Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I took my young son to see this movie yesterday in L.A.
I love Westerns, and this one did not disappoint. Indeed, I have a newfound appreciation for Christian Bale. He deserves some nominations for his performance, as does Rosamond Pike for hers (the woman can put on the most intense emotional expression ever; she's unreal).
Even if you’re not a legal eagle, you may at some point in your life have encountered the term “moral turpitude” when signing a contract. Employers will sometimes stick that phrase into the section dealing with termination for cause, for understandable reasons. The idea is that if you do something morally egregious, something that offends the sensibilities of the organization or brings it into public disrepute, you can be canned summarily. Your boss is under no obligation to keep an embarrassing degenerate on the payroll.
A moral turpitude clause would have come in handy for Harvey Weinstein considering that, if his accusers are to be believed, he’s been harassing, intimidating, groping, extorting, and raping women for, oh, 20-25 years now. And yet, according to TMZ, no such clause was to be found in his contract with the Weinstein Company. On the contrary, Big Harv had an unusual twist on the traditional moral turpitude provision in his agreement. If he was accused of “misconduct” and ended up settling with his accuser, he had to reimburse the company for any legal expenses it incurred in the process — and then he had to pay them a fine. Of up to a million dollars.
These sick bastards actually profited from Weinstein paying hush money to his victims.
According to the contract, if Weinstein “treated someone improperly in violation of the company’s Code of Conduct,” he must reimburse TWC for settlements or judgments. Additionally, “You [Weinstein] will pay the company liquidated damages of $250,000 for the first such instance, $500,000 for the second such instance, $750,000 for the third such instance, and $1,000,000 for each additional instance.”
The contract says as long as Weinstein pays, it constitutes a “cure” for the misconduct and no further action can be taken. Translation — Weinstein could be sued over and over and as long as he wrote a check, he keeps his job...
Ms. Taylor's really not my generation of music, so I asked my oldest son what he thought of her new song. He said he hadn't listened to it yet, and that in fact he was avoiding the news and the criticism, because he didn't want to be brought down and polluted by the haters, in so many words.
Well, this isn't what you'd expect from the far-left Los Angeles Times: an amazingly sympathetic and refreshing piece on the comeback of the good old boys in Hollywood.
The country was two years out of Vietnam and still bruised by Watergate when a wise guy in a Pontiac Trans Am roared through a movie that celebrated and poked fun at Southern culture with the affable charm of a moonshiner whispering tall tales in a roadhouse on a humid night.
“Smokey and the Bandit” is 40 years old, a raucous good ol’ boy tale that made Burt Reynolds a brand and left the screen crackling with country music, CB radios, car chases and the irascible and out-foxed Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played with gun-toting aplomb by Jackie Gleason. The movie is the South winking at itself, playing stereotypes for humor and laughing along at caricatures. It was a blockbuster.
It arrived as America was drifting from the turbulence of the ’60s and into the shaken aftermath of a misbegotten war in Southeast Asia and the disgrace of President Nixon’s resignation. “Smokey” was a salve, a lightweight rush of steel, beer and corny one-liners that epitomized an escapist (some would argue vacuous) pop culture as it raced through a land that flew the Rebel flag and strummed tunes of Dixie.
That folksy if simplistic notion drove other films and TV shows, including “The Dukes of Hazzard,” but Hollywood’s light-heartedness often belied the South’s deeper conflicts and scars over racism and civil rights in an often brutal history. That vexed legacy has been roused in the recent backlash over HBO’s “Confederate,” a proposed alternative history series that reimagines the South seceded from the North during the Civil War and continues to practice slavery today.
The cultural battleground the South has become also complicated portrayals of white working-class men who felt isolated and disenfranchised at a time of shifting demographics and technologically driven job markets. The country, many of them felt, was slipping beyond them, misunderstanding their pride and insecurities while turning them into punchlines and cautionary tales. Reynolds, who grew up in Florida, said he was long disturbed by films that mischaracterized the South.“Lots of movies ridiculed Southerners, and I resented them,” Reynolds, 81, wrote in his 2015 memoir “But Enough About Me.” “I wanted to play a Southern hero, a guy who was proud of being from the South. … Most of those folks are middle-of-the-road, not left or right. They believe in God, they work hard, and they love their country. They’re the people I grew up with, and I like them.”
He continued: “But Billy Bob Thornton had the last word. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘down South, we consider “Smokey and the Bandit” a documentary.’”
The new project from the 'Game of Thrones' creators could shock us by exposing how little of the Confederate future we avoided.
“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections.
The wild popularity of Game of Thrones has already set the anxiety bells of progressives jangling over how much a game of Confederate thrones might look like a fantasy of the alt-right. Still, if Benioff and Weiss really want to give audiences the heebie-jeebies about a Confederate victory, they ought to pay front-and-center attention to how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left, and what the Confederacy’s leaders frankly proposed as their idea of the future.
The general image of the Confederacy in most textbooks is a backwards, agricultural South that really didn’t stand a chance against the industrialized North. But it simply isn’t true that the Confederate South was merely a carpet of cotton plantations, and the North a smoke-blackened vista of factories. Both North and South in 1861 were largely agricultural regions (72% of the congressional districts in the Northern states on the eve of the Civil War were farm-dominated); the real difference was between the Southern plantation and the Northern family farm. Nor did the South lag all that seriously behind the North in industrial capacity. And far from being a Lost Cause, the Confederacy frequently came within an ace of winning its war.
