Category Archives: Entertainment

Kanye West and the Utopia Trap, by Tom Luongo

Posted on April 26, 2018 | 1 comment

Tom Luongo overstates the importance of Kanye West’s support of President Trump. However, black rapper West’s fulsome endorsement may be a sea change if it leads other blacks to question their unswerving devotion to the Democratic party. From Luongo at tomluongo.me:

The Culture War is over.  The Marxists lost.

They were always going to lose.  Because cultural Marxism cannot sustain itself without feeding off of other people’s wealth.  It’s a parasitic ideology that first consumes the host then drives it mad to destroy everyone else.

After the 2016 election of Donald Trump when Kanye West had his famous meltdown on stage and walked off during a show it was a pivotal moment.

Many saw an enfant terrible throwing a tantrum and crying for attention  But I didn’t.  I heard a man whose world-view was in flux and causing him real pain.

The kind of pain that changes a man.

It’s a moment when you look at what you’ve built and see it for what it is.  In Kanye’s case it wasn’t his art that was the problem, it was the reaction to it.  The system supporting it.

He saw the politics and structure of the music industry, rightly, as just another mechanism of social control. He railed against radio, MTV and the rest of the distribution system.

He saw his place within it, how it was driving artists and fans apart, to bicker and argue while the real power lay with those controlling and stoking the conflicts.

And he torched it.  Willingly.  With an almost hyper self-awareness.

Fast forward to this week when Kanye emerges from his personal 40 days in the desert and tweets out, as Scott Adams said, “Seven Words that Changed Everything.”

Scott’s right about that.  I’m not sure about his whole “Golden Age” thing (watch the video linked above).  But, I am sure that Kanye West put paid his promise to his fans that he pissed off in November 2016 that he would be a change agent.

That he wasn’t going to go along to get along, stay quiet, be a good boy and reap the benefits of a system he saw as corrupt and corrupting.

Like Kanye or hate him, in this moment you have to respect him.

What he did this week goes far beyond red-pilling a large swath of the American black community about how the Democrats take them for granted, use them for their purposes.

What he did was throw the entirety of cultural Marxism into the ashbin of history.  He just took a massive dump on the entire canon of identity politics.

To continue reading: Kanye West and the Utopia Trap

1 Comment

Posted in Culture, Entertainment, Government, Politics, Society

Tagged ,

Review: ‘What’s Up, Deplorable?’ Roseanne Barr’s Rebooted Sitcom Embraces Trump’s America, by Rebecca Mansour

Posted on March 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

It shouldn’t be headline news when one of the TV networks runs a comedy show that actually portrays a character whose views are representative of about half the US population in a sympathetic light. But that’s how far Hollywood has deteriorated. From Rebecca Mansour at breitbart.com:

ABC

“What’s up, Deplorable?”

That’s how self-described “proud Deplorable” Roseanne Barr’s title character was greeted by her pussy hat-wearing sister (two-time Emmy winner Laurie Metcalf) in the first episode of her rebooted sitcom Roseanne.

A record-breaking 18 million viewers tuned into ABC Tuesday night to watch the return of the 1990s queen of sitcom. After a 20-year absence, Barr revived her award-winning role as the matriarch of the working class Conner family of Lanford, Illinois. And Trump’s America found a champion.

After the 2016 election, Hollywood executives realized how ridiculously out of step they were with their audience. If the box office collapse and network television implosion wasn’t proof enough, the election of Donald Trump left no doubt they were clueless about life outside their media bubble.

Hillary’s loss came as a complete shock to them because, to paraphrase Pauline Kael’s infamous (and probably apocryphal) quote about Nixon’s 1972 victory, they didn’t know anyone who voted for Trump.

Well, actually, they did know at least one Trump voter: Roseanne Barr.

For a brief time following the election, Hollywood’s top brass tossed around the idea of  reaching out to Trump’s forgotten men and women with targeted programming. Most of those early conciliatory gestures gave way to pussy hat protests, Russian conspiracies, and mass “un-friend-ings.” The #Resistance furthered the divide.

