The Artist , by the French director Michel Hazanavicius, begins with the noise of an old-fashioned projector and a black screen. Music then comes up, a jazzy tune reminiscent of the 1920s without being quite of the period. The titles which then appear are entirely of the period, known to us now as “the silent era” — as is what we are soon seeing on the screen, which is a lurid adventure yarn in living black-and-white. Called “A Russian Affair,” the movie has reached a peak of excitement as the hero, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is being tortured with an electrical current through his head, administered by a couple of sinister-looking Russians. “I won’t talk!” he cries to his torturers by means of a dialogue title printed on the screen. “I won’t say a word” — a promise that the film allows him to keep in spite of the word he has just supposedly spoken. “Speak!” the Russians command him, also by inter-title. But he remains silent — then and throughout both that film and the one we are watching. It is a good joke and one that Mr. Hazanavicius returns to several times, as when he shows Valentin gathered with his fellow stars on the other side of the screen, awaiting their cue to appear for a curtain call at the film’s premiere under a sign reading “Please be silent behind the screen.” Later, his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) ominously says — again in print, of course — to Valentin: “We have to talk, George.” Alas, George has already told Al Zimmer (John Goodman), the studio boss of Kinograph pictures what he told the sinister Russians, namely that he’s not talking. Shown his first talkie, George tells Al via another dialogue title, “If that’s the future, you can have it.” Well, Al does and he doesn’t. Sticking with silence, he takes a bath with a self-produced film in which we see his character sinking into quicksand at the end. Virtually overnight, he’s all washed up. While he is on his way down in the quicksand of post-crash 1929, sinking into despair and alcoholism and, therefore, cliché, a young ingenue called Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), with whom he has had a brief but unforgettable flirtation in his glory days, is on her way up. She becomes, in one of the film’s few false notes, a “superstar.” For although the OED gives a date of 1925 for the first appearance of this word, I think for most people at the time just being a star was quite enough hype to be going on with — and quite enough, too, to make the familiar, melodramatic point that youth must be served and the old must give way to the young — as the wounded and failing George overhears Peppy saying to an interviewer. But this isn’t, quite, A Star is Born , for we also know from the larger-than-life faces of these two extraordinarily attractive people — which are all that we have to go on, after all — that their love is a different and brighter cliché. That love conquers everything will go without saying. George’s trademark on screen and off is his little Jack Russell terrier. “If only he could talk,” he says of this beast, though his own words are equally unheard. The inarticulate but obviously highly trained animal is also a reminder of the origin of the movies in vaudeville — where animal acts had absence of speech in common with early movies. Both were necessarily founded on familiar conventions, also known as clichés, but at their best — as they are in The Artist — these are clichés that preserve, somehow, an unexpected freshness. In The Artist this is owing, I think, to the unfamiliarity of modern audiences with the conventions of silent film. So much can be conveyed in the absence of speech partly because the absence of speech is, to us, so shocking and unusual. I think that our visual sense must be more acute in compensation as well, for we are continually struck by the long-forgotten silent-movie experience, especially the larger than life beauty of the two principals and, therefore, of their not quite tragic love for each other. To me, at any rate, it was like watching the familiar story for the first time. The unfamiliar context created sorrow at the lovers’ partings and joy at their reunions that would hardly have been possible in a more straightforward — and spoken — telling. The movie is a love story, but the yearning it expresses is not just of two people for each other but of a whole world for articulacy and understanding. At one point George has a dream where everything around him makes its appropriate noise — all noises we can hear on the sound-track — and only he is mute. Maybe, too, I was moved partly by the evidence that Hollywood story-telling is not quite dead after all, as I have so often suspected it is in recent years. Although the movie was made principally by French people, there was enough of a Hollywood presence in it, even beyond the setting in the Southern California of the heroic period, to make it a hopeful sign and an example to its models and idols to return to their roots.
