Commentary: Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks, Too

Tiktok User

In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.

Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.

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Commentary: 50 Years Later, ‘The Exorcist’ Continues to Possess Hollywood’s Imagination, Reflecting Our Obsession with Evil

The Exorcist

When the “The Exorcist” premiered 50 years ago, in December 1973, some theatergoers fainted or broke down in tears. A few even vomited.

The film, which cast a young Linda Blair as a girl claiming to be possessed by the devil, was an almost instant success, with moviegoers waiting in line for hours to secure tickets. It went on to gross over US$440 million worldwide.

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Commentary: Hollywood Is Demoralizing Americans, One Story at a Time

As a young boy, I lived for a time under the rule of a totalitarian regime when visiting my parents’ homeland of Iran during the 1980s. It was only a few years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the despotic new ruler, Ruhollah Khomeini, was investing heavily in his cultural propaganda machine. The Ayatollah’s dubious aim, like any new totalitarian, was to erase the proud culture of ancient Iran and replace it with one new and ideologically approved.

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Commentary: Christian Popular Culture’s Revival Cast Out the Money Changers

“Jesus Revolution” and “The Chosen” are not just Christian dramas but the avant garde in a revolution in faith entertainment. The former – a feel-good movie about hippies who returned to Christ during the 1970s, starring former “Cheers” and “Frasier” star Kelsey Grammer – has grossed more than $52 million since its debut just a few weeks ago, making it the most successful film released by studio heavyweight Lionsgate since 2019.

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Rep. Mark Green Re-Introduces Bill to Kick Communist China Out of Hollywood

U.S. Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07) on Wednesday re-introduced the Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits Now or SCREEN Act to discourage Hollywood from bowing to censorship from Beijing.

Green originally introduced the SCREEN Act just over a year ago on February 28, 2022, during the second session of the 117th Congress as H.R. 6855. Around the same time, the combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq issued a scathing op-ed calling on the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to put an end to Hollywood using the U.S. military for censorship by the Chinese.

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Actress Angela Lansbury Dies at 96

Actress Angela Lansbury passed away Tuesday at the age of 96, her family announced.

“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” her family said, according to NBC News.

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Commentary: Hollywood Should Make More Patriotic Films

Clocking in at 72 verses, Psalm 78 is one of the longest in the Jewish and Christian Psalters. At great length, it recalls the story of the Hebrew nation, focusing especially on the special, covenantal relationship between the Jewish people and God. Psalm 78 doesn’t merely recount a list of facts — it displays Israel’s past for a purpose: to say who they are and who they should strive to be.

Americans show a consistent hunger for reflecting on our own grand story. We find it in the continued success of books on our Founders. We also see it in a recent Echelon Insights poll which found that Americans — by wide margins — want to see more historical and patriotic films.

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Amazon to Acquire MGM Studios for $8.45 Billion in Mega Media Deal

MGM building in Las Vegas, Nevada

Amazon acquired MGM Studios for $8.45 billion in a mega deal that will bolster Amazon’s entertainment profile, the companies announced Wednesday morning.

The deal will allow Amazon to give its subscribers access to MGM Studios’ entire portfolio of movies and television shows, according to the announcement. MGM Studios’ content library includes more than 4,000 films and 17,000 television shows.

“The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, said in a statement. “It’s very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality storytelling.”

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Hollywood Goes to Bat Against Ohio Constitutional Carry Bill

george takei sulu

A Hollywood actor and internet activist has vowed to fight against Ohio’s HB 227, a constitutional carry bill that would allow residents of the state to exercise their Second Amendment rights more freely. 

“House Bill 227 in Ohio would ‘allow a licensee to carry concealed all deadly weapons that would otherwise be legal to possess, remove the requirement of a licensed gun owner to ‘promptly’ notify police of a gun in their car and allow anyone 21 and older to carry a concealed deadly weapon without a license,’” Goerge Takei said on his Facebook page. 

