If they ever run a James Cameron retrospective, they'll boo Arnold too, and cheer when he dies in "The Terminator."

But like Reagan, he'll be back...

Again, nothing to see here. The hatred of the hateful is praise.

We are not surprised that a collection of Comsymps, folk-enemies and culture-traitors would despise Ronald Reagan.

I tried watching this, but it's weird seeing a major historical figure being menaced by fictional characters.

Reagan was not billed first on imdb, he was 6th and he played the villan. http://imdb.com/title/tt0058262/

He was nearing the end of his career and the public didn't much like him as a villain--too much against type.

uh, i hate to barge in on the worship service, but, can someone identify just who it is going to the movies hollywood makes and generating, on average, in excess of $100 million in ticket sales per weekend?

lonbud:

Darwinists and soccer players. They're going ten times a day each.

Jesus, longbud, haven't you heard of the Hollywood Slump? Certain pundits think that Fantastic Four may have broken it, but other pundits think that may be just a one-off scenario. The words "longest box office slump in at least twenty years" are what you want to look for.
like this one

The last movies to make money were, what, Lord of the Rings, Spiderman 2 and The Passion? Real commy flicks, those.

As to who is going to movies -- I don't know, it's certainly not me. At $10 per ticket, $100 million means 10 million viewers. To put that into perspective, Rush Limbaugh has an audience of 25 million per week.

Gov: (left angle bracket)a href="http://the.rest.of.your.url"(right angle bracket)Your title(left angle bracket)/a(right angle bracket). "Left angle bracket" = "shift-comma", "right angle bracket = "shift-period". Put the whole URL in there starting with http:// and do not forget to put quotes ("") around it.

As far as the movies, the inimitable Howard Veit's got this this morning: They Made a Plan, It Worked, Now They're Going Broke.

Governor try this procedure [a href="URL"] HIGH LIGHTED WORDS[/a]

Where [ ] equals the following brackets

By the way OJ if it is ever convenient for your site to go back to that pop-up comment section, I vote that you change back. Although it's not a big deal with me.

We love going to the movies and would go a lot more often if there were films we wanted to see. I don't like to read reviews before I see a movie, so when we went to see, "Must Love Dogs," we foolishly thought it would be about dogs, not about another insipid divorced woman and the heartbreak of her social life.

I believe that the difference between this year and last year when it comes to movie revenues is the absence, this year, of The Passion, which drew many people to repeated viewings who do not usually go to the movies at all.

Given the ratings, I'm probably the only person here who watched all of the most recent version of the reality show Project Greenlight, which featured Clu Gulager's loveable lump of a son, John.

I thought Clu, who appeared frequently, was great. He's a sort of aged, mad, artistic redneck from Oklahoma.

Don't forget the impact of DVDs and better TVs. We go out to see stuff you have to see on the big screen (Lord of the Rings & so forth.) Everything else is a rental, and most of it looks just as good at 40 inches as it would at 40 feet. The sound at home is quite a bit better most of the time and I do not have an elaborate setup.

The blog Libertas covers these issues in great detail -- Jason Apuzzo, Govindi Murtry and their fellow blogger Dirty Harry. They all work in the movie industry -- Jason and Govindi run the Liberty Film Festival -- and this incident of the booing was actually reported in their comments a week or so ago. It's Libertas' opinion that blaming DVD's etc is off-target, that people still want to go to movies in a theater, but are simply turned off by the movies and the self-important left-wing puffery of the stars. And yes, there's been a tremendous amount of press, including in the trades like Variety and Hollywood Reporter, about something like a 15-week box office slump that has not been broken by a single movie.

joe:

Except that the DVD rentals are being killed because no one wants to see recent movies.

Yeah, I had heard that Fantastic Four broke the slump, but I also heard otherwise. But hey, lonbud says the industry is at an all time high and Americans love lots of lefty politics shoe-horned into their summer action blockbusters so he must be right. After all, we're the ones clinging desperately to outdated failed social policies and we're the ones who stubbornly insist that 2+2=5. Oh, wait, no we're not.

