The Restoration of Stephen Baldwin

Remember Stephen Baldwin? Want to give him money? Cool, so you're the one.

Stephen's fallen on some tough times. From the dizzying highs of Bio-Dome, he plunged to the amazing lows of Sharks in Venice, a movie that as far as I can tell only I have watched. Stephen's star rose in July of last year as he coupled his christian evangelism with the interests of the tea party movement. Stephen believes in fiscal responsibility and government living within its means. Naturally, later in the month, he filed for bankruptcy, revealing debts of $1.2 million for two mortgages and over $1 million in back taxes he had failed to pay, over the course of ten years.

The sad saga of Stephen Baldwin is reminiscent in scope to the sufferings of Job. Or so apparently someone thinks. Watch:

Tea Party Host Stephen Baldwin Owes Nearly $1m in Back Taxes

Time has not been good to Friend of the Blog Stephen Baldwin. Once the star of such films as The Usual Suspects and Bio-Dome, this actor's career has taken a nosedive, resembling Danny DeVito standing next to "twin" Arnold Schwarzenegger when compared to his brother Alec's return to critical acclaim.

When we last checked in with Stephen, he was hosting a July 4th Tea Party and encouraging as many as 12 Americans (not pictured) — who looked like they got lost on the way to buy tickets to Spamalot! — to protest Barack Obama's tax policy, which unfairly penalizes people like Mr. Baldwin to the benefit of the people surrounding him.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part III: A Pictorial Roundup of the Obese Shuffle of the Ignorant and Damned

Yesterday, while any reasonable person in America was busy spending time with friends, drinking cold beer and eating large amounts of animal parts, a subset of this great nation apparently began the day with posterboard, magic marker and loyalty oaths. While others entertained themselves, these patriots were busy making sure everyone else would be entertained by them throughout the week. Because it would require the intervention of a bored and capricious greek god to make the July 4th tea party protests any more of a sublimely humorous collision of ironies than they already are.

First of all, you have hundreds of people holding up images of Barack Obama as a leader of a cult of personality, implying that he thinks himself a godhead and that liberals worship him. Meanwhile, they're wearing Sarah Palin t-shirts, other Sarah Palin t-shirts, holding Sarah Palin bumper stickers, holding up Sarah Palin lipstick references, wearing Sarah Palin campaign signs, and waving countless handwritten signs sending her messages like "Run, Sarah, Run!" despite Palin's not being affiliated with the tea parties in any official capacity whatsoever.

And as if that irony weren't enough, there's the fact that her recent resignation from Alaska's governorship so dominated the holiday news cycle that it pushed their largely meaningless demonstration from the News in Brief sections of virtually every mainstream outlet and off their pages entirely. Their hero not only quit on them; she obliterated almost all traces of their relevance to the media. Nevermind the further irony that said heroes' state relies on government pork handouts for its own existence and practices a socialistic redistribution of wealth from energy profits.

Then, just when you think there can't possibly be any more ironies, there's the fact that a group of people who claim to "surround them" (whoever they are) managed to mobilize perhaps a tenth of the 3 million people they commanded on April 15th. Of course, on April 15th, their powerful grassroots movement had been promoted for three consecutive days on FOX news, with over $500,000 of free advertising time on that network, with that network setting up staging areas and on-location shows with live cameras. That, and the whole thing was funded and organized by an astroturf group created by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. But once you strip away niggling facts like no longer having millions in organizing and advertising capacity or the inducement of being able to get on live TV with news celebrities, these groups really do speak with the Voice of the People. About 1/1,000th of them, if we're generous.

There is just so much irony to work with, even at a glance. For instance, you have:

'Sharks in Venice'

One of the curses or delights of modern filmmaking, depending on your perspective, is the pervasiveness of "high concept." Put simply, it refers to an easily relatable movie plot, sometimes even one sentence. Alien becomes "Jaws in space." The Towering Inferno is just The Poseidon Adventure upright and in a building. Snakes on a Plane is awesome.

People who are totally hostile to high concept are mostly full of shit. Sometimes great ideas don't need more than a sentence. We accept that brevity is the soul of wit and love one-liners, so deploring brevity elsewhere seems a little convenient to snobbery and inconvenient to consistency, especially when so many great movies can be written off with the one-liner treatment. High concept movies aren't bad because high concept movies are a priori bad. (Alien is arguably the first high concept movie, and by any rubric, it rules.) Most are bad because they're mentally geared at the 12-year-old level, intended to be enjoyed by kids and adults with the same degree of pleasure, produced by trashmeisters like Jerry Bruckheimer, filmed by people who hate epileptics and written by screenwriters who Bruckheimer views as, like, really great with words and stuff — like a word doctor, or something.