An Inconvenient Truth

I WAS RIGHT! Yep, that's it, people. I was right. I'm not always right but this time, I nailed it. All rightie then, that's that. See you all tomorrow.

Oh shoot, you probably want context. This site would be so much easier to write if I never had to provide that.

Back in April, I wrote an edition of something I like to call Movies I Haven't Seen about a movie called The Ugly Truth. To sum up, if The Ugly Truth is being accurately portrayed by its marketing, it's a stupid monument to misogyny lacking in intelligence and humor. However, a commenter said that test audiences enjoyed the clips they had seen, especially a scene where Katherine Heigl's character is accidentally brought to orgasm in a crowded restaurant when she's wearing vibrating panties and a ten year old boy gets hold of the remote control. That made me think, "Wow, maybe this movie will actually be funny." Now, the vibrating panties clip is on YouTube. Let's take a look.



This was just like that fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally except that was good and this isn't. When you compare the two scenes, you see the reasons why. In When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan does what she does on purpose to make a point in a humorous fashion. Her behavior was her choice and she wasn't embarrassed by it afterward. Katherine Heigl, on the other hand, is the victim not only of unfortunate circumstances but also of that smirking woman hating asshole played by Gerard Butler, a man who knows exactly what's going on but doesn't stop it because he finds it amusing that she's being inadvertently violated by a ten year old. That situation is made worse by the fact that he's probably going to end up with her at the end of the movie simply because that's how romantic comedies work.

So, that's it. I was right. The Ugly Truth will be a black hole from which laughter and goodness cannot escape. It will take all the wonder and joy from the souls of they who see it and replace it with despair that will spread throughout the world until we all lose the ability hear the birds sing or feel the Sun shine on our faces. Smiles will be a thing of the past, something about which we will someday tell our grandchildren in the gray, depressing world of the future.

Still, I was right, so Yay Me!

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.

Fear of a Depp Planet

I don't know that much about famous bank robber John Dillinger. He's probably best known in modern times for the urban legend that his huge schlong is stored in the basement of the Smithsonian. When I lived in Indiana, I once had a neighbor who told me that he had to quit his job as a traveling salesman back in the 30s because he kept getting pulled over by the police due to his resemblance to John Dillinger. I also know how and when he died. To sum up, he was a bank robber with a huge penis, looked like my neighbor and died. That was all I knew before I saw Public Enemies.

Now that I've seen it, I hope that I still don't know much about Dillinger. I'd hate to think that Public Enemies was an accurate portrayal of him and his contemporaries. If the Michael Mann directed film is accurate, everybody who lived in the 1930s was a rather dull person whose behavior can only be explained by the fact that they someday wanted their life stories to be told in a movie so they behaved in a way that was most convenient for the screenwriters. For example, there is a scene where Dillinger (Johnny Depp) makes love to his girlfriend Billie Frichette (Marion Cotillard) for the first time, an encounter in which both participants remain pretty much fully clothed. I don't mean a case where the passion was so intense that they just dropped their pants and went at it, especially since the scene was decidedly devoid of passion as they mostly just laid there gritting their teeth like they were having splinters pulled from their fingers. I mean one of those stupid movie sex scenes where the filmmakers decide they don't want the stars to be naked so they keep their clothes on during sex. The only way that scene isn't stupid and distracting is if the real Dillinger said to Frichette, "Hey this may be dramatized on screen someday and I don't want the audience seeing your good stuff. Leave your lingerie on."

On paper, this must have looked like it would be a great movie. Popular stars like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale along with recent Oscar winner Marion Cotillard star in a film directed by Michael Mann about a famous and exciting historical figure. If movies were theoretical constructs instead of actual stories told on film, this would be the best movie ever. Instead it's just...bleh.

The movie opens well enough with Dillinger executing a very clever plan to break a friend of his out of a prison in Indiana. The whole event would have worked perfectly were it not for the fact that many people in prison are violent, unstable psychopaths, one of whom ends up alerting the entire prison to the jailbreak when he shoots one of the guards he's holding prisoner. Dillinger's friend who who also his mentor dies in the ensuing firefight. Dillinger, at least in the movie, is not a cold blooded killer and merely beats the guy who got his friend killed before leaving him on the side of the road for the cops to find. Dillinger and his partner, Red Hamilton, then show the audience why they were such successful bank robbers. They had a very meticulous and professional method that quickly stripped banks of their cash while minimalizing casualties unlike fellow celebrity bank robber Babyface Nelson who would go into a bank and randomly start shooting up the place. Dillinger is even regarded by some as a folk hero because he refuses to take money from the bank customers themselves.

