–

One of the classiest moments in the history of show biz starts at right around the three-minute mark.

Obviously, the comparison to Obama’s Nobel win is a little unfair. After all, Rhames actually accomplished a great performance. He wasn’t handed the award after a couple weeks of rehearsal.

–

One of the classiest moments in the history of show biz starts at right around the three-minute mark.

Obviously, the comparison to Obama’s Nobel win is a little unfair. After all, Rhames actually accomplished a great performance. He wasn’t handed the award after a couple weeks of rehearsal.

Though there were no announcements I’m aware of, almost immediately I knew he had retired … because almost immediately there was a disturbance in the force. Sometime during the early eighties, Hackman replaced John Wayne as my favorite working actor and rarely did a year pass without a new Gene Hackman movie – and sometimes there were as many as two or three. So when the movies stopped coming, something just felt off. 

Has there ever been anything like the ”Hackman Chuckle?” He’s such a marvelous actor and could so easily slip his unique  persona into any kind of character he wanted – from Popeye Doyle to Lex Luthor to Little Bill to God Himself – but always the “Hackman Chuckle” came along for the ride; that quiet, understated laugh that could convey anything, from awkwardness to pure evil. I miss it … and I miss Gene Hackman. 

This exclusive clip from an interview set to air tomorrow on The Washington Times Radio Show with Melanie Morgan and John McCaslin only increased my admiration for the former United States Marine and two-time Oscar winner:

Obviously, there’s much to disagree with here, but how refreshing to hear an actor state those positions like a mature adult. No ranting, no insulting rhetoric… And during a five-decade career, I don’t ever remember him saying anything that disappointed.  Better yet, you would never know from Hackman’s work what his politics are. From “Reds” to ”Uncommon Valor,”  from noble military men to crusading left-wing lawyers…

Unless it’s releasing a confessed child rapist on the land, no one cares how movies stars vote or what their personal politics are. How they express those beliefs is what matters, and if they’re not insulting me and mine, attempting to undermine my country during a time of war, hugging mass murderers like Fidel Castro or qualifying forced sodomy as ”not rape-rape,”  go with God, or that red string around your wrist, or whatever…

Like Paul Newman and James Garner, Hackman has something that transcends politics, something too many of his current counterparts do not, and that something is called class.

Top Ten Gene Hackman Movies:

1. The French Connection (1971)
2. Unforgiven (1992)
3. Superman (1978)
4. Hoosiers (1986)
5. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
6. The Conversation (1974)
7. Scarecrow (1973)
8. Mississippi Burning (1988)
9. Crimson Tide (1995)
10. Night Moves (1975)

Top Ten Twelve Underrated Hackman Movies You Should Rent Now:

1. Twice in a Lifetime (1985)
2. Full Moon in Blue Water (1988)
3. Class Action (1991)
4. The Package (1989)
5. Bite the Bullet (1975)
6. Bat 21 (1988)
7. Another Woman (1988)
8. Narrow Margin (1990)
9. Heartbreakers (2001)
10. The Replacements (2000)
11. The Quick and the Dead (1995)
12. Target (1985)

Last year Miramax released “Doubt,” a high-profile piece of Oscar-bait starring Academy Award winners’ Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Streep plays a puritanical nun on a moral crusade to expose a Priest (Hoffman) who she believes is sexually abusing a 12 year-old boy. Both characters are portrayed as unsympathetic (especially Streep’s) but in just a couple scenes the boy’s working-class mother (Mrs. Miller, played by Viola Davis) is established as the moral center of the film – the only one truly interested in the welfare of her child. When Mrs. Miller’s informed that her son’s being molested, the Moral Center Of The Film responds that her 12 year-old boy is gay, a social outcast, and beaten regularly by his homophobic father … so maybe the best option for him is a sexual relationship with a forty-something child predator.

Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, and written and directed by Oscar-winner Alan Ball, last year’s “Towelhead” is a film Roman Polanski might have seen many, many times while wearing a rain coat. The protagonist is 13 year-old Jasira (played by the then barely eighteen Summer Bishil) and the story surrounds her sexual abuse at the hands of a number of men, including Eckhart’s Gulf War Vet. Rather than the repeated abuse damaging the young girl, the filmmaker portrays the rapes and molestations as a healthy and sexually liberating experience. More than once the audience is “treated” to lingering shots of Jasira’s bare legs as she discovers the joys of the orgasm while masturbating to photographs of naked women.

