Twice over the last two years I’ve felt it necessary to rid Hollywood Elsewhere of the loons — i.e., the intemperate thinkers and ignorance-spreading extremists. Honest debate is obviously vital and necessary, but people who deliberately spread gross untruths are being removed. Call it a reaction to the midterms and being enraged by mainstream media lies about what’s really happening in this country (a situation that was brilliantly explained by Bill Moyers a few days ago), but I’m feeling a primal urge to flush out the more obnoxious righties.

Two conservatives (Travis Crabtree and Thunderballs) got the boot within the last 12 hours. Moyers and the late Howard Zinn are two of my personal heroes, and the afore-mentioned commenters assaulted their reps with cheap, ludicrous rightwing mythology, and that’s why they’re gone.

Crabtree wrote that “you don’t get any pinker” — socialist, Communist-leaning, vaguely subversive — “than Bill Moyers or Howard Zinn.” Moyers’ reputation is beyond reproach. Zinn, who died last January, actually did believe in a form of socialist philosophy, but one based upon an understanding that the rich and powerful will always attempt to suppress and manipulate the less rich and less powerful, and that a good government will always strive to redress this imbalance. And I won’t allow rightwing hammers to push the totally discredited idea that free-market selfishness is the only acceptable U.S. theology.

Differing opinion is the lifeblood of any comment forum, but accusing this or that learned person of being “pink” is odious and belligerent, and I simply won’t tolerate that kind of poison. The 1950s philosophies of John Wayne are dead, or will certainly be smothered ’round these parts.

Thunderballs said that Zinn “is no different than Glenn Beck” and “the fact that Zinn is actually taught in schools is horrifying.” To equate Beck’s hysterical, ignorance-pandering ravings to Zinn, a left-wing professor and social historian who wrote one of the most influential and widely respected counter-history books in the history of this country is just sickening. It’s way beyond the pale.

For whatever reason HE house-cleanings tend to happen in the early fall. The first “Stalinist Purge” happened on 8.30.08, and the second one (directed more at snarky slapdash writing than the the Fox News brigade) happened on 9.6.09.

I am actively looking for others to remove. Those who object to guys like Travis Crabtree and Thunderballs being banned from this site are urged to consider leaving of their own volition — please. The knives are out and, as I put it two years ago, “the house is being tented and the bugs will be killed.

“Interesting, thoughtful, well-phrased opinions of any kind are eternally welcome here. But the uglies, mark my words, are getting the boot.

“I believe in beauty, redemption, catharsis and the daily cleansing of the soul. I live for the highs of the mind — for the next nervy retort, impertinent crack, witty turn of phrase, turnaround idea or wicked joke. And I know — we all know — that blunt-gruff reactions and persistent ideological ranting works against the flow of such things.

“I will not permit the infinite array of reflections about life, movies and politics that could and should appear on Hollywood Elsewhere to be suppressed or pushed aside by the relentless hammerhead barking of a small cadre of ideological Mussolinis, tough guys, hardballers and friends of Bill O’Reilly.”

“These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one.” — Clemenza to Michael Corleone in Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather (1972).

The independent voters who voted against the the last two years on Tuesday were and are children — little people feeding off emotion (i.e., lethargy) and unconcerned with hard facts. Because “no matter your view of President Obama, he effectively saved capitalism,” N.Y. Times columnist Timothy Egan pointed out on 11.2. “And for that, he paid a terrible political price.”

It was Obama’s fault, yes, that he and his spokespersons failed to convey pertinent facts. You can’t expect children to engage themselves, buckle down and seek out facts — they have to be told and shown. But facts are still facts.

“The banking system was resuscitated by $700 billion in bailouts started by Bush (a fact unknown by a majority of Americans), and finished by Obama, with help from the Federal Reserve. It worked. The government is expected to break even on a risky bet to stabilize the global free market system. Had Obama followed the populist instincts of many in his party, the underpinnings of big capitalism could have collapsed. He did this without nationalizing banks, as other Democrats had urged.

