HollywoodIdiocy.com

Hypocrite actor George Clooney is willing to cause a fair amount of additional global warming if it means getting his candidate, Barack Obama, elected. How so?

Well, the Progesterone-needing actor learned from his support of John Kerry that making his support of a candidate know might actually hurt them, at least in the US. So Clooney is now willing to jet over to Europe to attend private fund-raisers on foreign soil in support of an Obama nation.

According to online reports, Clooney’s latest private jet trip was Geneva, Switzerland-bound, where for $1,000 you could attend a fund-raiser in the private home of one of Obama’s national finance committee members. For $10,000, you could accompany Clooney to the bash, though his private jet was still off-limits.

Wow, what a sacrifice for Clooney; by his own values, he is killing the planet for Barack Obama. Way to go, Georgie-boy!

One of Hollywood’s hottest female stars, Angelina Jolie, just became more interesting and a bit less brain-dead; while she hasn’t yet made up her mind, actress Angelina Jolie - wife of Brad Pitt - has made it known she hasn’t settled on a candidate yet for the 2008 presidential election, and that John McCain is still “in play” for her.

Jolie, hardly a “traditional conservative,” is the daughter of actor Jon Voight, who recently declared his support for McCain over Obama. Jolie is a celebrity goodwill ambassador of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, so who she supports wouldn’t matter much if she fell in with the rest of the Hollyweird Left, but if she choses to support McCain, it could raise a few eyebrows in much the same way that actor Ron Silver’s support for George W. Bush did in 2004.

Of course, Silver’s been in few films since outing his support for Bush, but quenching Jolie’s star power might be a bit more difficult for the Liberal Media Elite, considering Jolie is widely considered one of the top 5 female stars in Hollywood.

While HollywoodIdiocy.com remains firmly unconvinced that celebrity endorsements matter at all, we confess that the possibility of McCain gaining the support Jolie is at least of passing interest, and is sure to make producers re-check their corporate performance management charts for just how to respond.

The Dark Knight is showing signs of slowing its momentum, but is still doing powerful enough business to fend off the latest challenger, the Seth Rogan comedy, The Pineapple Express. Dark Knight had a $26 million weekend in its fourth week of release, while Pineapple Express enjoyed a close second place with $22.6 million in its debut bow.

The Dark Knight now totals $441 million domestically and $263 million overseas for a total of $704.6 million to date. The Mummy was third with $16 million, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 debuted at fourth place with $10.7 million, and Step Brothers rounded out the top five with $8.9 million. X-Files continued its unexpected plunge, dropping to 13th place, grossing only $1.1 million on the weekend, and quickly shedding screens in only its third week of release. That’s still better money than you can generate by buying auto insurance online, but not by much.

X-Files: I Want to Believe has grossed $19.6 million against a $30 million budget and seems unlikely to reach black ink until the Blu-Ray video release. The movie has yet to be released outside of the US.

Sometimes people will ask me why I put so much time into blogging. If you listen to the so-called experts, blogging can lead to poor social development, mental illness, violent outbursts and a peculiar itch that just won’t go away. Know what I call that? It’s a Hebrew word my messianic rabbi taught me:

First syllable: BA

Second syllable: LO

Third syllable: NEY!

BALONEY!

If anything, blogging increases mental health because it gives people an outlet for their thoughts, fears, hopes and frustrations - mental energy that, left to build over time, could result in honking your horn in traffic for no good reason, or worse!

OK, so I’m not taking the criticism of blogging that seriously, am I? Nope. That’s because the arguments against it hold no more water than the arguments in the 1950s against EC Comics’ Tales of the Crypt. Most bloggers I know do a lot more than just blogging; it only stands to reason… after all, if they didn’t, what would they have to blog about?

I blog for one simple reason, and I put a little video up to explain it, HollywoodIdiocy.com-style: Blogging Makes Me Happy! To me, that’s more than enough reason to blog. It’s fun. It releases stress. It’s a way to write and have an immediate audience.

And in times like these, with gas soaring and the economy crashing, what could be more fun than making fun of rich, spoiled celebs. Am I right? Of course I am… because I’m certainly not a liberal!

All in fun. Enjoy the video!