And no Lord of the Rings or Spiderman types. Hollywood stumbledinto a set of morally serious movies right after 9-11 but quickly got back to repugnant ones like Million Dollar Baby.

Edward Jay Epstein has been good on Hollywood's problems.

Did you seriously use the word commies? Who are you guys, the new Unamerican Activites Committee? Sorry that Hollywood hasn't turned out _First Blood V: Rambo vs. the Axis of Socialist Nordic Countries_ to draw you guys to the local cineplex. Have you considered that the crappy economy might be keeping folks out of the theatres, not just the lack of movies-that-are-ads-for-the-airforce?

Might consider it if the economy were crappy. Who are we guys? We're Batmen!

A Rambo vs al Qaeda movie could make money. But Hollywood is rooting against Rambo.

I'm Booster Gold, if we're forming the Conservative Justice League.

No, wait. I wanna be Lobo. He is the main man, after all.

Did anyone see that WWII rescue movie? Supposedly it was pretty bad.

Horror flicks have been popular lately, but the problem is that few of them have been scary. I will go see "The Skeleton Key" but won't get my hopes up. CGI effects have actually ruined this genre. "Exorcist the Beginning" was awful, as was "Constantine" and "The Boogie Man". "White Noise" was dissapointing. The last horror film that had any genuine creepiness to it was "The Others", and The "Ring" was pretty good. Didn't see any CGI effects in that movie (The Others).

Anybody know why none of the local theaters, including several small independents and the big boys like Regal and AMC are showing "The Great Raid." It's only being shown at an art film theater over 50 miles away.

yeah oj, I heard those 'woods (a pejorative, like commie or, worse, liberal) were working on _Bringing up Bin Laden_, a screwball comedy starring Tim Robbins as the Al Queda everyone loves to hate (except in L.A. where his height and thinness are all the rage: Nicole Kidman and Paris Hilton are totally stealing his look - except for those Santa-like whiskers that just charm the pants off Spielberg, er, maybe not Spielberg). Not contributing to Ws coffers doesn't mean 'woods love terrorists, just that they don't like W.

Movies are failing because they have gone the way of the modern novel. Stories about selfish, self-obsessed amoralists pouting away their lives in drab, dead, dry settings. I call it the dead-film: films about people with dead souls dying in a dried up and dead world.

People want passion and mayhem, love and betrayal, villany and heroism, romance and comedy - in short people want Shakespeare - and the films that give it to them are those that do well at the box office. But since most hollywooders have dead souls themselves they will never understand this, they will continue to believe that films like Lord of the Rings and Spiderman are successful due to spectacular FX rather content.

You are the movies you make.

lmarvinjr;

That doesn't sound far off from the movies actually being made right now. Good to see that you've come over to our point of view.

I don't know that folks do want Shakespeare - if they're so hungry for him you'd think they'd actually read him instead of buying their college papers or reading summaries online.

Also, I'm thinking that the qualities you're lamenting in movies and modern novels sound an awful lot like some Shakespeare material:

"selfish, self-obsessed amoralists pouting away their lives in drab, dead, dry settings" - Hamlet, Lear, Prospero, etc.

"dried up and dead world" - Denmark

Yet you've agreed he does extraordinary things with the material. Why won't you concede the same of plenty of modern films/novels/plays?

Aren't you mixing up Hollywood and Indy films? the big studios are down with the CGI, etc. and don't get that folks want substance; indy films seem more like the crusty stuff that troubles you.

Anyone else have high hopes for Battle for Fallujah? I know I shouldn't but two things make me optimistic--one, Harrison Ford. I don't know his politics, and that makes me happy. Two, the screenplay writer has never done any Hollywood work before.

If it's a red-blooded, patriotic war movie and sells itself that way, it will make money hand over fist. The best way to tell if this is the case is to see if any reviewers call it "propaganda."

l:

Shakespeare didn't think MacBeth was the hero of his tale.

