No, "Cuties" is not pedophilia. However...

OK, I watched the thing on NetFlix. I have been pondering quitting NetFlix for a while now, because while they do have interesting documentaries and some interesting comedies and dramas, they also have Leftist propagandistic crap. But my fellow right-wing patriots are off in their criticisms of it, although there still is definitely something to criticize.

So, is it pedophilia? No, quite the contrary in the way it is filmed; however, the message is still disturbing, because it reflects how the trashiest elements of ghetto culture are popular and even celebrated, and not enough emphasis upon how destructive that can be.

(a few spoiler alerts ahead, but I will try to avoid giving it all away)

The film is French, with English subtitles. It is about a Senegalese-French immigrant girl who gets involved with and wants to fit in with classmates who want to enter a dance competition, classmates who also have adopted the worst aspects of ghetto culture. The setting is clearly the lower classes of France and she and one other girl of that group clearly live in a tenement or housing project.

Along the way, the protagonist experiences her first period, teasing by peers, and other grade school bordering on middle school sad experiences and traumas. And yes, that teasing involves innuendo and disturbing aspects of children trying to grow up way too fast. The director herself, Maïmouna Doucouré, is Senegalese-French, and I suspect the film was meant to be autobiographical. Anyway, my fellow Americans, *never* think America has cornered the market for ghetto problems, (multi)cultural dysfunction, and immigration issues, the French clearly have these problems too.

Is the film pornographic? No, definitely not the way it was shot. Yes, their dance contest outfits and "twerking" or "freak" moves are disturbing, but it was not in any way cinematography filmed in such a way as to make that appealing. To the director's credit, you can see LOTS frowning parental faces when the girls do their terrible dance routine at the competition, and the protagonist does have a "OMG, what the hell am I doing here?" moment, after which she quits and runs off the stage. To quote a US Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart, in an old Court case, Jocobvellis v. Ohio, which was also about alleged pornography, "I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

However, that such trashy culture is prevalent and pervasive in society today is disgusting to be sure, and THAT is what really creeps me out about the film. I suppose the director will use the "Hey, I'm just the messenger, not the message" defense, but I don't see an ending where rejection of trashy culture is emphasized. At the end of the film, the protagonist Amy, abandons both the traditional Senegalese wedding dress (her father's bigamy a sub-plot in the movie) and her sexy dancer's outfit, and, in normal pre-teen girl jeans and a t-shirt, her hair down, she goes out to play jump rope with a group of girls. Which is better, but a rejection of trashiness is *not emphasized enough* in my mind.

So, while the film is not as bad as it has been made out to be, the message is clearly *not good*.

Remember MTV?

Daniel Flynn does. When it just played music, and didn't attempt to be the arbiter of anything, and certainly wasn't full of commie politics:

I want my MTV. I keep getting Snooki’s.

MTV celebrates the Fourth of July by declaring its independence from reality television. The initialism that formerly stood for Music Television returns for twelve hours to what it once did 24/7/365: music videos. Perhaps the move will inspire the network formerly known as The Learning Channel to ditch Long Island Medium and the History Channel to take a respite from Ice Road Truckers.

MTV, after all, is contagious. Cable’s reality obsession proves that.

The surreal announcement that MTV will play music videos comes in the wake of VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave, a memoir by the four surviving original video jockeys. “To this day,” Martha Quinn writes, “I have dreams that I’ve been fired by MTV. In my dream, I’m going to a party. I can see that Mark [Goodman] and J.J. [Jackson] and Al [Hunter] are all having a really good time, but nobody will talk to me because I’m not allowed in that area anymore.” But viewers aren’t even allowed in that area anymore, save for a few hours during a backyard holiday when the television is off.

The group memoir recounts tales of Alan Hunter snorting lines with David Lee Roth to an audience of onlookers (“they were all just watching us do blow”); Nina Blackwood finding herself a subject of the #1 hit “Missing You” by former beau John Waite; Martha Quinn on an ill-fated date with Paul Stanley in which a bowling loss compels the Kiss frontman to inspect the lane for defects; Mark Goodman “hooking up in the bathroom” midflight with the winner of the network’s “Asia in Asia” contest (“the mile-high club is great in theory”); and a sweaty and jumpy J. J. Jackson getting through his morning broadcast via the same chemicals that fueled him the night before.

