Iowahawk spills the beans:

Tinseltown Looks to ’06 Rebound

Los Angeles – As the box office closes on the US film industry’s worst year since 1990, showbiz insiders are looking to a strong slate of 2006 releases to help the industry snap back from the financial doldrums.

“If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the market is really hungry for more good, slow, imponderable stories and dim lighting,” and industry analyst Tim Jarrard of the trade journal Hollywood Reporter. “The industry has listened, and I think the public will be pleased with the direction it will be taking in 2006.”

Anticipated major theatrical releases from Hollywood include:

Incident at Amity: Steven Spielberg directs this cerebral remake of Jaws slated for summer release. Insiders say the 31-year update will feature “additional points of view” and “be less judgmental to sharks.” Starring Willam H. Macy as the anti-shark fundamentalist, and Tom Hanks as the Great White.

Silenced Wood: George Clooney stars and directs in this drama about the climate of fear among ventriloquists during radio’s notorious Charlie McCarthy era.

Hershey Highway: Based on the Tony Kushner play, a candy factory worker (Phillip Sousa Huffnagel) and Amish teen (Joaquin Seymour Gyllenhall) find forbidden pleasure in this poignant love tale set against the gritty backdrop of Pennsylvania’s chocolate belt.

Me Billy: Based on the inspirational true story of a learning disabled man (Sean Penn) who rescues New Orleans from racist flood with a magical red cup.

Baby Doc: Jamie Foxx stars in this biopic about Haitian civil rights activist wrongly accused of despotism by LA police.

Reservoir Puppies: Director Quentin Tarantino teams with Pixar in this animated children’s holiday tale about six lost whelps and a botched burglary. Starring the voices of Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, and Mike Meyers as Mister Pinky.

Zaftig Pi: The Eigenvectress. Plus-size video game superheroine comes to life, as Oscar winner Kathy Bates battles Christian fundamentalist aliens with kung fu cartwheels.

The Vespa Diaries: Romantic revolutionary scooterist Pol Pot (Lysol Phoenix) and US intellectual Noam Chomsky (Matt Affleck) find gay rainforest love in this Cambodian remake of ‘Roman Holiday’ that had Sundance audiences cheering.

Fearful Silence: Courageous What’s My Line? contestant (Leonardo DiCaprio) refuses to answer panelist questions in this gameshow drama set against the McCarthy-blacklist era. With William H. Macy as Bennett Cerf and Kevin Spacey as Kitty Carlisle.

Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop buttwiping.

Mugabe: Will Smith stars in this biopic about Zimbawean civil rights activist wrongly accused of mass starvation program by LA police.

Lunch Lady: poignant story of school cook-turned-playground strangler has generated advanced Oscar buzz for star Jennifer Lopez, who reportedly gained 400 pounds, facial tatoos and gum disease for the role

Fearful Deadly Fear: Blacklisted 1950’s screenwriter Damon Runyan (Tim Robbins) writes a secret screenplay about the the McCarthy-era blacklists, in this 1950’s blacklist drama set against the background of the McCarthy era blacklists.

Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded Gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Jenna Jameson) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Hovercraft Phoenix) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.

Redemption: the Idi Amin Story: Gary Coleman stars in this biopic about Ugandan civil rights activist wrongly accused of cannibalism by LA police.

Snow Fuji Mountain: Mothra (Toby Damon) and Gamera (Orlando Law) discover forbidden love while destroying Tokyo, in this story of nuclear-triggered sexual awakening.

The Girl is Fabulous: Totally straight New Yorker Ted (Tom Cruise) falls head over heels in hetero love with Marcy (Katie Holmes) in this completely ungay romantic comedy set against the backdrop of New York’s glamorous West Village.

Silence 1984: Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the survivors of Hollywood’s notorious Reagan era ‘Year of Fear,’ when only three McCarthy-themed movies were released.

Susan Cooper, an industry writer for LA Weekly, said that 2006 plans reflected “a renewed focus on real human stories,” after several disappointing 2005 action fantasy releases. She cited the planned spring release of Hollywood’s first non-documentary look at 9/11 — Oliver Stone’s Inside Job — as evidence of Hollywood’s return to realism and a reason for industry optimism.

“There’s a really good buzz about it in Hollywood,” said “With a top director and an all-star cast, this studios are hoping for a blockbuster return.”

Stone’s $140 million September 11 epic stars Nicholas Cage, along with Haley Joel Osment as Osama Bin Laden, Robin Williams as Donald Rumsfeld, Dakota Fanning as Zacarias Moussawi, Val Kilmer as the ghost Richard Nixon, Harvey Fierstein as the International Neocon Zionist Conspiracy, Bubbles the Chimp as George Bush, and Jim Carrey as ‘My Pet Goat.’

“I think ‘Inside Job’ shows the public that we artists can make serious films on subjects that they care about,” said Stone. “Maybe then we can move on to collective healing, and you inbred flyover fundie hillbillies will finally shut the fuck up.”

Hat tip to Libertas.