Kate Winslet won last year’s Best Actress Oscar for her role in “The Reader,” in which she plays a “sympathetic” Nazi guilty of mass murder who seduces and then engages in a steamy sexual affair with a 15 year-old boy. The sex scenes between this mature woman and a child lean heavily on the erotic, as opposed to the creepy. (The “sympathetic Nazi” issue we’ll save for another post.)

Yes, in just one year, Hollywood released three films that in one way or another portrayed sex with children as potentially healthy or their molester as sympathetic. And these aren’t fringe, indie films either. All three involve name stars and Oscar winners.

Unfortunately, this is not a conspiracy. Hollywood deviants never gathered together to plan for a slate of films aimed at a drip-drip campaign designed to dull our moral outrage towards the most heinous crime imaginable. It’s worse than that. We’re up against a culture; the same culture that can’t quite grasp why a child rapist should have to serve prison time for a crime he’s confessed to.

And this is how cinematic propaganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s motivations are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thoughtful people to start second guessing themselves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held captive by the powerful sound and fury of the moving picture. First we’re led to identify and sympathize with a particular character, then that character does something designed to challenge our belief structure. This can range from, “If John Wayne opposes racism, maybe I should,” to, “Well, if a loving mother is okay with it, maybe I need to get a little more nuanced and tolerant about this whole child-rape thing.”

On its face, that may sound laughable, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean our eyes are lying to us. Last year merely topped off a campaign targeted at our children that began some time ago.

In 2006’s “Notes on a Scandal,” Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett plays a school teacher engaged in a steamy sexual affair with one of her students. Like “The Reader,” the sex scenes between a mature woman and her student strive for the erotic and never once does the story stop to examine how such a destructive affair might psychologically affect a teen-aged boy. That same year, in “Little Children,” Jackie Earle Haley was Oscar-nominated for his support work as a molester just released from prison who’s the victim of that favorite Hollywood whipping boy, suburban hypocrisy. Just two years earlier, Kevin Bacon’s heroic molester in “The Woodsman” not only saves the day and wins the pretty girl, but in his valiant struggle to “reform” he’s presented as a kind of “civil rights” metaphor as policemen and “intolerant” co-workers torment him.

The award for Most Unsettling, however, must go to 2004’s “Birth,” where Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman stars as a widow convinced her dead husband has returned in the form of a 10 year-old boy. If watching a near-forty year-old woman exchange longing looks with a little kid isn’t creepy enough, wait till they end up naked in a bathtub together.

Whether it’s true or not that seventy-five years ago Clark Gable nearly bankrupted the t-shirt industry by not wearing one in “It Happened One Night,” what is true is that billions of dollars are spent annually by advertisers convinced sound and images can alter behavior. You’d have to be a fool to make an argument against the persuasive powers of moving images, but those fools do exist. Most of them are liars.

The Hollywood Left is many things but they’re not fools and they fully understand the power of the medium under their control. Certainly, damning everyone who works in the entertainment world would be unfair, but this is also a culture where only a handful of “names” were willing to speak out against the pro-Polanski movement – including many Leftists who have never been shy about speaking out in the past.

The film industry has a history to be proud of when it comes to opposing racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the most vocal from this current crop seem all too ready to tarnish that legacy as they target our children for profit and worse.

Is it too much to ask of the Hollywood Left that they show as much intolerance towards the sexualization of young children as they do towards conservatives and Christians?

That question has already been answered.

Last year Miramax released “Doubt,” a high-profile piece of Oscar-bait starring Academy Award winners’ Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Streep plays a puritanical nun on a moral crusade to expose a Priest (Hoffman) who she believes is sexually abusing a 12 year-old boy. Both characters are portrayed as unsympathetic (especially Streep’s) but in just a couple scenes the boy’s working-class mother (Mrs. Miller, played by Viola Davis) is established as the moral center of the film – the only one truly interested in the welfare of her child. When Mrs. Miller’s informed that her son’s being molested, the Moral Center Of The Film responds that her 12 year-old boy is gay, a social outcast, and beaten regularly by his homophobic father … so maybe the best option for him is a sexual relationship with a forty-something child predator.

Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, and written and directed by Oscar-winner Alan Ball, last year’s “Towelhead” is a film Roman Polanski might have seen many, many times while wearing a rain coat. The protagonist is 13 year-old Jasira (played by the then barely eighteen Summer Bishil) and the story surrounds her sexual abuse at the hands of a number of men, including Eckhart’s Gulf War Vet. Rather than the repeated abuse damaging the young girl, the filmmaker portrays the rapes and molestations as a healthy and sexually liberating experience. More than once the audience is “treated” to lingering shots of Jasira’s bare legs as she discovers the joys of the orgasm while masturbating to photographs of naked women.

Kate Winslet won last year’s Best Actress Oscar for her role in “The Reader,” in which she plays a “sympathetic” Nazi guilty of mass murder who seduces and then engages in a steamy sexual affair with a 15 year-old boy. The sex scenes between this mature woman and a child lean heavily on the erotic, as opposed to the creepy. (The “sympathetic Nazi” issue we’ll save for another post.)

Yes, in just one year, Hollywood released three films that in one way or another portrayed sex with children as potentially healthy or their molester as sympathetic. And these aren’t fringe, indie films either. All three involve name stars and Oscar winners.

Unfortunately, this is not a conspiracy. Hollywood deviants never gathered together to plan for a slate of films aimed at a drip-drip campaign designed to dull our moral outrage towards the most heinous crime imaginable. It’s worse than that. We’re up against a culture; the same culture that can’t quite grasp why a child rapist should have to serve prison time for a crime he’s confessed to.

And this is how cinematic propaganda works. Whether the filmmaker’s motivations are good or evil, the idea is to get decent and thoughtful people to start second guessing themselves as they’re enveloped in the dark and held captive by the powerful sound and fury of the moving picture. First we’re led to identify and sympathize with a particular character, then that character does something designed to challenge our belief structure. This can range from, “If John Wayne opposes racism, maybe I should,” to, “Well, if a loving mother is okay with it, maybe I need to get a little more nuanced and tolerant about this whole child-rape thing.”

On its face, that may sound laughable, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean our eyes are lying to us. Last year merely topped off a campaign targeted at our children that began some time ago.

In 2006’s “Notes on a Scandal,” Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett plays a school teacher engaged in a steamy sexual affair with one of her students. Like “The Reader,” the sex scenes between a mature woman and her student strive for the erotic and never once does the story stop to examine how such a destructive affair might psychologically affect a teen-aged boy. That same year, in “Little Children,” Jackie Earle Haley was Oscar-nominated for his support work as a molester just released from prison who’s the victim of that favorite Hollywood whipping boy, suburban hypocrisy. Just two years earlier, Kevin Bacon’s heroic molester in “The Woodsman” not only saves the day and wins the pretty girl, but in his valiant struggle to “reform” he’s presented as a kind of “civil rights” metaphor as policemen and “intolerant” co-workers torment him.

The award for Most Unsettling, however, must go to 2004’s “Birth,” where Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman stars as a widow convinced her dead husband has returned in the form of a 10 year-old boy. If watching a near-forty year-old woman exchange longing looks with a little kid isn’t creepy enough, wait till they end up naked in a bathtub together.

Whether it’s true or not that seventy-five years ago Clark Gable nearly bankrupted the t-shirt industry by not wearing one in “It Happened One Night,” what is true is that billions of dollars are spent annually by advertisers convinced sound and images can alter behavior. You’d have to be a fool to make an argument against the persuasive powers of moving images, but those fools do exist. Most of them are liars.

The Hollywood Left is many things but they’re not fools and they fully understand the power of the medium under their control. Certainly, damning everyone who works in the entertainment world would be unfair, but this is also a culture where only a handful of “names” were willing to speak out against the pro-Polanski movement – including many Leftists who have never been shy about speaking out in the past.

The film industry has a history to be proud of when it comes to opposing racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, the most vocal from this current crop seem all too ready to tarnish that legacy as they target our children for profit and worse.

Is it too much to ask of the Hollywood Left that they show as much intolerance towards the sexualization of young children as they do towards conservatives and Christians?

That question has already been answered.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

–

Predictably, CNN comes to the rescue, absolving all those awful school teachers who abused their captive audience with some of the creepiest child behavior since “Pet Sematary.” And I say “CNN” because Wolf –I lost on Jeopardy, baby– Blitzer just isn’t smart enough to figure all of this out on his own.

What’s so very disappointing about that clip is that these are many of the  same students from the same school that provided The Brightest moment of the 2008 election:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

–

Is it me or do the kids look looser — less programmed and more joyful — in this video than the CNN one?