They partied like rock stars. They weren’t paid like them.

The stingy network initially awarded Quinn a paltry $26,000 annual salary. (Even in 1981, this was not much). She couldn’t afford cable so, as one of the fledgling medium’s most identifiable faces, she stole it. Alan Hunter, an actor with bit parts in David Bowie’s “Fashion” video and the movie Annie, earned $27,500. He elected to keep his bartending night job. J.J. Jackson and Mark Goodman, veterans of FM rock radio, earned more than double. But on a channel less music than television, the popularity of the younger, more camera-friendly VJs soon eclipsed their colleagues with more impressive rock Curriculum Vitaes.

In the beginning, MTV was a transplanted-to-television album-oriented rock station, albeit one that leaned heavily on New Wave imports. Outside of reggae and ska music influences like Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie” and Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue,” few black performers won saturation airplay on the promotional juggernaut. So, the VJs found themselves on the defensive from recording executives charging racism. Country stations (and Country Music Television that came later) didn’t play new wave bands like The Waitresses. Why should MTV play Michael Jackson?

“We were ecstatic when ‘Billie Jean’ got added — art trumped format,” Quinn remembers. “What we didn’t see at the time was how it was the foot in the door to expanding the format. And then it became a constant exercise in expanding it a little more: How about a game show? How about a reality show?” The start of MTV’s end didn’t come with Remote Control or Real World but with “Billie Jean.”

When Quinn refused to ask Robert Palmer a trashy question at 1986’s Video Music Awards, she sealed her fate. “I went on unemployment, because I couldn’t pay my rent. That was my lowest point: Less than a year after that Robert Palmer interview, I was standing on line at the unemployment office in Van Nuys, California, praying that nobody would recognize me.” The reality of her post-MTV life dawned on her at a stoplight where, from her Honda Accord, she spotted acting school classmate Heather Locklear in her Porsche Turbo Carrera. “She was going home with her husband, Motley Crue’s drummer — I was heading back to Sherman Oaks, where I had a roommate because I didn’t have the money to pay the rent myself.”

Regrets? They have a few. Goodman spends much of VJ apologizing to his then wife Carol Miller for his serial adultery and admits that hard living has led to cirrhosis. “We’re the reason you have no attention span,” Goodman confesses. “And you can really pin reality TV on us too. You’re welcome.” Nina Blackwood laments that she exuded a sexpot image when she was in fact a prude. “I have very few regrets in life, but posing for Playboy is probably my biggest,” Blackwood recalls of a pre-MTV shoot that came back to haunt. Mom Martha Quinn now cringes at some of the videos she played then: “I have to admit, now I see where Tipper Gore and the PMRC [Parents Music Resource Center] were coming from.”

A Sunset Blvd. quality colors the retrospective. One can imagine Quinn and company surfing the web for old clips the way I do. If they searched back far enough, they would discover a Sunset Blvd. vibe present at the creation. What else is“Video Killed the Radio Star” but an aural reinterpretation of a dilapidated Gloria Swanson watching her old movies?

“In the beginning, everyone told us MTV wouldn’t last,” Quinn recalls. “As it turns out, they were right — our MTV doesn’t exist anymore.” For twelve hours on the Fourth of July, MTV lives again— if but as a ghost of its former self. But it’s never the same the second time around.

We can’t rewind. We’ve gone too far.

"The Bachelor(ette)": Wisdom for our times

Truer words were never spoken, and on a rather tacky "Reality TV" (sic) show, at that:

"Good things don't end unless they end badly...." -- Ben Flajnik, "The Bachelor", spoken to Ashley Hebert.

That goes for politics and for economics even more than for pseudo-romantic relationships arranged on television.

"What I don't need you to do is sugar coat it," either.....

"Avatar": Awesome special effects, but Commie crap

It's Christmastime and you are done shopping, done with presents, done with the relative invasion, or perhaps that hasn't hit yet, and / or you are done with church. Since you have time to kill, Hollywierd has learned to give you the Christmas blockbuster flick. This years one is James Cameron's "Avatar", with Guy Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" a not too distant second?