Clarice Feldman is reporting in The American Thinker on the developments in the Pouting & Leaking Spooks affair. She is of the opinion that the tables are soon to be turned:

Liberal fantasies of Karl Rove being frog-marched in handcuffs for leaking classified information may turn into a nightmare of prominent liberals being prosecuted for damaging the fight against al Qaeda via leaks of classified data. There are no names on the public record yet, but somebody leaked the classified information about NSA surveillance to James Risen of the New York Times, and a year later his paper published the story.

The pieces falling in place are far from conclusive, but they are mighty suggestive.

President Bush believes that the national interest has been harmed. In all probability, gears are turning right now for a criminal investigation leading to a possible felony prosecution. Others are noting, as AT did last Sunday, that at the demand of the left itself, precedents have been set that could ensnare not “evil Republicans,” but “virtuous liberals” who think of themselves as whistleblowers. As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

She links Jack Kelley who notes that L’Affaire Plame has already established the precedent of throwing reporters in the slam until they divulge their sources.

And she refers us to a very interesting theory proposed by AJ Strata, and continued here suggesting that activist liberal FISA Judge Robertson didn’t really resign after all, that he was suspended for a participatory role in the NYT leak leading to the current NSA Flap.

Editor & Publisher notes the appearance of impeachment talk recently in connection with the NASA flap all over the outposts of the leftwing commentariat:

NEW YORK Suddenly this week, scattered outposts in the media have started mentioning the “I” word, or at least the “IO” phrase: impeach or impeachable offense.

The sudden outbreak of anger or candor has been sparked by the uproar over revelations of a White House approved domestic spying program, with some conservatives joining in the shouting.

Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers (known as “Hutch” to the president), observed that “some legal experts asserted that Bush broke the law on a scale that could warrant his impeachment.” Indeed such talk from legal experts was common in print or on cable news.

Newsweek online noted a “chorus” of impeachment chat, and its Washington reporter, Howard Fineman, declared that Bush opponents are “calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The ‘I-word’ is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.”

Make no mistake. The level of the tactics of opposition the left is willing to resort to has increased continually over the last few decades with their ever growing frustration at political losses. These days, we see the Senate filibuster applied not just for the kind of primal confrontations which used to lead opponents in the major parties to die in the last ditch efforts. Today every significant mildly controversial bill, every tax cut, every presidential legislative initiative will reliably be filibustered.

We have reached a point of political opposition in which, if the weapon is available, the democrat opposition will use it.

The Bush Administration had better realize that it has only to lose control of the House of Representative in 2006, and they can bet that the NASA Flap or any later equivalent issue which can be inflated into a major scandal by the loving attentions of the democrat party’s MSM allies will be employed as a pretext for the Impeachment card to be played. The Left still believes it deserves revenge for the Clinton Impeachment, and for what it insists on looking upon as two “stolen” elections. The actual facts, fair play and intellectual honesty will have nothing to do with it. Lose the House and it will be Sauve qui peut! for the Bush Administration.

Since we could very well lose the House, if I were advising George W. Bush, I would tell him to fire that wimp Karl Rove, and get himself what is referred to in The Godfather as a war-time consigliere. The Bush Administration is being gradually brought down by the political equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, by an endless succession of leaks and accusations. The opponents of the administration just keep throwing this one at the wall, and that one, to see which one is going to stick, and serve as the basis for a good old-fashioned Watergate-style scandal which can bring down the Administration.

Over four years, any endlessly repeated political initiative has a pretty decent probability of bearing fruit. As we have editorialized before, just like a football team, either an Administration is on the offensive or it is on the defensive. The only effective response to the calculated politics of scandal is to retaliate in kind more effectively. It’s not as if the opportunity does not exist. You have an active conspiracy of disgrunted former, and still active, Intelligence Community personnel leaking the most sensitive kinds of intelligence information for political purposes on time of war. A really aggressive Administration could be indicting people for treason. In this case, it should be entirely adequate to identify, prosecute, and punish some of the principal guilty parties on less extravagant charges.

The Bush Administration could take a leaf from the democrat party’s book, and learn how to use the politics of scandal to its own advantage. Only the politics of mutually assured destruction via scandal is likely to persuade democrats to relinquish ambitions of removing this president from office by impeachment.

This morning, I find Glenn Reynolds (one of the leading bloggers in league with Satan, at least according to Blogosphere alarmists in a tizzy over the possibilities of corporate influence intruding into blogging) advertising books and (Hurrah!) absinthe in his PJM ads. Libertarians, like the author of this blog, approve of books and absinthe.

Meanwhile, Power Line is running Blog ads, and is shudder advertising memberships in Greenpeace, which are telling us the polar bears are all going to drown, if we don’t give up driving our SUVs.

If PJM is selling absinthe, and Blog ads are selling Greenpeace memberships, I suggest every blogger wanting to do ads should run, not walk, in a PJM-wards direction.

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Those Greenpeace Polar Bears grabbed PJM’s Absinthe and both vanished by late morning Pacific time.

