gdp's Comments

Big Hollywood : Whitney Houston Dead at 48, Cause Not Yet Known

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:29:26 +0000

Thanks Pappadave. Whitney is now enshrined as singing the best Star Spangled Banner. A near second however was Kristin Chenoweth at the NFC Championship game last month in San Francisco. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMW98ujRusY You can feel and see surprise and joy spread over the stadium as the quality of her performance becomes apparent.

Big Hollywood : Whitney Houston Dead at 48, Cause Not Yet Known

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:26:51 +0000

Here! Here! Greatest Star Spangled Banner ever.

Big Hollywood : 'In Time' Blu-ray Review: Flawed but Fascinating Look at a Society Run by Leftists

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 05:50:13 +0000

God love you John, but this is a movie Marx would love, not Friedman. It posits that the rich are rich because they cheat, while Marxist economics animate the fallacious rules driving the story. Full review at ViewGuide: http://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/3345-in-ti...

Big Hollywood : Top 10 Ways Hollywood Can Win Its Audience Back

Tue, 3 Jan 2012 04:11:45 +0000

Well taken John, especially the need to stop insulting the customer and to stop making partisan movies. The "surprise" success of The Hurt Locker a couple of years ago proves the point. Reviewing it then, I wrote what a pleasure it was to see "a Hollywood movie that doesn’t paint members of the US military as saps, losers or psychos." Then went on to say "Hollywood honchos and coddled critics think that Americans aren’t interested in Iraq War movies. Wrong. We’re not interested in self-defeating, self-abasing, and self-loathing Iraq War movies." The same holds true today. My full Hurt Locker review is at ViewGuide: http://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/2155-the-h...

Big Hollywood : 'The Descendants' Review: Clooney Powers Payne's Latest Character-Driven Dramedy

Sun, 4 Dec 2011 20:45:02 +0000

The movie perfectly captures Obama’s Hawaii. It’s said that our President doesn’t understand our country, its people or its economy. Extreme voices have even declared him unAmerican. He’s not. He’s Hawaiian. While not a descendant of Hawaii, he’s most certainly a product of the Hawaii depicted in The Descendents. Details in the Reality commentary of my ViewGuide review: http://www.viewguide.com/movie_reviews/3355-the-d...

Big Hollywood : Critics’ Favorite 80’s Film: 'Raging Bull'

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:07:34 +0000

I found Raging Bull as much a meditation on the corrupting influence of fame and fortune as anything else. My full review http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1753-raging-b...

Big Hollywood : Easterbrook: 'Avatar' Trashes America and the Marines

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 06:15:05 +0000

Reinforcing my point, yesterday's WSJ reported "Behind Momentum of 'Avatar' Are Big Sales Boosts From Abroad" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704... Outtakes: - Avatar is already the most successful movie ever in Russia. It's also huge in France. - "Two thirds of the total box-office receipts so far have been generated abroad." - "Some moviegoers abroad are drawn to what they see as an anti-capitalist message in the film's plot." - "Francois Eygun, a 19-year-old student in Paris, saw in the film's plot a message about U.S. foreign policy: 'With what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan it is quite relevant.'" That young Frenchman figured it out pretty quickly, didn't he.

Big Hollywood : Easterbrook: 'Avatar' Trashes America and the Marines

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 01:57:28 +0000

Good thing Avatar's seditious anti-Americanism is getting more attention. At the movie’s nadir – former US Marines destroy a civilization’s iconic tower by shooting missiles into its base and then watching it topple – it becomes clear that James Cameron has foisted an obscene world on us in which 9/11 is fodder for popcorn propaganda. Nothing if not brilliantly calculating, he must figure that global audiences will be enticed to buy tickets for the privilege to jeer Americans. My full review here: http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/2125-avatar

Big Hollywood : 'Avatar' Open Thread: What did YOU think?

