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.

Victoria Re(tard)gina

There are minuses to self publishing your own blog. It's hard to attract readers. No one pays you. You get in fights with foreign countries*. The major plus, though, is the author's complete freedom. You can write about whatever you want any way you want and no one can say boo about it. Still, for my own sake, I have imposed some rules on myself. Some of those rules involves Big Hollywood, the conservative movie site. I have a rule that I don't write about them more than once a week. That hasn't been a problem lately since they've slid very far down the "Things That Amuse Michael Clear" scale. Another rule is that I stay with the theme of this site and only comment on Big Hollywood articles that deal with movies or some other show business topic. That's supposed to be their theme too but they ignore it 40% of the time.

Today, I break those rules so I can once again comment on the perfect storm of stupid and crazy that is Victoria Jackson. Stupid and crazy combine in Victoria Jackson in such a way that, if engineers ever figured out a way to harness the energy generated from that combination, it could power the Enterprise. I gave you all a small taste of this a few days ago in which she was too stupid to realize she had just threatened the life of Nancy Pelosi. I hit Blogger's Publish button thinking, "That's that," not realizing that she was just getting warmed up. This piece reads like something written by a schizophrenic. Here's Vicki thinking she's stumbled onto the true reason that the Obama administration wants to institute a public health plan.

Social Security and Medicare are broke. Baby boomers, like me, are getting old and will soon be asking for it. Socialized medicine makes people die. You stand in a long, long line with a breast lump, clogged artery, or sharp pencil stuck in your eye, and someone like the DMV person, who can’t speak English, has chewing gum, an attitiude, really long fake nails that curl up at the end, and is talking on a cell phone, enjoying their power trip moment, is finally face to face with you. They mumble something incoherent about paperwork. You die. One less person in line for Social Security and Medicare!

Stupid, yes, but still vaguely coherent. Don't worry though, I promised batshit insanity and batshit insanity is what you will get.

Hitler did this. He killed the weak, the sick, the old, and babies and races/religions he didn’t like. Hitler also controlled the media. (Where’s the public debate between scientists on “Climate Change/Global Warming?”) Hitler had the VW bug invented as the state car. What will O’s nationalized car be? So… kill off the weak. That’s the plan. Tax the workers to death. Erase the middle class. Sounds like the evil governments we studied in high school long ago. The evil governments were : kings, oligarchies, facist, socialist, and communist. Now it’s called the Obama Administration. Sounds like candy or a rock band.

OH YEAH, BABY! Psychiatry students could write a doctoral thesis on those two paragraphs alone. I'm not even sure how to make fun of it. This is something I would have written if I were doing a parody of a right wing nut ranting about health care reform, except I might have tossed in something about using public health care to create a one world government run by atheist homosexuals. Also, I wouldn't have misspelled fascist.

But wait, she's not done. Remember, she's ranting about health care. You should remember that because she obviously forgot and started talking about some gift shop in which she started harassing the clerks.

I was browsing in a Burbank gift shop yesterday and I asked the store owner how business was doing. She smiled, “Well, you know, hit and miss. I’m sure it will be better soon.” The store was empty.

I apologized for not buying anything. “I’m sorry, but my husband now cringes when I order a Hazelnut Iced Coffee at McDonald’s, so I can’t really buy anything.”

Her smile hardened.

“You know, I’ve been speaking at Tea Parties lately. No one seems to know or care that our country just turned Socialist.”

She stared at me like a deer caught in head lights.

It goes on like that. Oh Lord, does it ever go on. She berates these poor shop clerks with all sorts of right wing talking points about taxpayer funded late term abortions, cap and trade legislation and how Obama will use national health care to decide who lives and who dies. I want to congratulate the clerks for the bravery they showed in not running away screaming. Victoria Jackson perceived their silence to be some sort of character flaw. She thought this because she's a complete and total idiot. If this were a movie, you would assume that her character was an alien who had just arrived here and knew nothing about human behavior.

