2009 has seen the dawn of a shining new star in the blogosphere:  Andrew Breitbart's 'Big Hollywood' website, meant to be a one-stop shopping destination for right-wing conservatives who just can't get enough of complaining about those damned west coast liberals and the commie propaganda spewed in their so-called 'entertainment'.  Most conservative blogs and websites focus on news and politics, and tend to give the entertainment industry a wide berth aside from occasional bitching.  Why?  Well, largely because every time they piss and moan about the terrible smut coming out of the dream factory, someone usually points out that people seem to like movies and TV, and since conservatives are such advocates of the marketplace of ideas, why don't they just make their own movies and let the public decide?  This is a recipe for disaster, of course, because conservatives tend to be really, really bad at this sort of thing.  (Examples:  the Left Behind movie, An American Carol, the post-9/11 career of Dennis Miller.)  

However, there's just no shutting these people up, so along comes Andrew Breitbart -- who, last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I heard make the frankly absurd claim that a well-known actor friend of his was afraid to admit that he supported our troops overseas because he was afraid such a sentiment would get him blackballed.  (He didn't say what actor it was, but I strongly suspect it was Genius Club star/exxxtreme Christian Stephen "Stevie B." Baldwin.)  Big Hollywood is meant to be a format for writers, filmmakers, artists, actors, and other people allegedly shut out of the Hollywood establishment by its left-wing pashas to sound off about the cruel disenfranchisement they've experienced.  But, perfectly in keeping with the public expressions of a movement that simultaneously claims to be downtrodden and oppressed by liberal chicanery and naturally morally right, beloved by the ordinary Joe, and inevitably triumphant, Big Hollywood also frequently claims that conservative values are on the upswing in the entertainment business, that no one wants to see those crummy left-wing anti-war movies, and that the heartland is just dying for movies that will reflect their true values.  This contradictory pose of the persecuted majority is nothing new, but Breitbart and his compatriots over at Big Hollywood are more shameless than most in assuming it.

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If there's one thing we here at the Screengrab love more than movies, it's crazy right-wing cranks.  Luckily, when Roger L. Simon is around, we don't have to pick just one.  Simon, who prior to co-founding doomed conservative clearinghouse Pajamas Media could boast as his greatest accomplishment having penned Scenes from a Mall, a film which brought us the delightful vision of Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater, has recently been on a tear about how those traitorous dogs in Hollywood, a town which apparently has corrupted everyone who sojourns there except himself, Burt Prelutsky, and Stephen Baldwin, are so alienated from real Americans that they keep making anti-war movies even though they lose money doing so.  His first installment in what is shaping up to be an interminable series on the subject revealed the reason the damn dirty hippies of Tinseltown keep making these hateful anti-American screen screeds:  it's because if you are a Hollywood liberal, you are, de facto, a "miserable self-serving bastard".  He also makes the curious argument that people like Brian DePalma, director of Redacted, are making movies that "validate the orthodoxy", which seems to go against his point that these movies are economic failures due to the widespread support of the war displayed by most red-blooded Americans.  Simon follows up that one with a claim that since Hollywood liberals know nothing of what they speak when it comes to war (an assessment  with which Oliver Stone might take issue), their films are the "addled product of unacknowledged moral confusion"; he then settles back and says that since the surge is working so well, he's beginning what may be a very long wait for the Iraq War version of Casablanca.  His latest on the subversive commie rats who lurk in the Hollywood hills is a hatchet job on Paul Haggis, who he first suspected of anti-American treachery when he saw Crash -- after all, Simon argues, he's lived in L.A. for years and hardly ever saw any racism, so there must not be any.  Simon goes on to savage In the Valley of Elah, and 'explains' the deviltry of this life-hating scum by noting that, like Sean Penn, he is under the sway of that charismatic Stalinist cult leader Dennis Kucinich.  He knows it's true, because he read it on Wikipedia!  Keep up the great work, Roger.