The star right winger of the Montreal Canadiens, Alexei Kovalev has released a two-DVD set of hockey tips and techniques that, allegedly, help give the NHL star his edge on the ice. Born in Togliatti, Russia, Kovalev was drafted 15th overall in the 1991 NHL draft and has been tearing it up on the ice ever since. A journeyman who has played for the Rangers, Penguins and Canadiens, Kovalev was a key component on the Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup-winning team. Kovalev is the first Russian to ever be drafted in the first round in the NHL, and along with three Rangers teammates, was one of the first Russians to ever have their name inscribed on a Stanley Cup.

So, the upshot is, Kovalev’s a sufficiently experienced NHL pro to turn to for hockey tips and techniques. There are two DVD’s in the set; one is split between on ice hockey tips and off-ice training and the other is background on Kovalev and the Gift of Life Foundation.

There’s nothing world-shaking about Kovalev’s tips and techniques, though he thoroughly explains his methods and style of play while covering everything from skating, stick handling, shooting and some situation-specific scenarios. What is a bit more impressive is the off-ice training video, which clearly shows just how hard Kovalev (and anyone else who wants to be great at this sport) has to work to make those tricks and techniques look so easy.

The documentary on Kovalev’s life is entirely hockey-focused and isn’t going to beat out even an average episode of A&E’s Biography, but proves interesting since he spent some time in the Russian leagues before making the leap to the NHL. The piece on the Gift of Life Foundation is pretty much a standard promotional video for a worthy charity that is dedicated to fighting the spread of heart disease in children. Proceeds from the sale of this package go toward this foundation, which is why Kovalev got involved in the project. (In other words, save your Target coupons for some other product; this one benefits a worthy cause.)

While this is definitely a narrow-market specialty video, it’s certainly a DVD package than any hockey mom would be proud to give to their hockey-playing sons and daughters. Beyond that audience, however, there’s little of note for anyone else.

British drama has always been a bit slow paced with typical English reserve, and My Boy Jack, a BBC production, is no exception to that general rule. The tale revolves around Rudyard Kipling and his son, Jack, with the latter being portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame. However, anyone picking up this film expecting anything like the action and adventure of, say, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be bitterly disappointed. There is no magic, no cloak of invisibility, not even a laptop computer to be found; it is a straightforward historical drama. Sorry, kids.

David Haig portrays Rudyard, a full-on British patriot who happened to work for the War Office’s Propaganda Department as World War I broke out. Based on Haig’s stage play and screen adaptation, My Boy Jack tells the tale of how Kipling’s son, Jack, struggled to gain entry into the British military despite severe near-sightedness and then went missing in battle one day after his 18th birthday. The story effectively portrays the terrible human cost of war without betraying genuine patriotism the pro-War Kipling embodied.

As Jack’s mom Caroline, Kim Catrall of Sex and the City fame makes an appearance and skillfully disappears into her character, rather than standing out like a sore thumb among the otherwise all-British cast. Virtual unknown Carey Mulligan makes a good first impression in the role of Jack’s sister, Elsie.

The best thing that can be said about Radcliffe’s performance is that it stands resistant to Harry Potter comparisons; he captures the spirit of his character and immerses himself in it for the entire 90-minute running time. And although he is the actor most likely to be recognized on US shores, it is Haig’s performance as the great British author that steals the show. He portrays a broad range, from comedy to sorrow, almost exclusively with amazing reserve and understatement.

The main trouble, however, is with Haig’s script, which builds to a satisfying climax but even at just over 90 minutes, feels slow and drawn out. While this is in the classic tradition of British moviemaking, the pace may come off a bit too slow for some US audiences. Nevertheless, it is a noteworthy film that marks Radcliffe’s maturity as an actor outside of the Harry Potter franchise.

Nauseating, pretentious, self-important, annoying, holier-than-thou. All these words, unfortunately, aptly describe the excremental proceedings awaiting viewers unfortunate enough to rent or, horrors, buy the DVD known as the Crave Film Series. A series of three short films, all under 10 minutes long, comprise the thankfully-brief collection that seems packaged to be marketed specifically to only the most obnoxiously self-righteous and smug of Christian churches.

OK, perhaps I’m being a bit unfair. The films themselves, for as long as they last, are not necessarily terrible, although their brief running time reduces them to little more than character sketches than anything significant. All three films are unrelated to each other, nor do they even comprise an overall story arc; only the loose theme of “crave,” as in “craving human and spiritual connections,” binds the package together.

