Mickey Kaus diagnoses a continuing pattern of self-deception in the MSM coverage of the theatrical run of Brokeback Mountain:

Touches the Heart of the Heartland! I hadn’t realized, until someone tipped me off, that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 had exactly the same marketing strategy as Brokeback Mountain, the gist of which was “Hey, a film sticks it to the conservatives but it’s playing in the red states!” This is the now-familiar Heartland Breakout meme. Moore boasted that his movie was big “in every single red state in America. … It sold out in Fayetteville, North Carolina.” As with Brokeback, the press bought into the story. In 2004, Time magazine wrote:

You would have expected Moore’s movie to play well in the liberal big cities, and it is doing so. But the film is also touching the heart of the heartland. In Bartlett, Tenn., a Memphis subuurb, the rooms at Stage Road Cinema showing Fahrenheit 9/11 have been packed …

1. The Heartland Breakout Meme seems like B.S.: Fahrenheit wound up reaching about the same number of theaters–approximately 2,000 at its widest distribution–as Brokeback. But Byron York, for his book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, got hold of confidential movie-industry data showing that, contrary to the Heartland Breakout scenario, Fahrenheit had done the vast bulk of its business in the usual blue state urban centers (and in … Canada). It had almost uniformly underperformed in red state cities–including Time’s Memphis, where the audience was more than 50% lower than you’d expect given Memphis’ share of moviegoers. Some enterprising reporter should get hold of similar data for Brokeback, once its run is over. Do you want to bet they show the same insular, blue-state dominance? The only difference would be that Fahrenheit 9/11 (at $119 million) was much more popular than Brokeback, measured in box office.

2. The Heartland Breakout Meme seems like B.S. of the sort that consistently hurts Democrats (and others who believe it): B.S. is B.S.. Bloggers are allowed to point it out (he says defensively)–especially if it’s B.S. the mainstream press has no particular interest in pointing out (because it kills the story, or because they’ll seem homophobic).** But this B.S. falls into a special category: the sort of gratifying myth that in the past has helped lull liberals (and gay rights activists who may or may not be liberals) into wild overconfidence.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

If Sleepless in Seattle were trailered as a thriller.

reports Reuters:

COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) – A German cannibal is taking legal action to stop the release of the horror film “Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story,” which he claims is based on his life.

Keri Russell (“Felicity”) stars as a graduate student researching imprisoned cannibal Simon Grobeck (Thomas Kretschmann). Russell is drawn into Grobeck’s world and becomes obsessed with the Internet cannibal community. “Butterfly” is scheduled for a March 9 release in Germany.

But not if Armin Meiwes, who was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for eating a man he met over the Internet, has his way. In a statement Monday, Meiwes’s lawyer, Harald Ermel, said the film is a “slavish re-enactment” of the real-life events and his client did not give permission to producer Atlantic Streamline to fictionalize his story.

“I feel used,” said Meiwes, who filmed the killing and confessed to the crime but denied it was murder since his victim volunteered to be eaten.

Arrrh!

2004 Documentary on Republican in Hollywood reviewed:

Hollywood has a richly-deserved reputation as an extremely liberal town populated by celebrities who rarely hesitate to assail their audiences with their political opinions…

But just as there may be a few Britney Spears fans at a death metal concert, surely there must be some Republicans in Hollywood; and Democratic speechwriter and independent filmmaker Jesse Moss set out to find them in his short documentary Rated R: Republicans in Hollywood, which initially ran on the American Movie Classics channel in September 2004.

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.

A non-film review

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I don’t intend to see this PC film, but I’ve read the Annie Proulx story, and have seen Frank Rich’s column in the Sunday NY Times, which opines:

Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective “agenda” concocted by conspiratorial “elites” in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a “lifestyle.”

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Perhaps Ang Lee made the film more heavy-handed and conventional than was the original story. Or perhaps Rich sees what suits his own political agenda. I can’t say. I haven’t seen the film.

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The short story Brokeback Mountain is one of a series of “the hard reality of life among the simple and poor” stories set in rural Wyoming of which Proulx has recently written enough examples to make up two published collections.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist aren’t homosexual “by inherent and immutable identity.” They are

high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.

After the accidental sexual encounter, the conversation goes:

Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.”

When four years later, they get together again, Ennis says:

“We both have wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain’t nothin like this. I never had no thoughts about doin it with another guy… You do it with other guys? Jack?

Jack replies:

“Shit no. You know that, Old Brokeback got us good.”

They are not homosexual. The entire point of the story is the tragic fate of two ordinary uneducated men, who accidentally develop an unaccountable and powerful emotional relationship
(including sex), which does not fit their ideas, circumstances, or possibilities.

The moral of the whole story is not: “Queers can be cowboys too!” Or: “A certain percentage of cowboys were secretly gay.” The moral of the story may be found in the closing sentence:

There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.

It seems interesting to note that the Left is treating the film as triumph in the culture wars, entirely on the basis of a 180 degree distortion of the central meaning of the original short story.

Rather than a vindication of “inherent & immutable gay identity,” Brokeback Mountain tells the story of the unhappy fate of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar in the very same vein in which The Half-Skinned Steer tells the story of an octogenerian returning to the family ranch from Massachusetts for his brother’s funeral, who winds up driving off the road in a snowstorm a few miles from his boyhood home and freezing to death.

Annie Proulx isn’t purveying political correctness; she’s chronicling representative examples of strange and cruel accidents in a hard country. In the original story, homosexual love isn’t so much “an inherent and immutable identity,” as it is another example of the weird and miserable things that can sometimes happpen to people under an indifferent Western sky.

Hollywood gets the fear as box-office sale plummet. Is it the ever-rising cost of tickets? Is the the hassle parking? Is it the competition from DVDs?

Personally, I think it’s a combination of horribly-written, unbelievably-lame films targeted at the Hollywood elite’s idea of the mass audience’s taste (the sort of Vin Diesel flic that bores even the teenage kids), combined with the occasional twisted-liberal-sensibility Message picture (do we really want to see Clint Eastwood put some chick out her misery? or a couple of cowboys kissing?) that had made movie-going so irritating that we increasingly just give up on the whole thing and stay home.

Hollywood is proving to be just as out of touch on the issue of entertainment as it is on politics. Even now, we wait with bated breath for Steven Spielberg’s latest deep thinking picture (the guy is good with sharks, but ideas? forget it!), which rumor has it, will be a lachrymose sermonette on the futility of hunting down and killing bad guys who murder innocent people to score political protest points. Steven ought to have asked himself what John Wayne would do, and filmed that.

An off-duty New York City police officer, Daniel Enchautegui, was killed, when he interrupted a burglary next door to his Bronx home, but the dying officer managed to shoot both burglars repeatedly. The second suspect was Lillo Brancato, Jr., a moderately successful actor, who played Robert De Niro’s son in the 1993 film A Bronx Tale. Brancato appeared in numerous other films and television programs, including The Sopranos .