deep fried or, more aptly, what sort of incredibly stupid meat tastes best when deep fried in crazy sauce. I suggest you read her entire Big Hollywood oeuvre. In it you'll be treated to the work of a woman who wonders why it is that shop clerks quietly smiled at her while she harassed them with right wing talking points, inadvertently threatens the woman whose is third in line for the Presidency and is unable to look smart even when engaging in imaginary conversations with people she's never met. This woman whose greatest show business achievement is that she managed to get through six years on Saturday Night Live without creating a single memorable character now distinguishes herself with the combination of thinking that her writing makes her look good and her inability to write in a way that make her look good. Or smart. Or sane. Or decent.

Happy birthday Big Hollywood. Here's hoping you find your way back home and publish some articles criticizing Harry Potter for being a Satanist or for making Lord Voldemort a dark wizard instead of a Muslim.