Anyway, looks like someone finally got to Ron Clark to remind him that true bipartisanship is agreeing with the Left.

UPDATE: The first video posted got zapped, but this new one is even worse. The kid talking to the CNN anchor opposes ObamaCare but he’s still forced to sing about it!

Compounding his mistake from last week, we got this last night:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

–

Of course Letterman didn’t think about how the media would hound every female who ever worked with him as he bared his precious soul for ten minutes last week. How could he when he was thinking only of himself? Anyone who spends ten minutes confessing their sexual indiscretions on national television obviously hasn’t yet figured out that everything isn’t all about him. If he had, he would’ve issued a short statement, taken the incoming fire without comment, and quietly and privately begged forgiveness from those he hurt.

Instead, it looks as though all the pain he says he caused his wife is nothing more than the latest muse for his joke writers and certainly not more important than retaining the good opinion of those who don’t matter.

Compounding his mistake from last week, we got this last night:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

–

Of course Letterman didn’t think about how the media would hound every female who ever worked with him as he bared his precious soul for ten minutes last week. How could he when he was thinking only of himself? Anyone who spends ten minutes confessing their sexual indiscretions on national television obviously hasn’t yet figured out that everything isn’t all about him. If he had, he would’ve issued a short statement, taken the incoming fire without comment, and quietly and privately begged forgiveness from those he hurt.

Instead, it looks as though all the pain he says he caused his wife is nothing more than the latest muse for his joke writers and certainly not more important than retaining the good opinion of those who don’t matter.

Tough times for leftie Hollywood. Nothing’s gone right this week. None of this is their fault, of course. In order to understand that it might not be a good idea to rally around a child rapist, bash religion in a religious country or trash capitalism in a capitalist country you have to live in the real world…

Steve Mason:

Michael Moore’s CAPITALISM tanks!

Ricky Gervais has launched his second consecutive box office bomb as The Invention of Lying (Warner Bros) only mustered $2.2M or so to start the 3-day. The comedy should finish #5 with approximately $6.5M for the weekend. …

[B]ut the biggest disappointment of the weekend is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture). After a $57K per theatre average on 4 screens last weekend, the picture broke to a wider 962 locations with terrible results. The “documentary” only sold an estimated $1.3M in tickets to start the weekend, and it will finish at about $3.9M for a PTA of less than $4,000. That soft opening will almost certainly make Capitalism Moore’s weakest-grossing movie since 2002’s Bowling for Columbine ($21.5M domestic gross).

As if all this isn’t enough for our friends on the left to take in, you have $800 billion spent to get us to 9.8% unemployment, the *poof* of the public option, and a nine-month World Apology Tour resulting in Rio getting the Olympics.

And what can we expect as a result of these “teachable moments?”

What’s that phrase again…? Oh, yeah: More Of The Same.

The worst sin imaginable among the Harvey Weinsteins who run this town and the Whoopi Goldbergs desperate to hold on to their celebrity, obviously isn’t the sodomizing a thirteen year-old child. The worst sin is making a moral judgment against another — unless that “other” is someone who makes them ashamed through the upholding of  a personal moral standard, like a Christian. 

But the whole thing is burning down around them and they don’t even see it.  The world now senses something dark and ugly at work among those who control the world’s most powerful propaganda tool, and the last two decades of being written off as a bunch of fuzzy headed, out-of-touch liberals are about to be remembered as the good old days.

To any rational human human being, proudly rallying around the most heinous crime imaginable in front of all your customers is beyond counter-intuitive, it’s like McDonald’s embracing food poisoning. But they’re “all in,” and even the Eugene Robinsons of the world can’t believe their eyes:

Could it be that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have been right all along? Not really. But in the case of Roman Polanski, the puritan scolds definitely have a point. …

More than 100 movie-business heavyweights — including directors Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Mike Nichols and Pedro Almod?var — have signed a petition calling on Swiss authorities to set Polanski free. Piling chutzpah upon gall, Woody Allen is among the petitioners. You will recall that Allen shocked non-Hollywood sensibilities by acknowledging his romance with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of Allen’s longtime companion, Mia Farrow. At the time, Allen was 56 and Previn was 21.

Actress, comedian and “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg has come under well-justified fire for making a jaw-dropping statement about Polanski’s crime: “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.”

Really?

Read the full piece here.