We then meet Christian Bale's FBI agent Melvin Purvis. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), under pressure to capture Dillinger, puts Purvis in charge of capturing him after Purvis tracks down and kills another famous bank robber, Pretty Boy Floyd. Purvis shows us why the concept "Celebrity Bank Robber" died out after the Depression was over. Famous isn't something a criminal really wants to be, especially with guys like Purvis who practice very thorough investigation practices but also new scientific techniques like wire tapping, something that is extremely effective when you know who you are looking for and who that person is likely to call.

Thanks to valuable connections formed through a series of bribes, Dillinger has created a safe haven for himself in Chicago and that's where he goes to relax after his latest robbery. It's also where he meets Billie Frichette. The whole Dillinger/Frichette relationship is the best example of the movie's lack of character development. He meets Billie and very quickly reveals that he's a famous wanted criminal. She rightly gets away from him only to have Dillinger track her down at her job and immediately start making very intrusive demands on her. One of the problems with her character is that we don't really know what is was about Billie that made her then quit her job and go off with Dillinger, a man she, at the time, knows only as a dangerous criminal who barged into her life like an obnoxious stalker.

In fact, character development and motivations are generally lacking in this movie. Billie is what is known in movies as The Girl. If she wasn't there, the movie would be a huge sausage fest and no one really wants that, but it also means that she does dumb stuff like angrily rejecting Dillinger just a few minutes before they go off together for sex. It really doesn't make sense. You may be thinking, "Okay sure Mike, she's just a dumb ol' girl. Surely the dudes are all well developed characters." No. not really. We never really learn that much about Purvis. All we know about him was that he was a competent agent. Everything else about him is a mystery. Christian Bale does the best he can but he doesn't have very much to work with.

Dillinger is the most thoroughly developed character, portrayed here as a thrill seeker who probably couldn't stop himself from taking the chances he did (at one point he actually walked into the FBI's Dillinger Unit just to look around) even though he knew it was probably going to lead him to a bad end. Even with all that, his character seemed conventional. Since it was Johnny Depp playing him, I was expecting more of the quirks and mannerisms that usually make his characters unforgettable.

Public Enemies isn't a horrible movie. It has some entertainment value. Some of the action scenes were good (though even then some of them were hard to keep track of) but, in the end, I wouldn't say it was worth seeing. The best part for me was the end. As I said, I knew how Dillinger die so, when I saw that coming, I knew it was almost over and soon I'd get to go to Five Guys for burgers.

Although, as I'm sure I'll say every time I see a movie I didn't like over the next several months, it wasn't as bad as Transformers.

Happy Birthday, America

It's Independence Day here in the States, one of our more important holidays. In honor of this momentous occasion, here is a holiday video.



Yeah, I know. YOU try finding a decent 4th of July video.

Have a great holiday, Americans. If you live in a place I like to call Not America, have a nice weekend.

Right Wing Movie Reviews -- Transformers 2

Regular readers already know about Gotterdamerung, a conservative blogger who often takes issue with what he perceives as my liberal bias. Today he has demanded space here to respond to what he says is the left wing take I had on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I said I thought my review was at all political and he said, "Same thing." Whatever, here's Gotterdamerung.

Hi all. I've been reading the various reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in utter disbelief. Almost all of them concentrate on the stupid plot, the messy editing, the poorly conceived effects and, well, everything else. I just cannot understand how so many people, audience and critics alike, missed the film's deeply positive message about religion and conservative values and its vindication of the right wing worldview.

Oh sure, it's all told symbolically. You can't go to socialist fascist communist nazi gay Hollywood and say, "I want to make a pro-America movie that blows the lid off of Obama's liberty-destroying agenda." No, you have to do this quietly and cleverly while the Leftist Overlords who run the movie business think you're making a movie about toys come to life.

It was obvious to me that the leader of the good Transformers, Optimus Prime, was modeled after George W. Bush while Barack Obama is represented by the Decepticon leader Megatron. It turns out that Megatron serves a Transformer called the Fallen, a creature who wants to destroy the Sun. This is similar to the way the Democrat Party is trying to destroy capitalism through the socialist myth of global warming.