But one project did break through the political noise, as the entertainment industry turned to an old pro for guidance.

Unlike Hollywood executives and their counterparts on Wall Street and Capitol Hill, Roseanne Barr knew exactly why she and the rest of America voted for Trump. Last night’s Roseanne reboot gave a simple and honest answer to the befuddled studio execs and the finger-wagging #Resistance scolds.

To continue reading: Review: ‘What’s Up, Deplorable?’ Roseanne Barr’s Rebooted Sitcom Embraces Trump’s America

 

 

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Media

Tagged

The Pentagon and Hollywood’s successful and deadly propaganda alliance, by Michael McCaffrey

Posted on March 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

Hollywood has long been, with a few exceptions, a cheerleader for and in bed with the military. From Michael McCaffrey at rt.com:

The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine.

The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known… Hollywood.

Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner ‘Wings’ in 1927, the US military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows. Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Captain Philips,’ and even blockbuster franchises like ‘Transformers’ and Marvel, DC and X-Men superhero movies have agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of US military hardware over the years.

✔@DeptofDefense

It’s Sunday and did you know the works with to ensure the is correctly portrayed in films? Find out how these partnerships work: https://go.usa.gov/xneSX .

Be sure to follow our coverage over on @DoDOutreach!

In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD), producers must sign contracts that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.

Capt. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation: “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”

Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear. “If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”

To continue reading: The Pentagon & Hollywood’s successful and deadly propaganda alliance

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Government, Military

Tagged ,

Hollywood hoopla ignores media’s history of servility, by James Bovard

Posted on March 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

Hollywood ought to turn the lens on itself and do a picture on the intelligence agencies’ influence in Hollywood. That, alas, would be like making a movie of What Makes Sammy Run? (a fine novel about Hollywood that cuts too close to the truth for tinseltown). From James Bovard at thehill.com:

Hollywood hoopla ignores media's history of servility

Much of the media nowadays is portraying itself as heroes of the #Resist Trump movement. To exploit that meme, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out “The Post,” a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. But regardless of whether Spielberg’s latest wins the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, Americans should never forget the media’s long history of pandering to presidents and the Pentagon.

“The Post” is built around the Pentagon Papers, a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam war had gone awry. The 7000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been profoundly deceiving the American people ever since the Truman administration and that the same mistakes were endlessly repeated. Like many policy autopsies, the report was classified and completely ignored by the White House and federal agencies that most needed to heed its lessons.

Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, heroically risked life in prison to smuggle the report to the media after members of Congress were too cowardly to touch it. The New York Times shattered the political sound barrier when it began courageously publishing the report despite a profusion of threats from the Nixon administration Justice Department. After a federal court slapped the Times with an injunction, the Washington Post and other newspapers published additional classified excerpts from the report. Likely because the Washington Post had a female publisher, Spielberg made it, rather than the Times, the star of the show.

Spielberg’s movie portrays Post editor Ben Bradlee denouncing dishonest government officials to publisher Katharine Graham: “The way they lied — those days have to be over.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who deluged the media with falsehoods about battlefront progress, did more than anyone else (except perhaps President Lyndon Johnson) to vastly increase the bloodbath for Americans and Vietnamese. McNamara’s disastrous deceits did not deter the Washington Post from appointing him to its Board of Directors. As author Norman Solomon recently observed, “The Washington Post was instrumental in avidly promoting the lies that made the Vietnam War possible in the first place.”

To continue reading: Hollywood hoopla ignores media’s history of servility

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Government, Media, Movies

Tagged ,

Street Artist Erects Three Billboards Over Hollywood: “Oscar for Biggest Pedophile Goes to …” by Paul Bond

Posted on February 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

There would be many unworthy contenders if an Oscar were given to Hollywood’s biggest pedophile. Abused kids don’t look as good on TV as abused starlets, and Hollywood is doing its best to sweep pedophilia under the rug. From Paul Bond at hollywoodreporter.com:The conservative provocateur who calls himself Sabo took aim at Hollywood days before the Academy Awards.

