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Tag Archive 'Hollywood'

Dean Cain politely, even charmingly, keeps his gun

Tweet When my first was born, I had a lot of sleepless nights, not to mention a lot of sitting around during the day during feeding times.  It was during these first few months that I discovered Lois & Clark – The New Adventures of Superman.  Or more accurately, I discovered Dean Cain as Clark [...]

Ben Shapiro just shot to the top of my reading list

Tweet One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in I don’t know how long is Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV.  The book’s beauty rests on two solid pillars.  The first is that Ben, who is so sweet-faced he looks as if he couldn’t [...]

Know your political opponent

Tweet I am really becoming a fan of Kevin Williamson, over at National Review.  Today, he goes beyond Progressives’ superficial characteristics (wealth reallocation, gun fear, etc.), and digs deep into their values and their psyches.  It’s fascinating reading on its own terms.  It’s also extremely useful because, as Williamson himself says, you have to understand [...]

Greg Gutfeld’s book about the “Tyranny of Cool.”

Tweet Thanks to a handy-dandy Amazon gift certificate, I just bought myself a Kindle copy of Greg Gutfeld’s The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage.  It sounds like a book that is simultaneously important and enjoyable.  I’ll be reading it with a close eye, because his ideas [...]

Practical suggestions for bypassing the media and getting the conservative message out

Tweet My forte is spotting problems, not finding solutions.  Thankfully, when I put out a call for suggestions, many of you responded.  This post sets out practical list ways to get conservative messaging past the media gatekeepers that so effectively insulted Romney, praised Obama, and squelched or promoted news stories depending upon whether they help [...]

Conservatives need a new ground game

Tweet Maybe I’m in denial, but I’m feeling less depressed than I felt last night and this morning.  Part of my more sanguine attitude is based upon a Taranto principle, which is that Obama now owns the events of the next four years: Obama has spent the past four years explaining away his failings by [...]

Scott Baio making sense

Tweet I’ve always been a Scott Baio fan.  He was the only one I liked in Happy Days.  I liked Charles in Charge, in part because it had an old-fashioned morality.  And I like his courage in being an open Republican in Hollywood:

What Occupy could have looked like — if Hollywood organized it in 1933

Tweet I am reading a delightful book about Fred and Adele Astaire, one that offers a little insight into a long-vanished world.  Along the way, the book mentions Eddie Cantor.  That reference reminded me of a song I always liked:  We Can Build A Little Home, from 1933′s Roman Scandals.  As was the case for [...]

European Fairy Tales versus American Fairy Tales — and how they affect the American psyche and the school yard bully

Tweet I love fairy tales.  I’ve always loved fairy tales.  Growing up, I devoured fairy tale books, with special emphasis on the Disney movies, with their beautiful princesses.  My personal favorite was Disney’s Cinderella.  I saw it once when I was a child and then, in a pre-video era, all I could do was replay [...]

Is Jon Lovitz for real or is he drawing out Hollywood’s closet conservatives?

Tweet Here’s an old, bad (really bad) joke: During the 1973 war, the Israeli Army determined that at least one third of all Arab forces arrayed against them were named Mohammed.  They quickly developed a new tactic.  The IDF troops would take cover and holler out, “Mohammed!”  In response to the call, one third of [...]

“The Help” — could there be more cliches in one movie? *UPDATED*

Tweet Subject to a very few exceptions, I don’t see movies during their first runs in movie theaters.  Instead, I see them when they’re released on DVD.  That’s why I’m only watching The Help now. (The Help is a movie about black maids in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.) Before I go any further [...]

Why was Chris Brown invited to the Grammys? I think I know.

Tweet I was surprised at how many of my “real me” Facebook friends watched the Grammys.  (One of them was even in the audience.)  Even in my younger days, when pop music mattered more to me, I wouldn’t have watched the Grammys.  In past years, though, as I’ve become increasingly aware of the moral decay [...]