Shia LeBeouf's character, Sam, represents the accomplished individual that the liberal Decepticons are trying to bring down. Sam touched the All-Spark and now has special alien knowledge in his head. The Decepticons are, after a fashion, trying to institute an excessive tax on Sam's brain and simply take away all for which Sam has worked so hard. Sam won't have that though and he fights off the Decepticons with the help of his girlfriend played by Megan Fox, a character who was so clearly based on Sarah Palin that I can't believe even the clueless liberal media missed it. This means that, once again, the lying libtards are intentionally trying to take glory away from Sarah Palin.

When Sam hooks up with the Autobots, Optimus Prime sacrifices himself to save him. Does that remind you of anything? Like, maybe, the way George W. Bush sacrificed himself to save us? And yes, liberals, I know Bush didn't actually sacrifice his life, but he did sacrifice his public image and his legacy in order to wipe the stain of Islam from the Middle East and make Iraq the 51st state. Anyway, Optimus is down and now the world seems almost certain to suffer defeat at the hands of the Terrorist Democrat Decepticons EXCEPT that Sam has placed his faith in Optimus Prime and, by extension, George Bush, the Republican Party and God Himself. Those three have never let anyone down who truly had faith in them. I mean, yeah, it sometimes looks like they've let down pretty much everyone to varying degrees, but only liberals would focus on a "fact" like that and not embrace the idea that the Holy Trinity of God, Republicans and Bush have never let anybody down. Thus, Same comes up with a way to bring Bush/Optimus back to life and defeat Obama/Megatron, the Decepticons and their human allies at Moveon.org (a plot point I assume was edited out for reasons of length).

Those elitist prigs we call "movie critics" thoroughly trashed this rare gem of conservative ideology but our center-right nation ignored them and rewarded a movie, directed by true Christian Michael Bay, that truly reflects their values with record setting opening week profits. Hopefully, Hollywood will learn from this and produce some ever more blatantly conservative films and make a fortune for themselves in the process. Probably not, though, since they get their marching orders from the Democrat Party, Obama's White House and Hell. The best evidence of this is that yet another Harry Potter film is coming out this month, a series of movies that tries to indoctrinate our children with the idea that secular sorcery is the answer to all of life's ills and that someone other than God can beat Lord Voldemort, a character obviously modeled after Al Franken.

Look At My Briefs -- 7/2/09

Upon request of the President of the European Union, I present another edition of Look At My Briefs.

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Really? Someone actually thought it would be a good idea to make a movie about a guy who impregnates his female friend by swapping out the sperm of an anonymous donor with his own AND to make the movie as a romantic comedy. This should be the story of a creepy stalker who is ultimately exposed as the degenerate he is. Instead, we'll be treated to Jennifer Aniston's initial revulsion upon hearing the news, her slow acceptance and the climactic reunion kiss between the two lovers. Also, we'll almost certainly end up seeing Jason Bateman masturbating to get his "donation".

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I hope no one thinks less of me when I say that I really, really hope we soon see a movie in which the hero is a pedophile. A particular pedophile, anyway. NO ONE F*CKS WITH THE JESUS!

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Following up on what I said yesterday, it's very difficult to have respect for the vaunted idea of The Free Market when it's capable of doing something like this. We desperately need a government takeover of the movie industry.

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Speaking of Transformers, someone on Twitter pointed out to me that my review had utterly failed to mention a character whose name I can't recall so I'll just call him Old Man Transformer. He was older than Optimus Prime and walked with a cane. He was in quite a bit of the movie too yet his presence completely escaped me when I reviewed the film. I think the reason that he was actually the least stupid element of the whole plot. Had the movie been better, I may have even been able to appreciate the appeal and camp value of Old Man Transformer. Unfortunately, the movie ended up eating huge chunks of ass and he got lost in the shuffle. Please don't think I'm prejudiced against old people.

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Netflix keeps springing these little surprises on me. The latest is that Neil Gaiman's BBC series Neverwhere is available for instant streaming. I'd read the book years ago but never saw the show. So far, it's as good as the book. I couldn't quite remember how it ended until I heard the word "Islington." then it all came back.

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Dear America's Got Talent,

Nice try. You're not fooling us. We knew you were going to try and slip in an American version of Susan Boyle and we saw Chuckly McPigfucker coming from a mile away. You'll have to do better than that.

Sincerely Yours, Mike Clear

Humpday

Once again, I'm extremely busy as I often am in the middle of the week. However, I do have one observation:

There is a school of thought that an unfettered free market creates higher quality products. Some even say that it's always right and that Utopia shall be created if the world simply allowed itself to be guided by the invisible hand of the free market.

I believe I have sufficient evidence to forever prove that this way of thinking is totally, completely 100% wrong.