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Filmmaker Says Hunter Biden Scandal Movie Running into Liberal Hollywood Headwinds

Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer is producing a film chronicling the highly publicized and complicated life of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden. But his efforts to make the picture and get it onto a screen face stiff Hollywood headwinds.

“We know that Hollywood won’t make these movies, and people want to see them,” the conservative filmmaker told the TV show Just the News AM with Sophie Mann. “People want the truth out there.”

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After a Long Slumber, U.S. Cinemas Awaken on Pivotal Weekend

With the previews about to start, a trickle of masked moviegoers made their way into one of the first U.S. screenings of “Tenet” at the Bow Tie Majestic 6 in downtown Stamford, Connecticut. They took their seats Tuesday night, eyeing the empty seats between each other and a little giddy at being back at the movies for the first time in many months.

Philip Scarante and Andy Flores, both 25, went every Tuesday religiously before theaters closed in March. “It’s just our thing,” Scarante said. Seeing Nolan’s latest mind-bending spectacle later on a smaller screen held no appeal. They sat down in center seats, up close.

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Oscar Winning Actress Olivia de Havilland Dies at 104

Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104.

Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.

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Carl Reiner, Beloved Creator of ‘Dick Van Dyke Show,’ Dies

Carl Reiner, the ingenious and versatile writer, actor and director who broke through as a “second banana” to Sid Caesar and rose to comedy’s front ranks as creator of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and straight man to Mel Brooks’ “2000 Year Old Man,” has died. He was 98.

Reiner’s assistant Judy Nagy said he died Monday night of natural causes at his home in Beverly Hills, California.

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Commentary: Hollywood’s ‘Fierce Resistance’ Kowtows to China’s Censors in ‘Top Gun 2’

by Thaddeus G. McCotter   Hollywood, the cultural epicenter of the “resistance” to the faux totalitarianism attributed to President Trump, has a vastly different approach to the real totalitarianism of Communist China: capitulation and self-censorship. As noted by Mark MacKinnon, the senior international correspondent for The Globe and Mail, the sequel to 1986’s “Top Gun” – which, after 33 years of intermittent thought, the creative geniuses behind the project have christened with the inspired title “Top Gun: Maverick” – has the rare quality of being a nostalgia trip that performs the deft, duplicitous trick of including a bitter dose of revisionist history. “There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket – only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone . . . ” Why did Hollywood change the patch and stuff the Japanese and Taiwanese flags down the memory hole? “‘Mystery’ solved,” MacKinnon reports. “China’s Tencent Pictures is one of the main producers of Top Gun: Maverick.”   In agreement is Alan Tonelson, the founder of RealityChek, which is “a blog covering economics, national security, tech, and their intersections”: “i.e., Hollywood Values . . . the…

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MyPillow’s Mike Lindell Helping Fund Conservative Movies in Hollywood

Minnesota businessman and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is trying his hand at Hollywood after investing $1 million in a new movie that offers a critical look at Planned Parenthood. The movie, titled Unplanned, had to be filmed in secret due to the sensitive nature of its subject, The Hollywood Reporter reveals, but that hasn’t stopped Lindell from speaking about his role in the film. “I don’t get into things for the money; I get into them if the message is right,” Lindell told The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that Lindell previously backed a Christian movie called Church People. Lindell’s investment in Unplanned amounts to one-sixth of the film’s whole production budget, and was made by the creators of such films as God’s Not Dead and I Can Only Imagine, which both grossed more than $60 million at the box office. The film is based on a book of the same title, and tells the true story of Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director and spokesperson who went on to become one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of abortion. “I’m pro-life and I’m happy to do it,” said Lindell, who makes a cameo in the movie set to…