The whole episode is similar to the amazement she expressed in her first article when the country failed to instantly turn against Obama when she called him a Communist on the O'Reilly Factor. She acts like a person who has just changed religions and wonders why other people don't convert too when she preaches The Revealed Truth to them. Those clerks did the same thing they would have done had she entered their store and started asking them if they were right with Jesus. They would have smiled, politely accepted a copy of The Watchtower and said, "Please come again," when they finally managed to get her the hell out of there. They did that because that's what people do when their jobs involve dealing with the public. Victoria Jackson didn't realize this because, as I have already said, she's a dangerous combination of nuts and stupid.

Oh, one more thing:

I got into my fuel efficient economy car, with the leopard seat covers, and the bumper that used to have the “I RESIST SOCIALISM” bumper sticker, until it got smashed, and I drove away thinking, “Ignorance is Bliss.”

Miss Jackson, I broke my rules for you so please STOP BITCHING ABOUT THAT DAMN BUMPER STICKER. You complained about it in the first article too. Buy another bumper sticker. I suspect someone told you it was a unique custom made bumper sticker and got you to pay $5000 for it, money you shelled out because you're an idiot.

*That may just be me. I'm currently having a major spat with Lapland. I don't want to get into the details. Besides, they know what they did.

Dumb, Dumber and Victoria Jackson

Regular readers of this site know all about Big Hollywood but for those of you just catching up, it's a conservative group blog that, when it first went online in January, was one of the most unintentionally hilarious things ever seen on the internet. In addition to numerous posts from people who think Jack Bauer is a real guy, you had Dirk Benedict's misogynistic rant about his Battlestar Galactica character now being played by a woman (as well as his insane rant about...hell, to this day I still don't know). I think my favorite was Debbie Schlussel's racist review of Taken where she proved that she thinks Albanian Catholics are the same as Arab Muslims.

Sadly, for the most part, they lost their edge and are just another conservative group blog. Still, from time to time, they take a break from doing Al Gore jokes in global warming denial articles and go back to their roots. In the past week they've produced three-count 'em-three articles worthy of attention and comment.

First up is Kurt Schlichter, a former standup comedian who was obviously so funny and successful that the other comedians got jealous and drove him out of show business. He wrote an article in which he compared Sarah Palin and her recent resignation to Star Wars.

Like “Star Wars,” she’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but her fans are rabid and chomping at the bit for the next installments.

That's true, neither Sarah Palin nor Star Wars are everyone's cup of tea. The difference is that the Star Wars films, even the lousy ones, are some of the most popular movies ever made while Sarah Palin is popular only with people who think we should have a nuclear war so that Jesus would be forced to return. He follows that dumb comparison up with this dumb comparison.

Again, a “Star Wars” analogy: Remember when Darth Vader faced off with Obi-Wan Kenobi? “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine?”

So Sarah Palin is Obi-Wan Kenobi? Okay, let's run with that. When Vader struck him down, Kenobi was reduced to a supporting role as a ghostly advisor whose total screen time in both sequels added up to about 15 minutes. If Sarah Palin finally disappears from the national stage only to pop up now and then to tell Republicans they should go to the Degobah System, that's fine by me.

Up next we have a favorite of this site, S.T. Karnick. Karnick's regular favorite thing to do at Big Hollywood is to find a piece of crappy entertainment that is both a critical and popular failure and declare it to be an excellent showcase of conservative values and ideas. He did it with the unwatchable show The Eleventh Hour (which has since been canceled) and the mediocre Will Farrell comedy Land of the Lost. He's back at it with this post about the movie Year One. This classic headline says it all: "Despite Ugly Facade, 'Year One' Has Positive Message About Religion." Once again, Karnick fails to find vindication for his worldview in real life so he turns to fiction, but this is a stretch even for him. Year One is a gross, vulgar comedy in which characters do things like murder relatives, rape animals and eat feces. How exactly does one read "Yay God!" into all that?

Fixating on this unpleasant subject matter, however, is causing critics to fail to see a perfectly evident meaning of the film: that the monotheist religions are the great source of civilization in human history.

Wow, he's good. He goes on to point out that when they are guests of Biblical figures Adam and Abraham, both worshipers of the monotheistic God of the Jews, "they encounter decent hospitality and are treated quite well," whereas when they wind up in the pagan city of Sodom they are enslaved and brutalized.

