Primetime Is Hollywood’s Attempt To Normalize The Disordered Evils Of Pedophilia
Primetime is the perfect example of how far our society has fallen.Primetime is the perfect example of how far our society has fallen.
Chris Hansen is NOT a fan of new Robert Pattinson film 'Primetime'
Chris Hansen built his career confronting alleged child predators — adults who had agreed to meet up with children — but Hollywood is telling his story from a different angle.
An angle where, apparently, he’s the predator.
In “Primetime,” Robert Pattinson portrays the longtime "To Catch a Predator" host in a fictionalized take on Hansen’s career.
BlazeTV hosts Stu Burguiere and Dave Landau are less than impressed with the film’s spin, especially considering Hollywood doesn’t hold any moral high ground when it comes to predatory behavior.
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“It’s odd because Hollywood’s like, you know, we’re the industry falling apart because we’re, you know, the industry that’s been accused of pedophilia and grooming. So what we should do is make a movie about Chris Hansen where the pedophiles are the good guys,” Dave says.
“This is what fascinates me more than anything else,” Stu agrees, “because of course we live in the country that would … make the guy getting the pedophiles arrested into the bad guy."
Dave notes that having met Hansen twice himself, he found him to be a “genuinely good dude” who “actually cares about his work.”
Hansen isn’t a fan of the film either, explaining in an interview that even though he is not “the most objective reviewer ... since A24 made it without [his] consult or consideration, and they use [his] name, image, and likeness,” that the film is “pure fiction.”
“They mix in some reality here and there. At the end of the day, I wasn’t blown away by it either way. It’s a movie, and I’ll continue to do the work I do, and people can watch this movie and make up their own minds,” he added.
A Washington Post article also addresses the new film’s spin on Hansen’s career, titled “A new movie asks whether Chris Hansen is the predator. He’s sure of his answer.”
“‘No’ is his answer,” Stu laughs. “Quite obviously ‘no’ is the correct answer. It’s easy to detect because he was the people putting predators into prison.”
“Yes, that’s how you know he wasn’t the predator,” Dave agrees.
“The pitch on him being the bad guy, by the way, is all he cared about was ratings and he was exposing these losers and their weird sexual things to the masses for his own publicity and ruining their lives, which, at some level, parts of that storyline are true,” Stu says.
“I’m sure he cared about ratings, as every television person does,” he continues. “I’m sure he was trying to advance his career and make the show popular.”
"But … just because you’re a loser and just because, you know, you have a weird sexual thing does not make it OK to act on that with kids,” he adds.
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East Of Eden Villain Is A Netflix Hero Because She Has No Sexual Mores
Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of 'East of Eden' trades literary truth for cheap moral ambiguity.Hollywood's latest villain: A guy famous for catching predators
The left has made its favorite formula clear: Stop talking about the wrongdoing and start questioning the people who confront it.
And BlazeTV host John Doyle points out that this couldn’t be more accurate than in the leftist portrayal of Chris Hansen and his famous investigations into online child predators in the new Hollywood film “Primetime.”
Rather than focus on the heroism of his exposes and the lives he saved, the film “deconstruct[s] his motives and make[s] the story really about how he was just driven by ego or fame.”
One motive for making a film like this, Doyle believes, is that the “left wants to take men who are successful and deconstruct them and tear them down.”
“I mean, Chris Hansen is a hero. He catches the predators,” he says.
“They want to make the conversation really about your response or your reaction to the bad behavior rather than the conversation being about the bad behavior itself,” he continues, “You see this with literally everything.”
Doyle points out that when murder or crime statistics regarding different races are brought up, the left ignores the crime and focuses on “racism.” When terrorism is brought up, the left focuses on “Islamophobia.”
“Literally any issue, this is what these people do. The real problem is always how you are responding or reacting to the bad behavior,” he says.
In the film, the attention is diverted away from the man who was trying to meet a child to engage in a sex crime.
“We are now made to feel like Chris Hansen is the weird person here for having this kind of fixation,” Doyle explains.
