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On the newest episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey, I talk about Oliver Stone’s new JFK Assassination documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.
Thanks for watching!
©2021
The Harry Potter movies are having a reunion, but a spell has been cast to keep J.K. Rowling and her alleged transphobia away from the festivities.
HBO Max will air the 20th anniversary reunion special but the creator of Harry Potter is persona non grata because she dared to speak the truth about the trans movement.
Twenty years-ago the magic of Harry Potter jumped from the page to the screen as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first movie of the Harry Potter franchise, premiered in cineplexes across the globe.
Now, after 8 total films based on books that sold more than 500 million copies, which raked in more than 7 billion galleons at the box office, Warner Brothers is celebrating the Harry Potter film franchise with a tv reunion set to air on HBO Max on January 1st, 2022.
All the surviving stars of the films and their directors will be there, including Daniel Radcliff (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) as well as Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Ralph Fiennes (Voldemort), Gary Oldman (Sirius Black) and even Draco Malfoy himself, Tom Felton.
But, like a god cast out of an Eden of her own making, J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and literary hero to a whole generation of readers, will not be there to bask in the glow of her creative genius.
Neither Warner Brothers nor Rowling have explicitly stated so, but it appears that the author of the Harry Potter books who was intimately involved in the making of the movies, wasn’t invited to this Harry Potter party.
Rowling’s egregious sin for which she has been banished from wizarding world and forced to wear a scarlet “T” for transphobe, is that she is a dutiful progressive on nearly every issue imaginable, but she just can’t bring herself to ignore objective biological reality and therefore refuses to fall under the insidious spell of the subjective lunacy of transgenderism.
The Rowling row heated up last year when, in response to an article that used the term “people who menstruate” instead of the word “women”, Ms. Rowling had the temerity to tweet, “People who menstruate, I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
She followed that up with a tweet saying, “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”
I whole-heartedly agree, but Rowling’s naivete is charming, as anyone with a first year Hogwarts education knows that in our damned world of lies, daring to speak the truth is now considered an expression of violent hate, if not an outright crime.
The author of Harry Potter becoming a scapegoat and being crucified on the “T” cross by trans radicals who live in their own imaginary and fantastical world with a bizarre vocabulary all its own, is such a deliriously delicious turn of events, I can’t help but think that Ms. Rowling appreciates both the irony and literary profundity of it all.
Rowling is now the muggle, a person without magical powers, who lives in ignorance of the wondrous wizarding world of the transgender. In her muggledom she is incapable of understanding the transfiguration, the art of turning one thing into another, of the trans, and is so far lost she can’t see the trans for the glorious centaurs that they are.
The real magic in this story is the black arts performed by the woke who have cast a spell that has transformed a resilient woman who left an abusive marriage and rose from abject poverty to build a multi-billion dollar empire, despite being labelled a purveyor of the occult by fundamentalist Christians, by using nothing but the power of her imagination to charm and enchant children and families across the globe, into a pilloried pariah because she “refuses to ‘bow down’ to a movement seeking ‘to erode women as a political and biological class.”
The insipid ‘pronouned’ woke, who proudly declare their pronouns of choice, and those who are trans or who reflexively support the trans movement, are at war with not just J.K. Rowling, but with the English language and biological and objective reality.
I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but as I’ve watched her be relentlessly chastised in this culture war battle by these malicious and nefarious nit-wits, I’ve become a fan of JK Rowling.
Unlike the spineless fools at Warner Brothers who have lined their pockets on her creation, and the ungrateful simps like Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, who wouldn’t have careers if it weren’t for Rowling, and who now chastise and shun her, J.K. Rowling actually has a moral, ethical and intellectual compass. Unlike them she won’t play the rigged game of transgender quidditch and bend the knee to appease a loud but absurdly inane movement trying to force everyone to accept a distorted subjective experience as unquestioned objective reality.
Good for her.
Now instead of wasting her time at the HBO Max Harry Potter reunion hob-knobbing with artistic midgets who all lack her genius, resilience and courage, and who degrade themselves by worshipping at the golden calf of transgender wokeness, Rowling can sit in her castle made of money and bask in her own brilliance knowing that she alone in the extended Harry Potter world has the most elusive yet magical power of all…integrity.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A contrived, and unintentionally hysterical, hour and half long campaign commercial for Pete Buttigieg, the relentlessly vapid and vacuous narcissistic sociopath White House wannabe.
This year has been a banner one for sycophantic documentaries of political figures.
First there was the eye-rolling, ass-kissing HBO documentary mini-series Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Then National Geographic gave us the insidiously fawning Fauci.
Now Amazon has rolled out what may be the most unintentionally funny bit of homosexual hagiography in documentary history, Mayor Pete, which chronicles Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.
The film starts one year before the Iowa Caucuses with South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg gearing up for his historic run as the first openly gay candidate for the presidency.
The opening sequence begins with a voice off-camera, I think it is Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten Buttigieg, lovingly telling the candidate, “don’t bullshit us, Peter!”
Mayor Pete and its diminutive subject then spend the next hour and half relentlessly bullshitting us, as this movie is less a documentary than it is an hour and a half long campaign commercial.
What’s so funny about Mayor Pete is that the couple at its center, Pete and his husband Chasten, who both appear to have been the recipients of charisma bypass surgery, have all the chemistry of two strangers sitting across from each other in the waiting room of a contagious disease clinic. When the two of them kiss it’s like watching lip-transplant patients trying to kiss for the first time. I suppose it’s a sign of progress that an openly gay man can now run for president and be in just as loveless a marriage as all of the straight candidates he’s competing against.
Another amusing thing about the documentary was that as it wore on, I realized of whom Pete Buttigieg reminded me…it’s the sociopathic serial killer Dexter who, coincidentally, recently returned to television after an eight-year absence. Did Dexter flee Miami after his last killing spree and hide out in South Bend, become mayor, and is now running for president? Find out on Dexter: New Blood.
Like Dexter, the wooden Pete works extremely hard to try to convince people he’s a normal person, yet his dead eyes give away the game. The guy exerts so much energy pretending to be human, he comes across as entirely inhuman.
Like the film that documents him, Pete Buttigieg is so contrived and manufactured I didn’t believe anything about him. I spent half the time wondering if Pete’s face was a skin-mask from one of his alter-ego Dexter’s unfortunate victims, or if he was just pretending to be gay in order to increase his electoral chances.
Pete so aggressively pushes his homosexuality as his main selling point the ridiculous notion of his sexuality being just a function of branding and not biology started to seem considerably less absurd. Would any Democrat pay any attention at all to Pete if he were straight? No, of course not.
This is why Pete puts his homosexuality front and center, it gives him the precious political commodity of victimhood which translates to credibility in the eyes of identity-obsessed Democrats. This victimhood is enhanced in the movie with two scenes of homophobic protests against Pete, which are so buffoonish they feel staged.
Buttigieg’s husband Chasten too makes being gay the be all and end all of his identity. There’s a sequence in the film where Chasten goes to a gay camp for kids and leads them in the pledge of allegiance to the gay camp flag, and then dresses potatoes up as drag queens, which felt like the funniest skit Saturday Night Live has never aired.
There’s another sequence where Chasten is complaining that all the Democratic candidates have their wives on stage with them on election night in Iowa, except for Pete. Even Pete grows tired of Chasten’s whining at this point and resorts to ignoring him when placating fails.
Another immensely amusing thing about Mayor Pete is watching Buttigieg navigate the victimhood pyramid of the Democratic party.
Pete is constantly seen contemplating, rehearsing and then spouting platitudes regarding race. Most notably at a town hall in South Bend after a white cop kills a black man in the city.
In another scene, Pete is seen strategizing over race and he says of his efforts, “make sure it doesn’t read as very white.” Then the documentary cuts to Pete and Al Sharpton having lunch together in Harlem. Chef’s kiss.
As funny as that is, it pales in comparison to the ass-kissing of Joe Biden that the film and its subject engage in.
For example, after an impromptu conversation between Biden and Buttigieg in Iowa, the film cuts to Pete enthusiastically telling an aide that Biden is “such a good guy!”
Later after Buttigieg drops his presidential bid, he gets a call from Biden, and we eavesdrop on the conversation between the two. Mayor Pete the movie, and Mayor Pete the man, are both so affected and manipulative I couldn’t help but wonder if all of these scenes about Biden were staged well after the events of the 2020 primary.
Biden ultimately made Buttigieg the youngest and first openly gay Secretary of Transportation in U.S. history. In that role his greatest accomplishments thus far are taking paternity leave and saying that some roads are racist.
Fans of Buttigieg shouldn’t fret though, because as Mayor Pete reveals, Pete is addicted to style and allergic to substance, and is also malignantly vapid, vacuous, ambitious, narcissistic and sociopathic, which means he meets all the requirements to be the President of the United States of America. His ascension feels inevitable. God help us all.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful documentary well worth a watch. It isn’t perfect, but it is important.
Oliver Stone’s JFK hit theaters in 1991 and sent shockwaves through Washington and the corporate media because it was a compelling cinematic counter-myth to the equally fantastical Warren Report.