Still, “Midnight Clear,” “Pop Star” and “Nameless Moment” are, in and of themselves and taken alone, mildly inoffensive. Of these, “Nameless Moment” has probably the best twist ending, while “Pop Star” is the most effective character study. Had they all been collected together without additional material, the collection might barely be tolerable.

Unfortunately, each film is bookended by commentary courtesy of Erwin Raphael McManus, lead pastor of the Mosaic Church and founder of Awaken, a group of Christian artists, poets and the like. That is where the pain begins. Pain the likes of which might drive you to want to hang yourself with a theater rope.

Now, although I’m not the same brand of believer as McManus, I am a person of faith and, that being said, I could not discern one lick of coherent thought in McManus’ self-important, pretentious ramblings that rob any enjoyment the short subjects might otherwise have rendered the viewers.

A blend of artistic pretentions, pop psychology and pseudo-spirituality all go into the mix of McManus’ pointless ramblings, but taken as a whole, he came off more effective than a politician at streaming off an endless supply of words without communicating one iota of meaning or real content in the process. His segments are simultaneously hyper-intellectual while at the same time coming off as insulting, demeaning and superior.

Perhaps the real miscalculation is in balance; by offering up both an introduction and an afterword to each film, McManus’ undesirable presence and contributions nearly rival the films themselves in running time, which is probably what makes matters so painful to endure.

The whole experience comes off like a bad concert performance by a drunken pop star who rambles on for 10 minutes about what each three-minute ditty means to her as a protest of the Bush presidency, the Iraq war, global warming or whatever other pop-culture obsession Hollywood is embracing at the moment. Eventually, you are just itching to scream at them, “Shut up and sing!”

The same urge applies to the Crave Film Series DVD… you’ll be best served by watching only the films themselves and skipping McManus’ pretentious prattle. Believe me, by doing so you may just be saving yourself years of therapy bills.

After watching several Fox Faith films, I was ready to screen something a little more gritty, yet without having to endure endless profanity, blood and guts. Fortunately, Resurrecting the Champ fit the bill quite nicely. Samuel L. Jackson does well in a surprising turn as a homeless man, Champ, who wanders wine racks and claims to be former boxing near-legend Bob Satterfield, a man nearly everyone thought was dead.

That is, until enterprising and ambitious sports reporter Erik Kamen (Josh Hartnett) stumbles across him coming back from covering a game, just as Champ is being beaten up by a group of young thugs. The two form a quick acquaintanceship, and Kamen is quick to recognize the story potential of a once-notable boxer now living on the streets of Denver. Despite using Champ’s story to launch his own writing career, he nevertheless forms a friendship with the man.

However, Kamen makes a rookie reporter mistake and wants so desperately to believe Champ’s story, he doesn’t properly check it out and only after the story run and his success starts overwhelming him does he begin to suspect that Champ may not be Satterfield after all, and that’s when the really interesting exploration into ethics takes over and drives the remainder of the drama.

Cold Case’s Kathryn Morris appears as Kamen’s estranged wife, but is little used throughout the film, which is a waste of good talent. Alan Alda and David Paymer fare better as Kamen’s superiors at the Denver Times, earning good screen time and some nice moments. Peter Coyote is almost unrecognizable in his cameo as a long-time boxing journalist, and Teri Hatcher appears as a Showtime Sports promoter, interested in hiring Kamen.

Overall, the Rod Lurie-directed drama, based on an actual LA Times magazine piece by J.R. Moehringer, is a solid mix of boxing action, human drama and empathetic performances. The story has some nice turns and its exploration of ethics, truth-telling and lying is clear-eyed and honest on all sides. As a bonus, there’s little in the way of profanity and Kamen actually turns down more than one chance to cheat on his estranged wife, so it’s nice to see a film character make smart choices in a film that isn’t bent on selling a specific religion.

While Resurrecting the Champ doesn’t rank up there with Rocky Balboa or Raging Bull as a boxing movie, it is solid family entertainment, without religious pretensions weighing it down. A solid film, worth seeing especially for Samuel L. Jackson’s atypical, noteworthy performance as Champ.