“So, again, never about the bad behavior itself, always about the reaction to the bad behavior,” he says.
“We see these shots of Chris Hansen literally lurking in the shadows as if he is a predator hunting his prey. That is what it is doing,” he continues. “So it’s implying that, you know, he is preying on the predator the same way that the predators are preying on the kids.”
“It’s this kind of moral relativism where it’s like, ‘Oh dude, yo, who’s the real predator?’ This kind of thing,” he adds.
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The audience you may need someday
Actress Tatiana Maslany recently called Tom Selleck and Michael Jordan “cowardly” for keeping politics out of much of their work.
Some readers may ask: Who?
If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen.
Maslany won an Emmy for “Orphan Black” and starred in Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” That is a career many actors would envy. Selleck and Jordan, however, are household names whose audiences have stayed with them for decades.
I wonder whether Maslany has thought much about why.
On Mehdi Hasan’s show, Maslany argued that all entertainment is political. Selleck had explained that he saw little sense in alienating half the country when his job was to entertain it. Jordan’s famous line about Republicans buying sneakers made much the same point. Maslany called that kind of restraint cowardly.
Fame and money can make anyone feel invulnerable. At the height of their fame, Selleck and Jordan could have told audiences what to think at every opportunity. Instead, they showed enough judgment to consider what they might lose by doing so — and whether politics was necessary to the work in the first place.
They built careers that lasted longer than the moment when everybody wanted an autograph.
I have seen this kind of signaling on a much smaller and more personal level. At one teaching hospital where my wife received extensive treatment, some young residents wore pronouns on their badges. None of the attending surgeons who treated Gracie did. I could choose the attending surgeon; the residents came with the package.
Let me be blunt. If you make pronouns part of your professional presentation, I notice. To me, putting them front and center signals concerns I do not want inserted into a relationship built on competence and trust. I could not choose the residents assigned to Gracie’s care. When the choice is mine, however, I make it.
Were the attending surgeons cowards for leaving pronouns off their badges? I have no idea what each of them believed. I know that when Gracie faced another surgery, their personal lives and politics never entered the room or gave me reason to question their judgment.
That becomes rather important when you are standing at an operating room door.
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An entertainer’s public choices work much the same way. Maslany can impugn Selleck and Jordan. She can say whatever she pleases. And I can decline to spend a dime or a minute on her work.
I cannot watch a Robert De Niro movie now without hearing his political rants instead of his character. When football players began kneeling during the national anthem, I stopped watching. Nearly a decade later, I still have not returned. The NFL went on without me, and I went on without it.
Gillette lost me the same way. When the company aired its commercial about “toxic masculinity,” I stopped buying its products. I never announced a boycott. I simply bought another razor. My eyebrows went up when I later heard Dana Perino say on “The Five” that her husband, Peter, had done the same.
How many other customers quietly made that decision?
Nobody has to organize a boycott. People can simply find another razor, another movie, or something else to do on Sunday afternoon. The business may never learn why the customer disappeared.
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Maslany recently turned 41. She is no newcomer waiting for her first break. She knows how much talent and luck it takes to land a role people remember, and she cannot know how many more will come.
Perhaps she will gain admirers for what she said. Perhaps she will never miss a role or a paycheck. Or perhaps some people she hopes will watch her next performance will quietly walk away. Others whose livelihoods depend on her work may absorb some of the cost.
That is the part of celebrity political speech people often miss. The audience does not owe the performer its continued attention.
If all art is political, as Maslany says, then let the art speak. Give us a performance powerful enough to make us listen. Calling two men cowards is easier than producing work people will still want to see decades from now.
Selleck and Jordan understood something about fame while they had plenty of it: An audience does not belong to you.
Maslany is free to speak her mind. The rest of us are just as free to decide whether we want to hear any more.
Fresh from defeating the 'Entity,' Tom Cruise unveils his formula for human supremacy over AI
In Tom Cruise's most recent "Mission Impossible" movie, the bad guy was artificial intelligence, in the form of a menace simply called the Entity.