When stars were stars

Tweet I watched a dreadful movie last night, really dreadful.  But here’s the interesting thing:  even though it was a terrible movie, with a creepy plot, I didn’t turn it off and walk away.  Instead, I watched it from beginning to end.  Why?  Star power. The movie was a Rock Hudson/Doris Day classic from 1961 [...]

Hollywood once again shows its callous disregard for America’s military *UPDATED*

Tweet Back in 2004, entirely coincidentally, I ended up at the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the same morning that veterans of the Battle of the Bulge had gathered for a reunion. Some got there under their own steam. Many, though, were on walkers or in wheelchairs. They were so frail. And so many [...]

An article for those of us who are not physically perfect

Tweet In my younger days, if buxom wasn’t your thing, I had a figure to die for.  Two children and a few years later and . . . well, I’m trim, but it takes a lot of work.  Given the realities of child bearing, age and gravity, there’s nothing more irksome to me than a [...]

The relative value of actors *UPDATED*

Tweet I already mentioned how impressed I was by Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech, which I posted here, and listed to in its entirety while folding laundry.  Listening to Reagan made that task go much faster.  It’s a fabulous speech, with each idea — most of which are as relevant today re government spending, individual freedom, [...]

I find myself in the peculiar position of defending “Family Guy”

Tweet I’ve never been able to last more than a couple of minutes watching Family Guy.  It is, quite simply, way too crude for my tastes.  It takes vulgar, and puts it into hyperdrive.  I’m also out of sync with its liberal sensibilities, but that goes for 99% of what’s on TV nowadays, so that [...]

Football, faith and the media

Tweet Well, I finally got around to seeing The Blind Side.  For those unfamiliar with the movie, it retells the true story of Michael Oher, a profoundly disadvantaged black boy who ended up as a scholarship student at a Christian academy in Memphis.  Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, parents at the school, stumbled across him, [...]

What do you get when you cross a Bratz doll with a Smurf? *UPDATED*

Tweet What do you get when you cross a Bratz doll with a Smurf?  A Na’vi. Yup, folks, I finally caught up with my pop culture and went to see Avatar last night.  Seeing it made me realize why I so seldom bother to catch up with pop culture.  The movie was a snoozer.  The [...]

Andrew Klavan’s must-see PJTV

Tweet You’ve got to see this one.  It’s so right — and it really resonates with me because I work so hard educating and inoculating my children against the omnipresent Leftist pop culture.  I think the video also works for me because, as a history major who has always rejected Marxist and deconstructionist approaches to [...]

Media continues to give new meaning to old ideas

Tweet There’s yet another movie coming out about the way in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq destroy lives and turn young men into pathetic losers: There is a grim timeliness to the release of “Brothers,” Jim Sheridan’s movie about the effects of war on the family of a Marine serving in Afghanistan. Whatever [...]

Is Avatar just another anti-imperialist film with fancy special effects? *UPDATED*

Tweet The big buzz is about James Cameron’s Avatar, which is supposed to be to modern movies what The Jazz Singer was to the silent film:  It will remake movies. I don’t know about that, but having seen the preview a few days ago when I took some boys to the movies, I can tell  [...]

Hollywood’s war on men continues

Tweet Back in 2006, I wrote an optimistic article for American Thinker in which I saw some hope in Hollywood’s approach to manliness.  I’m going to quote here at some length from my earlier article, because I want to make the point that I was lauding an enormously successful movie because it celebrated traditional male [...]

Hollywood’s perverted patriotism

Tweet Hollywood and the media establishment as a whole are inescapable parts of American and, indeed, world culture.  It’s fascinating, therefore, to think about the type of patriotism our American media now espouses and that which it embraced in the past.   Depending on how one defines patriotism, whether as love of country or love of [...]

About those Hollywood smarties

Tweet I went to NBC’s site looking for something else entirely, and got waylaid by a link to Hollywood brainiacs.  I found it somewhat interesting, at least initially.  Before I begin, though, let me say that I’m absolutely certain a lot of the actors and actresses profiled are indeed really, really smart.  Having said that, [...]