Tag Archives: Hollywood

It turns out Hollywood’s proverbial “casting couch” belonged to Harvey Weinstein. Glad it’s out of commission.

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Miramax Studio BossDo you wonder why only Harvey Weinstein is taking the fall? Was he too fat and ugly for us to imagine despoiling young actresses? I like to think it’s because he produced truly awful movies.
 
I am heartened to see that articles about the tolerance of Weinstein’s abuse of power do make the link to our Womanizer in Chief, but again, Trump is also low hanging fruit. Certainly the casting couch is still an active element of Hollywood. It pervades patriarch-dom.

So Renée Zellweger’s face is our fault?

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Not Renee ZellwegerAPPARENTLY it is our own laggard CONSENT that drives the manufacturing process –haha. I’m sorry, no question, the chicken came before the rotten egg. Go ahead, blame the victim. Shame on the public for balking at what Hollywood feeds us. The public rejects a red carpet trendsetter and apparently we’re showing insufficient sensitivity to the vehicle, herself a trafficked victim of the process. Yeah, no. Yes, Renée Zellweger is a casualty of artificial esthetic standards set by our culture industry, but that’s not the fault of its primary targets.

By the same logic, should blockbusters be excused for being idiotic because test screening reflect moviegoers to be vacuous? Do you accept that an entertainment industry’s role is to perpetuate empty headedness? I don’t want teachers resigning themselves to graduating dummies.

Zellweger defenders point to the spiraling abuse of plastic surgery. The term they use is “popularity” of plastic surgery, how cheeky! And how convenient it is to stand up for Zellweger in the vulnerable moment of her reveal –to peddle the industry’s chosen trope– rather than accept her audience’s perfectly natural reaction to vanity jumping the shark. Actresses are paid handsomely to set beauty standards, Zellweger for example has been tasked with aging. Those expected to follow are the real victims. We’re told the audience sets the standards. Here we see the audience in full gag reflex of those unnatural, unfair, unobtainable standards -out of reach for Ms. Zellweger too it turns out. The audience is in full gag reflex as the industry apologists say “swallow”.

We are aghast and saddened for two perfectly honorable reasons. First, because Ms. Zellweger’s face belonged to a common pantheon of iconic personages. “Bridget Jones” was paid for in full. Zellweger’s celebrity status is compensation for her obligation to stand-in, yes in perpetuity, whether or not her career becomes a “whatever happened to.” If Ms. Zellweger wants to reassert sole proprietorship of that face, to despoil as she pleases, she reaps the displeasure of her ticketholders.

Second, because we’ve been down the plasticized celebrity rabbit hole before.

Despite the “trend” -we’re told- toward surgical enhancement, the vast majority of people elect not to disfigure themselves, even if they can afford it. Plastic surgery isn’t like a tattoo, it is short-sighted disfigurement plain and simple. I don’t know what kind of a feminist champions negligent mutilation as a right.

This is not about ugliness being subjective. If we are to equate aging with ugly. An actor’s elective surgery does not rebel against standards of beauty, it submits to them. Whether male or female, celebrities hoping to forestall aging do not alter themselves to be ugly. But plastic surgery without fail cements that fate. Inexplicably it’s a lesson yet to gain traction in Hollywood. That is what I think is at the heart of the public’s incredulity, as untactfully as it is being expressed.

My profound sympathies are with Ms. Zellweger but I’m happy that her public’s OMG reaction is upstaging her star power to impress. The public’s horrified gasp is a teaching moment for impressionable stargazers. What she did is not okay.

Film critics toe corporate line to re-kill messenger Gary Webb, after Hollywood

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Gary Webb
AT BEST “KILL THE MESSENGER” portrays suspiciously deceased journalist Gary Webb as a heroic sleuth who refused to compromise his principles. At best, the film re-reports the enormous crime which Webb exposed in his series DARK ALLIANCE, that the CIA’s support of the Nicaraguan CONTRAs in the 1980s involved facilitating the smuggling of drugs into the US, in such large quantities as to precipitate the crack cocaine epidemic, delivered to our major inner cities by the CIA. UNFORTUNATELY the film muddies the crack connection, as Webb’s detractors did back then. Two deliberate plot omissions suggest this is probably not a coincidence.

