An MRC study published yesterday was the subject of a piece in The Hollywood Reporter. The study analyzed the violence in the top 10 movies currently in theatres to showcase the hypocrisy of celebrities demanding gun control after the Roseburg shooting.
(For the record: 334 separate violent acts; 121 acts of gun violence; 39 dead out of 142 total victims.)
Like clockwork, before anyone had time digest the horror of the latest mass shooting, the left started finger-pointing and demanding more gun control – whether it would have prevented the crime or not. From President Obama on down, they immediately began railing against the NRA and gun owners.
Not surprisingly, entertainment industry liberals were among the most vocal. That also made them among the most hypocritical. TV, movies and music videos thrive portraying – and often glamorizing – violence, and gun violence in particular. And while actors were demanding gun control, the top 10 movies in theaters this past weekend were awash in violence – 334 separate violent acts, 121 of them involving guns. The on-screen body count was 39 dead out of 142 victims.
Longtime Washington Post book reviewer Michael Dirda broke out the superlatives on Thursday for communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and the Bruce Cook biography that served as the basis for a new Trumbo-glorifying movie starring Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, geopolitically).
Dirda oozed “by the time of his death from lung cancer in 1976, Trumbo already seemed half-legend, half-saint: To Cook, he wasn’t just the Oscar-winner who broke the blacklist, he was a man who, no matter what, kept faith with himself, his friends and his ideals.”
Conservative filmmaker Phelim McAleer has a new film challenging Josh Fox and his claims about hydraulic fracturing. McAleer’s GasHoax will be released on October 1, the same day as Fox’s latest short film, GasWork, will be aired on MSNBC.
The head-to-head match up is intentional. McAleer said GasWork is “a zero credibility film because it comes from filmmaker Josh Fox who has a history of health hoaxes regarding fracking.” He has criticized Fox for his past claims about flammable water and breast cancer links, calling them “nonsense.”
A common allegation against Ronald Reagan during his White House years was that he confused movies with the real world. According to Chauncey DeVega, the current Republican presidential candidates do somewhat the same thing, and have added video games and a bit of Comic-Con to the mix.
“Wednesday night’s CNN debate showed the American people an alternate reality where Chuck Norris movies are the Bible for statecraft,” sniped DeVega in a Friday article. “Adult children who dress up and give speeches as they role-play being President of the United States are competing in a real life Republican cosplay competition to be one of the most powerful people on Earth.” DeVega also declared that the debate was so hysterical that it amounted to a “master class in lies. Joseph Goebbels would be proud.”
Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the Reagan years.”
A Tuesday USA Today preview of the movie Truth, which presumes Dan Rather’s 2004 “Memogate” hit piece against President George W Bash was accurate, conveyed the hostility of actor Robert Redford, who plays Rather, toward Bush. But Redford also undermined the “truth” premise by relaying that “loyalty” was Rather’s main motivation in defending his flawed story.
So who's Hillary's enforcer? Last week we asked "who got to Donny Deutsch?" when he suddenly became supportive of Hillary whereas just the week before he had been very critical of her.
The same thing has happened with Ed Rendell. Just yesterday, the former DNC Chairman and Pennsylvania governor was quoted in the New York Times saying Hillary has handled the email scandal "poorly, maybe atrociously, certainly horribly." But on today's Morning Joe, Ed was suddenly singing a different tune, claiming Hillary is doing everything right and plaintively suggesting that there is no problem. That led Mark Halperin to observe "I'm not saying he woke up with a horse head in bed with him," but "he was contacted . . . by what we like to call Clinton associates."
Viewers looking forward to the season finale of Mr. Robot on USA Network last night were disappointed to find a rerun of last week’s episode. The network postponed the final episode until next week because “The previously filmed season finale of Mr. Robot contains a graphic scene similar in nature to today’s tragic events in Virginia,” it said in a statement.
So the Mr. Robot season ender featured something somewhat like a gunman murdering two people during a routine local news live spot and then posting his own video of the killings to social media. “Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers,” the statement went on, “we are postponing tonight’s episode. Our thoughts go out to all those affected during this difficult time.”
Quentin Tarantino: Dumb as a post or incredibly dishonest? Both?
The “pornographer of violence” (Chuck Scarborough’s term) takes umbrage when asked about the impact of violent films and TV on society. “Obviously, I don't think one has to do with the other,” he once sputtered when pressed on the issue. “Obviously, the issue is gun control and mental health.”
Thursday's New York Times delivered yet another summer-movie bummer from Manohla Dargis, the paper's most doctrinaire liberal movie critic. Dargis, previously stuck on counting the number of women in movies, is expanding her film interests to include counting old people, gays, and minorities. Yes, it's a non-stop thrill ride in "Report Finds Wide Diversity Gap Among 2014’s Top-Grossing Films."
Like The New York Times, The Washington Post also undertook a political tour of the summer movies. Movie critic Ann Hornaday hailed Magic Mike XXL as a harbinger of more progressive male characters who are in touch with their “inner drag queens.”
Even stranger, Hornaday labored to compare the stripper corps of Magic Mike XXL to....mendicant priests? Since when do priests bump and grind?