With a nod to the Oscar-nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, conservative street artist Sabo has hijacked three billboards in Hollywood to attack the entertainment industry for allegedly shielding pedophiles.

Reminiscent of the signage in the Martin McDonagh film, which is up for seven Oscars including best picture, with black text on a field of red, three consecutive billboards in Hollywood sprang up Wednesday, each calling out the industry.

“And the Oscar for biggest pedophile goes to…” reads one sign.

Another says, “We all knew and still no arrests.”

A third billboard reads: “Name names on stage or shut the hell up!”

Until the artist, who goes by the name Sabo, took over the signage early Wednesday, the billboards were legitimate advertisements. Sabo manufactured fake overlays measuring as large as 48 feet across by 14 feet high and hired a crew of six men to help with installation, he told The Hollywood Reporter.

The first of the three massive signs appeared near the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood and another was a few hundred yards north. Still another appeared a few hundred yards from that one, mimicking the arrangement in the film, where three signs appeared in a row alongside a highway.

Sabo has posted faux ads attacking Hollywood on other occasions, but he said he considers the hijacking of three giant billboards on a single day his largest mission yet. The last time he took over a billboard was in November when he altered a sign for The Greatest Showmanto make it appear like Sen. Al Franken was grabbing at Zendaya, who starred as a trapeze artist in the movie.

Franken has since resigned from the senate under allegations that he sexually harassed women, and nearly 100 other men in the entertainment industry also have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct since claims were made against Harvey Weinstein nearly five months ago.

Sabo says his signage is meant to criticize those who allegedly enabled sexual harassment with their silence, and to tell celebrities they should refrain from preaching during their Oscar acceptance speeches — for this one year, at least.

Sabo

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Morality

Tagged ,

‘The 15:17 to Paris’ Review: Eastwood’s Ode to the Americanism that Makes Everyday Heroes, by John Nolte

Posted on February 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

Clint Eastwood has made some good movies. According to this review in Breitbart by John Nolte, The 15:17 to Paris is one of them. As an aside, he made a movie starring Angelina Jolie, The Changeling, (2008) that didn’t get a lot of attention or acclaim but was one of his best. It’s a haunting, disturbing movie, not Hollywood at all, based on a true story. Highly recommended. From Nolte at breitbart.com:

On the afternoon of August 21, 2015, on a train headed to Paris from Amsterdam, an Islamic terrorist named Ayoub El Khazzan exited a bathroom with a AKM rifle and 300 rounds of ammunition. The first person to try and stop him was Mark Moogalian, a 51-year-old American-born Frenchman, who wrestled the rifle away from El Khazzan but was shot in the back with a pistol Moogalian did not know the terrorist was carrying.

With his rifle and rounds back in his grasp, El Khazzan made his way to the passenger car. It was here that he met up with three Americans, three lifelong friends enjoying a European excursion together: 23-year-old Airman First Class Spencer Stone, 23-year-old Anthony Sadler, and 22-year-old Specialist Alek Skarlatos.

It is the story of the American friends that producer/director Clint Eastwood wants to tell. In fact, the three-time Oscar winner is so interested in these three, he had them play themselves in a $30 million studio film.

The opening scene is a doozy, a sharp stick in the eye of public school tyrants eager to feed drugs to boys as a means to control their behavior, or “to make your job easier,” as Spencer’s mother (Judy Greer) puts it just before Spencer and Alek are placed in a Christian middle school.

The Christian environment does not, however, calm the boys’ behavior, and it is in the principal’s outer-office where they complete their trio with Anthony, a street-wise charmer who proceeds to lead them into even more trouble. Eventually real life intrudes and they go their separate ways. For Alek and Spencer, that means life in the military.

Alek is eventually deployed to Afghanistan while Spencer struggles to find his way in the Air Force.  In the summer of 2015, while they are still young and unencumbered, they decide to get the band back together for a trip through Europe. Near the end of the vacation, they find themselves on the 15:17 to Paris.

