In addition to anchoring one of the smartest sitcoms of the past 20 years–Frasier–Grammer is the best guest voice actor ever to appear on the “The Simpsons” and every bit a match for the regulars. He’s Sideshow Bob. In a handful of episodes (7 or 8) he’s created a memorable nemesis for Bart and the rest of the Simpsons–that’s why his episodes (“Cape Feare,” “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming,” “Brother from Another Series”) are some of the best in the long, long run of the Simpsons, and why simply the words “New episode” and “Sideshow Bob” are enough to make me excited.

Willis is up and down, and for all I know is a jerk in real life, but watch “Unbreakable”; he can deliver.

Kurt Russell–”Escape from New York”? “Deathproof”?

Voigt–Midnight Cowboy. Mission Impossible.

Costner–no talent? Field of Dreams, JFK, The Untouchables, and one of the best liberal movies of recent years, Thirteen Days?

You’re right about the rest, but credit where credit is due.

I think you made a good point in your original article, but why are you nitpicking the hell out of the reader who posted that the portrayal of the prince in BraveHeart wasn’t out of the ordinary? r4d20 was making an arguably valid point. Hollywood skews just about all real-life characters, and it’s usually done for dramatic purposes. I’ve script-doctored for a while now, and if compressing a bunch of personality quirks into a character will save us a single page of script, we’ll do it.

Yeah! And retarded-ass Lynndie England can make a guest appearance each week, helpfully doin’ her cha-CHA! pointing gesture at their swimming-trunk-encased “stuff”!

July 21, 2008 at 23:30

Celebrties who have been marginalized for being conservatives:

Bruce Willis, Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, Adam Sandler, Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Chuck Norris, Charles Barkley, Robert Duvall, Kurt Schilling, MIke Ditka, John Elway, Bret Favre, Dennis Hopper, James Hetfield, the Rock, Bobby Knight, Tommy Lasorda, Meat Loaf, Heather Locklear, Al Michaels, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, Regis, Kurt Russel, Pat Sajak, Pete Sampras, Tom Sellek, Ben Stein, George Steinbrenner, Fred Thompson, Dennis Miller.

First off IMO, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Clint Eastwood and Gary Oldman are the only people in this list with any genuine talent. Considering how much they have all worked over the years and continue to work, the idea that they have somehow been “marginalized” is bizarre.

The rest have personalities, the markets for which ebb and flow.
“Entertainers” like Kelsey Grammer, Chuck Norris, Heather Locklear, Kurt Russel, Pat Sajak, Tom Sellek and Dennis Miller haven’t been marginalized because they’re conservative, they’ve been marginalized because they’re marginal talents. They were all “right place, right time” celebrities whose places could’ve been filled by any other of the thousands of marginally talented people vying for a shot in Hollywood. They were all lucky they got as far as they did. Please, enough with the professional victimhood.

The only emotions conservatives are comfortable showing in public are “cool detached superiority” (The Rock, Clint Eastwood, Arnold, etc.) or contempt. Hollywood has only a very limited supply of roles for such actors. For every Arnold coolly dispatching foes in a big picture, you need several hundred liberals showing fear, love, angst, swooning, running in terror, cackling maniacally, and writing the whole sorry affair.

Then there is the persistent message conservative talking heads and pundits program into their faithful, that Hollywood is a futile and corrosive and useless and immoral cesspool (even if some of that is contradictory). Conservative parents thus push their children far from the arts. They mock the arts, belittle the arts. A young conservative would be shunned by family and congregation if choosing to head out to Hollywood.

Hollywood would be more than happy to accept talented creative conservatives. It would let them tap into a pretty reliable and compliant and predictable market. Hollywood at it’s heart embodies capitalism. Hollywood wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

However popular the conservative image may have been in the past (and however unpopular they managed to make the liberal image) the plain truth today is that conservative political ideas are very unpopular. And try as they might, conservatives are unable to divorce the unpopularity of their ideas from their image.

Breitbart ignores the disease in favor of increasing our dosage of his perscription for the symptoms. We’ve already been mainlining conservative entertainment themes for the past two decades. The 20 percenters now live bunkered in the unshakable faith that the rest of the world is bent on our destruction. A few more game shows and Dom Coms featuring themes favorable to conservatives and a handful of Alex P. Keatons won’t rescue the failure of conservative political ideas. And the longer conservatives ignore their plight, the worse the situation will get for them.

I’ve gotta admit thought, it’s fun to watch.

Teh funnee ur doin it rong!

The last thing we need are more Republicans in Hollywood, they kill everything they touch.

I’m particularly fond of the Muppet Movie.

That did occur to me too. I think it’s another required feature of the wingnut mental landscape. Just like the main point of the entire article i.e. “There’s a serious problem, and everyone except me is morally obliged to help solve it.”