The Praetorian guards of the establishment in the halls of power and press met the film with ferocity as they set out to debunk and defang it, as it directly challenged their narrative and thus their authority. They failed. JFK was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and brought in over $200 million at the box office. More importantly though, it broke the spell of public indifference and somewhat loosened establishment obstruction in regards to the JFK assassination.
In the film’s wake the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed and the Assassination Records Review Board set up and funded.
Now, thirty years later Oliver Stone is back, this time with a documentary streaming on Showtime, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which sticks its thumb in the eye of those who mindlessly espouse the “official” story of JFK’s assassination as the truth.
As someone interested in the JFK assassination, and who has read a multitude of books on the subject across the spectrum, from Gerald Posner’s ‘Case Closed’ and Vincent Bugliosi’s ‘Reclaiming History’ to Jim Marrs’ ‘Crossfire’ and James W. Douglass’ ‘JFK and the Unspeakable’, finding a decent documentary worthy of a watch on the topic is a challenge.
Thankfully, Stone has stepped up to the plate with JFK Revisited, a serious work and worthy documentary that offers a coherent, if limited, counter theory to the official JFK assassination story.
The film runs a brisk two-hours, features a bevy of talking heads, including John M. Newman (whose two books ‘JFK and Vietnam’ and ‘Oswald and the CIA’ are terrific), David Talbot (who wrote ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’ – another fantastic book), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., James K. Galbraith, Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Henry Lee, and is a well-paced primer that would be a useful launching pad for anyone interested in diving even deeper into the assassination.
There is a four-hour cut of the film which will allegedly be made available to the public in the new year, and I’m looking forward to seeing that version as I assume it gets more into the specifics of who did the actual shooting, a subject the at-times rushed two-hour version foregoes in favor of more foundational topics.
The film does examine a plethora of fascinating JFK assassination topics though, including Oswald’s numerous and obvious connections to the intelligence community. The Warren Commission’s, the intel community’s and the media’s knowing distortions and deceptions regarding the assassination. The fantasy of the magic bullet theory. The contradictory medical evidence from Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. The other remarkably similar plots to kill Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa leading up to Dallas, which included other Oswald-esque patsies Thomas Arthur Vallee and Gilberto Lopez. As well as the story of Abraham Bolden, the first black secret service agent, who tried to inform authorities of the Chicago plot but instead of being hailed a hero was railroaded and sent to prison.
JFK Revisited also spotlights the struggle between Kennedy and the political establishment. Kennedy’s famed American University speech of June 1963, where he laid out his vision for a newfound, peaceful American foreign policy, opens the film. This vision is foundational to ‘the why’ of Stone’s theory regarding the assassination as it provides motive for the intelligence agencies and military to act to remove a president they deemed soft on communism and weak in general.
Kennedy wanted to promote anti-colonialism, normalize relations with Cuba, not make the same mistake as the French in Vietnam, and have détente with the Soviets, even including combining efforts in the space race.
The Intelligence community and Pentagon had a very different and much more nefarious agenda. They were busy eliminating Lumumba in the Congo, fomenting a military coup in France, conjuring both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods – which would use false flag terror attacks on U.S. targets to force a war in Cuba, and pushing for American escalation in Vietnam.
This is why Kennedy moved to reduce the CIA budget by 20%, fired CIA warhorse Allen Dulles (who curiously enough would become a powerful member of the Warren Commission), and famously declared he would shatter the CIA into a million pieces. According to Stone, the CIA beat Kennedy to the punch as it shattered his skull into a million pieces in Dealey Plaza, on November 22nd, 1963.
The gaping, gangrenous wound at the heart of America that rots our national soul, was born on that fateful day, and it still festers and it still matters.
Unlike both malignant political parties and the shameless corporate media, Oliver Stone, whose status as pariah is the fuel that powers all his documentaries, understands this, and he’s trying to heal that wound by seeking out the truth regarding JFK’s killing.
While the establishment may ignore JFK Revisited, the general public shouldn’t. It’s a useful and insightful film for anyone who wants to understand their government and what it’s willing to do in order to maintain its grip on power and the lucrative status quo.
Seek JFK Revisited out and watch it, it isn’t perfect, but it is vitally important.
For other JFK assassination related articles - check these out.
JFK and the Conspiracy Coundrum
JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins
Oliver Stone, JFK Revisited and the Establishment Media
The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don’t
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
HBO’s ‘Succession’ is a glorious guilty pleasure but the oligarchical family run media empire it dramatizes is actually a horrifying and harsh reality.
Four families control the majority of American media, and the Roy family of ‘Succession’ is an entertaining and clever amalgam of the dysfunction of them all.
Succession, HBO’s deliriously addictive and seductive soap opera that follows the travails of the Roy family dynasty and their media and business empire, is back in full swing for its highly anticipated third season.
The show is obviously a work of fiction, but the blueprint of the story is frighteningly familiar to anyone paying attention to our ever-consolidating media landscape lorded over by an oligarchy of just four families.
If you’ve not seen it, Succession is a sort of Shakespearean stew of palace intrigue set in the uber-wealthy and powerful world of monopolized media’s master class. It’s kind of what you’d get if you tossed King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth and Hamlet into a witch’s brew with the Murdoch, Redstone, Cox and Roberts families that control most of America’s media market.
The Roy family of Succession, with patriarch Logan and sons Kendall, Roman and Connor and daughter Siobhan, is most often likened to the media mogul Murdoch family.
The 80-year-old Logan, played with scowling ferocity by the inimitable Bryan Cox, is reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch’s combative and domineering leadership of NewsCorp. Logan’s sprawling media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo and its conservative cable news channels certainly bear a resemblance to the star-spangled simp-fest of Fox News.
Logan’s dueling sons Kendall, exquisitely portrayed by Jeremy Strong, and Roman, a fantastic Kieran Culkin, also bear some similarities to Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, as does their internecine warfare to find favor with, or advantage over, their powerful father.
The scandal that befalls Waystar RoyCo, with accusations of sexual misconduct and the like, is also eerily familiar to the tawdry accusations that knee-capped Fox News and its leader Roger Ailes and star Bill O’Reilly.
But the Murdochs aren’t the only family dynasty running a media empire for Succession to emulate. Another is the Redstone family, long led by Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020.
Sumner’s media empire of Viacom/CBS/Paramount certainly resembled Waystar, and his personal life is akin to Logan Roy’s too, as it’s littered with adultery, charges of cruelty and failed relationships with women.
The most striking resemblance though between Logan Roy and Sumner Redstone is that they both have/had ambitious daughters. Logan’s daughter, Siobhan, gloriously portrayed by the beguiling Sarah Snook, is making a calculated bid for the family throne, similar to Sumner’s daughter Shari, who battled with her father over control of the family business and ultimately took over his vast empire after his death.
Sumner’s son, Brent, who in Roy-esque fashion sued his father and sister Shari, and was eventually bought out after he was removed from the board of Viacom’s parent company National Amusements.
Besides the Murdochs and the Redstones, the Cox and Roberts families are also Succession-like dynasties whose family business is media empire.
Cox Enterprises, with its major subsidiaries Cox Communications and Cox Media Group, is run by James Cox Kennedy, grandson of the company’s founder, James M. Cox, a two-time Governor of Ohio.
Kennedy’s earthy mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his cosmopolitan aunt, Anna Cox Chambers, long had controlling intertest of the family empire in spite of their love/hate, very distant relationship, which seems eerily similar to Logan Roy’s relationship with his estranged brother Ewan Roy.
Kennedy eventually took over the massive company from his aunt at the age of 41, and while the aristocratic Cox family isn’t as prone to paparazzi or media prying as the Redstones and Murdochs, they’re just as powerful.
The same is true of the Roberts family, which founded and runs mammoth telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. Billionaire Brian L. Roberts took over Comcast at the tender young age of 31 from his father Ralph and now runs the media monster that includes NBC/Universal.
Brian’s ascent to corporate power was swift, but despite siblings having no interest in the family business, he still solidified his powerful position as CEO and Chairman by pulling up the drawbridge and literally having his leadership written into Comcast’s articles of incorporation. There will be no sibling coup d’etat at Comcast.
The same is certainly not true on Succession which is why it’s such a fun show to watch. But despite being an eminently compelling and entertaining piece of capitalism porn, the reality it dramatizes is both horrifying and dispiriting.
Having just four families be the movers, shakers and opinion makers controlling so much of America’s media, controlling discourse, manufacturing consent and silencing dissent, is detrimental to democracy if not terminal to the republic.
These aristocrats and oligarchs, despite their pretentious and vacuous displays of philanthropy, are populated by spoiled and sadistic monsters who only care about preserving the status quo in order to secure and ensure their egregious wealth and power.
These monopolist corporate tyrants use their wealth and propaganda power to influence politicians tasked with regulating them to get further expansion of their family businesses, so that they can then use their expanded wealth and propaganda power to further pressure politicians to allow further expansion of their wealth and propaganda power. This endless cycle of corruption is corroding the core foundations of American democracy as it allows these family run media misinformation manufacturers to keep the public perpetually disinformed and deceived.
