The Screengrab : brent bozell

Hollywood Conservatives Face "New McCarthyism", Goblins, Unicorns

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:30:00 GMT

One of the favorite activities of the modern movement conservative is to claim that, since not every single aspect of the culture panders to him, he is being discriminated against. Having never actually experienced any actual discrimination -- unlike, say, black people -- the right-winger seems to believe that it is an oppression too heavy to be borne that he is sometimes made aware of things that he does not personally enjoy. Liberal arts classes in college taught by liberals? Discrimination against conservatives! Some people don't adhere to the tenents of the Southern Baptist Convention? Discrimination against conservatives! Young people listening to the rappity-hop music? Discrimination against conservatives!

This week has seen a big push in one of the favorite such complaints of the movement conservative: that, because of the preponderance of liberals in Hollywood, conservatives are being discriminated against in Hollywood. Jason Appuzzo, founder of the late, unlamented Libertas Film Festival, was one of the biggest purveyors of this ridiculous myth; Brent Bozell is another. But in the last ten days, we've seen an op-ed by Jon Voight in the right-wing Washington Times in which he blamed American liberals for the murder of millions by the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and claimed that "if, God forbid, we live to see Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way". The editorial was widely scoffed at, and conservative gadflies, who mistake being made fun of for being blackballed and having your entire career destroyed, immediately came crawling up from the cellar to complain about "establishment entertainment journalists expertly wielding the tools of the New McCarthyism". So says Andrew Breitbart (who, earlier this year, I heard peddle the absurd notion that Hollywood celebrities are afraid to say they support our troops in Iraq, lest they face censure at the hands of the liberal bosses). While conservatives almost universally react to liberal opinions on the part of entertainers with some variant of "shut up and sing" (witness the widespread hostility the Dixie Chicks faced a few years ago), let one of their own get laughed at for mouthing of some ill-conceived right-wing talking point, and we're witnessing the vile fascism of "a town that doesn't embrace free speech anymore". Breitbart's commenters are even worse, claiming that "the old McCarthyism was harmless compared to the new". (Those who wish to compare and contrast may note that Mr. Voight currently has three films in production, and starred in one of the most successful films of 2007, as opposed to, say, Dalton Trumbo, who spent a year in prison because of the blacklist, or Hanns Eisler, who was more or less forced to leave the country and ended up in the hands of the Soviet East Germans, or Alvah Bessie, who never worked in her chosen profession again, or Canada Lee, Bartley Crum and John Garfield, who all died because of the horrible after-effects of coming under McCarthyite scrutiny.)

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard featured a cover story entitled "Hollywood Takes on the Left", in which David Zucker outlines his difficulties and frustrations in making An American Carol, his long-promised conservative comedy. Zucker, too, complains of a "new McCarthyism" in Hollywood, designed to keep Republicans out, and frets that "conservative films are almost illegal in Hollywood". Even if one ignores the fact that movie studios are owned and run by capitalist multimillionaires who are hardly hostile to the core principles of conservativism, this absurd sense of pseudo-oppression fails for one simple reason: audiences tend to like or dislike movies based on whether or not they're entertaining, not based on their ideological bias. (After all, as conservatives love to remind us, liberal anti-Iraq War films have been duds at the box office.) If Zucker's film fails, it won't be because of some mythical Hollywood liberal mafia; it will be because the movie is preachy instead of funny, and audiences don't like preachy.

Luckily, because of the freedom of speech people like them denied victims of the blacklist in the 1950s, Zucker, Breitbart, Voight, and their ilk are welcome to complain all they like about how terribly oppressed they are; that they actually do so is all the evidence you need of the moral bankruptcy of the modern conservative movement.