The only way I can describe Eastwood’s highly original approach to this story is to call it a populist art film. To begin with, the screenplay, written by Dorothy Blyskal, and based on the book written by our three heroes with Jeffrey E. Stern, primarily focuses on just how American these three guys are.

To continue reading: ‘The 15:17 to Paris’ Review: Eastwood’s Ode to the Americanism that Makes Everyday Heroes

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Movies

Hostiles, by Jim Quinn

Posted on February 5, 2018 | 1 comment

Hostiles, a movie with themes of reconciliation, is a good movie according to Jim Quinn, but reconciliation just doesn’t fly in the current political environment. From Quinn at theburningplatform.com:

 

Christian Bale in Hostiles

I don’t like going to the movies. Too much hassle, too many commercials and previews, too expensive, and 90% of the movies are worthless drivel, SJW inspired crap, or government buoyed propaganda. Last weekend was my wife’s birthday and she wanted to see a movie. When she shockingly suggested a western, I reluctantly agreed. So my wife and one of my sons got in the car and headed to an old Franks theater in Montgomeryville that only charges $8.50. I had seen a brief review of Hostiles on-line and saw it got a decent rating on rotten tomatoes. I was looking forward to being mildly entertained.

The next two hours and fifteen minutes of this dark, somber, violent, morally ambiguous treatise about the old west cannot be described as enjoyable. But I did find it riveting and thought provoking. Christian Bale, as Captain Joseph Blocker, mournfully carries out his duties without a single smile crossing his bearded countenance for the entire movie. The tone, atmosphere and message of this film reminded me of my favorite western and subject of the final part of my five part series based on Clint Eastwood movies – Unforgiven. One of the soldiers in Hostiles even has dialogue almost matching Will Munny’s foreboding exchange at the end of Unforgiven:

“That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”

It was clear to me Scott Cooper, the director, was paying tribute to Eastwood and his Academy Award winning revisionist western classic, with his dark cinematography, introspective atmosphere, and themes of good, evil, heroism, aging, duty and courage. Movies in this age of shallowness, disinformation, and fake news rarely broach subjects like the treatment of Native Americans in the 1800s.

To continue reading: Hostiles

1 Comment

Posted in Entertainment, Movies, Politics

Tagged ,

Facebook To Start Ranking News Sources, Promote Only The “Most Trustworthy”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 20, 2018 | 1 comment

Facebook can feature any news sources it wants, but assume its news, or any other purveyor’s, is not trustworthy until long experience proves otherwise. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

One week after it emerged  that FaceBook has finally thrown in the towel on free speech, and would henceforth mute accounts it deems “untrustworthy”, leaving open the question of just how would Zuckerberg would decide who is or isn’t trustworthy, on Friday we got the answer.

In a blog post, the company revealed its plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, in what Facebook said will be a step in its effort to fight “false and sensationalist information” which also will push the company even deeper into a role it has long sought to avoid— that of what the WSJ called  a “content referee”, and which we would define even simpler: the internet’s biggest censor.

This is how the company explained the biggest change in its content aggregation and distribution in years:

Last year, we worked hard to reduce fake news and clickbait, and to destroy the economic incentives for spammers to generate these articles in the first place. But there is more we can do. In 2018, we will prioritize:

  • News from publications that the community rates as trustworthy
  • News that people find informative
  • News that is relevant to people’s local community

To be clear, you can still decide which stories appear at the top of News Feed with our See First feature.

Last week, we announced major changes to News Feed that are designed to help bring people closer together by encouraging more meaningful connections on Facebook. As a result, people will see less public content, including news, video and posts from brands.

Today we’re sharing the second major update we’re making this year: to make sure the news people see, while less overall, is high quality.

Starting next week, we will begin tests in the first area: to prioritize news from publications that the community rates as trustworthy.

