‘No, of course We Can’t Cast Olivier. Only an Actual Nazi Dentist Will Do…’

Here’s the first thing Disney and Jack Whitehall need to do over this “straight actor cast as gay character” row: not apologize.

Then, the next thing they both need to do is never, ever, ever apologize.

And not back down either.

Otherwise what’s left of Disney’s credibility as an entertainment industry player will be toast. So too will all that hard work Whitehall has put in in the last couple of years trying to make the big break from popular English stand up comedian to major Hollywood movie star.

So too will the entire point of the acting profession.

Actors, let’s be honest, aren’t generally good for much. All they basically do is pretend to be other people, usually reading out lines that cleverer people have written for them – and get paid lots of money for it.

But if it’s no longer politically acceptable for them to play anyone other than themselves, then where’s the skill? Where’s the value-added that justifies all those inflated pay checks? There isn’t any. Which means that apart from that tiny minority of actors who are loved for only ever being themselves – Clint; Michael Caine; Joey from Friends – the entire acting profession is going to die on its feet.

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Delingpole: Pruitt Is Gone, but Trump Is Still Winning the Energy Wars

Photo credit SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Imag

Hollywood’s whoopings and ululations over the departure of Scott Pruitt tell you all you need to know. This was never about saving the environment. It was about desperate, vengeful progressives claiming a political scalp as their peevish sop to console themselves for their despair that Donald Trump is #winning.

It’s a big scalp, too, to give them their miserable due. Scott Pruitt was not only the most effective Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief in the institution’s 48-year history (not difficult, admittedly, given the dismal quality of his predecessors). But he was also one of the most able facilitators of Trump’s project to Make America Great Again.

He gave Trump the moral support he needed to make the key decision (opposed by many within the White House, notably Javanka and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Weinstein Is a Model of Liberal Values

Image credit: Evan Agostini/Getty Images

Of all the sordid details to emerge thus far from the burgeoning Harvey Weinstein scandal, there’s one that creeps me out above all else.
No, I don’t mean the potted plant jerk-off scene, or the shower jerk-off scenes or the scene where he sits jerking off to some rare nude footage of Meg Ryan…

I mean the one right near the beginning of the scandal, where he announced how he was going to make everything better:

“I am going to need a place to channel my anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the NRA my full attention.”

Let us pause awhile to relish that moment, because I don’t think history will ever provide us with a better example of what’s wrong not just with Hollywood in particular, but with liberalism in general. Let us bathe in the truly Augean disgustingness, the moral bankruptcy of Wankstain’s message to a world which he has personally done so much to deprave, demean and debase.

What Weinstein is saying, basically is this:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Bond is for Mopey, Whiny Liberals; ‘Kingsman’ is the Real Deal

Twentieth Century Fox

I totally love and adore Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Here are some reasons why – despite its miserly, sub-60 percent ratings thus far on Rotten Tomatoes – I think you will too.

The Swearing. Every second word is an expletive – as befits a director, Matthew Vaughn, who introduced his two producers at the London premiere this week as “Bad Cop and C*** Cop”. Possibly all that cussing may be a bit rich for some American ears but here’s the thing: no Hollywood studio would ever have passed this script, just as they would never have passed the Kick-Ass script in which the same language is used, only by an 11-year old girl who chops people in half with Samurai swords, like never happens ever in Hollywood movies, which is why Kick-Ass was so cool.

The Casting. No one in this movie was cast because they needed a person of color or a “strong female character.” Halle Berry is quite obviously there because they wanted Halle Berry, not because they wanted to tick a few race and gender boxes. (Ditto Samuel L Jackson in the first Kingsman, who was there, quite obviously because the part needed to be played by Samuel L Jackson, not A.N. Random Black Person).

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Clint Eastwood Just Reminded Us Why He Is The World’s Coolest Star

Mark Wilson/Getty

All hail Clint Eastwood for saying the unsayable: that Generation Snowflake are a bunch of politically correct pussies; that Donald Trump is preferable to Hillary.