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Movie ‘Gosnell’ Cracks Top 10 at Box Office

by Rachel del Guidice   A movie about Kermit Gosnell, the late-term abortionist in Philadelphia who went to prison after being convicted in connection with the deaths of three babies, hit the Top 10 films at the box office over the weekend. “We were [No. 10] on Friday and Saturday, but slipped back to 12 on Sunday,” Phelim McAleer, who co-produced the film with his wife, Ann McElhinney, said in a statement to The Daily Signal. “We are the No. 1 independent movie of the weekend and [No. 5] per screen average across the U.S.” “This has been achieved despite the mainstream media virtually refusing to review the film, despite it opening nationally,” McAleer said. The movie, “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” which opened in theaters Friday, tells the true story of Gosnell and how his 30-plus-year abortion career ended in a case alleging multiple murders. Directed by Nick Searcy, it stars Dean Cain, Earl Billings, and Michael Beach. The film’s reception so far is not at all due to mainstream media coverage, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said in a statement provided to The Daily Signal. The box office success of “Gosnell” is…

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Director Ridley Scott Alludes to a ‘Few More’ Sexual Predators Lurking in Hollywood

Following recent sexual harassment and assault allegations against , something unorthodox happened with an upcoming movie starring the performer. An announcement came out about “All the Money in the World,” directed by Ridley Scott, noting that Spacey would be replaced entirely in the movie through reshoots, which would insert actor Christopher Plummer in the role. …

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President Obama’s 19-year-old Daughter Malia Interned for Alleged Sexual Predator Harvey Weinstein

Former President Barack Obama has been silent so far on the firestorm surrounding Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer and major Democratic donor who was accused last week of three decades’ worth of sexual harassment. And as Republicans and Twitter users continued to blast him Monday for not commenting, a few brought up a unique connection the…

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Tim Allen on ‘Last Man Standing’: ‘Nothing More Dangerous’ Than a ‘Likable Conservative Character’

Tim Allen suggested Tuesday during an appearance on “Norm Macdonald Live” that the abrupt cancellation of his hit ABC sitcom “Last Man Standing” had something to do with his character’s politics. Mr. Allen, a conservative comedian who portrayed the politically conservative father of three, Mike Baxter, said “there’s nothing more dangerous” in today’s political climate than…

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Tech Company Fights for Parental Control of Video Entertainment

  “Watch movies and TV however the BLEEP you want.” That is the motto of a modern technological David taking on corporate Goliaths. VidAngel Inc. offers filtering of certain stream-on-demand media, said CEO Neal Harmon. Consumers have the option of removing objectionable content while watching Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO Amazon Channels, all from the comfort of their home. The technology can remove obscene language, nudity and violence. By age 18, a youth has seen 16,000 murders on movies and TV, according to a 1998 study titled “Psychiatric Effects of Media Violence” by the American Psychological Association, as reported on a VidAngel promo video. Parents don’t have to worry about covering their children’s eyes or covering their ears. Consumers can filter the streaming videos through the VidAngel app on most devices, Harmon said. Does that degree of parental control sound like a good idea? Some media giants do not think so. VidAngel has been locked in a legal battle with Disney, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm for more than a year. The fight is uphill at this point as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Aug. 24 denied the company’s appeal of a preliminary injunction that was…

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The Legendary Don Rickles Has Died

Tennessee Star

  Renowned comedy icon Don Rickles had died. He would have been 91 in May. Rickles burst into the mainstream with his acerbic style after Frank Sinatra spotted him in a night club in the late 1950s. A pioneer in the genre of ‘insult comedy,’ Sinatra said in later interviews he was impressed with how fearlessly Rickles would take on hecklers. His take-no-prisoners style soon earned him such nicknames as, “The King of Zing,” “Mr. Warmth,” and “The Merchant of Venom.” Although not really know as a big screen star, he has appeared in many box office hits, including the 1960 dramatic comedy, “The Rat Race;” campy Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello romp, “Beach Blanket Bingo;” and Scorsese’s high-stakes drama, “Casino.” But perhaps his most famous role to the current generation is as the voice of Mr. Potato Head in the groundbreaking “Toy Story” series. Amid the bustle of a busy news day, the internet took a moment to mourn his passing: The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, Toy Story, Sanford & Son + many more, there will never be another Don Rickles, RIP pic.twitter.com/ZN6xfJhGNy — 50's & 60's (@50sAnd60s) April 6, 2017   Over a Bloody Mary in Beverly Hills, insult comic…

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