How? We surveyed a diverse and representative sample of people using Facebook across the US to gauge their familiarity with, and trust in, various different sources of news. This data will help to inform ranking in News Feed.

We’ll start with the US and plan to roll this out internationally in the future.

To continue reading: Facebook To Start Ranking News Sources, Promote Only The “Most Trustworthy”

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Entertainment, Media, Technology

Tagged , ,

“I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.” by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 15, 2018 | Leave a comment

It’s a wonder we don’t have to stand for the National Anthem before movies. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

To cap off a long, strange day, my husband and I took the kids out last night to see Pitch Perfect 3. The first Pitch Perfect is a firm favorite in our household, the kind of movie we end up watching when we can’t agree on what to watch. We’d been waiting til we all had a night to see the latest one together, so we made a night of it and went out for some dinner, too. I even had a Coke. The sugary kind. This was a big night, people! So we were all in high spirits and I entered the theater excited to see some good music and have a good time.

I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I also wasn’t expecting to be blasted in the face with ninety minutes of blatant war propaganda from the United States Department of Defense.

Before I go on I should mention that a group called Insurge Intelligence published a report a few months back on thousands of military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which showed unbelievably extensive involvement of US defense and intelligence agencies in the production of popular Hollywood movies and TV shows. Just from the information this group was able to gain access to, the scripts and development of over 800 films and 1,000 television titles were found to have been influenced by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to advance the interests of the US war machine. We’re talking about big, high profile titles you’ve definitely heard of, from Transformers to Meet the Parents.

So it’s an established fact that these depraved agencies of destruction and domination are balls-deep in Hollywood production. You can understand my discomfort, then, as it became evident that the movie I’d sat down to watch with my family was set on US military bases for no reason whatsoever. There was nothing about the plot of Pitch Perfect 3 that required this; any music tour of any kind would have worked just as well. The antagonist had nothing to do with the military, the protagonists were a civilian a capella singing group, and the general conflicts and resolutions of the film were entirely uninvolved with anything related to the armed forces of any nation.

To continue reading: “I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.”

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Government, Intelligence, Movies

Tagged ,

The Big Problem With Hollywood Is Its Product, by Kurt Schlichter

Posted on January 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

They don’t make movies liked they used to, and its showing up in the box office receipts. From Kurt Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:

The other night we saw a superhero movie where the protagonist used his awesome powers to save the world from an evil supervillain – okay, it was The Darkest Hour, and the superhero was Churchill. The villain was Hitler, the real Hitler, not the fake Hitlers that are everyone who disagrees with liberals. But you get the point. It was nice to go to a movie for once and not be bored to tears by spandex-clad magic people flying about punching and exploding stuff. Of course, it was also weird because everyone in the theater was alive when Reagan was president, and no one was on their iPhone tweeting – except for me, but I’m special.

Plus, our future ambassador to Germany Ric Grenellwas there – there is zero excuse for a GOP Senate not to immediately confirm a nominee whose idea of a night out is going to see a movie about Winston defying Hitler.

What’s important is that for me and probably the rest of the adults in the audience, this was the first movie in a while that I had actually wanted to go out and drop $60 on (with tickets, refreshments, and that Los Angeles necessity, valet parking). Sure, I saw the latest Star Wars movie where Girl Luke met Hairy Crusty Luke and milked a llama-bird then Discount Han Solo did stuff and there was some weird other girl who went to another space racetrack (weren’t there space jockeys in another of these movies?) and then they had the same battle as they did on the ice planet except on a salt planet and then it ended and I was like, “Okay, well, that took place.”

Now, it’s easy to lament the death of Hollywood, which seems determined to ritually sacrifice itself on the altar of homogenous corporate moviemaking, if not the altars of leftism and perversions. But what are really dying are theatrical movies as we knew them. I like going out to movies, despite the cost and the inconvenience – when the lights go down it’s really something special. But it stops being special when everything that goes up there on the screen is lame.

To continue reading: The Big Problem With Hollywood Is Its Product

Leave a comment

Posted in Entertainment, Movies

Tagged