Movies

With his approval numbers sinking to 39 percent a week ago, according to the Gallup tracking poll, President Obama isn't alone in having a bad summer. So isHollywood. Entertainment Weekly calls gross receipts for what should have been a blockbuster July 4-6 weekend "downright terrifying." Writes EW, "Not only were grosses down 45 percent from last year's holiday, according to Boxofficemojo.…

Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie was finally noticed in The New York Times Friday – on the front page. The news story was “Heady Summer, Fateful Fall for a Conservative Firebrand.” Notice how “fall” had two meanings? The Times has failed to notice Michael Moore’s nasty divorce and how his hypocrisy about wealth has been revealed. But D’Souza is front-page fodder mostly for his admitted violation…

Hardball host Chris Matthews is quite the cinemaphile, frequently working movie references into his banter on the MSNBC program. So it was rather surprising when the MSNBC anchor made a whopper of a gaffe on his July 24 program regarding an iconic moment in the climactic lightsaber duel in the middle chapter of the original Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back. It seems Matthews remembers…

Fred Thompson, a former senator and presidential candidate who returned to an acting career,  granted an interview to The Hollywood Reporter to promote his new movie “Persecuted,” the story of a televangelist framed for murder by powerful government officials. Thompson acknowledges that conservatives in Hollywood have “a tougher road to travel” and try not to advertise their political views:

The abortion industry did its best to pitch the movie Obvious Child as an “unapologetic” but “hilarious” romantic comedy about abortion, even as the director and star eschewed such a depiction. And therein lies the irony. Abortion proponents want desperately to remove the stigma surrounding abortion, and they desperately hoped Obvious Child would be a “game-changing” vehicle to entice and…

Would right-wingers like a larger presence in mainstream news and entertainment media, or would they rather grumble about the MSM’s liberal bias while patronizing conservative media outlets? To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, it’s clear that the second is correct. Waldman’s peg for his Wednesday post was a National Review piece by editor and publisher Adam Bellow on the need for a…

It would have been shocking if the abortion comedy Obvious Child hadn’t been celebrated on Melissa Harris-Perry’s weekend show on MSNBC. But the spin on Sunday morning’s program could not have been expected. “MHP” wanted to know if abortion opponents just couldn’t handle the uncomfortable truth about women’s sexuality and how women’s bodies operate. She asked Obvious filmmaker Gillian…

Gillian Robespierre, the feminist director of the abortion comedy Obvious Child, is not a fan of Fox News, as she revealed in an interview with Matt Juul Wednesday in the Boston Globe. Asked about sexism and feminist hashtags on Twitter, she said "like, I’m watching a lot of CNBC and Fox News in these [expletive] hotel rooms and it’s just making my head spin. It just makes me really sad. It…

After several tantrums about how movies with keep-the-baby messages spread “consoling fictions,” Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday was duty-bound to adore the “abortion comedy” Obvious Child, but did she have to embarrass herself by insisting it “may be the most pro-life movie of the year”? Somehow, the movie Juno presented abortion as a “non-option,” but Hornaday loves a movie where…

How radical is Hollywood? There are two competing movie projects sure to lionize Edward Snowden betraying America’s secrets. Naturally, one of them is helmed by Oliver Stone, who bows to no one in casting America as a global supervillain. See his Untold History of the United States bilge on Showtime. "This is one of the greatest stories of our time," said the leftist director. "A real…

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Correction appended. Seth Rogen did not send the tweet mentioned below.) Lights, action - cue the Leftists! Or, what comes around, goes around. Seth Rogen, a Hollywood favorite as star or a supporting player in such gems as Knocked Up, The Green Hornet,The 40 Year Old Virgin and more, is having  what one might call a Martin Niemoller moment. Niemoller was the German…

Feminist Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday was the first one to see Hollywood sexism in the stabbings and shootings of one sick young man at the University of California-Santa Barbara who killed six. Hornaday tweeted out her article: “In a shooter's videotaped diatribe, reflections of the sexism, insecurity and entitlement that plague Hollywood.” Hornaday wrote that as Elliot Rodger…

A new biopic about Ronald Reagan is in pre-production, and Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter relayed that Manifest Film Sales has picked up international sales rights and will introduce the project to buyers at the Cannes Film Festival. The producers of the $25 million film, simply called Reagan, "inked a deal for a U.S. release on 3,000 screens and $35 million in prints and advertising."…

In Saturday’s Washington Post, they published a letter to the editor from a Paul Whittemore in Spotsylvania, Virginia, who noticed the Post’s movie critics never attempted a movie review of God’s Not Dead, which has so far grossed $55.5 million at the box office and tiptoed back into the top ten this weekend. On March 21, the Post could only report “This movie did not screen in time for…