Ultimately, we can turn off Succession and walk away from its spectacle of egregious privilege and dramatic display of family intrigue, but unfortunately reality is just a less entertaining but more depressing version of the same insidious disease.
I love Succession, I just wish it was total fantasy and not a terrifyingly real glimpse of the four oligarchical families manipulating our minds through their mendacious media machines.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Colin Kaepernick’s new Netflix autobiography ‘Colin in Black and White’ is the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism that reveals hims to be an entitled, self-absorbed jerk.
Colin in Black and White is the new mini-series on Netflix that dramatizes Colin Kaepernick’s teenage years where he struggles against racism and to be taken seriously as a quarterback.
Kaepernick, if you’ll remember, once led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and made a name for himself by kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games to protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression.
I utterly loathe flag fetishism as a mindless display of vacuousness, so I never had a problem with Kaepernick’s protests. I disagree with him on some of the specifics of his stance, but I always respected his kneeling. The way I see it, if the NFL wants to turn their games into de facto celebrations of militarism, then players kneeling shouldn’t be beyond the pale.
I also think it’s obvious that Kaepernick was unjustly black-balled by the league for his protests. While I admit that Kaepernick is a very specific and unique QB talent and that his skill set isn’t a fit on every team, it’s ludicrous to think he couldn’t at least have been a back-up somewhere. Of course, that brings up the question of whether he would accept that secondary role and at a price below what he thinks he deserves.
The reason I mention my moderate stance on the controversial Kaepernick is because I want to make it clear I went into watching Colin in Black and White without an axe to grind against the man, quite the opposite actually.
Having said that, let me tell you that Colin in Black and White isn’t just an amateurish tv show so awful it would be laughable as an after school special, it also exposes Kaepernick as being quite a despicable and deplorable human being.
This show is like the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism and Kaepernick is Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Tom Brady wrapped into one.
The series opens by literally transforming the NFL combine into a slave auction. Besides the fact that the NFL combine is something so elitist most football players of any race can only ever dream about attending, and that players at the combine have worked their whole lives to get there and are competing to become draft picks and multi-millionaires with generational wealth who’ll be worshiped like gods in our culture…yeah…the combine is EXACTLY like a slave auction.
Colin Kaepernick’s ignorance about the horrors of actual slavery is to be expected though since his social justice warrior pose and victimhood addiction apparently makes him blind, deaf and dumb regarding Nike, the company he has a big endorsement deal with that uses slave labor to make its profits. Of course, Nike is immune from Kaepernick’s social justice posing because they give him a fair share of their blood money.
It’s equally absurd witnessing real-life Colin watch and comment as his teenage screen version pouts and preens like a cheap tart at a red-light street over his anger and disappointment that the best colleges in the country want to give him a baseball scholarship, and Major League Baseball wants to draft him and give him a million-dollar signing bonus, and the prettiest white girls in school throw themselves at him, while all little Colin wants is to get a scholarship to play QB and have a black girlfriend. Boo fucking hoo.
What really turned my stomach though about Colin in Black and White is that Kaepernick’s adoptive, working-class white parents, insipidly portrayed by Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are depicted as vapid racist caricatures.
The fact that Kaepernick, who co-created this series with Ava Duvernay, would belittle, demean and slander the couple (who are still alive) that raised, loved and nurtured him from infancy, and shelled out big bucks by paying for travel baseball and high-end specialized QB coaches to help him achieve his dream, is repugnant and repulsive.
In one episode where Kaepernick’s adoption is briefly explored, the show frames his soon-to-be parents as deciding to adopt Colin only after another adoption falls through. Kaepernick then chimes in with his woe-is-me wail that “since the day I was born, I’ve never been anyone’s first choice.”
Again, boo fucking hoo Kaepernick, you sad sack clown. Your parents actually chose you. They got up in the middle of the night to feed you and change you, they held you and loved you, they gave everything to you and they moved heaven and earth to make your dreams come true, and because they’re a different skin color than you, you reward them, not with gratitude, or respect, or love, but with a tv show that bends over backwards to publicly ridicule them. That says more about you, Kaepernick, than it does about your parents.
Of course, Kaepernick turns everything into racism because he’s a nitwit incapable of understanding anything else. So, when he and his parents disagree over the usual things teenagers and parents disagree over…hair styles, facial hair, wardrobe, choice in girlfriends, Colin sees this as proof of the racist conspiracy against him.
Due to Kaepernick’s desperate need for victimhood, everyone is racist in his eyes…coaches, referees, umpires, opposing fans, opponents, hotel employees, his parents. The fact that schools weren’t tripping over Kaepernick too is because of racism.
The word that kept popping into my head as I watched this self-pitying shitshow was pathetic. There is absolutely nothing quite as egregiously pathetic as a grown man wallowing in long past perceived slights from adolescence. Nothing.
Adding to the idiocy is that Kaepernick, dressed all in black with a massive afro, looking like Morpheus from The Matrix wearing a wig as a joke, interjects various tidbits of racial knowledge throughout the show. Kaepernick is so hysterically ridiculous in these segments he seems like a character from Dave Chappelle on The Chappelle Show or Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live.
On the bright-side, Jaden Michael plays teenage Kaepernick on the show, and as bad as the show is, he’s terrific. Despite not having a lick of athleticism in his body, he’s a compelling screen presence and an actor who conveys an intriguing inner life. He’s a talent to watch.
A talent not to watch is Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL career is most certainly over, and considering his dead-eyed appearance on the self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, celebration of delusional victimhood, Colin in Black and White, which reveals his truly loathsome nature and intellectual midgetry, one can only hope he disappears from the public eye as well. The sooner the better.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Utterly useless piece of establishment media fluffery.
Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in the ABC “documentary” titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier.
Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which sparked a media feeding frenzy and government investigations because it claimed Trump colluded with Russia and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape”.
Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.
Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common - they’ve both worked for Clintons. Stephanopoulos as advisor to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed “interview” into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid even by ABC News standards.
Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy, Putin a KGB killer, and Trump a threat to American democracy. In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.
Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.
What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.
It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect, actively working to try and scuttle Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty cake chat.
Steele admits to no wrong doing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy”.
The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector”, but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source”. That seems like a distinction without a difference.
As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington D.C. whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay”. In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.
Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it”, is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.
The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.
Cohen denies the Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.
Stephanopoulos of course let’s this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic? Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.
The “pee tape” is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out? Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president…”
Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.
The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously dis-respected.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This documentary is devoid of insights and only serves up the same old insipid ideology of identity politics. The film ‘s manipulative thesis uses Covid as a cudgel to divide instead of unite and therefore reinforces the current power structure.
The Covid pandemic has been a difficult time for all of us, except of course for documentary filmmakers, who seem to be living through the most booming of boom times.
In recent months the much-hyped HBO documentaries Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenter: 9/11 – 2021 ½ and Nanfu Wang’s, In the Same Breath, have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to tackle the tantalizing topic of the Covid pandemic.
Now Netflix is getting into the Covid documentary game with Oscar winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s Convergence: Courage in Crisis, which began streaming on Tuesday, October 12th.
The film’s thesis is clearly stated as “While Covid-19 exacerbates vulnerabilities across the world, unsung heroes in all levels of society help turn the tide toward a brighter future.”
If you want to truly understand the intellectual impotence and manufactured manipulation of Convergence: Courage in a Crisis, one need only watch the final few minutes as it concludes with a montage of ordinary folks from across the globe singing the song “Lean on Me” in unison.
This scene sparked my PTSD and I began having ferocious flashbacks to the cringe-fest that was the bevy of self-righteous Hollywood celebrities singing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem “Imagine” back in the Spring of 2020. Yikes.
What precedes that sanguine sing-along of “Lean on Me” is just as contrived and seems just as fake as the sing-along itself.
Convergence, like seemingly every other Covid documentary, is devoid of insight because it’s incapable of actually focusing on Covid, and instead uses Covid as a delivery system for its various political, social and cultural agendas.
For example, the film follows the stories of nine different people and couples as they navigate the peril of the pandemic and selflessly help others and fight the disease. These folks live across the globe in London, Miami, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paolo, Lima, Oxford and Wuhan and do such varied things as treat the sick, clean hospital rooms, drive doctors to clinics and ambulances into poor neighborhoods.
Apparently though, according to Convergence anyway, the only people who were both deeply affected by Covid and also who fought most valiantly against it, were people of color, as they make up eight of the nine stories.
The lone white face featured in the film is Oxford Vaccinologist, Professor Sarah Gilbert, and she gets minimal screen time as she is treated as more an inconvenience to the film’s thesis than as a story worth watching.
A strange example of the film’s political bent is found in the story of Hassan Akkad, a Syrian refugee living in London. Akkad gets a job cleaning the Covid ward in a hospital and uses social media to protest the British government’s decision to not include immigrants like him working as porters and janitorial staff in hospitals in their “bereavement scheme” - which would grant “indefinite leave to remain” status for family members of any immigrant workers who died from Covid.