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:37:18 +0000

Avatar's fundamental reality conceit isn’t biological or physical but circumstantial. It asks us to believe that The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Save the Whales, and the rest of the Left Wing Environmental Complex will have disappeared in 150 years so that Earthlings can rape and pillage a foreign land more beautiful and populated than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Pigs will fly before that happens. Full review at http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/2125-avatar

Big Hollywood : 'Avatar' Contrarian Round Up: 'The King of the World is Naked'

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:33:45 +0000

Avatar measures up to its considerable hype and fills its nearly 3 hour length, yet its reprehensible politics and high-toned B-movie story suggest it’s likely to go down in history as little more than technical triumph. Avatar’s worldview starts where the HuffPost’s leaves off. Call it HuffMeth: Left wing whack – 3D tweaked. Avatar’s whole rape and pillage ethos went out with Nam yet looms like a Deathstar in Hollywood’s tragically hip worldview. At its nadir – former US Marines destroy a civilization’s iconic tower by shooting missiles into its base and then watch it topple – it becomes clear that we’re now in an obscene world in which 9/11 has become fodder for popcorn propaganda. Cameron – nothing if not brilliantly calculating – must figure that this is how you entice global audiences to buy tickets for the privilege of jeering Americans. Full WikPik review at http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/2125-avatar

Big Hollywood : Review: State of Play

Fri, 1 May 2009 05:38:36 +0000

Guy, I'm kind of shocked you didn't flag the libel about US forces in this movie – even though directed at private military contractors – that crosses the line of run-of-the-mill dramatic hyperbole, entering instead the realm of extremist propaganda. The red line section occurs when Affleck’s congressman rants at the head of a Blackwater-like company, accusing it of mass atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and preparing a de facto coup of the US government. The latter is ridiculous but harmless, and standard fare for this sort of plot. The gratuitous accusation of mass atrocities in Islamic countries, however, has the potential to hurt real Americans in a real way by feeding the worst Great Satan theories of Islamists and the Evil America views of the lunatic left, elements of which often overlap. Was this level of ad hominem attack necessary to advance the plot? Sure the bad guys in a thriller need to be made to look really bad. But these sort of offhand canards seep into the zeitgeist, deepening suspicions at home and abroad about the bona fides of US military forces. Affleck’s limousine-liberal politics are well known, so one imagines he hopes his speech will be taken at face value by his fans. Sadly it might get other Americans killed. In response to a real though similar abuse of power, a patriotic American once challenged an out-of-control congressman with the immortal words "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Full review at http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1821-state-of...

Big Hollywood : Review: Observe and Report

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:55:26 +0000

Well balanced review John. I judged it a darn good movie (3.5 beams out of 5), finding it to be 40% LOL funny, 50% hide the women and children. Make that 80% hide the innocents, yet still 40% LOL, more than enough funny to get the job done. While it is spectacularly mean, violently so, it is no more cruelly subversive than was Borat. (Oh great. Now Borat marks the limits of acceptable taste. Talk about defining deviancy down.) My full review is at http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1782-observe-...

Big Hollywood : Review: Gomorrah -- Five Minutes of Action Crammed Into Two Hours

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:25:20 +0000

Sorry you didn't like it Mike. I felt the movie dropped me into a strange, teeming and violent world in a very engaging way, and thus judged it a new addition to the canon of great mafia movies. In its meandering, parallel storylines, the movie bears a resemblance to Crash and Babel. But where those exercises in guilt and annoyance felt contrived, Gomorra feels organic and authentic. One scene in particular stands out as a quintessential Mafia movie moment: two Camorra bosses are arguing about what to do with a couple of young hotheads, conducting their “meeting” around the bed of an elderly dying boss. The dying old guy occasionally rasps out declarations in a voice that Brando’s Don Corleone would hope to emulate, all the while gesturing with upturned hands. Classic. Anyway, to each their own. http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1730-gomorra

Big Hollywood : Review: Watchmen

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 21:00:23 +0000

Not political? Watchmen’s left wing existentialism posits that America required a band of amoral superheroes to stand up to the Soviet Union. The flaws of the Watchmen, some of whom are prone to war crimes, suggests a moral equivalence between the US and the USSR. In short, flawed superhero exceptionalism stands in for authentic American exceptionalism. Funny how history played differently: Ronald Reagan (aided by Maggie Thatcher, Lech Walesa and John Paul II) defeated Soviet Socialism with nary a ripple in the space-time continuum. Guess that makes them real life Watchmen, sans the moral tarnish. Of course, Watchmen author Alan Moore no doubt believes that the leaders of the Western World were and are covered in moral tarnish, a view never more in vogue than during the Reagan years when Moore wrote Watchmen. To amplify that notion he places the proto-fascist Richard Nixon as the ongoing US President. However, the fact that the Cold War ended with a whimper and not a nuclear holocaust is an inconvenient truth that damages the story’s thesis. http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1738-watchmen