2009 has seen the dawn of a shining new star in the blogosphere:  Andrew Breitbart's 'Big Hollywood' website, meant to be a one-stop shopping destination for right-wing conservatives who just can't get enough of complaining about those damned west coast liberals and the commie propaganda spewed in their so-called 'entertainment'.  Most conservative blogs and websites focus on news and politics, and tend to give the entertainment industry a wide berth aside from occasional bitching.  Why?  Well, largely because every time they piss and moan about the terrible smut coming out of the dream factory, someone usually points out that people seem to like movies and TV, and since conservatives are such advocates of the marketplace of ideas, why don't they just make their own movies and let the public decide?  This is a recipe for disaster, of course, because conservatives tend to be really, really bad at this sort of thing.  (Examples:  the Left Behind movie, An American Carol, the post-9/11 career of Dennis Miller.)  

However, there's just no shutting these people up, so along comes Andrew Breitbart -- who, last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, I heard make the frankly absurd claim that a well-known actor friend of his was afraid to admit that he supported our troops overseas because he was afraid such a sentiment would get him blackballed.  (He didn't say what actor it was, but I strongly suspect it was Genius Club star/exxxtreme Christian Stephen "Stevie B." Baldwin.)  Big Hollywood is meant to be a format for writers, filmmakers, artists, actors, and other people allegedly shut out of the Hollywood establishment by its left-wing pashas to sound off about the cruel disenfranchisement they've experienced.  But, perfectly in keeping with the public expressions of a movement that simultaneously claims to be downtrodden and oppressed by liberal chicanery and naturally morally right, beloved by the ordinary Joe, and inevitably triumphant, Big Hollywood also frequently claims that conservative values are on the upswing in the entertainment business, that no one wants to see those crummy left-wing anti-war movies, and that the heartland is just dying for movies that will reflect their true values.  This contradictory pose of the persecuted majority is nothing new, but Breitbart and his compatriots over at Big Hollywood are more shameless than most in assuming it.

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Steve Johnson contemplates the ongoing disappointment that is the Internet thriller. It's not as if Hollywood has ever trusted computers any farther than they could throw them. HAL 9000 tried to hog the spacecraft for himself in 2001: Space Odyssey; in Colossus: The Forbin Project, an electronic super-brain invented by the guy who plays Victor on my grandmother's beloved The Young and the Restless, was designed to serve as a perfect missile defense system but immediately started acting too big for its business; its descendant, the computer in WarGames almost started World War III in an excess of playfulness; and don't get me started on that weekend at Westworld. (Hell, I had more fun at Euro Disney.) But for the better part of a decade now, Hollywood has been specifically trying to tap into the supposedly vast, ominous potential of the Internet and hook into some of those cool cyberpunk dollars, with decidedly mixed results. "Like a virus shrugging off an outdated antibiotic," Johnson writes, "the Net has proved resistant to such attempts. You've seen evidence of the struggle. Over and over, Hollywood has shown us things happening on computer monitors in improbably large and cartoonish letters, as if all Web sites dealing with national security are designed by the folks at Webkinz. 'To eliminate Baltimore, click here,' that kind of thing."

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