Kind of a "who cares" story, as in "who cares what a bunch of jagoffs at Entertainment Weekly think are the Top 25 Annette Benning Movies of All Time, let alone the top sci-fi movies."

Still, I'll link it, because this always stirs debate among you morongeeks, and also because it tracks a bit with my own feelings on Star Wars.

That prequel really, really diminished my enthusiasm for the original trilogy. Which is kind of irrational; but the simple fact that I now know Jar-Jar exists in the Lucasverse pretty much puts me off it.

Before, The Force was cool. Now it's got Jar-Jar taint, and just seems kinda ghey.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan gets mentioned in the top five, and Aliens and The Thing are in the top ten, so maybe these Entertainment Weekly fellers aren't the wankers I thought.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (55)
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45 days in jail, which translates in Paris-time to roughly three DUIs, two naked vagina Ferarri shots, and a whirlwind romance/broken engagement with the Detroit Pistons.

A judge sentenced Paris Hilton to 45 days in jail Friday for violating her probation, putting the brakes on the hotel heiress' famous high life.

Hilton, who parlayed her name and relentless partying into worldwide notoriety, must go to jail on June 5 and she will not be allowed any work release, no furloughs, no use of an alternative jail and no electronic monitoring in lieu of jail, Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer ruled after a hearing.

The heiress arrived at court 10 minutes late...

That's a good first step towards convincing a skeptical judge you take the law seriously.

Another good step: Firing an unlicensed firearm at the bailiff.

... and swept into the Metropolitan Courthouse with several men in suits, ignoring screams of photographers lining the route into a rear entrance.

...

Hilton, 26, pleaded no contest in January to reckless driving stemming from a Sept. 7 arrest in Hollywood. Police said she appeared intoxicated and failed a field sobriety test. She had a blood-alcohol level of .08 percent, the level at which an adult driver is in violation of the law.

She was sentenced to 36 months probation, alcohol education and $1,500 in fines.

Two other traffic stops and failure to enroll in a mandated alcohol education program, are what landed the socialite back in court.

I think this is all a career move. Within three months, she'll have a rap album out.

It's all about street cred with the kids these days.

Posted by: Ace at 03:51 PM | Comments (41)
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Al Qaeda in Iraq? I thought they were all in Okinawa or something.

It violates at least three MSM Thou Shalt Nots (Thou Shalt Not Mention Al Qaeda In Iraq; Thou Shalt Not Report US Troops Bravely Triumphing Over Terrorists; Thou Shalt Not Quote Frightened Civilians Pleading For US Aid).

Great story. It ends:

Fighting eased afterward. Soon, previously empty streets were teeming with crowds of people who shook soldiersÂ’ hands as they passed.

And that's gotta be the biggest Thou Shalt Not there is.

Question: That AP story is actually from the Army Times. It's cited as an AP story, but carried on the Army Times.

A bit of searching -- just a brief search -- has failed to turn this story running anywhere else, including on the AP sites listed on Drudge.

Is no one else bothering to carry this story? Is that the game now?

More Red On Red: At some point it stops being Red on Red and starts being Purple on Red. The above story mentions an "insurgent" group which had attempted to fight Al Qaeda, but fled when it ran out of ammo.

This story -- from Le Figaro of all places -- notes the increasing anti-Al-Qaeda sentiment even among insurgents.

Following the unconfirmed assassination by a Sunni tribe of Abu-Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of the Iraqi branch of Al-Qa'idah, the tensions between the Islamonationalist camp of the anti-American insurrection and its other component, the Usamah Bin-Ladin network, have never been so strong.

"Al-Qa'idah has gone too far in massacring Shi'i civilians but also very many Sunnis," explained Omar, a journalist close to the Islamonationalist factions. "More and more armed groups are realizing that Al-Qa'idah has tarnished the image of resistance by seeking to spark off a civil war. It no longer serves the interests of the Iraqis." Former Information Minister Mohammed al-Hakim went further: "Al-Qa'idah is forcing families to give very young girls into marriage with its fighters in order to benefit from the protection of their tribe."

Nothing wins hearts and minds faster than raping the locals' underage daughters.

...

"Al-Qa'idah has just been ousted from Ramadi and Haditha," Mohammed al-Hakim explained. "Its militants are in difficulty in Hit. They are unable to go and take refuge in Tikrit (the stronghold of Saddam Husayn - newspaper's editorial office note), because the tribes do not want this." On the defensive, the jihadists are said to be regrouping in Kirkuk, where they hope to benefit from the divisions between Sunnis and Kurds, and around the mountain bastion of Diyala.

...

