RUTHFULLY YOURS

Can you imagine Hollywood making a full-length feature film project with huge stars and a giant budget … about the evils of Planned Parenthood? Of course not. But ask for a budget of $15 million to do a film about a corporation buying land for fracking – a new and exciting form of oil drilling – and you can count Hollywood in. The new film Promised Land stars megastar Matt Damon, John Krasinski (Jim from The Office), and Oscar winner Frances McDormand. And it’s insanely boring.

It’s also propaganda. The film centers around a small town poisoned by the fracking. The townspeople whose town actually starred in the film are enraged at the filmmakers; they were told that the film would treat drilling fairly. Who’s funding this masterwork? Image Nation Abu Dhabi, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, unsurprisingly, relies on the failure of fracking to continue milking their traditional drilling market share.

But Promised Land isn’t the only – or even the most egregious – Hollywood leftist misfire of the year. Killing Them Softly, the Brad Pitt-starring gritty crime drama that imploded at the box office, featured characters uttering lines like, “America isn’t a country – it’s a business.” Pitt, in pitching the film at Cannes, said it was “criminal that there still haven’t been any criminal repercussions” for the 2008 financial collapse. If a movie about hit men that’s really about how much the free market sucks works for you, make sure to hit this one up.

Or how about The Campaign, the utter dud starring dud actors Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis? That film sought to attack the importance of political spending – and, of course, the Citizens United case, which established that corporations could spend cash on campaigns. The movie also singled out the Koch brothers for special consideration – they’re played as the Motch brothers by Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow.

Not your style? Try Bully, Harvey Weinstein’s tour de force about how bullying is bad. For an entire movie. Pushed by the Obama administration. Even though bullying is at an all-time low across the country.

Or maybe you’re in the mood for a retelling of the Biblical story of Noah. Only it’s not about mankind’s libertine sins anymore – it’s about environmentalism. Sure, that film doesn’t come out until 2013. But we can get excited, can’t we? According to an exclusive report on the film from Breitbart News, Noah actually has a crisis of conscience about whether to stamp out the future of humanity in order to save the trees. Or some other such nonsense. That film has a budget of over $100 million and stars Russell Crowe.

But there was a shocking amount of good news from Hollywood, too. It began with perhaps the most conservative big budget epic of all time: The Dark Knight Rises. That film featured a communist revolution in Gotham, corporatists going along with it to get along, an Occupy-style fifth column, and a rich person sacrificing himself and his fortune to save the populace. There are even Stalinist show trials starring demented psychopaths. The movie features a scene in which Catwoman, who had once been a socialist revolutionary type, sees a completely ruined mansion. “This used to be someone’s home,” she says, upset at the destruction. “Now it’s everybody’s house,” her friend replies.

The Hunger Games featured a tyrannical government keeping down a subject population. Who clearly need an assault weapons ban to protect them from themselves. Red Dawn featured a fight for American freedom – although the United States wasn’t fighting China, thanks to the Chinese influence on the American movie market, but North Korea.

Then there’s the much-anticipated Zero Dark Thirty, which conservatives suspected would be a paean to President Obama. The Obama administration reportedly gave special access to the filmmakers, with the unspoken proviso that the film show the Obama administration in the most pleasant possible light. Instead, the film takes an accurate look at the impact of enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration, with dramatic credit given to such techniques for crucial information in finding and killing Osama Bin Laden. The Obama CIA has condemned the film’s portrayal of waterboarding – but that’s the Obama CIA.

Hollywood movies still spilled out the typical liberal tropes – evil corporations (Looper), nasty Wall Street types (Arbitrage), nihilism (The Grey), loveable Democratic presidents (Hyde Park on the Hudson), and the like. But overall, Hollywood moved away from as much open propaganda – hell, even Spielberg and radical Tony Kushner couldn’t push their politics into Lincoln to any great extent. That’s a win for Americans.