Box Office Bill O’Reilly
The one positive about Bill O’Reilly’s continued existence is that it gives me an excuse to keep using the word ‘asshat.’ I know asshat is a couple of years behind the curve of cool, but it’s a funny word. It makes me laugh every time someone says it and every time I see it in print. So, thanks Bill for doing your part in keeping asshat alive.
This time, Bill would like Hollywood to know that ‘the folks’ in America aren’t interested in Hollywood’s brand of anti-Americanism. His proof? The failure of a slew of recent Iraq themed movies.
In a column on his website Thursday entitled Memo to Hollywood (tossed off in his patented “regular Joe” style), O’Reilly starts off with a flat lie. He calls the recent film Stop-Loss “a bomb, a major disaster at the box office” like he’s some kind of a box office guru. Then, without even pausing to let this artificial bombshell sink in, he frosts the cake, adding “…despite the presence of Ryan Phillippe.” Yeah, because whenever Ryan Phillippe is in a movie that’s not about Iraq, its box office gold.
The truth is, while Stop-Loss is no one’s idea of a success, it was #4 in per theater average last weekend - not great, but better than Superhero Movie which should’ve been right up the alley of even an above average O’Reilly viewer…the Little O’Reilly Achievers if you will.
What’s more, Stop-Loss wasn’t even anti-American. Bill might understand this if he’d actually seen the movie, though even then I doubt it. Questioning the American government is tantamount to hating America in Bill’s black and white binary world. You’re either for us, or you’re against us. I guess this is how the world looks when you wear your ass for a hat.
It turns out he was just getting warmed up with Stop-Loss. Next he ticks off a bunch of the other Iraq movies that tanked: Home of the Brave, Redacted, Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah, which he calls In the Valley of Failure - a pretty funny joke if you’re retarded and you’ve just been smashed in the face with a waffle iron.
O.K., Bill, you’re right. All those movies pretty much stiffed at the box office to varying degrees, but there’s absolutely no proof that it was because ‘the folks’ love America and Hollywood hates it. Maybe the movies sucked. Maybe people hear enough about how badly the war is going on the news and they want movies that help them escape for a couple of hours.
Whatever the reasons, one thing’s for sure: I don’t want Bill O’Reilly to ever stop running his mouth about things he so clearly doesn’t understand. It’s too funny. His phony righteous indignation over imagined enemies is top shelf comedy.
You’re an asshat, Bill. Don’t ever change, you smug prick.
Filed under: Opinion
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I think laughter and minimum personal investment is exactly the attitude to bring to those who professionally profit from promoting intolerance and prejudice. I never encountered the man prior to arriving in the US a little over a year and a half ago. Within 5 minutes I had his measure - loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, calculating, and hateful. A persona calibrated to appeal to the worse in people that to a large extent has to reflect the man himself. Thank goodness we can choose who to expose ourselves to.
Bill O’Reilly and his ilk have been claiming this as some kind of conservative victory for a while now, as if the failure of these movies somehow validates the war and shows how disconnected Hollywood is from America. If that’s the case why does America consistently gobble up the latest wannabe blockbuster fodder that Hollywood churns out week after week?
In a way, the failure of these movies is a kind of silent agreement on the part of viewers. Americans are sick of the war and want nothing to do with it, even at the movies. They get more than enough on the nightly news. It has nothing to do with the movies being “anti-American,” which only an insulated idiot like O’Reilly would believe.
And there hasn’t really been a great MUST SEE film about the Iraq war yet. “In the Valley of Elah” was great, and there have been some excellent, essential documentaries on the subject, but nothing “Deer Hunter” like yet. Iraq has yet to see its masterpiece.
Questioning the American government is tantamount to hating America in Bill’s black and white binary world.
Actually, that’s the view in many peoples’ black and white binary world, not just O’Reilly’s. Sad to say.
Yeah, this is a standard right-wing talking point (which is itself an overused phrase, sorry) and while there’s a kernel of truth to it (people don’t want to see serious, depressing movies about current events) it’s also basically bullshit, and O’Reilly is beneath contempt.
364 days of the year I ignore the guy, but once in a while I need to laugh at him out loud.