The elimination of the Iraqi terrorist network leader could nevertheless lead to a divorce. The different armed groups do have the ability to subjugate the few thousand jihadists linked to Al-Qa'idah. "But they need a good reason to start the offensive, a link, for example, between Iran and Al-Qa'idah," maintained Omar, for whom Al-Qa'idah derives its strength from the presence in its midst of a majority of Iraqis, particularly former centurions of Saddam's special guard.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 03:22 PM | Comments (53)
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A celebration of pure evil. Or, True Neutrality. Whatever.
Not Good, no matter how you slice it.

Unconventional conventioneers:

THE yawning atrium of the Holiday Inn in Memphis had been silent all morning, but by noon on a Friday in late March, it began to bustle and hum with the whispering thwip-thwip-thwip of cards being shuffled and the clacking rattle of dice being rolled, with the shouts of victorious adventurers and the death throes of impaled orcs.

Seated at a table slightly removed from the other would-be knights and wizards, Richard Irby, a burly young man from Jonesboro, Ark., with an easygoing manner, a thin, adolescent beard and a ring piercing his lower lip, was showing off his collection of rare Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards.

"Sometimes it’s actually looked down upon,” Mr. Irby, 18, said incredulously as he explained his hobby, in which card collectors face off in imaginary battles whose outcomes are determined by drawing cards from each player’s deck. “Some people just don’t understand it.”

Welcome to Earth. We call this strange gas "air."

Officially, the 25th annual staging of MidSouthCon, a three-day-long celebration of science fiction, role-playing games, fantasy artwork, medieval weaponry and just about every leisure pursuit that prefers to envision the cosmos as it might have once been or might someday be, would not begin until later that afternoon.'

[Some attendees] were in the hotel lobby engaging in cosplay, a kind of masquerade in which participants behave like the fictional characters whose costumes they wear.

I feel dirty.

...

Nigel Sade, a graphic artist from Kent, Ohio, does not consider himself a cosplayer, but he does dress as a 17th-century buccaneer. Though his sartorial choices have become more acceptable since the success of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Mr. Sade said that some conservative science fiction fans still weren’t ready to embrace him.

“I don’t even deal with them,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Whatever, man. You be from outer space, or from ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I’m going to be over here.”

You can pretty much hear him scoffing "Freakin' geeks" under his breath in an above-it-all sneer. And he'd pull that attitude off, too, except he's dressed up like a gay pirate.

One last image. A couple of "Valkyries" do some kind of dance.

If that's what a Valkyrie looks like, Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta have like totally lied to me.

Thanks to Checkers McBamp.

Dan Riehl Is A Lunatic: Seriously, the guy is a maniac. An obscure name pops up in the news and five minutes later he's got five hundred web references to it.

But this is really over the line. For no especially good reason, Dan decided to search for Nigel Sade, the prancing pirate guy mentioned above.

He actually found him on the web.

That's Nigel Sade on the right. No, really, it is.

Dan, ease up, ease up. The transaxle's gone. You're just grinding metal.

Posted by: Ace at 02:33 PM | Comments (38)
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Kinda-sorta.

Depends on who's doing the tyrannizing and oppressing, of course.

One would think that the blood-stained history of the Soviet Union, or its courageous dissidents condemned to Siberian death camps, would provoke a movie here or there. You'd be wrong. Hollywood loves movies about Naziism and British colonialism; about the Soviets, who butchered many more people than Hitler? Not so much.

Good article from TCS:

But where are the anti-communist movies? Oh, sure, there have been some, from early Cold War propaganda films to such artistic achievements as The Red Danube, Ninotchka, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Killing Fields, East-West, and Before Night Falls. But considering that National Socialism lasted only 12 years in one country (and those it occupied), and Communism spanned half the globe for 75 years, you'd think there'd be lots more stories to tell about Communist rule.

No atrocities, maybe? Nazis and Brits were vicious, but Communists were just intellectually misguided? Well, that seems implausible. They murdered several times as many people. If screenwriters don't know the stories, they could start with the Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such episodes as Stalin's terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara's executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot's mass slaughter—material enough for dozens of movies.

And what's more interesting is that, at least in the thirties and forties and fifties, this just wasn't some run-of-the-mill liberal bias at work. It was actually a conscious, coordinated conspiracy among like-minded communists to block anti-Soviet screenplays and books from ever being filmed, as this 2000 article in Reason notes:

Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), a Communist Party member and for a time the highest-paid screenwriter in town, described the screenwriting trade as "literary guerrilla warfare." The studio system, in which projects were closely supervised, made the insertion of propaganda difficult if not impossible. Hollywood did not become a bastion of Stalinist propaganda, except as part of the war effort, when Russia was celebrated as an ally. Ayn Rand, then a Hollywood screenwriter and one of the few in the movie community who had actually lived under communism, was to point out that, in their zeal to provide artistic lend-lease, American Communist screenwriters went to extraordinary and absurd lengths. In such wartime movies as North Star and Song of Russia (both 1943), they portrayed the USSR as a land of joyous, well-fed workers who loved their masters. Mission to Moscow (also 1943), starring Walter Huston, went so far as to whitewash Stalin's murderous show trials of the 1930s.

