Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

You might remember Zach Stark, the young man who was forced into the Love In Action “ex-gay” program for teens in 2005. A documentary chronicles his journey. It will debut at Frameline 35 – the 35th Annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival – in June. The trailer:

Water For Elephants — Directed by Frances Lawrence. Romantic Drama. A young man finds himself drawn to a female circus elephant and the elephant’s female mahout. 122 minutes Color 2011. * * * The best English speaking circus film I know of is Elia Kazan’s Man On A Tightrope. I had hoped to find a better one here, but I didn’t. Kazan’s film focuses upon the circus world itself, its filth, its color,...

I Am – Directed by Tom Shadyak. Documentary. A spiritual civics lesson about the family relation in the internal human anatomy and everything in the world, as a Hollywood broad comedy director seeks the truth of what has gone wrong with the world. 76 minutes Color 2011. * * * * * I wanted them all to shut up. For my sense was that every single one of them were talking about something that they knew about...

I’ve never started a post with a certain, expressive phrase used by some other bloggers, but everything does have its time so here goes. It turns out Donald Trump found the White House Correspondent’s Dinner “inappropriate” and felt there were too many jokes aimed at him by President Barack Obama and Seth Meyers. So (here goes the phrase): BWWAAHHHHHHH! Who could ever think of possibly...

Here’s the full video of President Barack Obama’s comedy routine at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s dinner. The parts that are getting the most buzz is his satire video using The Lion King, his pointed references to the implosion of the birther issue in both jokes and graphics and his pointed barbs aimed at Donald Trump who was in the audience as a guest of the Washington Post (a controversial...

And, from 2008, here’s someone loaded with talent: then 10 year old Kayla Starr:

Here’s a video showing President Barack Obama joking about the controversy over his birth certificate at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Obama’s comedic timing is getting better and better. This was delivered like a pro:

As the President makes Birther jokes to Oprah (“I was there”) and at fundraisers, the next stage of the media cycle begins: payback for Trump. Like the slaughterhouse that uses every part of the pig but the squeal, journalists build up a big name, feast on it and then chop up the leftovers for a stew of deconstruction. Now the Trump pot is heating up with editorial outrage at his antics, reports...

Donald Trump’s latest narrative that Barack Obama wasn’t good enough to get into the colleges and be editor of the Harvard Law Review has brought him charges of racism and npossibly be the cause of a reported sudden drop in his TV show’s ratings. But now, according to Pop Eater columnist Ron Shuter, he could be facing an even bigger threat: celebrities may want to distance themselves from him...

I’m not one to spend an inordinate time on pointless issues when I generally prefer to write about the big picture. However, our nation is completely pre-occupied with the trivial that these issues simply overwhelm reality and the many important things in life. Thus I must again put on my rubber boots and grab the plunger. It is ironic that our shallow and manipulated 24/7 info-entertainment news media is...

If there’s a clip that can be shown now to indicate why birthers deserve this theme song, it’s Orly Taitz’s appearance on the MSNBC show of Lawrence O’Donnell, who always has one of the more compelling hours on that liberal-skewed network (he reportedly is getting a young demographic in his viewership these days). O’Donnell’s teaser was that he was going to have relentless...

Is Donald Trump firing himself and his show in terms of ratings? Exlusive research by The Atlantic finds that his ratings are going down fast — perhaps not unsurprising since his show’s audience is among the most liberal skewered. Joshua Green writes: He may have gotten President Obama’s attention, but Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is presumed by most people to be a stunt designed...

Those who want to protect America from a Commander-in-Chief of questionable citizenship got ahead of themselves by putting all their energy into proving that Barack Hussein Obama was foreign-born and should not be reelected. In primaries before next November, they will first have to head off Mitt (another odd name) Romney who may not be a secret Muslim but is a professed Mormon, certainly out of the Christian...

Anderson Cooper, who was pushed around by a Cairo crowd earlier this year, takes a verbal mauling while trying to interrupt Donald Trump’s tirade about the Obama birth certificate with a few facts. This was not what Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he called the Presidency a bully pulpit. Luckily for the CNN anchor, it was a phone interview so the shoving was verbal as the non-candidate kept pelting him...

What is more infectuous than the sound of a baby’s laughter? How about the sound of a baby’s laughter a HALF SPEED?

I’m a huge fan of the multi-talented Seth MacFarland, creator of “Family Guy” and also the voice of some of its key characters. Here is a gem via You Tube of him singing “Luck Be a Lady” — using Frank Sinatra’s classic arrangement…and also Sinatra’s arrangement of “That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp”:

A beautiful song to start your day, sung with uncopiable style by the immortal Mrs. Miller: And if you want, here’s her original hit that was at the top of the charts in the 60s:

A lost comedic art: pantomime. For younger TMV viewers, here, from the 60s, is Jackie Gleason — the inspiration for Fred Flintstone — in one of his lesser known comedy incarnations, Rum Dumb the drunk: But lest you think Gleason was a comedian who did comedy without words, or was “only” the bombastic Ralph Kramden (which Hanna Barbera clearly used when it drew Fred Flintstone) he could...

After New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote a blistering yet candid column in the Times mocking Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations and debunking the tenets of his sudden “birther” epiphany, Trump immediately fired back a letter to The Times lashing out at Collins—insulting the lady. Trump’s rambling letter broke just about every one of the Times’ rules on letters...

There were two literary sensations during my college years — J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I took to Tolkein like a fish to water, but even my work-in-progress intellect recoiled at Rand’s belief system, which she called Objectivism and I called deeply flawed. Fast forward 40 years and Rand is back in fashion. Or perhaps never fell completely...

Dr. Rand Paul, who months ago was checking out patients’ eyes, is on TV proposing to cut off the Federal budget at the knees. Sarah Palin, who abandoned her own state for big bucks, is on the Wisconsin capitol steps, to praise a no-show Gov. Scott Walker for resisting “violent rent-a-mobs”: “He’s not trying to hurt union members. Hey folks, he’s trying to save your jobs and your...

If you’ve been wondering how Daniel Radcliffe aka “Harry Potter” has been doing in his revival of legendarily smash musical How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying, wonder no more. He is a hit…American acccent and all. Here’s a preview:

As if Tax Day weren’t painful enough, it brings the premiere of “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” a film 50 years in the making that, from reviews, seems almost as long to sit through. Nonetheless, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Tea Party members will be on the edge of their seats watching Ayn Rand’s epic of how “men are slave to society and government, and destruction of the profit motive leads...

(Portions originally published upon Vonnegut’s death on April 12, 2008) The pang of sadness that I felt when I read that Kurt Vonnegut had left this mortal coil was a bit deeper than the mere fact that like a lot of folks of my generation I went head over heels over everything this counterculture idol wrote. As it is, I work in a rare book and manuscript library that includes the papers of Seymour...