According to Akkad, the Assad regime tortured him and is currently bombing hospitals, a claim which should be taken with a grain of salt considering director von Einsiedel’s documentary The White Helmets is dubious in its veracity, but even though Akkad is living a good life in London, instead of being grateful he complains that he and his girlfriend deserve better immigration “status”.
Another example of the film’s insipid ideology is that it declares that Covid isn’t the only pandemic around, that there’s also pandemics of inequality, racism, poverty and “misguided nationalism”. How original.
Of course, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter get a good bit of attention, mostly through the story of Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician and activist in Miami.
When Henderson gets “racially profiled” by a cop in front of his own house during the pandemic, and his daughter witnesses the event through security cameras, Henderson claims the incident “robbed his child of her innocence”. I’m no fan of the law enforcement community but if you’re concerned about the loss of innocence of black children, blaming the police is about as obtuse as it gets when you consider black on black violence and the eroding morality and ethics of the wider culture.
Dr. Henderson dreams of a sort of utopia of equity being born out of the dystopia of Covid, a notion also favored by World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Teydros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Dr. Teydros goes so far as to proudly espouse the eye-rolling slogan “Build Back Better” and claims that “opportunities are born from crisis.”
That same sort of sentiment is how we got the War on Terror and the atrocity of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and got billions in bailout money to Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007/08. If past is prologue, the idea of using Covid as a catalyst for some great change that will usher in a glorious world of wonder is a chilling proposition that will only further empower the powerful and further enrich the wealthy.
Ultimately, I found Convergence to be an infuriating and emotionally manipulative exercise that decided to use Covid as a cudgel to divide people rather than unite them, thus deceptively reinforcing the status quo.
Covid doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone and, contrary to the propaganda of this documentary, we’d be better off looking beyond identity when it comes to solving big problems because once something becomes about identity, it stops being about anything else, most especially the truth. The insidiously manipulative and meaningless Convergence is glaring proof of that.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MATERIAL FROM DAVE CHAPPELLE’S NEW STAND-UP SPECIAL!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. Chappelle is the greatest comedian of his generation, but you better enjoy him while you can because weak-kneed Hollywood would rather virtue signal than entertain.
Firebrand comedian Dave Chappelle’s newest Netflix stand-up special The Closer has, not surprisingly, been met with predictable outrage by all the usual woke suspects.
Headlines like “Dave Chappelle faces backlash for troubling trans jokes” from Newsweek and Deadline declaring that “executive producer of ‘Dear White People’ are ‘done’ with Netflix” because the streaming service dared run Chappelle’s “homophobic” special, jump out when Googling the comedian’s name.
Chappelle has a woke bullseye on his back once again because in The Closer he’s simply does what every great comedian is supposed to do, humorously speak truths that ordinary people are too intellectually conditioned or socially cowardly to dare articulate.
And make no mistake, Chappelle is unquestionably the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, and is in the discussion of the best stand-up comedians of all-time, and while The Closer isn’t nearly his best effort, it does nothing to damage his prestigious position atop the comedy world.
Chappelle opens The Closer by informing his audience that this is going to be his “last special for a minute”. Like Michael Corleone, Chappelle is settling all family business with the aptly titled The Closer, and there was a lot of business stirred up by his recent run of six extraordinary Netflix specials, from 2017’s The Age of Spin up through 2019’s Sticks and Stones.
Chappelle’s uproarious evisceration of the sensitivities and absurdities of white feminists, the LGBTQ community, and trans people in particular, in those numerous Netflix specials has been what has made him public enemy number one among the woke.
In The Closer he once again pulls no punches and peppers his audience with quality bits, like his children’s book titled “Clifford the Big Black N*gger” and his movie idea of a conquering group of entitled aliens returning to earth titled “Space Jews”, both of which are masterly woven and defiantly delivered.
It’s his jaunt through the minefield of feminism and LGBTQ issues though that once again have riled the reactionary woke brigade and incensed the Torquemadas of Twitter. For instance, Chappelle’s blistering insights regarding the class and race issues woven into feminism, #MeToo’s performative idiocy, and the notion that “gays are minorities until they need to be white again”, are ruthlessly on point.
It’s when he once again wades into the dangerous waters of transgenderism though that he is most brutally effective as both a comedian and a philosopher, and is no doubt most offensive to the those with delicate sensibilities laying prone on their fainting couches.
Chappelle declares himself, like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, to be a TERF – trans exclusionary radical feminist. He also says “gender is a fact”, and transwomen are the equivalent of blackface, which are such blatantly obvious notions yet are so aggressively labelled anathema in culture today as to be blasphemous.
The hilarious heresy continues when he points out that Caitlin Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner) won a Woman of the Year award the first year she was ever a “woman”, despite never having menstruated, which in Chappelle’s eyes is like Eminem winning “N*gger of the Year”.
Chappelle then shows off his comedic craftsmanship when he subtly shifts gears towards the end of the show while recounting the tale of his friendship with a trans comedian named Daphne. This sequence is exquisitely executed and funny, but also remarkably poignant and moving.
Chappelle is accused by the woke of “punching down” with his comedy, meaning that he’s a bully against the defenseless and weak, like the LGBTQ community. But Chappelle goes to great lengths in The Closer to point out the absurdity of this charge, as he observes the LGBTQ community’s enormous cultural power. Chappelle’s evidence for his claim is that the rapper Da Baby actually shot and killed someone in a Walmart in North Carolina and his career never wavered, but when he uttered homophobic remarks, the LGBTQ community quickly got him cancelled.
Nowhere is the woke’s cultural power so evident as it is when it comes to reviews of Chappelle’s own work. Sticks and Stones was adored by audiences who gave it a 99 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas critics gave it a paltry 35% rating. You see, to the woke, especially those in the establishment media or those hoping to work in the establishment media, admitting Chappelle’s brilliance and genius is an impossibility because it’s the equivalent of a hate crime.
The woke approach with The Closer seems to be somewhat similar. I’ve read a few reviews of the show, all of them negative, but curiously enough at Rotten Tomatoes, while the audience rates The Closer at 96%, there is, as of this writing, no critical score listed at all, and only one review posted (it’s negative).
It seems the woke are changing tactics regarding their boogie man Chappelle, and instead of signaling their virtue through their negative reviews, they’re simply ignoring him.
Unfortunately, Chappelle’s current deal with Netflix is up and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have him back. The woke wave is a tsunami and it has overtaken all of Hollywood. Even if it costs them money, these streaming behemoths would rather signal their virtue and “allyship” rather than give audiences what they want.
My recommendation is to go watch The Closer and enjoy Dave Chappelle’s brilliance and comedic genius while you can, because the woke are gunning for him, and as much as it pains me to say it, they just might get him.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This sycophantic cinematic venture and unabashed ode to Anthony Fauci, Narcissist-in-Chief at the NIH, is self-serving agitprop meant to feed the Fauci fetish of fools.
Fauci, the creatively titled new National Geographic documentary airing on Disney +, sets out under a decidedly deceptive guise of impartiality to tell the truth about America’s favorite foremost scientist, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Over the last year and a half as the coronavirus has ravaged the U.S. and marched across the globe, Dr. Fauci, whom the film describes as “a world-renowned infectious disease specialist and longest serving public health leader in Washington, D.C.”, has become a beatified cultural icon to some and a lightning rod of controversy to others.
I consider myself agnostic on Dr. Fauci, but admit that I’ve never understood the media and public veneration of him. I don’t loathe the guy, but he also just always struck me as a blowhard bureaucrat with an ego inversely proportionate to his intellect. But what the hell do I know?
Now, if you worship at the altar of St. Fauci – Patron Saint of “Science”, then Fauci will certainly satiate your Fauci fetish, but if you even mildly question the actions or intentions of the Brooklyn-born scientist/sage then this documentary is definitely not for you.
The film seems like a slick, hour and forty-five-minute campaign commercial meant to solidify the base rather than reach the indecisive. It boasts a plethora of personal interest anecdotes, as well as montages of family time and even shots of a sexy Fauci in the family pool in a Speedo (no, I’m not kidding). Then there’s the requisite conjured tears to indicate Fauci’s heartfelt humanity, and moments of him cursing to reveal how down-to-earth he is, and a healthy serving of pious-filled Fauci faux humility. Oh, and there’s also the cavalcade of establishment endorsements from the likes of Bill Gates, George W. Bush and Bono.
But if you were hoping for an actual investigation into Dr. Fauci, you’ve come to the wrong documentary, as filmmakers John Hoffman and Janet Tobias seem deathly allergic to actual journalism.
Looking for questions regarding gain of function research or a feet-to-the-fire moment over the venerated Fauci’s falsities and flip-flops regarding Covid and masks? Or answers to questions like…if the disease is so deadly, why is the southern border still so porous, potentially allowing in infected illegal immigrants? Or if the lockdown was instituted in order to avoid overwhelming ICU units and hospitals, why weren’t more ICU units built and hospital capabilities expanded over the last year and half? Or if the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission of the disease but only reduces the severity of the illness, then why should anyone care about the unvaccinated since they are only putting themselves at risk?