Gabriel Malor reviews Avatar at AOSHQ, and kind of likes it for its awesome special effects, in spite of the Commie political message.

John Podhoretz at The Weekly Standard can't get past the Commie message and hates it.

I just saw it. My take: utterly lame-ass and laughable Commiecrat and romanticize the primitive politics in the film, and a story that heavily takes from other movies such as "Dances With Wolves" (in fact, wags are calling it Dances With Smurfs because the alien creatures are blue) , Disney's "Pocahontas" and "Quigley Down Under", done in a Sci-Fi context with lots of CGI animation. Except for some creative imagining of animal and plant life on another world with a different atmosphere, and of course those undeniably awesome special effects, nothing is original in this movie.

John Podhoretz states that:

[T]he movie is nearly three hours long, and it doesn't have a single joke in it.

But honestly, there were a few unintentional funny moments in the film. The mineral the corporation and its mercenary army are seeking is called "unobtanium". As opposed to Upsadaisyium? I half expected Rocky and Bullwinkle avatars after that. The subsequent "floating mountains" in the movie didn't help either. (Mount Flatten!)

On the upside, Gabriel Malor is right: it's visually gorgeous, loud, and stuff blows up in really cool ways. And the 3-D version I saw didn't overkill on the gimmicky pop-right-out-at-the-audience shots. After the first 20 minutes, I stopped noticing the 3D glasses and just saw the movie. On the level of an action flick with cool explosions, you could like it.

You just have to overlook gaping holes in the plot. For no good reason other than to get the movie into its second act, the shallow corporate head honcho and the (obviously) evil and sadistic military commander decide to stage a military attack on the massive Tree City where the funky giant blue critters live, thus blowing the zillions of dollars they sank into the project of making blue critter avatar ambassadors in the hope of negotiating with the blue critters.

They attack the massive Tree City where the blue critters live simply because "It's the largest deposit of Unobtanium in two hundred clicks!" gushes the shallow corporate, played by Giovanni Ribisi. As if 200km is that major a distance in travel, even today, to say nothing of an interstellar traveling future. And as if the corporation wouldn't have picked easier deposits to mine first where the pesky blue critter tribes weren't. Path of least resistance and all that.

Suspension called and it said the disbelief load is way too heavy to carry, even if you fancy the idea of plugging your fiber optic cable tail into Mother Gaia and having sex with her.

If the special effects were not there, if Avatar were drawn like a regular cartoon, or had been made on sound stages with sets and the like, would anyone really like this movie? Nope. Even the most hard core eco-greenie won't claim there was a really deep message here. Unlike the protagonists in Cameron's Titanic, who you could cheer on even as you knew at least one of them was doomed, none of the characters in the movie comes across as anything more than a cartoon.

The sad truth about Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson

Many people were shocked that Michael Jackson died at age 50 and Farah Fawcett at age 62. But modern medicine could not have prevented what these celebrities did to themselves. It was Jackson's and Fawcett's own behavior that led to their relatively short lives.

This sober truth should serve as a warning to young people: don't get hooked on prescription drugs or other artificial substances, don't engage in sexual promiscuity, and don't get your value from the attention that people lavish upon you.

Michael Jackson
As a child, Michael Jackson's identity was damaged by his father and never restored. In his 30+ years of adult independence, the "king of pop" made a series of horrible lifestyle choices that led to his early demise. Outliving Jackson is his abusive father (age 80) and his codependent mother (age 79).
• He remembered his father taunting him about his "ugliness."
• He underwent a series of plastic surgeries because he didn't "want to look like my father."
• He was reportedly a homosexual who dated men, in addition to his pedophile-like behavior of "sleeping" with boys.
• His addiction to prescription drugs began in 1984. After so many surgeries, addiction to painkillers is not surprising.
• Nearly 20 years later, in 2003, he entered clinical treatment for his drug problems.
• In the last three years, he was taking heavy prescription drugs including Demerol and morphine.
• He had a personal physician or nurse check him out regularly, and near the end, his doctor was with him every day.
• His nanny had to regularly pump drugs out of his stomach.
• He was hardly eating and was becoming anorexic and was suspected of being bulimic.
• He had recurring nightmares and could hardly sleep, keeping on lights and music all day and all night.
• At night, he was hooked up to an IV that pumped him with Diprivan (Propofol), a potent injectable drug used to induce and maintain anesthesia during surgeries and to provide continuous sedation.
• Because the drug-related cause in Jackson's death is so strongly suspected, his body was buried without his brain so it can be studied to determine which drug was the most lethal.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide idolized Michael Jackson, given his incredible musical talent.  Yet, despite his "spiritual" public funeral, would anyone really want to be like him?