But if Comintern fantasies of a Soviet Hollywood were never realized, party functionaries nevertheless played a significant role: They were sometimes able to prevent the production of movies they opposed. The party had not only helped organize the Screen Writers Guild, it had organized the Story Analysts Guild as well. Story analysts judge scripts and film treatments early in the decision making process. A dismissive report often means that a studio will pass on a proposed production. The party was thus well positioned to quash scripts and treatments with anti-Soviet content, along with stories that portrayed business and religion in a favorable light. In The Worker, Dalton Trumbo openly bragged that the following works had not reached the screen: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom; and Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell, also author of Studs Lonigan and vilified by party enforcer Mike Gold as "a vicious, voluble Trotskyite."

Even talent agents sometimes answered to Moscow. Party organizer Robert Weber landed with the William Morris agency, where he represented Communist writers and directors such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Bernard Gordon. Weber carried considerable clout regarding who worked and who didn't. So did George Willner, a Communist agent representing screenwriters, who sold out his noncommunist clients by deliberately neglecting to shop their stories. On a wider scale, the party launched smear campaigns and blacklists against noncommunists, targeting such figures as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis.

As Goldstein says, this all sounds vaguely... what's the word, what's the word... McCarthyite to me.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (18)
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True, it was 19 years ago.

But can we forgive a man who reported acted very much like "a white supremacist, spewing anti-Semitic comments and fondling an autographed copy of “Mein Kampf”?"

Although the LATimes is notoriously biased against Republicans -- witness their absurd politically-timed overcoverage of age-old allegations of Schwarzenegger's "busy hands" -- I have to say that in this case, the LAT is performing a valuable public service in publicizing this noxious videotape of Thompson spewing Nazi hatred.

Correction: What? Huh?

Oh. It turns out the videotape shows him playing a white supremacist character on an ancient episode of NBC's gangster-drama Wiseguy.

I guess that changes things a little. Maybe it's not proof he's a racist, but surely it's very troubling at the very least.

His colleagues say that he was just an actor putting everything he had into playing the role of a charismatic racist...

His colleagues say that. It's not like the writer can say, definitively, on his own authority, that Thompson was "just an actor" playing a role, speaking lines written for him by someone else.

No-- that would be going too far without enough evidence to back it up. So, for now, we'll just have to settle for his colleagues saying this was just a role.

But who knows what it really might have been? The LAT hasn't reached any firm conclusions.

But the LAT has found something also quite troubling -- Thompson's refusal to address this scandal publically.

...

The role is not something Thompson, who is in Orange County for a speech today, has talked a lot about in recent years. (His spokesman did not respond to several requests for comment this week.) In an appearance before the American Bakers Assn. in Phoenix last year,

What is Fred Thompson hiding? Why does he so steadfastly refuse to comment on a 19 year old cheesy NBC crime show starring inanimate block of wood Ken Wahl?

How can we trust a man who refuses to forthrightly address the big issues?

Thompson mentioned that he had a part on "Wiseguy," but he did not go into details.

Ah, hoping to immunize himself from Wiseguygate by alluding to it as if it were just some trifle.

Couldn't it be that Thompson was attracted to the role precisely because he himself is an anti-semitic, Hitler-worshipping white supremacist? Indeed, it could just be that. The LAT finds this amazing "Gotcha!" quote which very nearly proves Thompson is a Nazi:

He summed up his acting career this way: "I played a CIA director, FBI director, an FBI agent, a senator, an admiral, a White House chief of staff, corporate execs and myself twice," Thompson said in the speech. "Some might say I was playing myself on each of these occasions. In each of these roles it seemed as if I had either known the guy I was playing or someone like him.

"So instead of studying admirals or generals, etc., I envisioned that I, Fred Thompson, had become an admiral or general and played myselfÂ…. The range was narrow, but I was establishing myself as the character actor for authority figures."

He admits he always plays himself. He played a Nazi. Therefore, he played the Nazi as himself. Ergo, Fred Thompson is a Nazi. Q.E.D.

Also note he says he played himself twice. Well, I know of that movie where he played himself during his prosecuting days. That leaves one other role in which he played himself.

Which could it be? Obviously, he played himself in the Nazi role, though he went by a different name.

The LAT then claims that "conservative bloggers" are blogging about this.

Who?

Well, one conservative blogger -- Patterico.

And when did he blog about this "problem"?

Well, two months ago, when he said only that the MSM will find some way to "smear" Fred Thompson.

Note he wasn't talking about the Wiseguy role -- he just generally predicted the MSM would smear Thompson.

How absurd!

