Free Republic

There’s got to be a word for this in the urban dictionary someplace, but darned if I can locate it. It’s probably some sort of “transference” phenomenon in the psychiatric sphere. So what do you call it when you produce a product which is awful and you blame its poor reception on the people who all agree that it’s awful? When you find the correct terminology for that you can apply it to the Hollywood moguls who were responsible for the production of the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean film and that long awaited (/sarc) Baywatch flick. That’s because...

The R-rated comedy with the combined star power of Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron could barely stay afloat at the Memorial Day box office after being savaged by reviewers. Not even Dwayne Johnson could save Baywatch from sinking like a rock in its big-screen debut. Crippled by critics, the R-rated adaptation of the classic TV action drama debuted to a dismal $23 million over the long Memorial Day weekend, well behind expectations. The film placed No. 3 after Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and holdover Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, now in its fourth weekend,...

Memorial Day revenue at the domestic box office falls to its lowest level in nearly two decades; overseas, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales’ makes up ground with a $208.4 million launch. Memorial Day weekend was no picnic this year for Hollywood at the domestic box office. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales may have won the holiday frame with a four-day haul of $77 million from 4,276 theaters, but it is the lowest start for any Pirates movie outside of the first film. It did make up ground overseas, where it found plenty...

Memorial Day weekend would seem like the best time for a big summer blockbuster to hit the theaters, but in recent years audiences have been focusing more on their tans and grillmaster skills over the holiday than going to a movie theater. Past Memorial Day holiday weekend openings that were instant fails at the box office include: "Tomorrowland" ($33 million opening weekend), "Alice Through the Looking Glass" ($26.8 million), and "X-Men: Apocalypse" ($65.7 million). Now you can add two new releases from this year to that list.

It is by now widely reported that the concert in Manchester, England that was bombed by a member-in-good-standing of the islamic political system was by an American singer named Ariana Grande, and that Grande’s target audience was pre-teen and teen aged girls. Grande is a product of the odious Nickelodeon children’s cable channel machine, second only to Disney in its perversity and aggression in its attack on children’s souls. Not knowing anything about Grande, I did less than five minutes of reasearch and was stunned – yes, even in my severely jaded state I was stunned – by what I...

At premieres, beach parties, wine-soaked dinners and business meetings, the topic du jour at this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Trump. Buyers and sellers, studios executives and stars confess they’re glued to their smartphones, waiting for email alerts and updates on the latest White House scandal. “I’m obsessed with it,” said Stuart Ford, CEO of sales and production company IM Global. “The first thing I do in the morning is check the news. The last thing I do at night is check the news.” Some of the films searching for distribution along the Croisette grapple directly or indirectly with Trump and...

A group of students at American University labeling themselves the “AU Justice League” have taken credit for ripping down anti-abortion flyers on campus. The campus’s College Republicans put the flyers up Wednesday night, and called for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. But by Thursday morning, the vast majority of the flyers had disappeared. It didn’t take long to figure out why. At 12:30 a.m., the Twitter account @AUJusticeLeague tweeted a photo of dozens of crumpled-up flyers with the caption “We had some fun with the college republican posters tonight. Let us know if we missed any guys!” The incident was...

Republicans never have been particularly good at the culture war. Sure, they won battles here and there. But even most of those victories turned into losses through court decisions anyway. Now we’re in the midst of the ultimate battle in the culture war – the battle for the First Amendment – and if Republicans don’t recognize this is a war and fight like their existence depends on victory, nothing else will matter. If you had told me five years ago that, in 2017, we’d be debating the nature of free speech and whether American citizens could be blocked from speaking...

"Most people enter their first relationships with the traditional idea of sexual exclusivity. It's just the way we're socialized in our culture." For some couples, non-exclusivity might take the form of attending "play parties" together and swapping partners, watching other couples have sex, dating other people or even entering into polyamorous relationships with multiple partners. Determine what's OK and what's not.

America vs. Anti-AmericaWhen John Edwards touted the “Two Americas” during his presidential campaigns before his political career ended in disgrace, it was still a metaphor. It stopped being a metaphor at the end of last year. If you doubt that, you can watch Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, yelling that President Trump didn’t win the election. There is a huge difference between opposing the winner of an election and denying that he won it. It’s the difference between opposition and rebellion. Democrats have not recognized a single Republican presidential victory this century. There is no real...