Thus the film clearly depicts non-monotheistic societies as horrible (albeit in varying ways), while connecting these to what is unattractive about contemporary American society, and the monotheistic one as vastly better places to live despite a few comic eccentricities.

I'm sure it will come as interesting news to places like India and Japan when they hear that their societies are horrible. I'm sure it will also come as interesting news to Karnick that even if he's right and Year One is a movie of faith and hope, a movie in which a guy literally pisses in his own face may not be the best medium for that message.

This brings us to Victoria Jackson. You may remember Victoria Jackson from her days on Saturday Night Live and the fact that she pretty much disappeared when she left that show in 1992. She gained some notoriety last year when she wrote on her blog that she, seriously, thought Barack Obama might be the Antichrist. So, we know where she's coming from. Now she's back writing in Big Hollywood that she has demoted Obama from "Antichrist" and now merely calls him a Communist.

Well, they are finally starting to use it. I think you might remember I was the first. I bravely spoke it to the Hollywood Congress of Republicans (October, 2008), who put it on the Internet; and then I spoke it on O’Reilly and Hannity. My husband scolded me. He said no one would take me seriously if I was such an alarmist. I got hate mail. I lost friends. I probably lost jobs. I didn’t want to be mean. It really isn’t mean. It’s probably a compliment to the President since he likes to quote his Marxist professors, and by his own words and actions is trying his very best to “change” our country from Capitalist to Communist.

Victoria Jackson truly is an idiot. I'm not saying that to be mean. It's probably a compliment to a woman who, by her own words and actions, is trying her best to "change" our country from Smart to Idiot. I'd love to know what these "lost jobs" were too. I'm sure her status as a former member of SNL means her acting services are in demand these days. She truly distinguished herself during her tenure there by the fact that, in six years, she never created one memorable character. Good Lord, even Tim Meadows managed to do the Ladies Man. Still, all one has to do is look at her IMDB profile to see that she is a victim of liberal discrimination. After all, so far, she only has six acting jobs scheduled for 2009. Clearly Barack Obama phoned all the major studio heads and told them, "She gets six jobs this year and that's it, got it, Comrades?" Another reason I called her stupid is the fact that she admits to having threatened the the woman who is third in line for the Presidency.

I called Nancy Pelosi and when I got her voice mail, I said, “Please vote to keep Freedom of Speech, especially Conservative and Christian, on the radio and T.V. If you don’t, you’ll be sorry!” When I hung up my cell phone, my husband the cop screamed from across the car, “Who were you calling?!” He almost crashed. I said, “Nancy Pelosi.” He said, “You just threatened Nancy Pelosi?!! The Speaker of the House?!! The third in line?!!” I started shouting, “I didn’t threaten her life, I was just trying to be emphatic! I just meant that if she eliminates conservative and Christian talk radio, all that will be left will be Howard Stern, and filth, and porn, and everything will be dark and bad, and icky!” My husband the cop shouted back, “They take threats seriously, Vicki!!” So, I called her voice mail back, and told her my name and apologized and said that I was a beginner political activist and hadn’t worded my message right. I just wanted my freedom not to go away.” My husband shouted, “You just told her your name!”

Setting aside the extra set of quotation marks AND setting aside the fact that there is currently no proposed legislation to limit the speech of Conservative Christians other than the imaginary bill that she read about on some right wing website, we have now learned that Victoria Jackson is so stupid that she doesn't know what words mean. If she got a phone call from a stranger saying, "Do this or you'll be sorry," what would she think? Ha ha, look at that, I just said that Victoria Jackson had the ability to think. At least her husband seems to have some smarts so we can hope that her lack of functioning brain cells at least skipped a generation and her kids won't stumble into oncoming traffic because they saw something sparkly in the road.

Then there's the Democrat plot against her car:

I had a bumper sticker that said “I Resist Socialism” but someone smashed into my bumper.

Yeah, some liberal saw that and received a signal through the chip in his head from Air America to smash your bumper. Congratulations, Victoria Jackson. I didn't think it would be possible to lower Big Hollywood's writing standards or intelligence quotient anymore but you managed to do it.