Category Archives: Hollywood

‘Mad Men’ Go Mad Over MLK

History, Hollywood, Media, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism

I was under the impression that “Mad Men” was intended as a period drama. Last night, however, the Madison Avenue advertising team, generally true-to-the-times, enacted today’s racial scripts. “Mad Men” is set in the 1960s.

(A period drama is where “elaborate costumes, sets and properties are featured in order to capture the ambiance of a particular era.”)

The backdrop to this politically correct revisionism was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Struck by political correctness, one “Mad Man” even berates a colleague for not grieving appropriately. The annoying Megan Draper, who has begun to sound very 2013, drags the Draper kids to a nighttime vigil, as rioters rage around them. Don Draper suddenly finds love in his heart for one of his neglected waifs, when the child directs a syrupy word to a black man.

Really? A little too forced and didactic, if you ask me.

Jacqueline Kennedy, as revealed from audio recordings of her historic 1964 conversations with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., held a low opinion of Martin Luther King. America’s most engaging first lady called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “terrible,” “tricky” and “a phony.”

“His associations with communists” is why Jacky’s husband ordered the wiretaps on King. Mrs. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy—recounts Patrick J. Buchanan in “Suicide of a Superpower”—”saw to it that the FBI carried out the order.”

I guess our Madison Avenue advertising wizards could have been to the left of Jacqueline Kennedy, but it strains credulity.

Marxism Engages The Uterus

Celebrity, Communism, Gender, Hollywood, Intelligence, Liberty

You’d expect pinko Jada Pinkett (actress) to be a stalwart opponent of free markets and to praise a communist. Ditto Eva Longoria (actress). Freedoms such as Thomas Jefferson espoused engage the rational mind. Marxism such as these females espouse engages the uterus; it requires a menstrual cycle. No more. This Jada Pinkett and Eva Longoria possess. For the rest, these women are not working with much.

Coughing up furballs over Hollywood pea-brains like Pinkett and Longoria is plain silly. The real issue: why are these deeply silly people treated as if they’re capable of sound judgement? They take themselves seriously because America at large takes them seriously.

GREG GUTFELD: “So, last week, we saw Robert Redford crawl up the butt of the Weather Underground, bona fide terrorists who killed innocent people.”

Now, it’s Jada Pinkett, who’s gone pinko, showing her new flick on Angela Davies, the commie who tried to help a murderer flee form jail. Her boyfriend George Jackson had committed five armed robberies before killing a guard. He also wanted to poison the water system of Chicago. Great guy.
In 1970, his brother Jonathan entered a courthouse armed with shotgun that Davis had bought. That gun blew a judge’s head off.
So whatever became of Davis? Surprise. He was awarded a faculty job and a salary far beyond a prison guard’s widow. How funny is that left-wing academics mock law abiding folks with guns, yet somehow always embrace armed radicals who want to destroy America?
I guess one is cool and the other isn’t, which is why Jada is hawking her flick, “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” How objective was she when covering her subject?
Here Jada describing Davis, quote, “She never apologized for her politics or her association and she always looked fabulous doing it.”
So, look fab and have the right politics and Hollywood bends over. What dirt bags.
Thankfully, though, Jada strongly condemns bullying.
Yes, bullying, the go-to issue for celebrities who cannot condemn deadly behavior. I guess being called names is far worse than getting your head shot off. So hurray for Hollywood, a place where terrorists get tribute and Charlton Heston gets humiliated. Hollywood, it’s how we speak to the world and we’re telling the world that we suck.

[Transcript. Copyediting: me.]

UPDATE II: Who Made ‘Jim Carrey Talking Ass’ So Mighty? You! (Carrey & The ‘Idiocracy’)

Celebrity, GUNS, Hollywood, Individual Rights, The Zeitgeist

“Jim Carrey is a talking ass,” sings a bloke on Reason TV, below. Very funny. True too. But let’s get serious. Carrey is a bad actor in more than one way. His venomous contempt for my right to defend myself aside; Carry is without talent. His slapstick schtick is pathetic, repulsive. So tell me this: Who made him the celebrity he is, and who’ll continue to patronize his rotten films? YOU! And you won’t change a bit, despite the man’s manifest contempt for your right to life*, will you?

*Inherent in the right to life is the right of self defense, as a right that cannot be defended is a right in name only.

Lyrics:

It takes a talking ass
to oppose a vaccination
when your Ph.D. is in
making funny faces

It takes a talking ass
to tell people they can’t arm when
you don’t walk around
without an armed bodyguard

It takes a talking ass
to call fans dumb and demented
when you are the one
who wants something uninvented

It takes a talking ass
to be out there passing blame
when you’ve shot someone
on every TV ever made

Lyrics:

Sometimes dudes’ minds are skewed
and they choose to go a-killin’
’cause they saw a Batman villain
killing, well … ring a bell?

Sometimes stars get armed guards
when they make a million buck-ers
then call you heartless motherfuckers
to want the same … is it the fame?

Polio and smallpox they no longer kill en masse
because of vaccinations they are a thing of the past
but you tell parents to skip them and the science you contrast
because just like in your movies … you’re talking our your ass

UPDATED I: “Idiocracy” pegged the Jim-Carrey humor brilliantly in the segment, “Ow my B-lls!”

UPDATE II (3/29): Chime in on Facebook. From the thread:

I’m proud to say I have never watched anything by Carrey the cretin. I know his “worth” from flicking through channels. I might have paused b/c of a Kim Basinger scene (she is utterly gorgeous). Did she do one with him? Maybe not.

UPDATE II: ‘The Americans’ Is Awesome TV

Communism, Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Pop-Culture, Socialism

I was wrong. “The Americans,” a period drama from the FX network, is not trite TV. I should not have fallen so fast into dismissive mode—but, then, can you blame me? Hollywood’s record of producing abysmally acted, amateurish, sub-intelligent scripts is solid. It speaks for itself.

In “The Americans,” Keri Russell kicks more than corporeal ass as a complex, introverted (now that’s novel), and most interesting character.

Matthew Rhys as her spook husband is magnificent; intense, authentic and manifestly conflicted.

The plot, script and attention to detail deserve high marks too.

And lo and behold, the Russian characters in the series are not just American extras with bad accents; they’re for real, accent and all.

So good is “The Americans” that Holly Taylor and her slightly less offensive brother, as the spy couples’ horrid kids, do not spoil the viewing experience. The children are straight out of 2013, down to their awful vernacular (lots of “like” to preface every sentence), and the staccato tart tones of Taylor’s voice.

“The Americans,” as I see it, is better entertainment than “Justified,” whose protagonist is well-acted (but I don’t like him one bit; I like the “Drew Thompson” outlaw and the prostitute he rescues from a sure death).

It’s all good TV courtesy of Sony Pictures Television and FX Productions.

UPDATE I: From the Facebook thread. “Nicki Fellenzer: Tell me more. I can’t get enough of this series. I’m a fan. Good, fun TV, harking back to a better time in our American history. The fact that Keri Russell looks so all-American works in her favor and with the script: Of course her Russian handlers would have chosen an American-looking Russian girl to be the spy next door. More Nicki.

UPDATED II: We were cheated out of the new episode tonight. Sorrows were duly drowned in the delights of the Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory. Cooper is an animated, wonderful creation (which Wikipedia delights in maligning as a sicko. What’s new?).