Now rack your brains and try to think of anyone of Clint’s celebrity eminence who’d admit to such views on the record. Charlton Heston, possibly, except he’s no longer with us. Michael Caine is the only living movie star I can think of – but he’s English so his views on the US presidential election wouldn’t carry quite so much weight.

How depressing is it that the entire universe of celebrity is so politically one-sided?

None more depressing, I’d say. If you believe, as Andrew Breitbart did, that “politics is downstream from culture” then it clearly matters very much what our movie and TV stars, pop idols, comics and so on think.

Why do you think Hillary had so many of them surrounding her at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia recently?

Because, duh, there’s a significant chunk of the voting populace which doesn’t give a damn whether or not their potential next president is a lying, cheating, email-hiding, Benghazi-tainted, crony-capitalist, continuation-Obama witch. All that matters to them is knowing they’re on the same team as Katy Perry, Sigourney Weaver, Elizabeth Banks, Meryl Streep and the incredible chick who played Hit Girl in Kick-Ass.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Why the Alt-Right Isn’t Wrong

The Trump-supporting vigilantes of conservatism dismiss the mainstream as spineless cuckolds.

I got told off this week by a presenter on BBC radio for using a four-letter word live on air. In my defence, I was merely quoting a tweet from a black Hollywood comedy star called Leslie Jones which said: ‘Lord have mercy… white people shit.’ And the only reason I did so was that I thought it important that someone, somewhere, spoke out against the double standards which seem to exist on social media right now: one rule for progressives and accepted victim groups; quite another for everyone else.

A good example is the ban recently imposed by Twitter on my friend and colleague Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo had got into a public spat with Jones when he goaded her over the awfulness of her new movie, an all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Nothing he said matched the borderline racism and incitement to mob bullying in some of Jones’s tweets. Yet guess which party it was that ended up being booted permanently off Twitter…

This is why I took very strong exception to a piece written by Brendan O’Neill on Coffee House condemning Milo and his Twitter followers as ‘alt-right angries, convinced the world is one big lefty, feminist plot to ruin your average white dude’s life’ and ‘as anti-PC, bedroom-bound fans of Trump and strangers to sexual intercourse’. It seems to me that if you’re going to campaign for fairness and free speech — as Brendan frequently and heroically does — then you need correctly to identify the true enemy.

To help you understand what’s going on, I’d like you to cast your minds back to the Eighties and the era of ‘political correctness gone mad’. At the time, we thought it was so loopy it would disappear up its own bottom. Instead, it continued to get worse and worse, leading to lunacies like the nursery schools in Oxfordshire teaching kids to sing about ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’, and thence to nonsense like the ‘safe spaces’ promoted on university campuses for a generation of special snowflakes, as well as to vexatious campaigns like the one conducted at Oxford by anti-white race hustlers known as Rhodes Must Fall.

Yes, to some it might seem a joke but to the kids who have to live in this oppressive environment — as Brendan himself knows, having written about the Stepford Students in The Spectator — it’s horribly real. Young white straight males suffer especially: the moment they arrive on campus they are treated like potential rapists; in lectures they’re harangued by Marxist professors on their ‘white privilege’, as if all ills in the world from the abuse of women to racism are somehow their fault. And the conservatives who should have been fighting their corner just haven’t been up to the job because of the fatal weakness so many on the right have: a secret terror that they’re as nasty as the left claims they are.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Why I Support Spike Lee’s #Oscarsmustfall Campaign

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Someone called Spike Lee is threatening to boycott this year’s Oscars for having failed to include a sufficient quota of black talent on their nominations list.

This is an excellent campaign and one I shall definitely support once I’ve managed to discover who this Lee gentleman actually is. According to some rumours, he was one of the Rhodes scholars who recently campaigned in Oxford to have an old statue removed because every time they walked past its eyes seemed to be following them in a really racist way. Others insist that, no, Spike Lee was once the recipient of an Academy Award himself. But I can find no record of this: I’ve looked up the Oscars in the likely categories – “gaffer”, “best boy”, “key grip”, “dolly”, etc – but there’s definitely no Spike Lee mentioned.

