Libertas Launches A Broadside

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It's been a while since we checked in with Libertas, the perpetually frowning film blog of the culture-warrin' right wing. Not that we want our dear readers to think we're getting lazy, it's just that usually, you don't actually have to read the site to know what Jason Apuzzo and company are panty-knotting about: the filth coming off of our screens is a perennial favorite (usually in the form of homo-, or at least metro-, -sexuality), second only to their incessent blare about how Hollywood is full of treasonous terror-abetting monsters who want to weaken our resolve to win in Iraq. (This is usually accompanied by a similar, if slightly contradictory, bit of crowing about how out of step these al-Q'aeda-loving movie producers and/or directors are, with Exhibit A being the allegedly dismal performance of some anti-war documentary that played on eight screens. If these guys are so powerless and out of touch with the heartland of America, who cares that they won't make pro-war propaganda? Do we really need the rah-rahing of 38 people on the Upper West Side to achieve final victory in the global war on terror?)

But it just goes to show you: with right-wing crazies, as with the Jerry Lewis telethon, you miss a little and you miss a lot. Jason has a new complaint about the world of moviemaking: there are no good roles for women. But unlike some people, who would blame this on rampant ageism, sexism, the flattening of available roles, the narrowing demographic focus of blockbuster movies, or even the fact that movies, as a rule, tend to kind of suck, thus leaving no good roles for anyone. No, Jason knows where the real trouble lies: with feminism. Or, to put it another way, with women themselves. "As far as I’m concerned the complaining needs to stop at '…more female executives in Hollywood than ever before'," he says, making it clear that there is no need to look any further for the cause of sexism in Hollywood than the obvious fact that women are bad.

Apuzzo then launches into a flat-sounding back-in-MY-day litany about the Golden Age of Hollywood, in which female movie stars were treated with the utmost respect and honor (no one thought of women as sex objects back then, goodness no!, and sexual harrassment was unheard of and thus nonexistent). None of the blame, of course, lies with the American people, because "we're certainly not a more sexist nation than we were", he reckons, having somehow missed the "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon, or, more likely, blamed it on women. The problem as he sees it, is that once women got power, they became morally confused, and now they are all trying to be like men instead of super classy like they were in the liberated 1930s. The article ends, as predictable as clockwork at high tide, with the usually beefing about movie stars who "cuss like sailors, show us their tatas, or take whomever to bed in a fit of some twisted definition of empowerment".

It's all very salutory, and if, as Roy Edroso points out, Apuzzo himself is plenty guilty of glorifying cheesecake in the same way he accuses confused, power-mad female executives of doing, so what? He's performing that most valuable of all public services offered by the right: absolving himself and everyone like him of any role in making our culture a cesspool, and placing the blame where it always belongs: with the victims. Well done, Libertas! Way to fight the good fight!

Warner Bros. Before Warner Hos

Peter Smith — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood columns are the movie biz equivalent of the Drudge Report: juicy bits of unsubstantiated (and unattributed) inside baseball that are wrong a lot more often than they’re right, but are generally so spicy that you just can’t help shoveling them down like jalapeno poppers. The latest, though, is shocking even by sexist Hollywood standards: Finke reports that, due to the underperformance of a handful of recent films, Warner Brothers production boss Jeff Robinoff has decreed that his studio will no longer be making films with women in the lead role. If this is legit, and not just rumor-mongering, Finke speaks for us in quoting Gloria Allred: "It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men." — Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : sexism

Libertas Launches A Broadside

Warner Bros. Before Warner Hos