So, if Benioff and Weiss want to steer their fantasy as close as they can to probable realities, they should consider a few of these scenarios as the possible worlds of Confederate:
A successful Confederacy would be an imperial Confederacy. Aggressive Southerners before 1860 made no secret of their ambitions to spread a slave-labor cotton empire into Central and South America. These schemes would begin, as they had in 1854, with the annexation of Cuba and the acquisition of colonies in South America, where slave labor was also still legal. This would bring the Confederates into conflict with France and Great Britain, since France was also plotting to rebuild a French empire in Mexico in the 1860s, and the British had substantial investments around the Caribbean rim. The First World War might have been one between Europeans and Confederates over the future of Central and South America.
A successful Confederacy would have triggered further secessions. There were already fears in 1861 that the new Pacific Coast states of California and Oregon would secede to form their own Pacific republic. A Confederate victory probably would have pushed that threat into reality — thus anticipating today’s Calexit campaign by 150 years — and in turn triggered independence movements in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes. The North (or what was left of the United States) would bear approximately the same relation to these new republics as Scandinavia to modern-day Europe.
A successful Confederacy would have found ways for slavery to evolve, from cotton-picking to cotton-manufacturing, and beyond. The Gone With the Wind image of the South as agricultural has become so fixed that it’s easy to miss how steadily black slaves were being slipped into the South’s industrial workforce in the decade before the Civil War. More than half of the workers in the iron furnaces along the Cumberland River in Tennessee were slaves; most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. They are, argued one slave-owner, “cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places … which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.”
A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.
Wielding sharpies, foam swords and protective tubes to guard the exclusive treasures they hope to find, more than a hundred thousand pop culture and comics aficionados are about to descend on the city of San Diego for Comic-Con International, the annual gathering for all things geek.
But for some longtime fans and retailers, a tipping point has been reached in the profitable but uneasy alliance between the comic-book world and Hollywood.
For the first time in 44 years, retailer Mile High Comics will be skipping the convention. Considered the country’s largest comic-book dealer, Mile High regularly brought 100,000 comics to sell on the convention hall floor.
“San Diego has grown far beyond its original premise,” wrote Chuck Rozanski, founder and president of the Colorado-based Mile High Comics, on the retailer’s website, “morphing from what was originally a wonderful annual gathering of the comics world, into a world-renowned pop culture and media festival.”
It’s no secret that Comic-Con went Hollywood years ago, but with each new convention it’s harder for independent comics retailers to make an impression, especially when they not only have to compete with major studio presentations in the famed Hall H and displays from DC and Marvel that dominate the convention floor, but with a growing number of attractions outside Comic-Con, available to anyone who happens to be in the area.
Offering tributes of buttons, T-shirts and manicures, the entire Gaslamp Quarter will transform into a geek metropolis. NBC’s new series “Midnight, Texas” will offer free food and tarot card readings at a local restaurant, coffee drinks will be renamed “White Walker Mochas” and the Syfy channel will legally marry superfans in a makeshift chapel with the help of officiant Orlando Jones from “American Gods.”
“As a businessman, I can tell you that the fact that the city of San Diego is allowing dozens of [attractions] around the venue is contributing to a decline in traffic in that main hall,” Rozanski told The Times. “The off-site traffic is good for fans because it enhances the experience. But when you have HBO putting their ‘Game of Thrones’ experience across from the convention center, that acts as a real magnet. As an exhibitor, when you’re paying $18,000 [for a spot on the convention floor] you don’t want to see your customers leave for across the street.”
The hard truth is that many of those potential customers would rather see their favorite stars than shop for comic books. As the masses sweep in, so do the winds of change for the annual convention...
I guess it really used to be about comic books. Now it's about Hollywood movies about comic books.
It's not the biggest blockbuster you'll ever see, but I really like Kate Mara, so I made it a point to see this one. Plus, I rarely miss a war movie. I went to the early-bird budget matinee, so the theater was almost empty. I don't see the opening weekend numbers online, although at least the movie's not straight to DVD. It's heavy on the personal relationships, especially Corporal Leavey's relationship to her dog, Rex. It's a tear-jerker as well, but a true story.
It's worth a look, either way. Most refreshingly, the director eschewed any inclinations towards leftist antiwar anti-Americanism. Indeed, the conclusion's hella patriotic, but I'll leave it at that not to spoil things.
It’s also a movie that doesn’t wear its issues on its stripes. Without feeling the need to brand itself either a woman-in-the-military movie or animal-activism yarn, [director Gabriela] Cowperthwaite quietly goes about humanizing everything so that both of these elements, which might get treated as hot-button topics elsewhere, gain a kind of understated momentum all their own. Sure, that gives it the slight tinge of a chummy, politics-free, armed-services recruitment video — especially when Common’s around to play the supportive sergeant always this-close from breaking into a smile. But the battle scenes are direct and tense, if not exactly original, and even when the screenplay tosses in a burgeoning flirtation with a fellow K-9er (the charming Ramon Rodriguez), “Megan Leavey” makes it feel like an extra color in a soldier’s story, not a predictable story beat for a heroine...
The reviews were pretty enthusiastic, but then, you have to see it for yourself. Gal Gadot is lovable, but the movie itself is coherent and refreshing. I hope she stars in a whole bunch of sequels. Now that Wolverine's retired, I'll need something to keep me into the genre.
I want to send out the deepest and sincere THANK YOU to all of you who made this so. YOU have helped us make change. Amazing!! #wonderwomanpic.twitter.com/vQQQfOzPyM
That was an extremely enjoyable movie. You feel like you're plopped right back into the original "Alien" with Ellen Ripley (Signorney Weaver). And you don't feel like you've missed too much even if you haven't seen "Prometheus" (which Ridley Scott now thinks was a mistake).
The L.A. Times review (linked at top) was ecstatic about it. So was my son.
Here's the review at the New York Times, below. And do yourself a favor: Go out and have some fun --- see this movie.
