Over at Pajamas Media, John “Dirty Harry” Nolte is like a kid on Christmas Eve, trembling and giddy in anticipation of David Zucker arriving to lay waste all of Hollywood with jokes about Michael Moore’s unhealthful BMI.
In just this past year, counting both narratives and documentaries, we’ve seen nearly a dozen, high profile anti-Iraq War films and not a single one has made a profit or argued the other side.
Any decent anti-war movie is going to give equal time to promoting the pro-war side, because drama is conflict. (Note: Equal Time provisions do not apply to AM Talk Radio.) Besides, if Americans really hated the Iraq War, they’d eschew escapist fare like Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and spend their summer entertainment dollars watching movies that remind them how hateful the war they hate is. And 7-Eleven would have offered its Rendition Big Gulp in the 64 and not just the 32 ounce size.
Unless it’s to inspire their annual cinematic treatise to all things them — the annual film decrying the 1950s blacklist which forced a few screenwriters to use a pseudonym –
Bunch’a babies. John uses a pseudonyn when he blogs, and you don’t hear him whining about it. Anyway, I’m probably not qualified to comment, since I missed this year’s big studio film decrying the blacklist. And last year’s, too. In fact, the most recent movie I can remember that even used the blacklist as a plot point was 2001′s The Majestic, but it’s entirely possible that the anti-Blacklist propaganda in The Hottie and the Nottie flew right over my head.
— present-day liberal Hollywood doesn’t much care for the word “blacklist,” especially when it’s them being accused of doing the blacklisting. Their defense is to hide behind the literal and claim there is no actual blacklist or organized conspiracy to keep openly conservative filmmakers from getting work.
They hide their reluctance to produce Dirty’s movies behind feeble, transparent euphemisms like “trite melodrama,” “steaming, witless ejecta,” and “Good grief, how is it possible for any single person to suck this much without the assistance of a Shop-Vac?!”
Fine.
Okay, then. Dirty goes on the recount how Hollywood leftists conspired to stop Mel Gibson’s (pre-Sugar Tits, and ante-anti-Semitic tirade) masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ.
…the goal was therefore two-fold: to hurt the movie financially (which obviously failed), but also to launch a pre-emptive strike against any filmmaker thinking about following Gibson’s lead and scampering off the liberal Hollywood plantation.
I thought that problem was settled by the Supreme Court in Dredd Scott v. Columbia/Screen Gems Home Entertainment.
The Passion may be the only film to make over a half-billion dollars and not create a me-too phenomenon.
Not one other major star belonging to a splinter Catholic cult run by his father, the Pope of Malibu, opted to spend millions of dollars of his own money to make an Aramaic language fetish video about beating up Jesus. If that’s not a blacklist I don’t know what is.
A more tolerant industry, or at least one driven by financial considerations, would’ve quickly greenlit a serious-minded sequel based on the Acts of the Apostles.
If only Hollywood was more focused on the bottom line, we could be in a movie theater right now, enjoying Sister Acts of the Apostles II: The Cock Crows At Midnight.
Reasonable people would call this a form of “blacklisting,” but liberal Hollywood isn’t reasonable and rather than have an honest discussion on the matter they instead wrap us ’round the axle of specificity when it comes to the word “blacklist. ”
They also insist on inflating the Tires of Proper Definition.
So let’s use another word: Passioning.
Well, the metaphors weren’t working out, so I guess we might as well try neologisms. But let’s start by defining our crappy, made-up terms:
“Passioning” is what happens when the leftist Hollywood establishment, using whatever power available, demean, dismiss, diminish, and defame those they consider an ideological apostate. In 2004 it was Mel Gibson and The Passion of the Christ; today it’s director David Zucker and An American Carol.
According to Dirty, various bloggers have reacted with muted enthusiasm to The Passion of the Zucker, implying that a film in which Michael Moore “finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby” may not provide the sort of rollicking, laugh-a-minute thrill ride that readers of internet spoiler sites legitimately expect.
Thus, like Red Channels, the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the iron heel of CHUD.com and Ain’t It Cool News grinds another artist into the dust for the crime of standing up and declaring, “I am not a number! I am a free man!… By the way, how’re the weekend numbers?”