“Saving the American auto industry, which has been a huge drag on Obama’s political capital, is a monumental achievement that few appreciate, unless you live in Michigan. After getting their taxpayer lifeline from Obama, both General Motors and Chrysler are now making money by making cars. New plants are even scheduled to open. More than 1 million jobs would have disappeared had the domestic auto sector been liquidated.

“Yes, an industry was saved, and the government will probably make money on the deal — one of Obama’s signature economic successes.

“Interest rates are at record lows. Corporate profits are lighting up boardrooms; it is one of the best years for earnings in a decade.

“All of the above is good for capitalism, and should end any serious-minded discussion about Obama the socialist. But more than anything, the fact that the president took on the structural flaws of a broken free enterprise system instead of focusing on things that the average voter could understand explains why his party was routed on Tuesday.

“Obama got on the wrong side of voter anxiety in a decade of diminished fortunes.

Nobody gets credit for preventing a plane crash. ‘It could have been much worse!’ is not a rallying cry. And, more telling, despite a meager uptick in job growth this year, the unemployment rate rose from 7.6 percent in the month Obama took office to 9.6 today.

“Billions of profits, windfalls in the stock market, a stable banking system — but no jobs.

“Of course, the big money interests who benefited from Obama’s initiatives have shown no appreciation. Obama, as a senator, voted against the initial bailout of AIG, the reckless insurance giant. As president, he extended them treasury loans at a time when economists said he must — or risk further meltdown. Their response was to give themselves $165 million in executive bonuses, and funnel money to Republicans this year.

“President Franklin Roosevelt also saved capitalism, in part by a bank ‘holiday’ in 1933, at a time when the free enterprise system had failed. Unlike Obama, he was rewarded with midterm gains for his own party because a majority liked where he was taking the country. The bank holiday was incidental to a larger public works campaign.

“Obama can recast himself as the consumer’s best friend, and welcome the animus of Wall Street. He should hector the companies sitting on piles of cash but not hiring new workers. For those who do hire, and create new jobs, he can offer tax incentives. He should finger the financial giants for refusing to clean up their own mess in the foreclosure crisis. He should point to the long overdue protections for credit card holders that came with reform.

“And he should veto, veto, veto any bill that attempts to roll back some of the basic protections for people against the institutions that have so much control over their lives – insurance companies, Wall Street and big oil.

“They will whine a fierce storm, the manipulators of great wealth. A war on business, they will claim. Not even close. Obama saved them, and the biggest cost was to him.”

The script for Ivan Reitman‘s No Strings Attached, written by Elizabeth Meriwether, was originally called Fuckbuddies. Paramount wouldn’t release a film with that title so they renamed it Friends With Benefits — an okay substitute. But a Justin Timberlake film with the same title had dibs.

That ten-year-old *NSYNC track is the most familiar reference, but for me No Strings Attached is a decades-old Richard Rodgers title. What an ignoble ending for a script that everyone liked when it was on the Black List.

This trailer for Peter Weir‘s The Way Back is pretty much the same one that appeared three weeks ago, but it’s a little bit different so let’s give credit where slightly due and what the hell.

I liked Lost in Translation as far as it went, but otherwise I’ve never been a huge Sofia Coppola fan. But now I am. Last night I saw Somewhere (Focus Features, 12.22), an existentially arid Michelangelo Antonioni-ish art film. For me it contains the same “traces of feeling” that Antonioni said he was aiming for in L’eclisse (’62).

At last September’s Venice Film Festival, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson asked Coppola, “[Given] the stately pace, are you a fan of Antonioni? Were you thinking about that kind of approach? There’s that element of taking your audience to the edge of your character’s boredom.”

And Coppola answered, “I love some of his films, he always made an impression…and Antonioni does do that. I mean, I must know that from watching his films. But I wasn’t thinking that directly.” However indirect the suggestion, Somewhere definitely has that mood of elegant contemplation, that sense of things being anxious and slightly corroded under the surface, that unhurried way of taking it all in.

