Category Archives: Hollywood

UPDATE II: Oscar Offal (Salutations From the Stutterers)

Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Previously, I watched the Grammys for you guys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.)

The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of “The King’s Speech”). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in-sync with the times, I know.

The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture.

The last simply superb picture I watched was “The Secret In Their Eyes,” a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Naturally I will be on the lookout for more such gems in this category.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): TRUE PUKE.
Mike D.: For me film is not really about striking the right ideological tone; it’s about weaving a yarn and avoiding that wagging ideological finger. I will not be lectured by pin-heads. I’d like them to weave a story that I have not figured out in the first 5 minutes.

I would never watch—much less wax fat about (as some libertarians have been doing)–“Atlas Shrugged” when placed in the hands of Hollywood. (I believe Dagny takes to green energy, or something along those lines.) And the snippet I saw of the “You Go Girl,” aka “True Grit,” was the standard emotional rubbish from Hollywood. Mike, you seem no longer able to even detect the abiding themes that ought to repulse you: young courageous girl sets lax, libertine, drunk adult on the right track and awes all with her moral certitude. They should provide vomitoria in the cinema for this kind of fare.

Such hackneyed, corrupting pabulum ought to repel the intelligent viewer. It’s Hollywood’s revival of the Noble Savage, only applied to kids; they are always the prescient sages; adults are the dolts needing the guidance and direction of babes barely out of diapers. Puke.

And if saintly, snotty-nosed kids are not enough, then you have “The Social Network”: fast talking, hubristic Millennials, making, if to go by Mike’s advisory, “profound” statements about the Culture of the Commons. Yeah, that’s just what I crave. Wisdom from Meghan McCain’s peers. Remember the dot.com kids to whom errant adults were praying, not so long ago?! Get a grip!

UPDATE II: Salutations From the Stutterers. A disease has been born. A new adversity to diagnose, medicate, write soppy stories and scripts about overcoming, launch campaigns for, and discuss, if you are lucky, while plonked on Oprah’s load-bearing couch.

Nullifying Brimelow’s Seminal Work On Unions?

Education, Film, Hollywood, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race

Steve Sailer has an interesting take on “the media-celebrated documentary ‘Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and by extension, on the “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions” (the title of my new, WND column). “Davis Guggenheim, white liberal dad, winner of an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary,” writes Sailer, “drives past three public schools in Venice every morning to get to a private school in Santa Monica. He muses on the narration that he felt he was ‘betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.'”

Why, then, doesn’t he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn’t think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He’d never get another Oscar.

[Read “Hoist By Their Own Petard In Wisconsin”]

Is Steve implying that the thesis of “The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,” a pathbreaking book by VDARE.COM editor Peter Brimelow, no longer obtains? In “The Worm,” Brimelow mounted a devastating case against the monopolistic nature of public education as the root of most of this system’s evils. He did so by analyzing “the efficiency of the education system, as expressed in its output and input.”

I would say that both the liberal director of “Waiting for Superman” and Steve Sailer are resorting to reductionism. There is more to the colossal failure of American schooling than the aggregate racial achievement gap in schools that are increasingly dominated by minorities. Conversely, government unions are not the whole story.

From my perspective, the film “Idiocracy” offered the most multifaceted treatment of creeping cretinism in America. The best of social science (kidding, of course).

Green Light For ‘Lights Out’

Debt, Economy, Family, Feminism, Gender, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

It has become ALMOST impossible to watch the assorted “estrogen-oozing” action dramas and crime series inflicted on the TV viewer. The phony heroine lords it over meek meterosexuals with fussy falsettos. Men know their place. Dare-devil women run the show, which makes the show dull, because 90 pounds of botoxic, silicone-plumped flesh in stilettos can’t run very fast (in real life, and I’m a sucker for reality). And you just know that back on terra firma, the 200 pounder she’s cuffing with seeming ease would have flung her as far as the equator, or coshed her to death.

A leading man is invariably a mentalist (I don’t know what that is), a gentle doctor suffering from low-sperm count, or a buffoon (“Burn Notice”).

“Lights Out” (http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/lightsout/index.php) is a good antidote to the above fare. However, it is a sad series, and the protagonist a tragic figure—“an aging former heavyweight boxing champion who struggles to find his identity and support his wife and three daughters after retiring from the ring,” played by Holt McCallany.

Last night, Lights’ typically spoiled wife (the Lovely Catherine McCormack from “Braveheart”) begins to understand the extent of the debt they have incurred, helped in no small part by her lavish lifestyle.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with voracious consumption just as long one pays for one’s purchases. The data demonstrate that Americans, in general, don’t. Of late, consumption has tended to reflect, not an increase in real wealth but an increase in indebtedness.

Aggregate household debt in the US has a lot to do with female expectations. Steve Sailer goes as far as to call this “The Estrogen Recession.” (I’m first and foremost the enemy of the Fed, fractional reserve banking, and regulation.)

In any event, from what I’ve seen, the average American woman’s existence is every bit as voracious as this fictional character’s. The evolution of the “Theresa Leary” character ought to be instructive.

And The Award Goes To … Joan Rivers

Aesthetics, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

The closest I’ll come to watching the 68th Annual Golden Globe Award is “Fashion Police”: a sartorial send-up by the magnificent Joan Rivers. She’s the only comedian and great wit who can get men to watch a program about fashion. Like me, my husband hates all “estrogen oozing” TV programing, but greatly appreciates Rivers. And rightly so. She’s lethal. Alas, the lantern-jawed Kelly Osbourne is an unwelcome addition to this show. Prissy and sanctimonious.

Wait a sec. I did watch “Salt” with Angelina Jolie. Is that up for an award? Can’t be.

Watching “Salt” was unsettling. America’s XBox, special effects, language-less movie culture reflects a certain reality-averse atavism. Up-close, Jolie the star is frightening. In this film she has cultivated a comic-book look with a newly sculptured nose and cheekbones that might have been enhanced. Her mouth is hemorrhoidal. And her come-hither glances! A CIA agent, or whatever she is supposed to be in this moronic movie, struts her stuff in a skirt slit up to her panties, which she promptly removes to make a bomb (an underwear bomber). My G-d; that’s not even Avatar-like clever. (Well, they say Avatar was clever. I don’t know; I could not bring myself to watch such far-removed stuff about a blue people fighting for their invaded fairy forest. I guess I’m just too wedded to reality.)

Fashion Police (http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/fashion/index.html)