Never one to pass up an opportunity for bullying, Michael Moore has posted excerpt from his new book on his website, entitled “How to Blow It.” It’s a snide, six point “blueprint from the Democrats’ past losing campaigns” to ensure that “the Democratic Party establishment, can help elect John Sidney McCain III to a four-year extension of the Bush Era.” As Nikki Finke points out, the final item on the list is “especially intriguing” — in that Moore conflates his own self-importance with Democratic cowardice.
“Denounce me!,” Moore shouts. Obama, he says. “Better denounce me or [Republicans and pundits] will tear him to shreds. He had better back away not only from me but from anyone and everyone who veers a bit too far to the left of where his advisers have told him is the sweet spot for all those red state voters.”
Remember, this is an Opposite Day list, which means the clear implication is really, “Embrace me or you deserve to lose.” Because we certainly haven’t wasted enough time talking about which candidatesare in bed with which media figures, right?
Over the weekend, a video called Jack and Hill appeared on YouTube. The clip strung together clips from Jack Nicholson films (including A Few Good Men, Five Easy Pieces and Tim Burton’s Batman) with white-on-black title cards summarizing Hillary Clinton’s qualifications to be president. Though first thought to be the work of the Clinton campaign, the Politico reported on Sunday that it was the brainchild of a number of Hollywood figures, including Rob Reiner and Nicholson himself, who produced it independently of the Clinton camp.
In the film blog world, the general consensus was that however Jack and Hill was produced, as a campaign video, it was pretty bad. “Just utterly pathetic,” was how Michael Newman put it in a comment on Chuck Tryon’s blog, and FILMMAKER editor Scott Macaulay sighed, “This election is getting too bizarre.” Beyond the obvious ideological problem that the clip has Hillary being endorse by various Nicholson villains, there’s something exceedingly lazy about the way it’s been put together. None of the characters repeat, and there’s barely a connection between their pullquotes and the titles on screen. It seems as though the idea was to stack one clip on top of the next in the hopes that, out of context, they’d play as a series of punchlines. Instead, as Tryon notes, anyone who can bring the context of the excerpted films with them to the viewing experience will be unable to refrain from doing so, and at that point, the whole thing backfires: ultimately, this is a clip in which the implication is that Hillary Clinton is going to make life better for the axe wielding psycho of The Shining, whilst restoring the Joker’s trust in the political system.
But of course, there’s already a reaction clip, one which, in particular, puts scenes from that Kubrick film to good use.
LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video––in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech––is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there’s no ideas in it; it’s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.
Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Never one to pass up an opportunity for bullying, 