In order to become a Best Actress contender this year, you apparently have to play a character who not only struggles (who doesn’t?) but suffers through anguish and misery. You can’t be nominated for playing someone who just plows right through with a robust personality and somehow makes it all work out. You have to wear the yoke around your neck and show the hurt and the steel that it takes to get through difficult stuff.

Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory

Because if you didn’t have to do that, Rachel McAdams‘ irrepressible, never-say-die Morning Glory character could leap right into the Best Actress arena. Her character, a TV morning-show producer, has the drive and pizazz to finesse a tough job in a brutal, high-pressure environment.

Her vibe isn’t the same as Judy Holliday‘s in her Oscar-winning performance in Born Yesterday, but it’s almost in the same general ballpark. Ditto Katherine Hepburn‘s Oscar-nominated performance as a headstrong heiress in The Philadelphia Story. The closest precedent, of course, is Holly Hunter ‘s Oscar-nominated news-producer performance in Broadcast News.

But no — today’s rule is that tears have to stream down your cheek and you have to get bruised and pushed and kicked around.

Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, portraying a Manhattan ballet dancer, suffers through intense insecurity and anxiety about whether she’s good enough to satisfy her director and stave off a competitor. Poor Annette Bening suffers the pain of marital betrayal in The Kids Are All Right, and Julianne Moore — the cause of Bening’s anguish — bears the guilt of having jumped into an impulsive, unwise affair. Another Year‘s Lesley Manville is constantly grappling with alcoholism and loneliness. Jennifer Lawrence suffers through constant suspicion, hostility and threats in Winter’s Bone. Nicole Kidman‘s character is tortured by the relatively recent death of a young son in Rabbit Hole. Anne Hathaway is dealing with first-stage Parkinsons disease in Love and Other Drugs. During half of Blue Valentine Michelle Williams is grappling with a marriage that’s lost its spark and is heading downhill. And I Am Love‘s Tilda Swinton plays a Russian-born wife of an Italian industrialist whose affair with a younger man (a chef) invites terrible tragedy.

Think about Diane Keaton winning Best Actress for Annie Hall 32 years ago, and how the only downswirl issues her character went through were relationship problems with Woody Allen. That kind of female role doesn’t seem to be happening any more. Not lately it hasn’t, and certainly not this year.

I’m basically saying I wouldn’t mind if the woe-is-me moodface from all those highly-touted female performances was enlivened by a little spritzy can-do by way of McAdams.

Meet the mopies — always with the tears and the stress and the anguish and the pain. (Except, possibly, in the case of Amy Adams — I haven’t seen The Fighter yet.)

Remember that moment in Blazing Saddles when “new sheriff” Cleavon Little said “let me just whip this out” and the crowd screamed and recoiled? Mel Brooks knew, and so, presumably, does Scott Feinberg.

Isn’t using the image of a tree kind of a literal-minded thing to do? (And with a metaphorical ladder leaning against it?) And how come Brad Pitt‘s name is above Sean Penn‘s? Penn is the central protagonist while Pitt plays a supporting character (i.e., the adolescent Penn’s dysfunctional bad dad) in the flashback sequences. And don’t you need something to balance that little house with the yellow-glow windows on the lower right? Like, for instance, the silhouette of a Tryceratops or Tyrannosuarus Rex on the lower left?

This Hollywood Reporter‘s just-posted Best Actress round-table includes Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech), Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Hilary Swank (Conviction), and Amy Adams (The Fighter)…fine. Swank is a non-contender and I’m not convinced that Carter, excellent as she is, is a Best Supporting Actress favorite but okay, whatever.

Kids Are All Right costar Julianne Moore wasn’t invited because she was at the London and Rome film festivals. Another Year‘s Lesley Manville wasn’t in town, I presume. Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams and Winter’s Bone contender Jennifer Lawrence were in England shooting. And nobody was focusing on Love and Other Drugs star Anne Hathaway or Morning Glory star Rachel McAdams when this thing was taped on or about 10.25.