Although released under the Fox Faith banner, Ace of Hearts is a heart-warming family film that could easily take its place alongside such standard children’s fare as “Eight Below” and “Old Yeller.” The movie features Dean Cain (“Lois and Clark”) as the human half of a K-9 police unit whose partnership with a police dog, Ace, is causing him to neglect both his wife and his daughter.

Despite his neglect, both wife and daughter remain unswervingly loyal to Cain’s Officer Dan Harding, especially when a controversial take-down by Ace seems to prove him uncontrollable and a biter; Cain doesn’t want to believe it, and his daughter only wants to see him happy again, so she launches her own unlikely investigation into the crime in which Ace allegedly bit a criminal.

Even though he was apparently euthanized shortly after the biting incident, Ace makes his escape an tries to reunite with his family in time to keep them safe from the criminal Ace took down. Like most children’s movies, the daughter has the surprising ability to be a better investigator and fact-finder than her experienced, well-trained father, and whenever danger threatens, a rescue never arrives too late to save the day.

Despite this, the film has just enough action to appeal to boys and well as girls, and the film is entertaining enough to make watching it enjoyable for adults as well, even though the film lacks much edginess. Of course, few films in the Fox Faith family sport much edginess, so no surprise there.

Cain’s daughter is ably portrayed by Britt McKillip, who Showtime watchers might recognize as Reggie Lass, the “invisible” sister of Ellen Muth’s George Lass on the cable drama Dead Like Me (which is soon transforming into a major motion picture, barring any of the principles undergoing drug treatment, by the way). As Julia, she fits the young female heroine role well, and shed of her Dead Line Me classes and ponytails, is almost unrecognizable in this role.

The story, unfortunately, is thin and predictable stuff, but not so much as to be insulting. While hardly a classic, “Ace of Hearts” makes agreeable, if not exactly memorable, family viewing.

Love’s Unfolding Dream is the sixth movie in the Love Comes Softly series, based on the popular Christian historical romance novels penned by Jeanette Oke. The series, initially directed and now only written and executive produced by Michael Landon Jr., has featured a series of tales centered around three generations (so far) of the same pioneer family. Romantic enough to draw in the female audience and just slightly Western enough to keep the men from fleeing the room, the series is as squeaky-clean as you might expect it to be, avoiding profanity and excessive violence in much the same way as Daddy Landon’s “Little House On the Prairie” NBC TV series did.

Despite remaining mostly true to the series, the latest installment veers furthest yet from the plot of the book after which it is titled; in the print version of “Love’s Unfolding Dream,” there are three young women, lifelong friends, vying over the attention of the same young man, but that subplot is missing in action in this film. Also, one of the main story points of the movie is Belinda’s ambition to become a doctor (not a nurse), yet in the novels, Belinda’s biggest ambition is to be a nurse.

The most notable change, however, is that the movie version of Love’s Unfolding Dream has Belinda (played capably by the appealing and spirited Scout Taylor-Compton) nursing an elderly matron suffering from the after-effects of a stroke back to health, only to be offered a chance to return with her to the East Coast to pursue her medical dreams. Unfortunately, in the books, that is the entire main plot of the seventh novel, Love Takes Wing. (There are a total of eight books in the series to date, ending with Love Finds A Home.)

How borrowing the main plot of Love Takes Wing to power through Love’s Unfolding Dream will affect the final two installments, which seem likely to be made (as were the rest of the films) for the Hallmark Channel prior to being released on DVD, I’m not sure.

Scout’s Belinda is a refreshing mixture of a woman of faith who nevertheless is an advocate of equal opportunity for women, and her character is given plenty of opportunity for emotional growth as well as some comic moments in the film. Of course, Dale Midkiff returns as the patriarch of the family, always handy to lend some sage advice about the nature of love, just when it feels like a couple may never find each other past the barriers in their way.

Sure, it’s slightly-sappy family-oriented stuff, but it mostly achieves that in a good way, ala Little House On the Prairie, rather than the saccharin-sweet family entertainment that has less substance and gives a bad name to the genre. In the early films, the matriarch of the clan was appealingly portrayed by 27 Dresses’ Katherine Heigl, but she only stuck around for the first two films and has been replaced for the past few films by Samantha Smith.

