The stars of two recent films mirroring elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement, “In Time” and “Tower Heist,” couldn’t be happier to throw their arms around the alleged 99 percent.
“The movie is a comment on the inequalities that are crushing 99 percent of the people in our society,” “in Time” co-star Olivia Wilde told Fox411.
Something else is in play of late, a sign that the nascent movement may not have pop culture on its side after all. This week featured three OWS slams, one from a not so unlikely source but two that took entertainment consumers by surprise.
It was only a matter of time before the “South Park” gang took on OWS, and the results pulled no punches. But who would have expected a liberal like Stephen Colbert to use his comic pulpit to mock the movement?
The latest OWS insult comes courtesy of “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” and it’s the harshest one yet. The film depicts Harold (John Cho) as a Wall Street executive forced to dodge angry protesters outside his office building. The protesters are a surly lot, angry and unfocused, and they hurl eggs at Harold’s hapless assistant who endures the barrage to protect his boss.
Those “mostly peaceful” protesters weren’t done yet.
They followed Harold to his car, surrounding the vehicle and pounding it as he cowered inside. Later, one protester smeared feces on the car window.
Can you imagine a movie making Tea Party protesters act in such vile fashion? You can’t because it would be utterly detached from reality, and even Hollywood knows it can’t make some things up out of whole cloth.
Celebrities will continue to speak out in favor of OWS while cashing their sizable checks and ignoring their own hypocritical lifestyles. But some entertainment scribes are coming around to the fact that there’s gold to be mined from a movement as unhinged, and radical, as OWS.