The filming predated a significant number of rogue AI events that point toward oncoming disaster. In his version though, humans are too clever and unpredictable for the machines to comprehend. Put shortly: Humanity will win.
'I always believe in humanity.'
This made Cruise the perfect person to ask about AI's intrusion on the entertainment industry, and his answers give a glimpse into how he sees the future of film.
On Monday night, Cruise was in London for an in-depth discussion on film, where he overwhelmingly supported the notion that people "want to see real things" in movies.
Cruise told the British Academy of Film and Television Arts he is keen on keeping movie theaters alive and will continue to have people coming together in person to see other real people.
"Here's the thing: There is nothing like human," Cruise began, per Variety. "I have nothing against streaming or anything like that," but seeing a film in theaters is simply "a different art form."
Cruise has remained confident in the box-office experience, which is why he pushed so hard to have his films storm through COVID-19 protocols and continue production.
The movie star was famously heard yelling at crew members on set for breaking COVID-19 restrictions, telling them the entire industry was hinging on the idea that they could make a movie without incident.
"We are not shutting this f**king movie down!" Cruise yelled.
The industry may now have Cruise to thank as he pointed toward record-setting box-office numbers for the summer of 2026.
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A reported $4.76 billion between May 1 and Labor Day had Cruise boasting that "people want that experience."
"They're going to movie theaters," Cruise said, before he put his faith in man over machine.
"I always believe in humanity."
Cruise fought for more actors' and stunt performers' rights in recent years when it comes to AI. The 64-year-old dove into SAG-AFTRA labor negotiations with movie studios in 2023 to hit on certain proposals that would protect "human-created work."
He reportedly argued for compensation for actors, as well as their consent, before a studio can use AI to replicate their voice or likeness, or if they wish to create a "digital replica" of them.
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Creatives must "keep creating," Cruise concluded. "You know, [AI] is coming and it’s going to happen. ... But people want to see real things."
Cruise is not one of the growing number of public personalities who are tossing their likeness around for profit, even as AI studios try to force their hand in the industry.
Interestingly though, Val Kilmer expressed gratitude in 2022 that he was able to have his voice recreated for Cruise's "Top Gun: Maverick" despite being sick with throat cancer.
Since his passing, the estate of Kilmer announced earlier this year that the deceased actor would be resurrected on film using AI.
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The Consent Decree Between Paramount And California Is Insane
Who decides how much product a corporation should produce? California's top prosecutor.Chuck Norris died. The Emmys were still too scared to say his name.
Regrets, Shaggy has a few.
Actor Matthew Lillard just took a stand in classic Hollywood fashion: years after doing so might have cost him something.
John Leguizamo works and works, and in between, he whines about Hollywood’s woke deficit.
The “Scream” and “Scooby-Doo” alum says he now regrets staying silent when actress Melissa Barrera lost her gig for her extreme pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views.
Better late than brave?
Barrera’s comments, made shortly after the October 7 attacks, alarmed people in the industry. She was subsequently fired from the “Scream” franchise.
Lillard kept his head down.
Now, with pro-Palestinian activism commonplace in La-La Land and Hollywood stars rallying around Macklemore after he got bounced from Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour, Lillard is ready to speak truth to power.
It’s really f**king bulls**t and really hard, and she’s on the right side of history. When they start coming after your job, sometimes things are worth it. … When that happened to Melissa, the whole world didn’t pipe up. But she was a year early on what the f**k’s going on. But the whole world should have popped up and said, "She’s right." And they didn’t. And that’s brutal.
The cultural winds have shifted. What might once have put an actor’s career at risk now earns applause from plenty of his peers. And Lillard has finally found his voice.
Remember his impassioned public condemnation of the Oct. 7 attacks? His demands that Hamas release its hostages?
Neither do we.
Being forgotten fears Chuck Norris
They couldn’t beat him in life, but in death it’s easier. A little.
Action movie legend Chuck Norris died earlier this year. A huge part of his decades-long career was his starring role in CBS’ “Walker, Texas Ranger.” The series lasted for nine seasons, no small feat, bringing the iconic actor to the small screen.