Despite feeling a bit too made for TV, Love’s Unfolding Dream is certainly family-safe entertainment that comes off as a couple rungs above After School Specials about the best acne treatment. Instead, it’s more of a callback to the sort of stories Little House On the Prairie featured, and that’s not an entirely bad thing, and certainly offers a welcome respite from the Quentin Tarrantino’s Grindhouse-style moviemaking that too often dominates release lists of late. Like father, like son.

Into the free music downloads fray comes MP3 Rocket, Inc., a company that is trying to do legally what others have failed at pulling off: creating a point-to-point file-sharing network that starts legal and stays legal. Tricky stuff to do, especially in light of the music industries martyrization of Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota native who was hit with legal penalties for illegal downloading and distributing of MP3 files with a financial penalty that came to over $9,000 per song.

Sorry, but there’s no Britney Spears song worth that much, even before the failed marriages and sham comebacks.

MP3 Rocket has been around for a while; since at least 2005, according to their site’s copyright notice. Their software, which includes a free version and a one-time fee version, hooks you into the network that claims acces to about 12 million songs and 250 million users.

The network has strengths and weaknesses. First, it’s search is relatively effective, but a bit slow in returning results. Since MP3 Rocket is attempting to keep their site legal, it you’re looking for the complete works of well-known artists, you might find it a bit of a struggle, but if you’re into wacky, goofy and obscure, you’ll have better results.

For example, just for kicks, I looked up American Idol winner from two seasons ago, Carrie Underwood, and found about half the songs available from her two albums, within the network. When I looked up Brandi Carlile, who also has two albums out, as well as a lot of live tracks recorded from last summer’s concert tour, I found almost nothing except some audio captures from the couple songs she contributed to Grey’s Anatomy last season.

That’s not a great average of matches for two higher-profile artists.

However, I found a wealth of Weird Al Yankovic material within MP3 Rocket, as well as a good amount of material from musical satirist Paul Shanklin, who is pretty much the conservative political embodiment of Yankovic. Unfortunately, I also found a ton of stuff attributed to Yankovic and Shanklin that were actually the work of other artists.

Such mis-identification of the proper artist of given material is usually evidence that there’s a ghost in the machine and there may be some less-than-legal files kicking around in the MP3 Rocket network, despite the company’s efforts to run their company legally.

Despite the 12 million songs claim, MP3 Rocket, Inc., doesn’t appear to be in the same category as the announced, but not fully launched, Qtrax music network, which is promising free and legal downloads with studio agreements in place. Instead, MP3 Rocket appears to be more in the mold of Spiral Frog, Imeem, Napster and the like.

The network is relatively fast; I downloaded about 50 songs just to test the speed and had about a 92 percent success rate for a completed download, in about two hours of effort. That’s not bad, although I had to babysit some of the songs, telling them to resume several times.

The software also hooks you up with access to free TV viewing sites, although the quality of the image will depend on your network speed and conditions. There’s also some access to software downloads, but I didn’t test that out.

In the end, MP3 Rocket’s primary appeal is as a source for MP3 music; there’s plenty to be found, but it’s certainly not a one-stop shop for everything you might want access to. The software is free, though they have a one-time-fee version that runs between $30-50, depending on the special offer active at the time you visit. The pay-software is supposed to increase network performance and speed and claims to give you access to files that folks who access the network with the free software can’t get to.

While I’m not completely convinced yet that MP3 Rocket isn’t walking a legal tightrope already tread by Napster before they got stomped on, what I can say is that the software works reasonably well, the files seem mostly of good quality, and it delivers at least some of what it promises. That’s not bad. Worth a gamble, at least while the company appears to be operating in the clear from legal issues.

I’ve mentioned Car Angel before; they’re the nonprofit company that accepts donated cars and other sorts of vehicles in order to help kids and teens in crisis. But how does it work, exactly?

Well, it begins when someone has a vehicle they don’t need anymore and decide to make a car donation to charity; in this case, of course, the charity would be Car Angel. What happens then is that volunteers who are part of Car Angel set about restoring and repairing the donated cars, then reselling them.

Sound like a scam? It’s not. While a lot of charities - even famous ones - eat up a lot of donated money in exorbitant administrative fees and the like, Car Angel puts all their proceeds directly into their mission, which is to produce and distribute videos that can help young children and teens during times of crisis.

Some of the videos have a religious message; some don’t. Either way, the central goal of Car Angel is to help out young kids and teens when they need it most. What could be better?