If there's one thing we here at the Screengrab love more than movies, it's crazy right-wing cranks. Luckily, when Roger L. Simon is around, we don't have to pick just one. Simon, who prior to co-founding doomed conservative clearinghouse Pajamas Media could boast as his greatest accomplishment having penned Scenes from a Mall, a film which brought us the delightful vision of Woody Allen going down on Bette Midler in a movie theater, has recently been on a tear about how those traitorous dogs in Hollywood, a town which apparently has corrupted everyone who sojourns there except himself, Burt Prelutsky, and Stephen Baldwin, are so alienated from real Americans that they keep making anti-war movies even though they lose money doing so. His first installment in what is shaping up to be an interminable series on the subject revealed the reason the damn dirty hippies of Tinseltown keep making these hateful anti-American screen screeds: it's because if you are a Hollywood liberal, you are, de facto, a "miserable self-serving bastard". He also makes the curious argument that people like Brian DePalma, director of Redacted, are making movies that "validate the orthodoxy", which seems to go against his point that these movies are economic failures due to the widespread support of the war displayed by most red-blooded Americans. Simon follows up that one with a claim that since Hollywood liberals know nothing of what they speak when it comes to war (an assessment with which Oliver Stone might take issue), their films are the "addled product of unacknowledged moral confusion"; he then settles back and says that since the surge is working so well, he's beginning what may be a very long wait for the Iraq War version of Casablanca. His latest on the subversive commie rats who lurk in the Hollywood hills is a hatchet job on Paul Haggis, who he first suspected of anti-American treachery when he saw Crash -- after all, Simon argues, he's lived in L.A. for years and hardly ever saw any racism, so there must not be any. Simon goes on to savage In the Valley of Elah, and 'explains' the deviltry of this life-hating scum by noting that, like Sean Penn, he is under the sway of that charismatic Stalinist cult leader Dennis Kucinich. He knows it's true, because he read it on Wikipedia! Keep up the great work, Roger.