Another corporate CG entertainment intended to narcotize the nodding masses with a fake default “liberate yourselves!” message. Hot babes (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone) behind bars. The fight against the machines. Any movie with Scott Glenn portraying a wise, all-seeing Obi Wan Kenobi guru type in a white robe (who is literally called, believe it or not, “Wiseman”) is an automatic level 10 on the HE bullshit meter.

“To see just how our system was rigged by the financial, political, and university elites, run, don’t walk, to a showing of Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job,” said Bill Moyers in a 10.29 Boston University speech honoring Howard Zinn. “Take a handkerchief because you’ll weep for the republic.”

Moyers was describing the poisoning of the American political system by way of “a 30-year trend” — i.e., one that began with Ronald Reagan — “toward plutocracy, where the rich get richer at the expense of the average citizen.”

The spreading corruption funded by this plutocracy is easily the one fundamental water-table evil of our times — the central pipeline of political pollution from which myriad wrongs and nutter lies and smoke-screens are being fed. One would think that recognizing this could become a basic bond uniting progressives and tea-partyers alike. If Barack Obama had the stones to say what Moyers said a few days ago in this speech, people would rally behind him like never before.

But no — Obama talks instead of John Boehner and Michelle Bachmann and the corporate-funded right as honorable Americans with whom he’d like to find “common ground.” What delusion! Nobody knows how to capitulate to evil better than Barack Obama.

The stink of rhetorical horseshit that filled the East Room during Obama’s post-election-wipeout press conference yesterday afternoon represents the fundamental lie that will erode and destroy his Presidency if he doesn’t wake up. The super-rich have pretty much taken over everything — not just the government but much if not most of the political donation streams going to the major parties, as well as most of the major media news organizations. (I was listening to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer ramble on about the meaning of the midterms yesterday, and the man is nothing but a corporate lackey and a jack-in-the-box entertainer who spews “white noise” pollution.)

President Obama will never admit it and Blitzer and his ilk will never tell you that what’s happening right now is far more pernicious than the corruptions that took root during the age of the turn-of-the-century robber barons.

“To remember a thing, you must first name it,” Moyers said. “We’re talking about slush funds. Donors are laundering their cash through front groups with high-falutin’ names like American Crossroads. That’s one of the two slush funds controlled by Karl Rove in his ambition to revive the era of the robber barons.

“Promise me you won’t laugh when I tell you that although Rove and the powerful Washington lobbyist who is his accomplice described the first organization as ‘grassroots’, 97% of its initial contributions came from four billionaires. Yes: The grass grows mighty high when the roots are fertilized with gold.

“Rove, other conservative groups and the Chamber of Commerce have in fact created a ‘shadow party’ determined to be the real power in Washington just like Rome’s Opus Dei in Dan Brown‘s The DaVinci Code. In this shadow party the plutocrats reign.

“We have reached what the new chairman of Common Cause and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls “the perfect storm that threatens American democracy: an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money, flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.

” We’re losing our democracy to a different system. It’s called plutocracy.”

“That word again. But Reich is right. That fraction of one percent of Americans who now earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans — a group that includes the top executives of giant corporations and those Wall Street hedge funds and private equity managers who constitute Citigroup’s ‘plutonomy’ — are buying our democracy and they’re doing it in secret.

“That’s because early this year the five reactionary members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are ‘persons’ with the right to speak during elections by funding ads like those now flooding the airwaves. It was the work of legal fabulists.

“Corporations are not people; they are legal fictions, creatures of the state, born not of the womb, not of flesh and blood. They’re not permitted to vote. They don’t bear arms (except for the nuclear bombs they can now drop on a congressional race without anyone knowing where it came from.) Yet thanks to five activist conservative judges they have the privilege of ‘personhood’ to ‘speak’ — and not in their own voice, mind you, but as ventriloquists, through hired puppets.

“Does anyone really think that’s what the authors of the First Amendment had in mind? Horrified by such a profound perversion, the editor of the spunky Texas Observer, Bob Moser, got it right with his headline: ‘So long, Democracy, it’s been good to know you.'”

[Will somebody explain why the video plays fine on the Boston University origin page, but won’t play when you copy the embed code and reconfigure the dimensions and paste it onto your own page?]