You’ll have to look elsewhere because Fauci doesn’t only not have answers to those questions, it never even considers asking them.
The whole documentary feels like a bad job interview, where the interviewer asks “what are your biggest weaknesses?” and the candidate replies, “I work too hard, care too much, and am too dedicated to helping people.”
Of course, this is a sentimental, softball cinematic venture so there’s no pushback amongst the prodigious amount of pattycake.
Even when the film does go through the motions of pretending to be impartial, it lets its bias overwhelm it.
For instance, Fauci’s arrogant bungling of the AIDS crisis in the 80’s is transformed into the narrative of a noble public health worker bridging divides, bringing people together and bravely standing up against homophobia.
Fauci’s mishandling of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is also shown in a similar light, but instead of Fauci fighting homophobia, he’s fighting racism.
The filmmakers use of Fauci’s alleged fight against homophobia and racism in these cases is meant to suffocate any liberal questions of Fauci’s record and solidify support among the movie’s ideological base.
The filmmakers and their saintly subject also use Trump as a convenient foil, once again to signal their and Fauci’s liberal bona fides. A red-faced Trump comes in for some very heavy criticism in the documentary, for example, when asked what his first impressions of Trump were, Fauci derisively responds “Yikes!”.
Fauci paints himself as a paragon of truth and Trump as an arrogant buffoon, but the good doctor’s own, sometimes fatal flaws never make a blip on the radar screen of Fauci.
For example, from the very beginning of his career all those decades ago, Fauci’s narcissism is readily apparent as he adores being in front of cameras and at the center of attention. This narcissism directly feeds his blind spot - arrogance, most notably in regards to the AIDS crisis and his failure to tell the truth regarding Covid to the American people. This arrogance has cost countless people their lives.
It’s Fauci’s lack of humility and inability to admit mistake that has done so much damage to the credibility of the medical establishment in the U.S.
If Fauci were consistent and truthful about what he’s done and hasn’t done, and where he’s been wrong, it would go a long way to healing what ails the medical establishment, but self-reflection isn’t Dr. Fauci’s strong suit, self-promotion is, and Fauci is proof of that.
Ultimately, Fauci is a painfully pandering paean to its subject, and an unintentional ode to the relentless narcissism that drives him. If, like Fauci, you love Fauci, then you’ll love Fauci. If you loathe him or are ambivalent, this piece of shameless and brazen agitprop isn’t going to convince you otherwise.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
To: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, RAF Exchange Officer
From: Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, U.S. Space Force
CC: Dr. Strangelove – The War Room, General Buck Turgidson – Joints Chiefs of Staff, President Merkin Muffley – President of the United States of America.
Dear Captain Mandrake –
I regret to inform you that the Russians have once again beat us to the punch in the space race, this time by shooting the first feature film in space, and I’m deeply concerned that all American’s precious bodily fluids are now in grave danger.
Let me explain, Mandrake. For my entire life as a proud American, I was dutifully marinated in establishment media propaganda that long ago indoctrinated me with the holy belief that all things Russian are nefarious and evil. It was through this lens of star-spangled truth that I read the news that Russia had successfully sent actress Yulia Peresild (Battle of Sevastopol – 2015) and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station in order to shoot a feature length film in space, something never before accomplished.
What makes this space-based movie shoot for the film Challenge, which tells the tale of an emergency mission to the international space station to tend to an ailing cosmonaut, all the more villainous, is that it beat Hollywood legend Tom Cruise in the moviemaking-space-race, as the Mission Impossible star had hoped to be the first to pull off the stunt with the help of our friends at NASA and SpaceX.
Russians have long been scoring firsts when it comes to the space race against us, Mandrake, as they put the first satellite (Sputnik), first dog (Laika), first person (Yuri Gagarin) and first woman (Valentina Tereshkova) into space and also did the first space-walk (Alexei Leonov), but none of those victories came at the expense of American icon Tom Cruise.
Yes, we did beat those commie bastards (and we all know they’re still commies because a commie leopard can never change its spots!) by having Stanley Kurbick shoot a fake “moon landing” in Burbank…oops…that’s the pure-grain alcohol talking, please disregard that last statement. What I meant to say is that at least we beat those Rooskies to the moon. But still, Mandrake, I can’t help but feel that we’ve taken a hit on this one.
To add to my aggravation the New York Times is reporting that Dmitri Rogozin, head of the Russian state space agency Roscosmos, “hopes the mission will make ‘a truly serious work of art and a whole new develop of the promotion of space technologies’, in order to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.”
A movie as a “serious work of art”? How un-American can you get? Ami right, Mandrake?
Furthering my irritation is that NBC News reports that Rogozin said, “Movies long have become a powerful instrument of propaganda”, and that he hoped this new film would “counter the West’s attempts to ‘humiliate’ the Russian space program.” Can you believe he just openly admitted that this commie Russian movie is propaganda, Mandrake?
Personally, I’m proud to live in a free country that doesn’t manipulate movie audiences with mindless militarism and nationalist narratives meant to propagandize and indoctrinate them. By the way, Mandrake, did I ever tell you that my favorite Tom Cruise movie is Top Gun? I loved it when he slaughtered those MiG flying Soviet sons of bitches at the end.
Mandrake, understand this, as a devoted fan of Rachel Maddow and a devout consumer of American corporate media, I’m smart enough to connect the dots regarding this Russian movie-making space venture and can no longer sit back and remain quiet about the true nature of this devious mission.
I confidently declare to you that this mission is about using a mysterious microwave weapon, the same one used against our noble and loving intelligence agency operatives in Havana and across the globe, to sap and impurify all American’s precious bodily fluids.
Just like the mainstream media, I have no proof or any clear understanding of the plan, or how it works, or if this mysterious microwave weapon that impurifies American’s precious bodily fluids even exists, but that won’t stop me from acting against it.
To counter this cinematic microwave space-attack I believe we need to put into motion Operation Starlet Starship. If you’ll remember, Operation Starlet Starship gathers together every nubile young starlet in Hollywood, along with a select group of government and military leaders, like us, as well as Tom Cruise, and sends us into space so that we can run a breeding program in order to repopulate the U.S. after the microwave weapons attack wipes out all precious bodily fluids of every American.
I believe it was Buck Turgidson who came up with the idea of Operation Starlet Starship, and he recommended a Starlet to Stodgy Old Man ratio of 10-to-1. Wise old bird that General Turgidson.
If we can’t round up the requisite number of starlets, I suppose another option is to just get Tom Cruise up to space immediately and have him shoot an all-American, non-propaganda movie where he kills some evil commie cosmonauts as he dismantles their microwave weapon before it impurifies all our precious and vastly superior bodily fluids.
I’d love to see that movie, Mandrake, almost as much as most Americans would want to see all of Hollywood shot into deep space and never seen again. Hopefully we can get Tom Cruise into space before the Russian’s cinematic space plan gets too far advanced!
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
‘A Clockwork Orange’ is fifty years old and rings as even more true today than it did in 1971.
Kubrick’s masterwork of sex and violence is an insightful work of art that is deeply relevant to our depraved modern era.
Fifty-years-ago the Beethoven-loving Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) donned his droog uniform of all white, false eye-lashes (on one eye), a bowler hat and prominent codpiece, and sang and danced into our twisted hearts with his brutally ironic and ironically brutal rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”.
Yes, it’s been fifty years since A Clockwork Orange, director Stanley Kubrick’s controversial masterpiece, was unleashed upon the public. Apparently, time flies when you’re busy doing all that old in-out in-out and ultra-violence.
Kubrick’s highly-stylized, now iconic film, which was chock full of sex and violence and sexual-violence, shocked many, as even esteemed film critic Pauline Kael notoriously lambasted the film and called Kubrick a “pornographer”.
I recently bellied up to the Korova Milk Bar, put my feet up on a distractingly attractive nude mannequin, downed some Moloko-Plus (with drencrom) and re-watched the film and discovered that Kael is still egregiously wrong and that Kubrick’s vision has only gained in strength over the years.
Seeing the movie through the eyes of 2021 is an alarming exercise, not because the film is bad pornography but because the world of A Clockwork Orange bears an uncomfortable resemblance to our own.
The film is set in a dystopia that is both decaying yet decadent, where every relationship and inter-action is clouded by a will to power and will to pleasure that dehumanizes everything it touches. Alex’s universe is authoritarian and cruel on both an individual and institutional level, where everything and everyone is deeply marinated in a corrosive moral and ethical corruption. Sound familiar?
Turn on a television, read a newspaper or wade into the fetid swamp that is social media and you’ll experience the same ghastly, grotesque world Alex inhabited with only minor details being different.
Like violent cops, flag-waving militarists, MAGA members, Black Lives Matter, identity politics adherents, CRT proponents, or cancel culture Twitter mobs, for Alex and his droogs, cruelty isn’t a bug – it’s a feature, as it gets their blood pumping and gives their meaningless lives a momentary purpose.
Another striking similarity between the film’s world and our own is that everything is performative.