MarvinJr. -

Indy film is a myth - they are all bankrolled by hollywood stars and shown at film festivals run by hollywood producers.

A few thoughts on your comments about Shakespeare:

1) Shakespeare's plays have run perpetually in every major city in the world for the past 400 years. How long did Monster's Ball or Million Dollar Baby run?

2) When hollywood films (and modern novelists) start treating the material the same way that Shakespeare did then I'll "concede the same" as you say - that is entirely my point. OJ's comment is on target - Shakespeare didn't celebrate nihilism, selfishness, and paralysis - he condemned it.

3) Even the most drab and dull of Shakespeare's plays, even the plays with the most selfish and depressed characters are filled with more passion and expression than any film celebrated by today's hollywood elite.

Re; the $100 mil grosses.....a movie that costs $150 mil and up loses money at $250 mil world wide. At $10 a ticket a hundred mil translates into lousy attendence of 10 million out of a population of 300 mil. Before you feel sorry for these crooks, and they are total crooks, consider the money from toys, kickbacks from the product placements, other sweetheart deals they make, sound track revenue (if anybody cheats more than Hollywood, it's the music biz), DVD sales and rentals (all misreported so they can stuff their pockets), sales of posters, star autographs, network tv rentals, pay tv rentals, cable rentals, and in some cases kickbacks from the sales of goodies inside the theatres.

Last movie we saw: March of the Penguins

Before that, The Incredibles, which is about as conservative a cartoon as was ever made, and also one of the three or four best things I've ever seen.

The only movies I plan to see this year are March of the Penguins and Chronicles of Narnia.

Mike and Gideon: See "Millions" if you haven't.

Sheldon,

1) Yes, the people are banging down the doors of those city theatres, filling up all 50 seats every night of the week-long run. I suspect you and I (and maybe even everyone here - why did you start arguing with me about this, which I never brought up anyway?) both wish that was the case, but sadly it's just not so. And, even the greatest films (I don't think the two you name are very good either, btw) haven't played for very long (relatively speaking) because the medium's so young. Let's both wait for 400 years to elapse and see what happens.

2)Do you sincerely think Shakespeare is condemning Hamlet's nihilism, paralysis and selfishness? Or even poor, sad Lear's, despite all that they both do? Seems more likely he's exploring what we all wrestle with, facing that these, too, are a part of being human, just as writers - modern, non-, whatever - have always done.

3) Shakespeare rocks. I agree again. Other folks have made great art since Elizabeth (god rest her soul) passed on. And, it's good!

Oh, and sweeping generalization (which I've been extremely guilty of as well - sorry for my crappy arguing) on the indy/'wood distinction. What about Arnofsky's _Pi_, Smith's _Clerks_ (which I despised), Napoleon Dynamite guy's _Napoleon Dynamite_? And as for the funding that does sometimes go on, artists (like Shakespeare) need patrons. If these folks are the ones willing to open up their coffers...

Pi is a terrific film:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.moviedetail/movie_id/40

Yes I do believe that Shakespeare makes a moral judgment of Lear, the Macbeths, Hamlet, Prince Hal, etc. and that the judgments are clear (sometimes the judgments are explicitly stated in the epilogue). Its what made the Shakespearian tragedy so strikingly different from the old greek model - its what made the Shakespearian model so much better.

As for film, you are right, I'm overgeneralising for rhetorical purposes. I'm a huge film fan - I watch hollywood films every day - I make a point to watch two films a week that I have never
seen. I liked both Clerks and Napoleon Dynamite and Pi is on my NetFlix Q. Though one could argue that both films were just entry level auditions for the filmmakers introduction into the hollywood bureaucracy. And Shakespeare they aren't. My problem with hollywood, like my problem with the modern book publishing, is that the elite (the critics, the producers, the publishers, the professors) are all focused on the wrong works of art.