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The Artist
My WSB colleague and guru, the Talkmaster Neal Boortz, created a bit of controversy this past week over comments he made about shooting thugs in Atlanta. The controversy actually blew up because of Ed Schultz at MSNBC who claimed Boortz was advocating the murder of urban youths in Atlanta. In fact, you can see this screen shot from the Schutlz show highlighting Neal Boortz’s controversial comment: There’s just one problem here. In both the screen shot and the accompanying audio, Ed Schultz doctored Neal Boortz’s quote. See, Boortz said those things, but in the middle there was this bit: You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city. The full quote is below the fold. But this is the relevant portion for purposes of Ed Schultz’s monologue and it is clearly references self-defense, not wanton murder of thugs. In fact, when Schultz then interviewed a Hillary Shelton, Sr. of the NAACP about Boortz’s comment and Mr. Shelton brought up Boortz making the comment in terms of self-defense (around 11:02), Schultz jumped in and pushed the guy away from Boortz’s context and moved on to bashing the tea party movement. This was a wholly dishonest editing of Boortz’s quote and his context, without even using ellipses in the on-screen text, to accuse Boortz of advocating murder instead of self defense. Here are Boortz’s full remarks: You know what? I, for one, am tired of putting up with this crap. And you want to know why I moved out of Atlanta and only spend a couple of weeks a year in this town? That’s one of the reasons. Carjackings, violence, people getting shot. It’s ridiculous. This city harbors an urban culture of violence. And I want you to look around. You drive into the city. The railroad overpass is on the downtown connector covered with graffiti. And that– That is just an advertisement for everybody coming into this town that we really don’t give a damn about those who would screw up our quality of life around here. We really just don’t care. We don’t care enough to paint over graffiti on the overpasses that come into our city, advertising welcome to Atlanta, here’s some of our finest graffiti, from some of our finest urban thugs and their little gang signs. And pick up the paper tomorrow morning. Read about all the carjackings. Read about the innocent people shot for the pure de-hell of it. This town is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I’ll tell you what it’s gonna take. You people, you are – you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city. And let their — let their mommas — let their mommas say, “He was a good boy. He just fell in with the good crowd.” And then lock her ass up.
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Ed Schultz Doctored a Neal Boortz Quote to Accuse Boortz of Advocating Murder
TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE CAPTION, VISIT TobyToons . The poll will be in the right sidebar on the screen. The polling will start Sunday morning and end at 9:00pm Sunday night. Cross-Posted: TobyToons Here is this week’s caption contest. This week, we will take entries until midnight Saturday. On Sunday, I will create a poll of my favorites and let you, the RS readers, vote on them (on TobyToons.com). Then the top polling entry will be announced Monday morning. Have fun.
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RS Saturday Caption Contest 01.29.2011
Featured links from Drudge today: Screen Name: Put an X in the box next to the team you think will win and return via e-mail to bjgfootball@hotmail.com by Greenspan: FEAR undermines America’s recovery… POLL: Working-class whites shun Dems… Food Stamp Recipients at Record 41.8 Million Americans… GOLDMAN SACHS: Economy ‘fairly bad’ or ‘very bad’ over next 6 months… New Yorkers’
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Bad Economic News Keeps Coming
Well folks, looks like I could be “peeling off” a few more here. Not only do conservatives have to contend with Obama’s OFA (Organizing for America) , progressive orgs like MoveOn, SEIU, et al in massive Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts but now I’ve discovered to my chagrin that NBC, MSNBC and YouTube are in the mix. How did I get here? I’m not going to divulge all of my “Mrs. James Bond” tactics but it’s easier to just put it up on the screen in pictures. I started out by wanting to delve further into the ultra-progressive cell phone company CREDO which has donated over $65 million to progressive causes but got side-tracked when I discovered what I’m about to show you. CREDO had its beginnings from Working Assets: Working Assets is a for-profit business that markets services, including phone services and credit cards, to a liberal demographic, and provides a small percentage of its annual profit to non-profit liberal and activist organizations. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see that Drummond Pike was the co-founder. Working Assests and Credo fund ACORN and it’s voter registration arm Project Vote. As the screen shots from 2007 and 2008 illustrate. Click to enlarge. Here is Working Assets web page. Since a lot of these web pages tend to go to “URL heaven” I’m going to give you a screen shot of their “Activism Center.” Highlighting is mine: Note the above highlighted paragraph: To further strengthen our democracy in the run-up to the 2008 election, we helped 2.5 million Americans register to vote and organized our landmark Election Protection program [emphasis mine] of volunteers, who fanned out across the U.S. to monitor polls and guarantee free and fair elections. What many on the Right may not realize is that Election Protection and Election Administration are code words used by the Left to stop legitimate solutions to problems within our electoral system. Groups like ACORN and Project Vote have routinely sued Secretaries of State across the country to stop voter ID bills and prevent states from removing dead and inactive voters from the rolls. The term Election Protection is thrown around on the left as a way to convey what they like to portray as targeted attacks on minorities. So I googled Election Protection and came up with this. Header is below: We get a list of all their member organizations. ACLU, Alliance for Justice et al. The Alliance for Justice members are mostly legal orgs but also contains Planned Parenthood and others protecting women’s abortion rights. SEIU as no surprise is on the member list but I didn’t screen shot it. Now on to another screen shot of members: We see NAACP, Deepak Bhargava’s Center for Community Change, Color of Change and CREDO mobile. However, if one scrolls down further we find these other “members.” And the mega-surprise for me here folks was, as you guessed it: NBC News, MSNBC, and YouTube. Partners in a massive GOTV effort in 2008. Now if one scrolls way down to the bottom of the page you will see at the bottom left hand corner “follow us on twitter.” Their twitter handle is 866OURVOTE, AKA Election Protection . And if one spells that out in numbers, it is the contact phone number at the top of the Election Protection page. 866OURVOTE’s web page is Election Protection and here is a quote: If you experience problems at the polls on Election Day(such as long lines, voter intimidation, suspicious behavior, machine malfunctions, registration errors, etc.) you can report it to us via text message or the web by using your Twitter account! (Don’t have one? Click here to sign-up.) Now if you look at a tweet they put out on Nov. 5, 2008, one day after the election: (screen shot in case they pull the account…): The URL leads you to this web page and I’ll give you a screen shot and a quote. Highlighting is mine: Washington, DC — Election Protection, the nation’s largest nonpartisan [emphasis mine] voter rights coalition, has fielded over 200,000 calls to its 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline, including over 80,000 calls on Election Day alone. Questions and concerns from voters across the country – from the hotline, website and social networking sites like Twitter – were answered and acted upon by a network of over 10,000 trained volunteers across the country. Nonpartisan? With members like ACLU, CREDO Mobile, SEIU, Color of Change, Center for Community Change? Come on guys, give me a break. For some reason this writer highly doubts with all these ultra-liberal progressive organizations involved in this massive GOTV effort their campaign slogan was “Vote McCain/Palin.” Even though we all know Maddow, Olbermann and Matthews are full of drivel, it is still disturbing to this writer to find the names of NBC, MSNBC and YouTube as members of this “GOTV Coalition.” Allegations of media bias have swirled around since before Obama was elected. Media outlets have been accused of ignoring stories and refusing to properly vet Obama and now with NBC, MSNBC and YouTube partners with OTHER leftist organizations to “protect elections” it’s easy to determine what side they are working for. Yes, this may have helped place a Man in the Oval Office in November of 2008. FYI anyone interested in using CREDO Mobile they use Sprint service. Crossposted at Emerging Corruption Crossposted at Conservative Outlooks
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NBC/MSNBC & YouTube teamed with progressive orgs with financial ties to ACORN in 2008