Whether it be the droogs fight against Billy Boy and his Nazi adorned gang – which is reminiscent of an Antifa v Proud Boys battle where the anti-fascists are just as fascist as the fascists they fight, occurs under a proscenium arch, or his infamous song and dance as he assaults the Alexander couple, or his on-stage humiliation under the spell of the Ludovico technique, or his smiling, steak-eating photo-op with the Minster of the Interior, Alex is always performing. And so it is with our time, where social media has morphed both the mundane and the monstrous and the personal and the political into performance art.
The most intriguing revelation of my re-watch was the realization that Alex’s odyssey down the bloody brick road of A Clockwork Orange is a journey to the most exalted position of power in any decaying and inverted civilization, that of victim.
Alex is a sort of anti-Christ, not in the sense that he is Satan but rather that his suffering ultimately does not bring about any personal or spiritual catharsis, but rather solidifies in him the fallen nature of man.
Like the apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey who evolve to use bones as weapons, victimhood just becomes another tool for Alex to reap violence. When he is labelled a “victim of the modern age” the wily Alex quickly recognizes that moniker as a powerful new weapon and thoroughly embraces it.
This evolution doesn’t turn Alex from a barbaric beast into a beatified being, but instead makes him an even more monstrous predator able to swim with a higher class of sharks, namely the Minister of the Interior who fills Alex’s gob with filet in front of a mindless press who eats up the story like Alex does his well-served meal.
In our current age where victimhood reigns supreme, there are hordes of eager new Alex’s yearning for this ultimate superweapon, and none of them even care a lick about Ludwig Van. These self-declared victims know to exploit their stories to gain power, while others emulate that manipulation and conjure victimhood where none exists in order to elevate their social status and bludgeon their enemies. Of course, the establishment media drink up this insidious victimhood narrative like its Moloka Plus with Vellocet.
Re-watching A Clockwork Orange made it abundantly clear that a movie like this, as great as it is, could never be made in a cultural climate like ours.
The film is too bold, too brash, too brazen in its honest yet stylized depiction of the foibles and failures of humanity and our society, and to unflinching in its artistic honesty and insight.
In addition, Kubrick, despite the fact he is one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, would be deemed too ‘problematic’ and his politics too amorphous to pass the cancel culture test of 2021.
The film also features a prodigious amount of nudity and violence which in our oddly and performatively puritanical times would make it a no go for the corporate entities of Hollywood, which is ironic since our country and culture is so steeped in actual pornography and real-life violence.
Thankfully A Clockwork Orange did get made and it was a great film in 1971 and is even greater when seen in the context of 2021. Do yourself a favor and go watch it and see that Kubrick wasn’t just a cinematic genius, he was a prophet.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The show inexplicably and frustratingly trades drama and suspense for vacuous trans virtue signaling.
Y: The Last Man is a new tv show on FX/Hulu that boasts a very intriguing premise – what if all the men of earth, but one, were wiped out in a mysterious plague.
The show, based on a popular graphic novel of the same name that ran from 2002-2008, premiered in mid-September and is now through six episodes in its first season.
The dystopian drama’s basic story is that a sudden bloody illness kills every male mammal on earth except for a guy named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. In a mildly clever commentary on the current state of masculinity, the rather ridiculous and feckless poor Yorick, named after a dead clown in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is alas, a failed magician, oops, I mean escape artist.
Yorick’s mother, Jennifer Brown, happens to be a U.S. Congresswoman and she succeeds to the presidency after all the men running things drop dead. If you thought women running the world would make it better, then not only have you never heard of Margaret Thatcher, but you’ll also be disappointed by Y: The Last Man.
Life in a woman’s world is filled with just as much violence, crime, chaos, corruption and cruelty as the man’s world it replaced. The only real difference between men and women ruling appears to be that women seem incapable of clearing away the hordes of dead bodies littered everywhere. Maybe they just lack the upper body strength to get the job done, who knows?
While the show has some bright spots, such as the performances of the terrific Ben Schnetzer as Yorrick, as well as Diane Lane, Amber Tamblyn, and Ashley Romans, it also has some major problems, namely its relentlessly predictable political agenda.
Most of the politics are of the usual vacuous variety you’d come to expect from Hollywood. All the villains are irrational right-wing Republicans and all the heroes are allegedly logical liberal Democrats. Tamblyn’s Kimberly derisively describes the new all-female administration as “a Rachel Maddow fever dream” and she’s correct.
But the most egregious example of the show’s political pandering is that it has veered sharply away from its source material by incorporating gender fluidity and trans men into the mix and in so doing has incomprehensibly castrated its own dramatic power.
In contrast to the comic book – which some deemed “trans-phobic” because it mostly ignored the trans community, trans men are featured predominantly throughout the tv show. A major character, Sam, and his merry band of trans men are one example, as are other groups of trans men who are referenced searching for their precious elixir testosterone, which ironically enough is tough to find.
In the most recent episode gender fluidity was at the forefront as Dr. Allison Mann, a Harvard geneticist, passionately declares in a long monologue, “not everyone with a Y chromosome is a man!” She also rants about how transgenderism and gender fluidity are much more prevalent than we realize and how it wasn’t “just men” who died from the cataclysmic “event” but “all people with a Y chromosome”.
Ok…but I don’t think the title ‘Y: The Last Mammal with a Y Chromosome’ would inspire much interest.
A major dramatic device in the story is that Yorick is in danger because he’s literally the last man on earth and is the only hope for mankind’s survival. Trans men may “believe” they’re actually men, but the premise of this story, at least the graphic novel version, obliterates that subjective assertion. This is no doubt why trans activists were so up in arms about the show being made and why the producers were so quick to kneel before the altar of gender fluidity despite how that questionable notion neuters the premise and drama of their show.
For example, being the actual last man on earth means Yorick has the utmost value, and when you add in that he’s the current president’s son, then his value skyrockets even more. This is why he continuously wears a gas mask to hide his bearded face and he skulks in the shadows to avoid being discovered. But none of this makes any sense at all since trans men are so predominantly featured on the show.
In this context, if Yorick is discovered he could just say he’s a trans man, and according to the world of the show, no one would bat an eye. In fact, in the latest episode a group of rebel/terrorist women stumble upon Yorick and just assume he’s trans and tell him where a bunch of other trans men are who have testosterone, which needlessly defused a potentially very dramatic situation.
The bottom line is that Y: The Last Man could’ve been great, but its ultimately a foolish and unforgivable waste of a good sci-fi premise. The show is nothing but another example of pandering producers who’d rather signal their woke virtue and render impotent their project’s suspense and drama than actually make something interesting, challenging and worthwhile.
If a mysterious sudden plague ever comes that wipes out just the woke in Hollywood, I’ll look into the vacant skulls of these long-lost producers and muse, “where your gibes be now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.”
Just kidding. What I’d actually say is “God bless and good riddance” and be merrily on my way.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dismal and disappointing directing effort from Clint Eastwood that features some utterly embarrasing performances and a painfully thin script.
Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood has long been an avatar for America. From the phenomenal spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone to Dirty Harry to his genre closing masterpiece Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has been an archetypal figure embodying America’s sense of itself and its masculinity.
Eastwood’s new movie Cry Macho, which he directs and stars in, isn’t in the same cinematic ballpark as Unforgiven or Dirty Harry, in fact, it’s a pretty dreadful movie, but that doesn’t mean it lacks archetypal insight.
Cry Macho features Eastwood once again mirroring America, but this time he unintentionally reveals a deeply delusional nation in steep decline.
The film tells the story of Mike Milo (Eastwood), a very old ranch hand hired by wealthy Texan Howard Polk to get his wayward teenage son, Rafo and pet rooster named Macho, from Mexico out of the clutches of Rafo’s drug dealing, abusive mother.
It is important at this juncture to unequivocally salute Clint Eastwood for making Cry Macho. Directing a movie requires a Herculean effort. Starring in a movie takes a super-human amount of energy. Clint Eastwood not only directing but starring in a movie at the age of 91 is a stunning and miraculous achievement.
While I have been highly critical of many of Eastwood’s late-stage films, and rightfully so, that does not diminish in my eyes his singular position in the history of American cinema and the breadth of his acting and directing career.
I respect Eastwood’s continued ambition and work ethic (but certainly question his work style) but I refuse to let sentimentality cloud my judgement of his work.
Eastwood has been starring in movies for 57 years, and while he’s never been a great actor, he’s always been a formidable and compelling screen presence. But Clint Eastwood is 91-years-old, and while he’s robust for a 91-year-old, that doesn’t make it any less delusional that he cast himself as a character that is 40 in the book upon which the movie is based. Hell, Eastwood even turned down this same role back in the 80’s when he was a much more age appropriate.
At 91, Eastwood doesn’t just seem old, but elderly and fragile, as he moves like an extra on Night of the Living Dead. The sight of him breaking horses, dancing the night away and punching thugs, beggars belief.
When a woman less than half his age is so overcome with sexual-attraction she tries to seduce him, and another about half his age falls madly in love with him, it’s utterly absurd.
