Weekend Box Office: Promised Land, The Impossible

Here is an interesting article from http://www.debbieschlussel.com/ reviewing some of the movies that came out over the past weekend. This follows this post about some of the movies from last week and THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed! This all follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself!




Weekend Box Office: Promised Land, The Impossible

By Debbie Schlussel



One okay movie and another, a Muslim-funded propaganda piece against fracking, comprise the new movies debuting in theaters today. Also, I came very late to the critics’ screening of “Not Fade Away,” and chose not to see the first half that I’d missed, so I’m not allowed to review it (and it wouldn’t be fair). But you do the math.




* “Promised Land“: Yes, it’s the anti-fracking propaganda screed funded by ImageNation Abu Dhabi. I’ve written about and objected to ImageNation Abu Dhabi before back i 2010–much before the so-called conservatives now pretending to object to Muslim Gulf state funding of Hollywood movies. As I noted then,  the company financed, “Fair Game” (read my review), the anti-American Valerie Plame BS-fest starring Sean Penn, and I called this new development, “Islamywood.”



That said, it’s hilarious to note that among the biggest “critics” of this Gulf state Arab funding of a movie–this movie–is the phony Heritage Foundation, which gets gazillions in funding from Qatar–hey, a Gulf state!–and other Gulf state emirates after jihadist Grover Norquist introduced his good friend, Heritage founder (and chief until his recent retirement) Edwin Feulner (the lobbyist for anti-Semitic Malaysia) to the Emir of Qatar (and other anti-Semitic, pan-terrorist Gulf leader buddies and financiers of his), taking Feulner on an Arab Gulf state sponsored trip to the Middle East, after which Heritage  “softened” its stance on Islamic abuses and outrageous conduct and Feulner and his wife got more Malaysian lobbying dollars. Cha-ching! (This Muslim money Feulner was readily stuffing his wallet with is the same reason that Feulner listened to Jihad Grover’s demand that I be removed from Townhall.com, then owned by Heritage, even though I was the site’s most popular columnist (by more than twice Ann Coulter) and had given the site far too much free publicity and traffic with my appearances on Howard Stern and on various cable news shows plugging the site.) You won’t hear a single critic of the ImageNation Abu Dhabi funding of “Promised Land” object to the mass Muslim and Arabist funding of Heritage Foundation. But, hey, they’re not hypocrites and frauds, right? (BTW, don’t look for Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Mark Levin to ever point any of this out, since all three of them get paid big bucks by Heritage, which is a major sponsor of each of their syndicated radio shows.)


And while the government-run ImageNation Abu Dhabi funded this, missing among the objections to that is the fact that Abu Dhabi is an oil-rich state, which has every interest in preventing America from becoming energy independent through alternative energy sources such as fracking. If the much-villainized “Big Fracking” companies were allowed to frack without environmentalist-wacko-induced government intervention, we could say good-bye to Abu Dhabi and the Saudis and the rest of the oil-rich Gulf states forever and bankrupt them. In Michigan, where leftist freaks failed to outlaw fracking, liberal Republican Gov. Rick Snyder correctly stated that fracking hasn’t hurt Michigan because it’s been done correctly, as it is in most places. There isn’t mass contaminated drinking water here or holes in the ground from the fracking. But they don’t show you that in this movie because that’s inconvenient to the agendas of ImageNation Abu Dhabi, Matt Damon, John Krasinski, and the rest of Hollywood.



And now to the actual details of the movie. It’s long, slow, and extremely boring. What is under two hours seems like over four. It’s just uninteresting. Writers Damon and Krasinski and director Gus Van Sant trot out the same old “big business” stereotypes and myths. Damon and Frances McDormand are employees of a big fracking company. They come to a small town somewhere in America, where the people are the way Hollywood sees them: uneducated dupes, unsophisticated simpletons, and elected officials who just care about the size of the bribe. Damon and McDormand buy plaid shirts at a local one-stop shop, called, “Gas, Groceries, Guitars & Guns.” Damon and McDormand agree that, “A place like this–they always wear flannel or camo.” Yup, it’s those dumb, average White people who hunt and wanna stay warm in the winter. The nerve of them.



While Damon is at first very successful in getting people to sign away the fracking rights to their lands, he soon finds opposition in the form of Hal Holbrook, a school teacher who was once a scientist and engineer. And then there is organized opposition in the form of an environmental activist (Krasinski).



But things are not as they seem. Not that I cared, since, again, the movie is such obvious propaganda. And, again, I know who’s funding the movie, and they wanna keep me hooked on Saudi Soda. No thanks.



FOUR MARXES PLUS AN ALGOREZEERA


* “The Impossible“: This is an okay movie, but just okay. And I question the transformation of what, in real life, was a tremendous tragedy–the tsunami which struck Thailand and other nearby countries, in which many lives were lost and many others were badly maimed–into an action adventure thriller. But that’s insensitive liberal Hollywood for ya (and yet they always demand that the rest of us be uber-sensitive to the most absurd things). While it’s based on a real-life story of a French family that survived the tragedy, the movie portrays the family as a British one.



Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor play the parents of three very cute young boys. The family travel to Southeast Asia for a beachfront vacation. But while they are outside at the pool, the tsunami strikes. They spend the rest of the movie searching for each other and wondering if the others in the family have survived. Some parts are touching, mostly because of the cute kids (they make the movie, no question), but it’s not a “great” movie. It’s entertaining enough, if a little slow.



And, the way things are going, I should probably be appreciative that this movie presents the dying species of an intact nuclear family, in which the parents are married (to each other) and the father is actually a decent guy, responsible, and risks it all to find and save his family. Not the kind of stuff Lalaland wants you to see anymore.



ONE-AND-A-HALF REAGANS