The LAT is very prescient -- they reported "conservative bloggers" were writing about this issue when not a single blogger anywhere wrote about this before the LAT piece exposing Wiseguygate. They were 100% right, of course -- just precognitively right.

They see into the future and shit.

Now, maybe I got a little carried away with the flaming skull and sirens.

But still -- we've just discovered the LAT can see into the future. It's reporting claims of "conservative bloggers" writing about this issue before that actually happens.

And that, at least, deserves one siren.

Posted by: Ace at 12:56 PM | Comments (160)
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The alternate-reality-based community:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

...

Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance. White Americans are less likely than others to believe that either the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance. Americans are more likely than their elders to believe the President or the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.

Truther Nation.

Sickening.

Can a good liberal please explain to me how this mass psychosis is any different, or any better, than Hitler's "stabbed in the back" propaganda justifying the hatred (and then murder) of internal political enemies?

And remember -- John Kerry has identified himself as among those 26% of Democrats who "aren't sure."

Thanks to A. Weasel.

Posted by: Ace at 12:29 PM | Comments (107)
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Just because I like the guy, and many of his movies. It's not that I dislike the Spider-Man movies; more like I'm appreciative of the stuff he gets right, but disappointed that he doesn't get it all right.

Anyway, the guy who started his career filming dumb little horror movies in his Michigan backyard isn't letting mainstreams success go to his head.

Are you comfortable with being a franchise guy now?

RAIMI: Well, I know that that will pass. Mostly I see myself as who I was for 20 years of making films professionally, and that is Mr. Low-Budget Schlockmeister Horror Film Guy. You know, low-budget crime thriller or low-budget supernatural thriller. Although I have the occasional different picture, IÂ’d always thought it was strange that [Sony Pictures chief] Amy Pascal hired me to do [the first] film. I mean, I really love the film and I wanted it. But I thought it was a bold and unusual choice and when it had that tremendous success as a big franchise, I realized this too will pass. This is a very strange experience and I realize how unusual it is, and I know that it wonÂ’t be here long.

I know this is probably a stupid move for him, but I'd like him to be stupid anyhow: Bring back Ash, with a decent (but not large) budget. A big-budget Ash wouldn't be Ash.

With his cachet, and with the growing cult of Ash, churning out a mid-budget Army of Darkness sequel would be practically guaranteed to at least break even. And with a modest budget, it could have a big financial upside.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (17)
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They're very serious about winning the war on terror.

But as Barack Obama so eloquently said about violence, there are many types of "terror." The verbal terror of Don Imus, the "terror of privilege" of the Duke 3, the terror of global temperatures rising just over one degree Farenheit over the course of the next century, which gives rise to the terror of being in that "'tweener" state of not knowing if you can get away with just an extra shirt or if you need a light jacket....

A singularly bad idea, pandering the those who claim there is no real terror threat. But this isn't like previous over-the-moon proposals like a Department of Peace and Nonviolence, proposals generally offered by fringe actors and leftwing extremists usually kept out of the limelight by image-conscious establishment Democrats.

No, this is being proposed by the Democratic leadership. They are seriously proposing precious intelligence dollars go towards tracking down and terminating with extreme prejudice any "cells" of "extremist carbon dioxide molecules."

Will this involve repositioning surveillance satellites, moving them away from Islamabad and Teheran to cover the Ross Ice Shelf? I imagine it will.

Democrats, who outnumber Republicans on the committee, blocked the minority from stripping the warming language from the bill.

Intelligence panel Chairman Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat, said the climate-change study is one of several shifts his party has made to intelligence policy.

"We're concerned that global warming might impact our ability to maintain national security," he told The Times, describing the idea as "cutting edge."

Reyes, notoriously, didn't know the difference between a Shi'a and a Sunni, and couldn't say which of those sects the famously Wahabist Al Qaeda susbscribed to.

But, you know, he's the guy to decide where the spy satellites ought to be scoping.

As Hot Air notes, if this goes through, the next terrorist attack on America tolls the deathknell for the Democratic Party.

They don't seem to care. They're that out there now. MoveOn.org and the nutroots provide most of their funding -- so they've got to dance with the girl that brung 'em, even as she leads them into calamity.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (31)
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Nuance. Perspective. Shilling for terrorists.

It's yet another verse in the left's eternal song -- there are no external enemies. Only internal enemies -- fellow countrymen -- who must be treated nearly as enemies of the state.

Were this sort of thinking applied to any group the left approves of, they'd be denigrating the demonization of fellow Americans as a craven, McCarthy-esque attempt to drum up fear and loathing of "The Other."

But Republicans really are The Other, the bogeymen you really ought to be frightened of.

So it's really no difficult trick to claim the Muslim Brotherhood poses no threat while Mitt Romeny does.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (16)
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