Did he perhaps once go under the pseudonym Bruce? There’s a Bruce Lee on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The problem here is that this particular Lee seems to have died some years ago, didn’t look very black, and also – it would appear – was likeable, amazingly talented and made movies that everyone wanted to watch. So I don’t think it can be the same person.

Anyway, as a great believer in social justice I totally support this campaign by this man who may or may not be the son of Spiderman creator Stan Lee, or someone with a similar surname. But I just don’t think it goes far enough.

Lee believes that Oscars should be apportioned on a socially just basis and he’s absolutely right: look at the wonderful social justice work that was achieved by all those subprime mortgages made available to marginalised communities thanks to Barney Frank’s affordable housing laws. Imagine the transforming effect similar legislation would have on Hollywood.

For example, every week could be 12 Years A Slave week. That is, not just occasionally but throughout the entire year our cinemas could be filled with powerful, worthy movies – see also Beloved; The Color Purple; etc – designed to help white people feel more terrible about themselves. It could be the black make-work equivalent of the Hoover Dam and it might well generate large sums of box office to be handed to worthy causes like #blacklivesmatter. Even white racists would turn up in droves to see these movies – secure in the knowledge that wherever they sat in the auditorium there wouldn’t be a single black person anywhere nearby because, for some reason, black people don’t really go in for these liberal-breastbeating-auto-torture fests. Not enough car chases and gats, possibly.

Once the ethnic quota system has been introduced, we can then start broaching the more fundamental problem with the Academy Awards. They are, and always have been, quite outrageously elitist.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Hollywood Fracks Up

Matt Damon of the Film Actors Guild

Matt Damon’s new film Promised Land sounds really promising.

It’s about a cynical young man sent by a large wind farm company to a lovely village in rural Pennsylvania to seduce the locals with tales of the massive sums of money they’ll make if they sign a deal to have huge wind turbines built on their farmland.

Dollar signs flash in the greedy hicks’ eyes. This wind farm scam is crazy: no way would they have made that much money in their entire lives from just farming. Every one rushes to Damon: “Where do I sign?”

But Damon has begun falling in love with a local farm girl who tells him the truth about wind farms: that they’re ugly, that they kill birds and bats, that they ravage the countryside, blight views, divide communities and make people sick with their Low Frequency Noise.

So instead of bribing locals to have these bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes erected in their village, Damon leads the fight back. NO MORE WIND FARMS!

The village is saved and he and the girl live happily ever after.

If only. But the sad truth is that this lame-assed, eco-propaganda movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the genuine threat of wind farms but with the almost wholly imaginary one of fracking. Fracking has been a godsend to the US economy, blessing it with clean, cheap, abundant energy which has enriched those states lucky enough to have big shale gas reserves, created jobs and increased America’s energy security by reducing its reliance on imported gas from unstable countries.

What’s not to like about shale gas?

Well indeed. And this is proving something of a problem for America’s showbiz bleeding hearts. As we saw the other day with the Sean and Yoko story, being opposed to shale gas is the new black for every two-bit celebrity. Like having a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker on your Porsche Cayenne, it shows you CARE. The propaganda machine opposing shale gas development is massive and very well-funded. Its opponents include the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, the Park Foundation (which since 2009 has spent over $3 million funding ‘grassroots’ opposition to shale gas), and pretty much everyone involved in the renewable energy scam. When you hear people like Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey talking down British shale gas prospects, what you’re hearing is green ideology: the environmental movement loathes shale gas because it renders expensive, environmentally unfriendly “alternatives” like wind and solar essentially superfluous.

But back to that Hollywood problem I mentioned a moment ago. If shale gas and fracking aren’t bad, how the hell do you make a half-way convincing movie in which they are the villain of the piece (aka The monster that needs to be slain: if you’ve read Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots you’ll know what I mean here)?