This aggressive self-delusion is the perfect embodiment of the current state of the American empire, which is in a sorry state but sees the ruggedly handsome Clint Eastwood of 1965 in the mirror instead of the more accurate reflection of the feeble, infirm and geriatric Clint Eastwood of today.
This level of delusion is equivalent to those American voters who convinced themselves that Joe Biden wasn’t a dementia-addled, establishment whore or that Donald Trump was anything but a bloated, bloviating reality tv buffoon.
Like so much of America and American culture, Cry Macho is a cheap, sloppy, dramatically and narratively incoherent venture that features some of the worst acting you’ll ever see. When the best actor in your movie is a rooster, you’ve got serious problems.
Eastwood is famous, or infamous, for shooting minimal takes on his films in order to stay on time and on budget. When his cast consists of all-time greats like Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and Richard Harris, as it did on Unforgiven, this approach can work incredibly well. When, in an attempt to cut corners and save money, the cast is loaded with unknowns, as it is on Cry Macho, then the results can be frighteningly amateurish, which is painfully similar to the cast of characters currently starring in the stale drama of American politics. Who among us doesn’t think a rooster would be a significant upgrade from Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of the other vacuous and vapid villains inhabiting Washington?
Cry Macho, much like Unforgiven thirty years ago, highlights Eastwood wrestling with the darker side of his uniquely American archetype.
In Unforgiven he grappled with the ramifications of the violence he portrayed on-screen and that the American ethos unleashed upon the world. In Cry Macho the meditation is not nearly as profound, but it’s certainly there.
The teenage Rafo, one of the countless two-dimensional, third-world characters in the film that can either be a sinner or a saint and nothing in-between, is uncomfortably desperate to prove his masculinity, as Mike points out when he tells him how odd it is for “a man to name his cock Macho”.
Eastwood saying the lines “the macho thing is overrated” and “they don’t like that macho stuff in America” to Rafo feels like a frank admission that America has become so hyper-feminized that even Clint Eastwood, the archetype of American masculinity, is now admitting defeat.
But the most insightful dialogue comes from Rafo, who confronts Eastwood’s Mike and rips into him, and by extension, eviscerates the notion of American exceptionalism, when he says, “you used to be tough, now you’re weak…you used to be strong, and now you’re nothing.”
That’s uncomfortably insightful as the decrepit Clint Eastwood of today perfectly reflects the current state of America, as he’s delusional, infirm and feeble. The reality is that America pretending it’s anything but a decadent nation in a death spiral doesn’t change that fact, it just maintains the facade for those too frightened to admit the truth.
This is reminiscent of when Rafo continuously defends his pet rooster by telling Mike, “he’s not a chicken, he’s Macho!” Calling a chicken ‘Macho”, doesn’t change the fact that it’s a chicken, and sooner or later it will end up sliced and diced on the dinner table.
I wish Cry Macho was a better movie because it has something to say and didn’t say it very well, but the one obvious take away is that if the once-great but now over-the-hill Clint Eastwood is the embodiment of modern American masculinity, now is definitely the time to cry macho.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Never before has a nearly 8-hour documentary talked so much but said so little. Spike Lee marinates 9/11 and Covid in unrelenting identity politics resulting in a documentary that is a tedious, tangled mess of misinformation.
Spike Lee’s new four-part HBO documentary series, NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½ caused controversy when critics pre-screened it because the series finale spent time focusing on the conspiracy theories of the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Lee, who openly disbelieves the official 9/11 story and in 2006 featured conspiracies regarding the intentional flooding of black neighborhoods in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in his HBO documentary When the Levees Broke, is usually an unrepentant firebrand, but under pressure the Brooklyn-based blowhard folded like a cheap suit and cut the entire controversial thirty-minute segment from the project prior to it airing.
I wasn’t granted access to the original version, but after having watched the edited, seven and a half-hour, uneven slog of a series that came to a close Saturday night on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I can report that if truth and accuracy are of prime concern then there’s about six and a half more hours that needed to be cut from the series, which abounds with disinformation, misinformation and propaganda, none of which has anything to do with 9/11.
NYC Epicenters is broken down into four episodes, with the first two episodes focusing on a myriad of more current events and the last two on 9/11 itself. Not surprisingly since this is a “Spike Lee joint”, every topic tackled, and there are a lot of them, is deeply marinated in a manufactured racial resentment.
In episodes one and two the story zigs and zags from Covid in China and New York, to Trump’s birtherism, to Covid’s impact on education and restaurants, to Black Lives Matter, to Trump’s charges of election fraud, to “kids in cages”, to black vaccine hesitancy, to January 6th and beyond. Spike’s approach to this dizzying array of topics isn’t chronological, rendering it virtually incomprehensible.
Watching episodes one and two is like a Bataan death march where every few steps Spike Lee shouts the phrase “disproportionately affects black and brown people” into your ear for no discernible or coherent reason.
These two episodes are entirely devoid of insights, and are like the scattershot, rancid remnants of a social justice binge barfed into an incoherent hodge-podge of alarmist headlines.
Adding to the egregiousness, Spike interjects himself throughout to a remarkably annoying degree by constantly interrupting his subjects and yelling at them to “say it again” when they’ve made a point with which he agrees.
Lee also peppers the program with Spike-isms, like calling ground zero “Da Pile” and Brooklyn “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and referring to Obama as President Barrack “Bruddah Man” Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as “Papa Joe” and “Sistah Kamala”. He also dubs Trump “Agent Orange” or “Der Fuhrer and Il Duce”. I’m a native-born son of “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn” and loathe “Agent Orange” more than most, but even I found the Mussolini and Hitler comparisons sophomoric and shallow.
With help from his friends in the mainstream media, like Van Jones and Al Sharpton, Spike also vomits out the usual vacuous establishment talking points, like blaming Trump for the moral atrocity of “kids in cages” at the border while ignoring “Bruddah Man” Obama’s complicity in that crime.
He also blames anti-Asian violence on white supremacy and Trump’s rhetoric, even going so far as to show a white man assault an Asian woman, and putting up the white man’s mug shot, but then without explanation or identification of the race of the assailant, shows a series of murky videos where black people assault Asians.
Spike also regurgitates the MSM’s misinformation about the “Central Park Karen” story. That story is told by Christopher Cooper, the black bird watcher in Central Park who videotaped a white woman calling the cops on him. The media destroyed this woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), dubbing her the Central Park Karen. Spike does the same, intentionally ignoring much deeper reporting that puts some desperately-needed context and nuance into the situation.
Spike also declares that all the violence and looting at Black Lives Matter protests was a result of outside “instigators”. And yet, he holds up the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer by militia men as proof of right-wing, white supremacist nefariousness, while ignoring the fact that the FBI were so deeply involved in the inception of that kidnap plot as to have potentially “instigated” it.
Lee’s rabid partisanship blinds him to the obvious, that “instigators” may very well have sabotaged both BLM protests AND right-wing protests.
This possibility also never occurs to Spike regarding January 6th either, which he obscenely labels as being equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Using a deceptive graphic of those “killed by the Insurrection” is the piece de resistance of deceptive propaganda.
As for the last two episodes of the series, they’re rather standard and occasionally effective 9/11 reminiscences, but they too are peppered with a tedious hyper-racialism.
It’s unfortunate that even when finally focusing on 9/11, racial grievances are given the spotlight when the cataclysmic wars and the rescue workers stricken by deadly cancer post-9/11 are given short shrift.
The bottom line is that this nearly eight-hour, ego-driven extravaganza could’ve and should’ve been whittled down to a taut one hour, stripped of its incorrigible identity politics and solely focused on 9/11, with all of the modern-day political pandering, posturing and propagandizing left on the cutting room floor. But if that were to happen, then it wouldn’t be a “Spike Lee joint”…we should be so lucky.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie musical really sucks. Just a dreadful piece of amateurish trash.
Amazon Studio’s new Cinderella, written and directed by Kay Cannon, is a jukebox musical that sets out to upend the old-fashioned fairy tale by injecting a powerful dose of girl power into its traditionalist veins.
Starring pop singer Camilla Cabello this woke re-telling now streaming on Amazon Prime, which might have been considered ideologically edgy in 1956, is a bland, flat concoction that looks as unappealing as it sounds.
To promote the new movie, cast members Cabello, Idina Menzel, Billy Porter and James Corden (also a producer of the film) recently got into costume and did a flash mob at various Los Angeles intersections where they sang the grating Jennifer Lopez hit “Let’s Get Loud”.
After having seen a video of this occurrence, which included Corden sexually thrusting his hips in a mouse costume, I’ve been, like Winston Smith, haunted by rodent filled nightmares.
After having watched the movie itself, I only wish I could’ve been at that intersection when the mob of the thirsty and famous broke out and done the world a favor by running over every one of these annoying fools. At least then I could’ve spent the hour and fifty-three-minute run time of the movie hosing Corden’s copious innards from the underside of my car rather than suffering through his bloated performance on screen. (It is important to note that this paragraph is not an endorsement of hit and run or encouragement of violence of any kind against anyone, particularly James Corden…I am just making a dark joke at that annoying fat fuck’s expense.)