The Tree Of Libertas Is Watered By The Blood Of Idiots

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As longtime readers will know, I am a dirty stinking liberal. I complain about the depiction of Arab terrorists in movies about Arab terrorists. I make fun of right-wing cultural pest/William F. Buckley son-in-law Brent Bozell on a regular basis for his alleged resemblance to Ghostbusters bureaucrat/asshole Walter Peck. I infiltrate conservative polticial conferences in order to take pills and mock bogus documentaries featuring Ben Stein. I think one of the most irritating things about the modern-day Democratic Party is that they pretend to care about stuff like violence in video games and smut in movies. I would rather watch Ben-Hur ten times in a row than spend five minutes hearing Charlton Heston gas on about gun control, and I'm a gun owner who hates Ben-Hur.

But let it never be said that I don't play fair. I believe in a level playing field, and I've decided that it's about time, given all the posts I've made here linking to bastions of communism like the Guardian and the New York Times, that I give some props to my favorite right-wing movie blog: LIBERTAS!

Founded as the internet component of Jason Apuzzo's Libertas Film Festival, a tiny annual symposium of conservative cinema, the Libertas blog has grown from a mere forum for right-wingers to complain that their values aren't honored by those crooked pornographers in Hollywood to a wonderful full-service site featuring movie news, reviews and writing from the perspective of angry cranks! (As an aside, Libertas and their ideological counterparts love to point to the poor commercial performance of anti-war documentaries as evidence that America isn't interested in such subversive flapdoodle. So where does that leave their claim that no one ever makes movies from a right-wing perspective?)

If you visit Libertas this very day, you'll see an exciting array of crazy cooterness: a review of Definitely, Maybe that condemns its "distasteful display of Hollywood values"; a review of Diary of the Dead that laments George Romero's "increasingly strident politics"; an article which condemns the mainstream media for failing to report Bob Geldof's recent praise of President Bush (although a quick Google News search reveals that it was covered by such non-radical papers as the International Herald-Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Investor's Business Daily); a review which calls the new Harold and Kumar sequel "unfunny and mean-spirited" even though the reviewer has not seen the film; and a pre-emptive condemnation of Iron Man for possibly containing anti-war sentiments. Now that's good film blogging! Enjoy, folks!

Teenage Pregnancy (Don't Do It!)

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Hey, have you heard that this is the year of the unwed mother? It's true! 2008's official dead horse is the trend towards movies featuring women who are unmarried, pregnancy, and strangely diffident about it. If you don't believe us, read, oh, every other film blog in the last twelve months or so.

In addition to daily blog-fodder, the Year of the Knocked Up and Wisecracking has inspired lots of back-and-forth opinionating among women, mothers, pro-choicers, anti-abortionists, and everyone else who has, or thinks they have, a stake in whether or not women should be having kids out of wedlock. Juno, understandably, has been at the center of the debate, with some unusual results: no less august a personage than right-wing cultural critic/humorless Walter Peck look-alike Brent Bozell, a man with a history of despising anything that might suggest the enjoyment of life, has come out in favor of the film because of its alleged pro-life message.

Until recently, though, nobody seems to have bothered to ask actual teenagers what they think of Juno, which is what makes this article in the Guardian so intriguing. The paper took a group of genuine teenage girls and boys to watch the film, and then asked them how realistic they found it, with some surprising results:

- One sixteen-year-old focuses on the somewhat lackluster portrayal of the child's father: "The film didn't really focus on Bleeker's reaction to the pregnancy, but then boys are quite inarticulate and don't talk to their friends much."

- Another wonders at the reaction of Juno's classmates: "At Juno's school, the other students were almost scared of her. At the school I go to, people are much more used to pregnancy. Quite a few people have got pregnant. At first, it's a big drama and you're shocked that someone's pregnant, but then you get used to it."

- One boy finds the rather blase view of teenage sex in the film hard to relate to: "It's not about our lifestyle. You got the feeling the two teenagers had sex because they were bored, but in London, you don't just get bored. . . school provides a lot of sex education — a bit too much, you think sometimes — and your parents are saying it as well."

- Most tellingly of all, almost every teenager interviewed says that they'd prefer to have an abortion than take the (suspiciously simple) route chosen by Juno. "Raising a child now would just be unfathomable," says a fifteen-year-old girl. "My friends and I talk about what we would do if we got pregnant and almost everyone I know says: 'I would have an abortion,' no questions asked."