I don’t even believe he’s a real conservative. I think he just saw an opening to pray on ignorant people’s fear and anger to make a success of himself and he’s milking it for all it’s worth.
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Too little collective public effort is spent mocking O’Reilly. I really don’t think even he takes himself seriously. And not just about movies. But, about movies - around Oscar time he was discussing the Best Picture nominees and spewing some meaningless blather about liberal Hollywood and blah blah blah. I think he was mainly just going after Clooney for MC, and I actually don’t think he had seen anything except Juno (which he loved?). Anyway, the most ridiculous part (it’s hard to define that, I know) was when he mentioned that he used to be a film critic for some 4th tier newspaper way back when. I haven’t been able to find such evidence, but boy would that be high comedy.
Yeah, Daniel, O’Reilly’s asinine take on the Oscar race was one of the most hilarious things I’ve heard. He loved Juno, refused to see Michael Clayton and Juno, said No Country for Old Men was something like “a lot of fun” but–wait for it, wait for it–”it didn’t have an ending! The Coens, they’re wacky, they make wacky movies, that’s what they do!” Refused to see Atonement because he thought it sounded too British. He said There Will Be Blood should be called There Will Be Boredom. He said it was 2-1/2 hours of torture. Shortly followed by O’Reilly trademark bon mot and debate-closer: “COME ON!!!” That guy is just a lot of fun. And, no, he isn’t a real conservative or a real anything, especially a real thinker, but somehow in the degraded intellectual arena of American politics he has somehow assumed the place of Aristotle. Depressing.
I think Daniel is right - he takes himself just a little more seriously than Colbert does. Which makes him vastly more dishonest.
Please believe me, as an American, when I say that he is ignored and mocked by a lot of us, but not enough. Sadly.
Damn right he is, Craig. I don’t have a major problem with conservatism (limited government, open economy) per se. My problem is that I have never seen a “true” conservative. I’d say they were extinct, but it’s gotten to the point where I doubt they ever existed in the first place. A true conservative wouldn’t foist his religious or moral views on everyone else and he wouldn’t spend $6 trillion of taxpayer’s money on anything, let alone a pointless war. The closest we have are the libertarians but, seriously, I only know one person who’s a libertarian and he’s voting democrat this election.
Unfortunately, this is the paradox that people are willing to accept when blinded by xenophobia, greed, et. al.
O’Reilly also claimed BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN bombed. He’s often so spectacularly wrong that I literally can’t believe people take him seriously. And if you want to know Bill at his best for what he truly is, recall his stint on tabloid show INSIDE EDITION where he did reports on topless car washes with a smirking grin.
Heh heh, Bill O’Reilly equals THE Mr. Lebowski.
“Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost! My advice to you is, to do what your parents did! Get a job, sir! The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski? THE BUMS WILL ALWAYS LOSE!”
Not a huge fan of Stop-Loss, but I don’t think it bombed. I think it did reasonably decent business.
Personally, I’m kind of tired of the way the term “hit” and “flop” are now a set of moving goalposts, generally speaking. it used to mean, “a lot of people went to the movie to see it.” Now it’s a parlour game of financial expectations, grosses vs. costs, etc. How can Superman Returns make more than $200 million at the box office and not be considered a hit? I don’t care how much it cost. A heck of a lot of people went to see it.
There was a time when Billo got under my skin, mostly b/c there was no one else to counteract him. Then, I started watching Keith Olbermann and realized I didn’t have to worry about Billo (or Comedian Rush or Coultergeist or…), because now at least someone was calling them out for what they really are (not that their recent comments and behavior have helped all that much). Now, I just watch Keith go after this glorified monger-monkey and get a good laugh from it!
All the films he cites are, undeniably, cut from the same cloth. If on one end of the spectrum you have Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah and on the other you have a John Wayne-style propaganda piece (I love the Duke, but a lot, not all, but a certainly a handful of films he did during WWII were straight up propaganda), I would say the tastes of most Americans are somewhere in the middle.
It isn’t so much that Americans have rejected films about the war, they’ve simply rejected Paul Haggis.