BRIAN CHATWIN
Staff Writer
After seeing George Clooney’s new sophist film “Good Night, and Good Luck,” I decided to take a page out of the Hollywood playbook and use my own media forum to describe the problems with the Hollywood left. Clooney repeatedly hit me over the head with his pro-liberal media – anti conservative government mallet, so now I’m irritated.
It doesn’t bother me that Hollywood, for the most part, is uber-liberal. This country is made better by having two sides to the political argument. What grates on my nerves is that Hollywood chooses to use its monopolistic industry to bombard me with their political views. I resent it. Not because they have different views, but because the movies are so bad.
Some say that I can always abstain from going to the movies if I don’t want to see a ridiculous film such as “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Well, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Just recently, Hollywood bemoaned that the quarterly box office receipts hit another all time low. This is having serious implications. In the upcoming film “The Di Vinci Code,” Tom Hanks reportedly took a 40 percent pay cut. Because the terribly made leftist films cater to the Blue States, the economics of the industry are changing.
The public is responding with their political feet, and Hollywood is paying the price. “Brokeback Mountain” is an excellent example of this problem. “Brokeback Mountain,” with all its media accolades, has just cracked the $50 million mark. While this is indeed a lot of money to you and me, by Hollywood standards, it is a failure.
This leads me to wonder why this box-office flop would receive such glowing endorsements from supposedly reputable news sources. The New York Times, calls the film “landmark,” the New York Post calls it “one of the best serious films …” I call these reviews pandering. Clearly, the propaganda behind the alleged success of this movie is a product of the Hollywood machine.
Predictably, “Brokeback Mountain” won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and was nominated for eight Acedemy Awards. That seemed odd to me. There were several good films this year, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “Cinderella Man,” and “Munich.” Interestingly enough, none of these films was even nominated for the award.
Michael Medved, film critic and radio talk show host, recently gave a speech at an event I attended. In his speech, Medved claimed that in a recent survey, the four main studio heads chose not too see Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Apparently they decided that it was not important to see a movie that made $370 million. It didn’t interest them. It didn’t conform to their moral views. I guess they know how I feel.
The problem these studio execs have on their hands is that the public is more interested in conservative, morally uplifting films that have religious undertones. The Chronicles of Narnia’s $277 million dollar box office receipts, and references to “Sons of Adam, and Daughters of Eve,” should tell them that. But they don’t understand that about the public, and I don’t think they will.
In the meantime, we all have to endure the endless commercials for liberally polemic films like Syriana, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night And Good Luck, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jarhead, etc. The list is endless and none of them are good.
Help is on the horizon. As the old guard of Hollywood grays, and we begin to think of Clooney as “washed up,” the economics of the entertainment industry will drive Hollywood to produce films that conform to the public, not pander to the left.
02-03-2006