Conveniently the screenplay ends before the years when Gary Webb was able to elaborate on those links. By then he’d lost his audience. Unfortunately the film that might have given his life’s work a main stage reprise chose not to go that far. Does it matter anymore? These days the CIA and its covert cohorts are understood to have authored a litany of unimaginable evils. So it’s not too early to demonize the CIA. Evidently someone thinks the American public is not ready to be shown the racist stratagems of corportate class war.

Exposing the genesis of the crack attack on African American ghettos is clearly a missed opportunity for a film in 2014. Given Ferguson. Given the rising awareness of our government’s coordinated and premeditated containment and criminalization of dark-skinned populations. Let’s remember that while the US was fighting Nicaraguan rebels, it was also at war with the Black Liberation Army. Funding and arming drug warlords was the same strategy Brazil used to administrate the favelas, via proxy gangs. One might say that LA’s Bloods and Crips played domestic Contras set loose to destabilize community building efforts by militant Black Power.

UNPARDONABLE however are the film’s departures from the truth, which paint a curious fiction as if to indemnify the national press from its complicity with the intelligence community. Two lies will stand out to anyone who was there. (Did the filmmakers think their audience would be only millennials?)

First, the San Jose Mercury News was hardly a “local news outlet” unfamiliar with handling national stories and unknown to the average reader. The Mercury News was an award winning paper which competed with metropolitan mastheads. I can’t imagine its employees aren’t indignant by the film’s yokel characterization. The Los Angeles Times’ vindictive campaign to defame Gary Webb was hardly driven by professional embarassment over a missed scoop.

Second, the Contra-CIA drug smuggling link was suspected well before Gary Webb brought it to the mainstream. I remember during the Iran-Contra Hearings a decade earlier, the alternative media often lamented that the official investigation had been narrowed to exclude mention of the cocaine connection.

These amendments might be excused for simplifying the plot except that they minimize the breadth of the corporate identity of Webb’s censors. How very 90s of this narrative to pretend that Capitalist media outlets compete for news scoops like highschoolers at a science olympics. Newspapers and networks have always only ever peddled the themes their owners dictate. Media consolidation has only meant the manufacturing of public consent has become more uniform, perfectly illustrated by the collusion of the tag-team that hit Gary Webb.

AND AFTER HOLLYWOOD FAILED GARY WEBB, the film critics were waiting with daggers.

David Denby begins his New Yorker review by associating KTM with other crusading journalist thrillers, “some depicting real events, some not”, then pointing to director Michael Cuesta’s “paranoid” TV work, finally contriving that the film botches “many contraditory assertions.” Um, sorry, neither. But I do worry that giving all thumbs down will succeed in scaring away viewers. Denby finishes by making it all about actor Jeremy Renner, un-ironically aping the campaign waged on Gary Webb, overtly described in the film, shifting the focus from the story to all about the messenger.

The Washington Post dispatched one-time Webb adversary Jeff Leen to reprise the hatchet job begun when Gary Webb broke the story. Labeling Webb as “no journalism hero”, Leen’s rebuttal hangs on the technicality that no CIA “employees” were implicated, ignoring what everyone knows post-Blackwater, post-Wikileaks, that the US has long outsourced its crimes, from torture to food service. Dimwit.

Lincoln: from Obama we hoped for a presidential reprise, not an Oscar

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President Barack Obama couldn’t deliver on the campaign inference he’d fill Abraham Lincoln’s shoes, so what do we do? Cut the Great Emancipator down to size. Portray America’s most lionized president as political operator, and distribute copies of the film to all the nation’s schools to cement the revisionist theme. Generations of visitors to DC’s monument will no longer recognize the seated giant, he’ll seem to big.

ARGO is a near deftly crafted thriller, jingoist agitprop, full-on Islamophobic mockumentary

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This movie is rated AYFKM– Film critics are unanimous in their praise of ARGO, Ben Affleck’s retelling of an Iran Hostage Crisis era escape caper. Either these reviews also reflect media agencies uniformly shrugging off Argo’s obvious anti-Iranian jingoism or these authors are inured to crude Islamophobic propaganda. Whatever the film’s highly praised period piece accuracies, the Angry Arab and bearded terrorist stereotype are pure post-9/11 refinements. The ill-fitting eyeglass frames, face-obstructing Prell hair, and presumed fitness-less sloop-shouldered physiques pretend to lampoon everyone of that era, but the character assassination is precision targeted at Iranians, all of them.