Answer: with considerable difficulty.

In the New York Post, Phelim McAleer co-producer/director of the forthcoming Frack Nation relates the amusing story of how Matt Damon and co were driven to increasingly desperate measures to make their Promised Land movie look vaguely credible.

I broke the news that “Promised Land” was about fracking and now I can reveal that the script’s seen some very hasty rewriting because of real-world evidence that anti-fracking activists may be the true villains.

In courtroom after courtroom, it has been proved that anti-fracking activists have been guilty of fraud or misrepresentation.

There was Dimock, Pa. — the likely inspiration for “Promised Land,” which is also set in Pennsylvania. Dimock featured in countless news reports, with Hollywood celebrities even bringing water to 11 families who claimed fracking had destroyed their water and their lives.

But while “Promised Land” was in production, the story of Dimock collapsed. The state investigated and its scientists found nothing wrong. So the 11 families insisted EPA scientists investigate. They did — and much to the dismay of the environmental movement found the water was not contaminated.

There was Wolf Eagle Environmental Engineers in Texas, a group that produced a frightening video of a flaming house water pipe and claimed a gas company had polluted the water. But a judge just found that the tape was an outright fraud — Wolf Eagle connected the house gas pipe to a hose and lit the water.

Other “pollution” cases collapsed in Wyoming and Colorado. Even Josh Fox, who with his Oscar-nominated documentary “Gasland” first raised concerns about flammable water, has had to admit he withheld evidence that fracking was not responsible.

These frauds and misrepresentations created huge problems for the Damon/Krasinski script about “what defines us as a country.”

So, according to sources close to the movie, they’ve come up with a solution — suggest that anti-fracking fraudsters are really secret agents employed by the fossil-fuel industry to discredit the environmental movement.

In the revised script, Damon exposes Krasinski as a fraud — only to realize that Krasinski’s character is working deep undercover for the oil industry to smear fracking opponents.

Hollywood is worried about declining theater audiences; it’s blaming the Internet and the recession. But the real problem might be closer to home.

Rodney King saved my life | James Delingpole

June 18, 2012

It was hell

In April 1992, I was on holiday in California when the LA riots broke out. Arriving back at Laguna Beach after a roadtrip I was greeted by three, increasingly desperate answer messages from the Daily Telegraph foreign desk. The first wondered whether I was around and could I ring back soon. The second asked could I call back as SOON as I got the message because it was very very urgent. The third screamed that riots were breaking out all over Los Angeles and being the nearest journalist available (the stringer was on holiday) they needed me now.

For all this I had to thank the late Rodney King – the footage of whose beating after a car chase led to a trial in which the police responsible were acquitted. That’s when the riots broke out, resulting in 52 deaths and over 2,000 injuries, plus widespread damage to property.

I’d never covered an event like this before and it was a steep learning curve. The thing old hands tell you about civil unrest is that it’s deeply deceptive. One minute you’ll be hanging in a hotel or a cafe going: “This feels all very safe and calm.” But just take one wrong turn and you can suddenly find yourself in extreme danger. “Overtaken by events” as the euphemism has it, when foreign corrs end up being chopped to bits by panga-wielding mobs.

Anyway, I persuaded an insane cab driver to take me to Hollywood Boulevard so I could report on what was happening there. Some buildings – eg Frederick’s lingerie store – had already been burnt out or looted (Madonna’s bustiere had been stolen), while long lines of riot police were clearly expecting worse. I wandered on, away from the police lines and fell upon a group of about five or six teenagers, blacks and latinos, standing outside a shoe shop.

