Monday, April 16, 2007

Simon Respectfully Wishes You a, Well, Not Happy, So Let's Go With Meaningful Yom Ha'Shoah.

Just real quickly, today was Holocaust Remembrance Day, which would've been a great day for President Ahmadinejad of Iran to apologize for comparing said historical event's actual historcial veracity to that of unicorns and leprechauns and other beings that apprently caper about in his head when he isn't inciting impoverished farmers to take up their pitchforks against the hook-nosed enemy.

You know who else could've taken today to reflect on the past instead of opening his capacious piehole? Tommy Thompson, the "conservative" (that's code for "I hate you if you're not exactly like me or much richer") Republican who recently announced his bid for President. At today's function at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C., he unhinged his yap to utter the following: “I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know, that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that.” Nice work, Tommy. Have a knish.

How did I, personally, commemorate this auspicious yearly event? By writing taglines for an upcoming movie about, I shite you not, one of the architects of the Final Solution!

Professional discretion prevents me from being more specific, but let's just say his name rhymes with "Play-Golf Trike-Man." Spinning out dozens of pulpy teasers (in partial tribute to Grindhouse, about which more in a moment) for this undoubtedly gripping and dark production caused my mind to unmoor itself very briefly and to drift about airlessly like those hapless astronauts in Kubrick's 2001 who pissed off HAL the computer. As the darkness of genuine atrocity and the mad hyperbole of one-sheet convention deranged one another, I found myself typing things like "There's a New Adolf in Town!"

Not good. But it does afford a somewhat linear segue (for me, at least) to something that's been sticking in my big Jewy craw lately. OK, not just lately — it's been there forever, like a fetid caraway seed stabbing indefatigably at the inter-molar gums of my soul.

It's the way people still talk about Jews in the entertainment business, as though our Starbucks grande cups are really filled with gentile-baby blood and we spend each day wondering how to demoralize and degrade America.

It's the way "Jew" and "entertainment" bounce off each other in the reactionary-dumbfuck popular imagination, each making the other seem more evil and twisted and unwholesome.

And most of all, it's the utter hypocrisy of blaming the Jew-entertainment complex for all of America's problems but never once saying anything like, oh, gee, "The DEFENSE industry, which is largely run by non-Jews (many of whom give ample lip service to the merciful word of Jesus), is responsible for untold real destruction, unlike the entirely virtual mayhem of Hollywood (or, more accurately Vancouver)." Or, "The OIL industry, peopled by the evangelical golfers of Dick Cheney's inner sanctum, is truly and literally ruining America, unlike the squib-heavy pantomimes that glimmer fleetingly on the screens of your local multiplex."

Grrr.

Still, it's likely that the blame-Jewy-entertainment-firsters took heart at the much-ballyhooed underperformance of the Weinstein-produced Grindhouse. I suppose if you hate that kind of entertainment and consider it moral poison, I can't really blame you. But if you're one of those people who enjoyed this flick but have since, ahem, revamped their opinions in light of what the dunderfucks who consider opening box-office to be Holy Writ called its disastrous performance, well ... stop it.

I freakin' loved Grindhouse. I ate up every gnarly bit of gore, every geeky allusion, with a knife and fork. It afforded me more than three hours of delirious enjoyment. That America, the same America mentioned above, did not clutch this fearlessly gross and meta-referential labor of love to its bosom the way it did such worthy cinematic benchmarks as Norbit and Wild Hogs does not give me pause.

To reiterate: I heart the gun-legged Rose McGowan. I dig the crazy stuntman and his car. I relish the trash-talking chicks who take revenge. I adore the lurid trailers. And I love the fact that it was all hatched in the fever dreams of two movie freaks who didn't give a fuck if the focus-groupies didn't get it. I don't care either.

I love this movie because it takes all the funky compost of exploitation moviemaking and uses it to grow a beautiful film-fanatic's garden. It's a tribute to a fantasy realm full of fantasy violence. No doubt some will take today's horrifying headlines and try to blame the real-life carnage on the out-there imagery of Grindhouse and kindred flicks. Count on election-season sermons about our "sick" culture, alluding to some subversive element that rots America from within. They will tell you that guns don't kill people — movies do. And between the lines of their diatribes you'll know they mean movies made by Jews.

As far as I'm concerned, they can go sit with Tommy Thompson and President Ahmadinejad and shut the hell up. I'm trying to watch a fuckin' movie here.

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