“Mockumentary” is meant to describe a mock documentary. Argo is not a documentary, although it asserts to be historical, but most assuredly it mocks.

Borat couldn’t have made this film more offensive. If the Muslim world wasn’t in an uproar about a fictional Hollywood video disparaging to Islam, Argo would do it. What a mockery to pretend that real Zionist movie moguls aren’t laughing about a story that depicts Jewish movie industryists pranking Iran with a fake production they called Ar-Go Fuck Yourself.

Let’s dispel right away the pretense of historical accuracy. The painstaking period details, and mimicked video footage is meant to lend a scent of authenticity to a CIA personnel expatriation that did happen, but much of the villain-at-their-heels tension was fabricated. Poetic license might excuse drama, were it not for the added perk of vilifying, parodying and humiliating a people.

I counted no insult spared. Angry Arabs (the Persians aren’t Arab — do they filmmakers know or care?) never attenuating their cacophonous accusatory gibberish. Death squads circulating house to house, Muslim-garbed women hypocritically enjoying Western fast food, every dark face a humorless compassionless fanatic, their soldiers hirsute menacing mongrels who do everything by force.

I’m off to research Argo’s fabrications which so flavor the Iran-bashing. For the time being I can surmise two. The film assert that the White House pulled the operation at the last minute, prompting ballsy improvisation when our hero agent went rogue. Later he was awarded the CIA’ highest honor. How likely was it that they gave a medal to an agent who really defied every link of his chain of command? Unless he didn’t. And second, the movie plot has Iran’s Revolutionary Guards so hot on their heels that the guards shoot their way through airport doors and mount pickup trucks to brandish guns as they chase a departing jumbo jet along the runway, providing Argo that Black Hawk Down, post-apocalypse Iraq, Libyan rebel stereotype sent up so well in Team America. The tarmac scene is witnessed only by the movie audience and the CIA extraction specialist as he looks out the airplane window. None of his charges sees it because they are of course real people who could do interviews and swiftly confirm the exaggeration.

Hollywood showcases ‘Arab face’ minstrel show- Backing US military campaigns with Jewish racism against Arabs

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What is the movie ‘The Dictator’ all about? It’s about the ever growing Jewish RACISM against Arabs and Muslims.

Hitler’s time is now long over. Today’s international racism centers on the Arabs and their victimizers are not Germans, but rather they are Jewish people and Christian fundamentalists allies of the Ziponist Apartheid State who hate Arabs and Muslims as a whole, all because they are primarily not as White as the European heritage folk are.

Hollywood doing the minstrel act routine over and over again is shameful. Sacha Cohen's movie a minstrel show. …The US today is as racist a society as it ever was.

Hollywood to rest of world: Whatever.

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It used to be the effusive “You love me. You really love me” but the Oscars post-Guy Fawkes have lifted Hollywood’s green curtain. Meryl Streep may have thought she was retweeting the audience when she pulled the Federer/Schumacher victor’s lament, but what was that really saying? A world audience appreciates genius in the performance arts, equal parts haughty, but Hollywood’s standard for a thinking-man’s actor is clearly not deep. Hollywood puts the silver shimmer on the corporate media pro-war propaganda, and when its spokes-glamor catch a whiff of discontent from the masses, their reaction is as genuine as Sally Fields, says the 1% to the 99%: “whatever.”

John Travolta caught cheating uh, fans

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By all appearances, a traditional paparazzi scoop. Wanna bet Brand Travolta has calculated that being “unmasked as a cheating spouse” will be outweighed by positive inferences of the shifty Scientologist’s virility? The photo on the tabloid cover appears to have caught Travolta mid-tryst, half-toweled, before he could dress and flee. Except his hairpiece isn’t the least ruffled, and the headline implies that Travolta’s adulteress is a woman. Travolta being bald and gay must be taking a toll on the star’s billing. No doubt this product placement will play in Peoria where moviegoers haven’t read about Travolta’s refrigerated wig vault, or that Team Travolta has final approval over every photo shoot to certify that his fake hair passes muster, or his industry-celebrated status as alpha queen of the set. If Hollywood would stop behaving like there’s something wrong with that, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that.