March 31, 2017 (TheBridgehead) -- Media figures, pundits, and commentators spend a decent portion of their time these days enthusiastically advocating for all sorts of new sexual lifestyles—their championing of gay marriage has quickly moved on to discussions surrounding the benefits of polyamory, the consensus they insist exists on transgenderism, and the rising trend of “open marriages.” So its hard to imagine what would shock these veteran bedroom journalists, who cut their teeth on reporting on Pride Parades, orgies, and unique marital arrangements. But it turns out that they have finally found something that has stunned them to their...

The warning was clear: Christian parents should pull their children out of public schools, now, to protect them from spiritual damage, extreme indoctrination, and other serious problems. Pastors and churches should work to encourage that “exodus,” helping and encouraging families to put their kids in homeschools or private Christian schools as quickly as possible. The alternative will be the continued decline of the church in America and an acceleration of the nation's decline. That was the explosive message of an evangelical ministry leader speaking as a guest this week on one of America's top Christian radio programs.Dr. James Dobson, one...

Iowa Republican, Steve King attracted criticism after posting a tweet which read the following: “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The statement is open ended, mildly confusing, and leaves a plethora of room for interpretation. King would have done well to clarify exactly what people he believes falls into the category of ‘somebody else’s babies.’ People who fall under the category of immigrants appears as the most likely match for ‘somebody else’s babies.’ Nonetheless, King’s tweet was in response to a Dutch parliamentarian who aspires to close all Mosques and ban the Quran.

In the movie Men In Black, there’s a scene where an abusive farmer gets killed by the villain, some kind of giant alien cockroach. The alien then possesses his body and walks around in comic fashion, like some kind of rotting zombie. The farmer’s wife exclaims “like an Edgar suit.” This is pretty much what Worldcon looks like, these days. Social Justice Marxists operate in the same manner. They take over institutions, groups, corporations, movements, whatever… and kill them. They then wear the skin of the destroyed, rotting institution like an Edgar suit, ambling around in comic fashion, expecting to...

As soon as the news broke last week that Disney’s new Beauty and the Beast movie would feature an “exclusively gay moment,” Franklin Graham called for a boycott of Disney in a Facebook post that has since been shared almost 100,000 times. The next day, a drive-in theater in Alabama announced that it would not show the movie, while, even before Franklin Graham’s comment was posted, the conservative group One Million Moms called for a Disney boycott, with a clear warning: “Alerting all parents! In a first for the Disney Channel, a Disney XD show subtly displayed several gay kisses...

....Moonlight won the top prize at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony—after some initial envelope confusion created a bizarre scene—and, despite the fact that the independent drama never made much of a splash at the box office. The movie, about a young, gay black man growing up in an impoverished Miami neighborhood, has only made a little more than $22.2 million in domestic movie ticket sales so far, according to Box Office Mojo. That made Moonlight the lowest-grossing Best Picture nominee at this year’s Academy Awards—and among the lowest ever for a Best Picture winner—even after generating months of Oscars buzz.

The campaign to get rid of marriage has not gone away. Civil partnerships for heterosexuals were not thrown out by the Appeal Court last week, only put off till later. They will come. In fact, after 20 years of New Labour government (some of it nominally Tory) we can now look back and survey the smoking ruins of marriage. It's not that the New Labour radicals and their Tory imitators wrecked marriage on their own. It's just that they have more or less finished it off. The very words 'husband' and 'wife' have been erased from official forms and even...

In the latest episode of Fox's "The Mick" which aired Tuesday, two underage boys are seen sitting naked in a bathtub together while waiting for another underage girl to have a threesome. From NewsBusters: What a pleasant scene to end another Valentine’s Day with: minors possibly having a threesome. Forget the flowers. Forget the chocolates. Forget all that sentimental notion of finding that special person who can love and cherish you. No, the Fox comedy The Mick’s implication of two underage boys in a bathtub waiting for an older girl is something that will stick with me, whether I...

During the presidential campaign, several dozen brainless Hollywood stars were so upset at Donald Trump that they promised to leave the country if he won. Well we are still waiting for them to do everyone a favor and exit stage left. Of course, they lied and continue to pollute the airwaves here in America. Now that it is awards season for the movie industry, it has been non-stop criticism of our new President. At the Golden Globes Awards, Meryl Streep blasted President Trump for his supposedly hateful gesturing about a disabled reporter during the campaign. Never mind that the...

The American coastal elites are living in a different country than they thought and it has a powerful voice in the new president Donald Trump is an unlikely president. He is also an unlikely cultural warrior. That hasn’t stopped him from becoming both. Besides throwing American politics into a tumult that won’t end in the near future, President Trump has reoriented and reinvigorated the American culture war. He has wrenched it away from its decades-long focus on issues related to religion and sexual morality and created another axis around populism and nationalism. The issues involved in this new culture war...