So how did the Emmys honor his passing? By ignoring him.
This week’s Emmys telecast featured a segment remembering the TV stars who passed over the last year, much like the one that haunts the annual Oscars gala. And like the Academy Awards segment, the Emmys left out several notable stars.
Accidental? On purpose? Do we even have to ask? It’s Hollywood ...
Grin and bare it
USA Today is a far cry from Blaze News, but every once in a while, the liberal rag lets a right-leaning opinion sneak out. This time, it’s a columnist who said what everyone should acknowledge about the latest Sydney Sweeney non-troversy.
It’s all about politics, even though the “Housemaid” starlet isn’t political. Wait ... what?
The liberal news outlet published an op-ed debunking the most recent attacks on Sweeney for baring (mostly) all on behalf of a sports betting platform.
Yes, it’s easy to argue that we’ve seen other attractive stars and athletes get nekkid for ad campaigns. It’s nothing new at all.
Yet what Ingrid Jacques argues is more important. Sweeney has a target on her back because people assume she’s pro MAGA. Even if she never wore a red hat in her life.
She’s a registered Republican in Florida, but she doesn’t weigh in on politics. Ever. It’s not her style, and that’s her choice. She keeps telling interviewers that she wants to keep her political views private.
For that, she must be punished, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Even USA Today sees the scam ...
Mad hombre
An actor who spends way too much time complaining is getting another plum gig.
John Leguizamo works and works, and in between, he whines about Hollywood’s woke deficit.
Really.
Leguizamo has blasted James Franco for taking the role of Fidel Castro in an upcoming project. He’s not Cuban, the actor cried. He also shrieked over Chris Pratt taking on the title role in the “Super Mario Bros. Movie.”
He’s not Italian!
Leguizamo also said the movie industry doesn’t accept Latinos. That same industry cast the star in “The Odyssey,” one of the biggest movie projects in recent years. Now, he’ll play the main villain in the upcoming “Miami Vice” reboot with Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler. That’s one of nine projects he has lined up, according to IMDB.com.
If he ever stopped complaining about Hollywood for just a minute, he might land even more roles ...
Tom Cruise is utterly bizarre. He’s also America’s greatest movie star.
Tom Cruise is a strange human being. This is not up for debate.
Nor is the fact that he’s a great movie star and perhaps the last truly great American movie star.
Cruise doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays.
Even at 64, this genetic anomaly shows no signs of slowing down. Cruise is so monomaniacally devoted to his craft that what he does off-screen should have no bearing on what he delivers on-screen.
Losin' it
Yes, he sold his soul to a sci-fi cult founded by a charlatan and a known criminal. Yes, he bounced around on Oprah’s couch like a toddler who had just inhaled a dozen Red Bulls. Yes, he left a trail of high-profile divorces behind him. And yes, his relationship with his youngest daughter, Suri, has all the warmth of a North Korean prison camp in November.
None of this matters. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway.
That’s because Tom Cruise is essentially a diminutive delivery system for larger-than-life cinema.
We live in a culture obsessed with dragging actors into the town square to answer for their sins, whether real or manufactured. Audiences demand that stars double as Sunday school teachers. Expecting a guy who scales mountain faces for fun to have a wholesome, normal domestic life is borderline delusional.
As a young man, Cruise briefly considered becoming a Franciscan priest. That didn't work out, but he eventually found a vocation almost as all-consuming.
All the right moves
Circa 1986, Cruise abandoned the real world to become a perpetual entertainment machine. If he wants to spend his days grazing on a handful of almonds, running on a treadmill at 3:00 a.m., and worshiping cosmic conquerors, that’s his business. And in truth, it’s really none of ours. He is an actor, not a member of Congress.
The miracle of Cruise is his ability to play an everyday American while living a life that seems more alien than the creatures he runs from.
Which brings us to Steven Spielberg’s 2005 masterpiece "War of the Worlds." Cruise plays Ray Ferrier, a divorced New Jersey dock worker with a rusted V8 engine block sitting on a coffee table in his messy living room.