Hubris, thy name is Gazette

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Maybe it’s because the American-born Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is in fact born American, but his statement that there should be Retaliatory killings of American Civilians fits so very well with the American killings of Afghan, Pakistani, VietNamese, Korean, … Mexican, Native American, Guatemalan, Chilean, Bolivian, Colombian, Grenadan, Salvadoran, Chinese, Iraqi, Honduran, Libyan, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, just really any-old-an civilians whose governments happened to stand in the way of U.S. Corporate Interests. But what makes the Colorado Springs Gag-Zette stand out is their work-up for this weekend, with the celebration of Territory Days, where they’ll be celebrating the exploits of such Baby-killing anti-civilian warriors as Kit Carson, Chivington and General Palmer. What FUN that is!

The Gag-Zette hasn’t even made the slightest polite little squeak of protest over a couple of active Anti-Civilian Killing Sprees started and maintained through the use of outright outrageous LIES. No protest whatever about the Baby-killers of Blackwater Inc gunning down civilians in Baghdad, then lying and saying (and dutifully reported as Truth by the Lap-Dogs at the Gag-zette) that the civilians had fired on THEM. No weapons were retrieved from the bodies, especially of the kids. No spent shell casings that didn’t come from the rifles of the Blackwater Death Squad Goons. Then when one of them breaks honest, testifies, the Bush-Appointed “justice” Department so called prosecutor deliberately botched the case and the so-called Judge dismissed the case.

Protests from the Gagzette? None whatsoever. When the Gunsight Videos of U.S. Helicopters murdering Reuters Reporters were released, the only protest from the Gagzette was that “classified” information was CRIMINALLY leaked. Same with the CRIMINAL leaks of information about the Torture Centers.

And are now joined into the Howling Mob screaming “Terrorist! Traitor!” for somebody suggesting a little taste of “What-goes-around-coming-back-around”

Oh, and the Territory Daze dog-and-pony-show is going to feature Gunfighters. As in, Murdering Pukes who padded their undeserved reputation for “courage” with as many backshootings apiece, or more, as the face to face duels in the street popularized by Hollywood Mythmakers like Wyatt Earp.

Let’s all celebrate and rejoice for the Murderers! They should rename it “Terrorism Days”.

Wolfman is a man’s werewolf, no Olalla

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Poor wolf man, he’s the bastard of the horror big three. Dracula and Frankenstein have antecedents in folklore but bloomed on the quills of novelists. The werewolf traces back to the Greek, yet no one will pull him from the doghouse, not that Hollywood doesn’t keep trying. Whenever I see the cinematic transformation of man to beast, from An American Werewolf in London to the latest Wolfman offering, I can’t help but recall the terrifying hairification of Jerry Lewis in the Nutty Professor, RLS painting itself a spoof of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, regarded as the most literary of inferences to lycanthropy. But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote another short story seldom cited as a werewolf tale. Curious, because I think it holds the key to the man- wolf allure, when it’s not gay teen cheese. In his 1887 Olalla, RLS described the entrancing menace and tormented fate of the lupine-afflicted without mentioning the word.

Of course Stevenson’s angle separated man less from beast.

…the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me. They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe’s, but the pupil at that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard. A look more blankly stupid I have never met. My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed. Yet, when I came there and saw the face of the portrait, I was again reminded of the miracle of family descent. My hostess was, indeed, both older and fuller in person; her eyes were of a different colour; her face, besides, was not only free from the ill-significance that offended and attracted me in the painting; it was devoid of either good or bad – a moral blank expressing literally naught. And yet there was a likeness, not so much speaking as immanent, not so much in any particular feature as upon the whole. It should seem, I thought, as if when the master set his signature to that grave canvas, he had not only caught the image of one smiling and false-eyed woman, but stamped the essential quality of a race.

Ah signed up thinkin’ Ah was goin’ there fer mah country

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Here is a very funny review for this Right Wing Hollywood charade called ‘Stop Loss’, that bills itself as the antiwar film for those who normally would not partake of such. Yeah… In other words, even its own advertising and propaganda gives away that this film is total crap to be spoon-fed to pro-war folk disgusted that it is not all turning out so good after all. Boo-hoo-hoo. ‘Ah signed up thinkin’ Ah was goin’ there fer mah country.’ This film so full of shit it even sounds like Dubya talking!