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In a recent post titled “Something Not Worth Seeing,” KY lubricant spokesman Perez Hilton, with his usual wit, class and delicacy, declared that Oliver Stone’s yet-to-shoot George W. Bush was was not his cup of tea. “We’d rather go see the Rachael Ray life story….on Lifetime!” was how the blogger put it, writing in the second person presumably based on the assumption that he speaks for an entire nation. To punctuate his assessment of the unmade Stone film’s quality, Mr. Hilton playfully altered a photograph of the actress cast as Laura Bush by painting a disembodied, semen-spewing penis over her lips.

Not content to leave the matter at that bit of MS Paint protest, when the next casting announcement for Stone’s film hit the wires, Hilton once again saw fit to inform his public that W does not bear the coveted Perez Hilton seal of approval. “We still don’t think we’ll spend money to watch it,” Hilton sniffed at the news that James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn had been cast as the Bush parents. “We wouldn’t watch even if it were free.”

Why doth Perez protest so much? He can’t be a closet Bush protector––in the second post, he refered to our Commander in Chief as “arguably America’s worst president ever. And dumbest!” So I wonder: does Hilton know something about Stone’s not-yet-existent film that we don’t know? Perhaps in addition to his skills at ****-drawing and self-promotion, Perez Hilton has been gifted with clairvoyance?

Under discussion:

King Kong  (1933)

Wanna know how I know I’m not racist? I’ve been staring at the cover of the latest Vogue magazine for weeks and I didn’t once link the image of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen to King Kong and Fay Wray. But plenty of other people have been making the connection, calling the Annie Leibovitz-photographed cover offensive. Sure, maybe the pose makes James, who is apparently now the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue, look too violent, but I wouldn’t necessarily claim he’s made to ape Kong (pun intended).

Then again, it took me years to find out/realize that King Kong was as racist a film as they come. Perhaps I’m more ignorant than racist, at least in the way NAACP spokesman Richard McIntire puts it: “some younger folks who don’t have that exposure may not even know what the King Kong movies were, may not get that.” (quoted by Women’s Wear Daily). However, when I finally did watch the 1933 original in its entirety as an adult, the colonialism allegory was clear as day. And I believe the film is pretty racist in retrospect, as are so, so many early films. Yet for all the places that have been colonized in history, I think it’s even more racist to claim that Kong is necessarily metaphoric of black victims of colonization.

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Under discussion:

Under the Same Moon  (2007)

I’m not totally convinced that this is not a joke, but the Huffington Post claims that the Weinstein Company is going to start running this TV ad for Under the Same Moon today. The immigration drama broke the record for the biggest opening for a Spanish-language film in the States last week, and essentially became TWC’s first Miramax-style success (acquire small/foreign film; identify and laser-target natural audience; use success with that audience to push film as general arthouse hit) since the Weinstein brothers divorced Disney in 2005. Apparently, Harvey thinks the way to maintain that success is by going after the segment of the audience that gets off on the idea that their movie choices could turn CNN pundit Lou Dobbs into a weepy little girl.

Each of the ad’s three pullquotes––from TIME, the Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly––claim that Moon’s portrait of one family’s border struggle could wring sympathetic emotion from hardass Dobbs, who preaches almost nightly about how immigrants should be rounded up and launched into outer space, our agricultural and service economies be damned. And maybe that’s true––maybe Dobbs has been waiting his entire professional life for the indie film that would turn his schtick around––but with the three references lined up consecutively, the ad plays like an unfunny spoof of mainstream film critic laziness. Is “Lou Dobbs will cry” such internationally recognized shorthand for “this is a good movie about immigration that will appeal to your liberal sensibilities and change your conservative asshole friend’s mind”, that 90 percent of the print film critics who still have jobs simply could not conceive of stating the matter any other way?

Oh, and an Impending Snake Eats Tail media alert: TWC has apparently booked the ad on CNN in five major markets.