As the Tom Hanks-Sandra Bullock drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close hits theaters today, New Yorkers are voicing their displeasure over the decision by both Warner Bros. and the MTA to air the movie’s commercials in digital subway ads in New York City. Most notably, the commercials are airing on a digital panel at a subway station right next to Ground Zero.

The film is about a young boy whose father (Hanks) dies in the attacks on the World Trade Center and his subsequent search for the answers to life’s questions, and so the ads feature footage of the attacks and smoke billowing from the towers. You know, I could see how that might upset some people in New York City.

“Everybody’s trying to make money off 9/11,” said Bill Doyle, whose son, Joseph, was killed in the north tower.

“A lot of families got upset. Why couldn’t they warn us about this? I don’t think people really realized that these people are really still stressed.”

A Warner Bros. spokesman, Paul McGuire, said the movie company would pull the ads.

“It was never our intention to cause any distress,” McGuire said. “As a result, we will make best efforts to pull the material from pertinent locations.”

(Via the New York Post)

Common sense is a rare treasure these days. I mean, I understand that you want to be able to convey to people that you’ve made a dramatic film that has 9/11 as a backdrop (oh how I miss the Cold War) and you need to show the horrific footage to really hammer home your point.

But I also want to believe that at some point during the video editing process for the TV ads, someone looked up and said, “Hey, I just had a thought – this might upset people.” Then again, I also assume another person just responded, “Nah, people still like Tom Hanks.”

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If you half paid attention to one of the Machete trailers and never saw the movie, you too would know that Robert Rodriguez’ film is an anti-white hateporn snuff film promoting genocide against the white race. This was first discovered by Bay Area National Anarchist (yes, “national anarchist”) leader Andrew Yeoman, who not only vowed to protest the Machete premiere while brandishing actual machetes, but even started a Facebook page. That’s right, sh*ts getting real now!  (*writes “HELTER SKELTER” on the wall with poop*)  ATTICA! ATTICA! (*throws pillow at cat*)

A group of white nationalists will protest the new Robert Rodriguez movie Machete at Bay Area cinemas this week. This gets even more interesting: The protesters will show up “armed” with machetes.
“We feel that this is an explicit threat to white folks,” Yeoman wrote on the far-right blog Occidental Dissent, “and that it is necessary to send a message to moviegoers and the producers of this film that threatening people because they happen to be white is unacceptable.” [SFWeekly]

Whoa whoa whoa, “happen to be white?”  I don’t know about you, buddy, but I didn’t “happen to be white”, I was bequeathed my pure-white skin by God himself so that I might rule over all manner of swarthy ethnics from behind locked doors as I drove through their neighborhoods shaking my head at their obnoxious jungle music. 

I digress, but the blockquote above was an excerpt from an article from last week, which among other things, included the news that carrying around a machete is apparently perfectly legal.

San Francisco Police spokeswoman Lieutenant Lyn Tomioka says there’s nothing inherently illegal with openly carrying around a machete, as long as protesters aren’t using them in a menacing manner.
Yeoman says “we feel that bringing machetes is important symbolism.”

Aw yeah, this is going to take my pigeon-chasing sessions to a whole new level.  So anyway, how’d that protest turn out?
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Though distributor 20th Century Fox hasn’t officially commented, a few reviewers have noticed that even on the “unrated” DVD versions of Miss March, the word ‘retard’ has been carefully excised. 

There’s a scene in which two abstinence promoters are trying to frighten kids into never having sex, and they share a story about a teenager who smoked while she was pregnant, causing the baby to come out a “crack head.” Except the actress’ lips clearly weren’t saying “crack head.” Her lips looked like they were saying “retard.” The baby is mentioned twice more, each time with “retard” replaced with “crack head.” Later in the film, someone’s behavior is described as “stupid,” and again it’s clear that he originally said “retarded.” [Cinematical]

It’s highly probable Fox made the changes in response to protests of the kind that happened when Tropic Thunder came out last year.  Bottom line, we all know these PC retards are out there and will protest anything they think they can hijack to advance their agenda, and it only makes it worse when you actually pay attention to them.  Not that anyone should expect anything different from Fox.  But go ahead, retards, ban the word retard.  Fine.  Now make up a new, “nice” word you think we should use instead and we’ll all go along with that too.  And you know what’ll happen?  10 years from now retardism will remain uncured and your new word will be our insult.   Why?  Because no matter what you call it, mental deficiencies are undesirable.  And that’s not going to change until we all work in Human Resources at Fox.

The Earth-shaking tidal wave of condemnation of Slumdog Millionaire continued this week in India as slumdwellers turned out in force to protest. Says Reuters:

In recent weeks the movie’s success around the world has been overshadowed by objections in India to the name, which some slum dwellers find offensive.

Overshadowed, you say?  Please, tell me more about this important movement.

Dozens of residents of a Mumbai slum where Slumdog Millionaire was partly shot protested  Tuesday, hurling insults and hitting pictures of its cast and crew with slippers [of course].
“They have made a mockery of us, they have hurt our sentiments,” said N.R. Paul, a protest leader and resident in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum.
“Slum dwellers are human beings, not dogs,” said one poster [hey, dogs live in the slum too, shithead].
“They should change at least the title ["...which is all I know about it"]. Why did our Censor Board allow such a title in India? It is very sad,” said Kallubhai Qureshi, a resident in Dharavi.
Nicholas Almeida, a social activist and slum dweller who has filed a complaint in a local court against the title, said the filmmakers also had a responsibility toward the slums in which they shot the movie.
“It is making so many millions of dollars, why can’t they spend some money here to improve our lives?” said Almeida.

That’s right, dozens.  In a country with almost 1.2 billion people, at least 12 people came out to protest.  That’s less than the film’s crew.  Why is anyone talking to these idiots?  12 people? I can find more hoboes than that in my neighborhood protesting things that don’t exist, like the holocaust, or the female orgasm.  If the object of this protest was to make me pray the protesters starve to death, well done.

Blindness opens this Friday and of course blind people are pissed because it’s super offensive.

Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food. For Marc Maurer, who’s blind, such a scenario — as shown in the movie “Blindness” — is not a clever allegory for a breakdown in society.

“The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie,” said Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.”

The organization plans to protest the movie… Blind people and their allies will hand out fliers and carry signs. Among the slogans: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life.”

The movie reinforces inaccurate stereotypes, including that the blind cannot care for themselves and are perpetually disoriented, according to the NFB.

“We face a 70% unemployment rate and other social problems because people don’t think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all,” said Christopher Danielsen, a spokesman for the organization.

Based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, “Blindness” imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light — resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.

The book was praised for its use of blindness as a metaphor for the lack of clear communication and respect for human dignity in modern society. [THR]

These A-holes are just like the Tropic Thunder and Towelhead protestors.  I mean, where do they get off protesting a movie they haven’t even seen? **tap dances off stage**