The Onion is breaking the latest Bush Administration leak scandal:

Rove Implicated In Santa Identity Leak
December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, DC—The recent leak revealing Santa Claus to be “your mommy and daddy” has been linked to President Bush’s senior political adviser and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

What on earth is the admirable, highly respected, and politically sound Power Line blog doing running ads for…. Greenpeace? Ads selling memberships in the moonbat organization by promoting fears of Global Warming, no less. I’m as much in favor of capitalism as the next fellow, but really, guys.

The goofballs in the US Senate again blocked oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Tara Sweeney explains what oil exploration means to her people, the Inupiaq Inuit who live there.

Right now, it’s 30 below zero in Kaktovik, the only village within the entire 19.6 million acres of the federally recognized boundaries of ANWR. It is total 24-hour darkness, and the wind is howling. Beyond the little houses, there is flat frozen ocean and tundra for as far as the eye can see. Stretching 1000 miles from the Barents Sea near Siberia in the west, to the Canadian border in the east, the Arctic Coastal Plain is one of the harshest climates in the world. Only the strongest people survive.

The PURE LUXURY of running water, flush toilets, local schools, local health care clinics, police and fire stations, were unavailable prior to the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, America’s largest oil field, 90 miles to the west. Kaktovik was the last community on Alaska’s North Slope to get these wondrous things, courtesy of tax revenue from oil operations at Prudhoe Bay.

What would Americans in the Lower 48 States do if they were denied these basic necessities? They’d scream bloody murder!

Yet these are the basic amenities that radical environmentalists of the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society say the Inupiat Eskimo people should be denied.

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John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

It’s a funny thing: when the Democrats are in the majority, the Democrats run Congress. When the Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats still run Congress. How does that work?

Maybe if we get lucky, the democrats will nail Bill Frist with that phony scandal they’ve been working on, and get rid of him for us.

Never Yet Melted’s author was interviewed today by Blogasm.

Prenuptial Agreements are standard operating procedure among Hollywood celebrities these days. Sandy Cohen of AP reports:

LOS ANGELES – No mother-in-law sleepovers. Only one football game per Sunday. Mandatory sexual positions…

Prenups are the norm for most stars — even regular folks should have one, if you listen to Kanye West — and these documents can dictate far more than who gets what. Attorneys say some recent celebrity prenups include:

• Limiting the wife’s weight to 120 pounds or she must relinquish $100,000 of her separate property.

• Allowing a spouse to perform random drug tests, with financial penalties for positive results.

• Requiring a husband to pay $10,000 each time he is rude to his wife’s parents.

• The previously mentioned rules regarding mothers-in-law, football and sex.

“Everything is legal unless you’re dealing with custody of children or child support,” said Los Angeles divorce attorney Robert Nachshin, who has represented Barry Bonds (his ex signed the prenup the day before their wedding) and author Terry McMillan (who discovered the young hubby who brought her groove back was gay). “Everything else is up for grabs.”

“People have their own little peculiar peccadilloes they’re concerned about,” said attorney Leon F. Bennett, who has represented Marlon Brando, Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper. “People of wealth have a sense they have power over others that their money can acquire, and reality shows it can.”

Infidelity clauses are common, Nachshin said. Michael Douglas agreed to pay Catherine Zeta-Jones millions should he stray, and Denise Richards made similar requirements of Charlie Sheen.

Granddaddy Long Legs (a relatively new blog devoted to MSM debunking) goes to work on backgrounding the NSA Flap story, fisking its propositions, and identifying the key mechanism of these kind of anti-Bush Administration news cycles:

The MSM reports stories about Democrats (who) opine and sensationalize about Republicans.

Writing in the Washington Post, Posner argues that innocent parties’ privacy is not really generally being invaded by data-mining to find terrorist communications:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.

An English Baronet, lacking an heir, is resorting to DNA testing of Americans of the same name to locate a suitable male relative to take up the burden of maintaining the estate. This interesting exercise in genealogy will by covered by the Discovery Channel in a program currently, misleadingly, titled I’m Really a Royal.

The ad would read: Free to one lucky American named Slade, a 16-room English mansion surrounded by 1,300 acres of prime land in southwestern England. But be prepared to work for it.

Baronet Sir Benjamin Slade, 59, has no heir, but is desperate to pass his ancestral home, Maunsel Home — now a busy entertainment venue — to someone in the family.

So he has given a DNA sample to a team of genealogists, who will search for the closest match among Americans called Slade; some 5,000 are estimated to live in North Carolina alone.

“Running Maunsel House is a young person’s thing and I’m tired of it,” Slade told The Associated Press Wednesday. “I spoke to my 14th cousin in England, but he has a nice house of his own and he doesn’t want to move.”

The lucky man — Slade insists his heir must be male — will inherit the stately home near Taunton in southwest England, which dates in part from the 13th century and boasts a library, a dining room for 80 guests and a staff of five.

Maunsell House

Slade Surname Genealogy Project

Slade Surname Genealogy Project Current Results

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Sir Benjamin appears on television to discuss the search.