Jackson's lifestyle was a death style, full of emotional misery, many resulting physical problems, and a dangerous mix of prescription drugs. His personal demons had devoured him.

For all his weirdness, emotional immaturity, pedophile-like activity, homosexuality, crotch-grabbing dance moves, and nightmares, I wonder if Michael Jackson had been molested as a child to set him on this disastrous course. Only his father Joe Jackson knows for sure.

Farrah Fawcett
Early on, Farrah Fawcett's identity was in her looks. Influenced by years of attention from boys and girls and men and women, Fawcett became the "pin-up poster girl" of the late 70s, and had lots of sexually-charged admirers. In the end, it was a sexually-transmitted disease -- human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes anal cancer -- that killed her. Outliving Fawcett is her father (age 91); her mother died at age 91 in March. Unlike Michael Jackson, by all accounts her parents were quite loving and supportive. However:
• When she was a young girl in Texas, her parents let children come over to look at how beautiful she was.
• In high school and college, she got lots of attention for her looks and won "best looking" contests.
• She became world famous in 1976 for her lust-inspiring swimsuit poster and her TV role in "Charlie's Angels."
• Porn kingpin Hugh Hefner said, "Men fell in love with her and women wanted to look like her."
• Her life in Hollywood involved drug abuse, alcohol abuse and cosmetic surgery gone wrong.
• She had several affairs and had to have caught HPV from one of them.
• She was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006.

First Fawcett developed an appetite for others' attention, then she entered the sexually-promiscuous modeling world. In the midst of it all, she had one marriage and several notorious relationships before and after. Promiscuity opens women, especially, to being infected by human papilloma virus (HPV), which is the cause of 73% of anal cancer cases and is associated with up to 90% of cervical cancer cases.

Let's hear it for the NBC TV network

An actual promotion from a few months back....

Is Hollywood too timid for the war on terror? Or too treasonous?

Andrew Klavan writes a great column, in the Left Angeles Slimes of all places!

But unfortunately, he can't bring himself to the full conclusion:

"...at the movies, all we're getting is home-front angst and the occasional "Syriana," in which "moderate" Islam is thwarted by evil American interests. But the notion that this war is about our moral failings is comfort fantasy, pure and simple. It soothes us with the false idea that, if we but mend ourselves, the scary people will leave us alone.

The real world is both darker than that and lighted brighter in places by surprising fires of nobility. It's darker because our enemies were not created by the peccadilloes of free people and will not melt away before a moral perfection that we, in any case, can never achieve. It's brighter because there are heroes like the FBI, the military and the cop on the corner who will give up everything, even their lives, to stop these madmen.

That kind of rousing story seems tailor-made for films. So why aren't they telling it? It's not just about left and right, blue and red; it really isn't."

Oh, but IT IS, Andrew! IT IS!!! The Hollyleftists used to apologize for the communists; now they apologize for the Islamunists. The "anti-anti-communism" that apologized for the Viet Cong and then the Sandinistas has now reared its ugly head again. Commiewood really hasn't changed, it just "morphed".

South Park Cartoon On Hollywood Lunacy

Kevin Costner: A Better Guy Than You Thought

He's not a commie leftist asshole after all!

He may have been dumb to pass up the role Tom Hanks took in "Apollo 13" in order to film "Waterworld", but he actually said and did something tremendously decent.

Movie fans reportedly sat in stunned silence at the end of Range's screening, which featured doctored images of Bush getting shot, and Costner, who wasn't in the audience, isn't happy with what he's heard about the film. He says, "It's awfully hard if you're his children, his wife, his mother, his dad; there's a certain thing we can't lose as human beings, which is empathy for maybe the hardest job in the world. "Whether we think it's being performed right or not we can't, like, wish... or think that's even cute."

Here's to hoping that this doesn't end his film career.