I asked them what they were doing and they said they were the Four Tray Crips, waiting for their brothers to come and join them with some guns. I said what’s “Four Tray”? They explained it meant 43rd. Then we got chatting about the shoes in the shop – they were planning to loot them, obviously, and wondered whether I fancied a pair. Only once I’d eventually made my excuses and got well away from them did I allow myself the luxury of having the pit drop out of the bottom of my stomach. But while I was talking to the gang, I wasn’t scared one bit. What helped, I think, was that my guilelessness and my English accent appealed to them. Anyway, before I left they gave me a friendly warning. “Be safe, bro,” they said. “You wanna be careful. Guy was round here last night, asking questions like you. He got himself stuck with an axe.”

I think, along with my first day’s hunting with the Devon & Somerset, and diving with great white sharks it was definitely among the top 10 most fun moments of my life.

It did me lots of good, too. My report earned me a herogram from the then editor Max Hastings. It extended my holiday in California. I got another really good scene for my novel Thinly Disguised Autobiography. (Which Tom Wolfe’s daughter reckons is one of the best books she’s ever read. And she’s right, it’s a total bloody masterpiece, perhaps the most brilliant thing I’ve ever done, with definitely the best E scene in literature and probably the best acid scene apart from maybe the one in Julian Cope’s Head-On.)

Many of the English journalists who reported on the LA riots have been blessed ever after with the “Golden Touch of Rodney King”. William Cash (who covered them from the Playboy mansion) is now a magazine magnate; Geordie Greig is editor of the Mail On Sunday; I am arguably the most brilliant, well-loved, most popular, witty and incisive writer in British journalism.

So cheers, Rodders. I owe you a lot!

9 thoughts on “Rodney King saved my life”

ColinPowis says:26th June 2012 at 4:48 amRodney King drown in a swimming pool ? but they didn’t tell you it was filled with Budweiser ….when they found his bloated body there was less than 1 Ft of beer left in the pool
Moses may indeed of parted the Red Sea , but it was Rodney King who prefomed the real miracle of ”parting and emptying ”the swimming pool …allegedly, his last words were ‘ ‘ Is that you Moses , burp ?…can we all just , hick , hick , GET ALONG ‘ ‘ ?
crownarmourer says:26th June 2012 at 5:38 pmTest.
1. Ewoznac says:26th June 2012 at 6:06 pmGlad it’s not just me :-).
  1. crownarmourer says:26th June 2012 at 6:46 pmIt appears strange goings on are a going on at the DT, I have multiple theories, it’s a virus/malware, they are going behind a paywall, upgrading to diksux 2012 (latest evil software release), or it’s space aliens.
    Or blobby has lost it and is now holding them all hostage at the DT.
    Most likely space aliens so I will now adjust my tin foil hat. If you need an alternate meeting place try….. http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/
    1. crownarmourer says:26th June 2012 at 6:46 pmOr they bank with RBS and haven’t paid their bill to disqus for obvious reasons.
      1. ColinPowis says:27th June 2012 at 7:29 amThey should start charging folk to leave comments on the Blog…it’s only fair
    2. ColinPowis says:27th June 2012 at 7:28 amSo what are you going to do for a life now that the thread is down ? hahaha …you’re probably got some bizarre conspiracy theory about what’s going on
James says:27th June 2012 at 9:10 amyes. Even more annoyingly I think someone may have hacked into MY computer.
1. ewoznac says:27th June 2012 at 10:22 amWhat makes you think your computer was hacked?

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Tag: Hollywood

‘No, of course We Can’t Cast Olivier. Only an Actual Nazi Dentist Will Do…’

Delingpole: Pruitt Is Gone, but Trump Is Still Winning the Energy Wars

Weinstein Is a Model of Liberal Values

Bond is for Mopey, Whiny Liberals; ‘Kingsman’ is the Real Deal

Clint Eastwood Just Reminded Us Why He Is The World’s Coolest Star

Why the Alt-Right Isn’t Wrong

Why I Support Spike Lee’s #Oscarsmustfall Campaign

Hollywood Fracks Up

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Rodney King saved my life | James Delingpole

June 18, 2012

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9 thoughts on “Rodney King saved my life”

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June 18, 2012

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9 thoughts on “Rodney King saved my life”

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