A man worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who flies private jets around the globe, somehow steps onto the screen and instantly radiates the exact energy of a guy who owes child support and eats cereal straight out of the box. He doesn’t overplay the working-class persona. He doesn’t force a cringeworthy accent. He simply embodies the concerns of a terrified father trying to dodge alien death rays. And he does it superbly.
Far and away
This effortless ability to play an average American sets him apart from his peers. Brad Pitt is a fine actor. But he always looks like a Hollywood A-lister playing dress-up when he tries to portray a normal civilian. Pitt was fantastic in "Fight Club" and "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," but he could never match the ferocious vulnerability delivered by Cruise in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 drama, "Magnolia."
In an ensemble that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards, and William H. Macy, Cruise stands out as Frank T.J. Mackey, an obnoxious, hyper-alpha pickup-artist guru. But when Mackey sits beside the hospital bed of his estranged father, now comatose and dying, the tough-guy facade fades.
The scene had an eerie parallel in Cruise's own life. His mother left his father when Cruise was 12, and father and son didn't see each other again for a decade. They finally reunited when his father was dying of cancer in a hospital — on the condition, Cruise later said, that the son ask no questions about the past.
Cruise, who has described his father as a "bully and a coward," brought some of that history directly into the scene, rewriting the monologue himself. The result is a brutal, believable breakdown that remains one of the finest performances in modern film history.
Risky business
Cruise's range is genuinely impressive, even extending into areas where it really shouldn’t. In the 2008 comedy "Tropic Thunder," Cruise donned a fat suit, a bald cap, and inordinate amounts of fake chest hair to play Les Grossman, a psychopathic, Diet Coke-chugging studio executive. The performance was comedic gold, turning a Harvey Weinstein-esque caricature into a cult-classic figure. The idea of Maverick aggressively dancing to hip-hop while screaming expletives into a satellite phone should never have worked. But it did, with magnificent effect.
The first time I saw Cruise on screen was in Oliver Stone’s 1989 classic, "Born on the Fourth of July." I was much too young to watch it, and my father should really have known better than to let me see it. But he didn’t at the time, and I’m eternally grateful for his questionable parenting decisions.
Playing Ron Kovic, a paralyzed Vietnam veteran, Cruise captures the heartbreak of a young American patriot who was betrayed by the country he served. The performance, which earned him an Academy Award nomination, remains a masterclass in psychological horror.
Yet people still wax lyrical about Daniel Day-Lewis and his much-discussed commitment to method acting, while treating Cruise as little more than a charismatic movie star. The disrespect is almost automatic. Cruise gets lumped in with Jason Statham and Keanu Reeves, as though physicality and box-office appeal somehow disqualify an actor from serious dramatic greatness. That’s the great irony of Cruise’s career. One of Hollywood’s most technically gifted dramatic actors has spent decades being dismissed because he also happens to be one of its biggest movie stars.
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Minority report
At an age when most Hollywood legends are retired or playing roles no one cares about, Cruise instead chooses to hang off the side of an Airbus A400M aircraft at 5,000 feet. He breaks his ankle while jumping between buildings in London, gets up, finishes the shot on camera, and then gets physiotherapy so he can do it all over again. The sexagenarian treats his body like an industrial turbine. He treats his craft with the devotion it deserves. Tom Cruise is an absolute machine, and he has given so many memorable performances.
The obsession with his off-screen antics reveals a sickening hypocrisy in how we consume art. We routinely listen to songs sung by disgusting individuals and admire paintings by violent lunatics, yet we expect our action heroes to be salt-of-the-earth types who adopt African children and fight for Zelenskyy on the front lines.
Cruise traded a quiet life for total mastery of cinema. When you sit down to watch a newly minted sequel to "Days of Thunder," you’re not buying a ticket to a lecture on family values. Instead, you’re paying for two hours of pure, unfiltered adrenaline, delivered by someone who sacrificed his sanity and his physical safety to make sure you enjoy your popcorn. Forget the trampolining on a couch. Forget the celebrity gossip. Tom Cruise is bizarre, but his body of work is damn near unimpeachable.
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