Putting the Cinderella story through the woke wash cycle seems like a painfully-typical-for-the-times, Disney channel inspired, algorithm assisted experience. The plot they came up with was that the new Cinderella is a fashion designer who, along with all the other women in the kingdom, is suffering under the patriarchy and its sexist traditions.
As everyone knows, Cinderella is supposed to marry the prince, but in this new wokelandia, she instead literally says, “I choose me!”, and decides on her blossoming fashion design career over love. You see, this Cinderella doesn’t want to be confined to the basement or the Royal box. She wants to toss the glass slipper and shatter the glass ceiling. You go, girl!
Of course, Cinderella ultimately gets to have both her career and love when Prince Robert, played by Nicholas Galitzine who, how do I put this…doesn’t exactly seem like the type of guy who is into the ladies, gives up his bollocks, oops, I mean his claim to the crown, and follows Cinderella in her fashion career.
You’ll be glad to know that Prince Robert’s sister, Gwen, an ambitious Hillary Clinton type bursting with so many great ideas that none of the men ever listen to, now becomes ruler of the kingdom. Girl Power rules!!
If that all sounds really egregiously dreadful to you, then you are not alone.
The problems with Cinderella aren’t just the relentless girlboss bullshit, it’s also the fact that the movie looks and feels like a bunch of ten-year-olds lip-synching to the radio as they put on a play in their grandmother’s backyard.
It has also boasts a nearly incoherent script, is amateurishly directed, embarrassingly choreographed and abysmally acted. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
A big problem with the film is that its lead, Camilla Cabello, is an unappealing and unattractive screen presence who seems less a fairy princess in waiting than a rookie waitress stumbling through her maiden shift at a renaissance fare.
The first forty-five minutes of the movie are run of the mill garbage, but then the awfulness goes into hyper-drive when the king of crap arrives, James Corden, who in an uncomfortable bit of typecasting plays an annoying fat mouse.
To add insult to injury, at about the same time Billy Porter (acclaimed star of Kinky Boots and Pose) brings his gay minstrel show to the festivities in the form of the character Fab G, which is described in the film’s promotional material as a “genderless fairy godparent”. Fab G is, you guessed it, “FABULOUS!”, but unfortunately is not genderless, as she describes herself as a “fairy godmother” in the film, which horrified me no end as it seems aggressively binary. Cancel Cinderella for its binary conformism and trans-hate!
As for the rest of the cast, Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver play the king and queen and their work seems to embody the attitude that ‘the mortgage ain’t gonna pay for itself’, which as we all know…it isn’t.
Idina Menzel plays the wicked step-mother, but thankfully she isn’t really wicked because women aren’t capable of being bad in wokelandia because they have no agency, instead the wicked step-mother is just a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy.
The music in Cinderella, which features songs from Janet Jackson, Queen, Madonna, Ed Sheeran among many others, falls decidedly flat because the performances are dull and the arrangements so predictable, they seem to be done by a second-grade music teacher.
I understand this is the world we live in and we have to suffer through these uber-woke movies and tv shows that only care about “the message” and not the quality of the product or its entertainment value, but this feminist monstrosity is beyond the pale.
It astounds me that in our already hyper-feminized to the point of absurdity culture, which denigrates men at every turn and intentionally conflates true masculinity with toxic masculinity, that Hollywood still feels the need to so aggressively indoctrinate young girls and boys into this rancid woke nonsense.
We’ve become a vapid and vacuous nation of clowns, cuckolds and eunuchs, and Amazon Studios, James Corden, Billy Porter and the awful new Cinderella are a sign of how far and how fast we’ve fallen, and we aren’t getting up.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds
Is TV too woke?
As someone who works with a lot of producers, writers and directors who all privately tell me that if their TV project isn’t woke in conception and rigidly diverse in execution, then it won’t ever move forward, the answer is eye-rollingly obvious.
Unsurprisingly, the epidemic of wokeness is just as virulent across the pond in the UK TV world as it is in Hollywood and New York.
Proof of this was evident at the Edinburgh TV Festival panel discussion of TV professionals unironically titled “Diversity of Thought: Is TV Too Woke?”
At the discussion, Ash Atella, the producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, admitted, “I’m in a lot of meetings now where people tell me, ‘This will never get on because it’s not woke enough.”
The reality is that any sentient being with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think, can tell you that TV is so awash in wokeness as to be hysterical.
Whether it be ideologically biased, identity-obsessed news coverage, or entertainment featuring the performative absurdity of a black Anne Boleyn, the obscenity of white male erasure in Marvel’s What If?, or incessant LGBTQ cheerleading, the trend is clear, the woke revolution is most certainly being televised.
What’s interesting about TV’s woke affliction is that while it’s obvious to regular people, many industry insiders are either afraid to speak publicly about it or blind to it.
A specially commissioned Ipsos Mori survey supports this notion, and shows that the TV industry in the UK is wildly out of step regarding wokeness compared to the viewing public. The survey found that 62% of British TV viewers believe political correctness on TV has gone too far, while only 19% of TV industry professionals agreed. It also revealed that 40% of viewers were proud of the UK, as opposed to 20% of TV professionals, and that 23% of viewers were ashamed of the British Empire while 63% of TV insiders shared that sentiment.
Obviously, TV professionals live in an alternate universe to audience members, and that is reflected in the lack of ideological diversity we see on our screens. But TV doesn’t care about ideological diversity, only in the surface diversity of identity.
The Egyptian-born Atella, who is a big proponent of diversity in TV, gave voice to the reality of the pro-diversity agenda and its effect when he told the panel, “I’m amazed how fast the white people have thought, ‘We can’t get on television’, that’s come in hard and fast in the last two years, and it’s a bewildering experience to be in those meetings after 15 years of the opposite. Now white people think there’s no place for them.”
Well, “the white people” think there’s no place for them in the culture because news channels consistently label them evil and entertainment endlessly denigrates them.
The corporate behemoths that run Hollywood have made it very clear too that white people, straight white men in particular, are not welcome in the industry.
For example, Disney and Amazon have made their worship of all things “diverse and inclusive” official company doctrine with insidiously specific identity quotas that above all target reducing straight white males from the creative and production process.
The same is true of the Academy Awards, which have made racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation box-ticking, as well as straight white male exclusion, mandatory, in order to be eligible for awards contention.
The woke bias of other panelists in Edinburgh, such as Louisa Compton, Head of News, Current Affairs and Sport at Channel 4, was also exposed, as was a shocking level of contempt for the audience.
Compton first claimed that being woke is benign as it literally means, “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone, which seem like fairly important principles.”
Compton heads a news division and the fact that her fidelity is to the subjective principles of “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone” as opposed to searching for the objective truth, is alarming but illuminating.
Compton did admit that wokeness can “alienate some audiences who feel that the world is moving on faster and leaving them behind” and also claimed, “I don’t think anyone in TV would be surprised to hear that a lot of the people who work [in the industry] think differently to the audiences we’re making progress for.”
Broadcast journalist Mobeen Azhar shared a similar holier-than-thou attitude when speaking of the type of shows needed to “move forward the people who think PC’s gone mad, because it hasn’t.”
To Compton, Azhar and their ilk, wokeness is the proper religion populated by the evolved and the pious, and they and their fellow TV professionals are working hard to make “progress for” and “move forward” those knuckle-dragging barbarians in the audience who feel left ”behind”.
Wokeness is now the state religion and entertainment and news its propaganda wings, brimming with missionaries like Compton and Azhar, filled with self-righteous superiority and evangelical zeal.
To these people TV is just an indoctrination machine used to do the public service of spreading the good news of the woke gospel to help spur evolution among the filthy, backwards proles.
So, is TV too woke? If you don’t think so then either you don’t watch TV or you’re a self-involved, delusional TV executive suffering from a severe case of stage 5 wokeness. Hopefully it’s the former and not the latter, as that’s the decidedly healthier and more enlightened choice.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities
The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.
‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.
If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’
The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.
Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!
In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.
Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.
The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.
Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.
Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.
Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…” And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture.
Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.
Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”
Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.
As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.
The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.
He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.
He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.
It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.
As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
New HBO documentary ‘In the Same Breath’ examines the horror of Covid and the Chinese and American government’s initial misinformation campaigns in response to the outbreak.
The film shows that trusting government, whether it be socialist or democratic in nature, is a fool’s errand.
In the Same Breath, the flawed but at times fascinating new documentary airing on HBO and HBO Max, chronicles the inept response and often deceptive practices of both the Chinese and U.S. governments in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the power of propaganda to shape perception.
The documentary features some harrowing and horrifying footage from within Wuhan during the height of the Covid outbreak. Scenes of patients gasping for air and dying, and families struggling to decide whether their elderly mother should die in a hospital parking lot waiting for care that will never come or admit death’s inevitability back in the comfort of their apartment, are gut-wrenching.
One of the most unnerving sequences in the film is when a CCTV camera captures the very beginning of the pandemic when it records a cavalcade of people from the Wuhan fish market coming to a clinic with a cough and high fever. The doctor who greets and treats them then develops the same symptoms and goes from hospital to hospital looking for care, but is turned away every time, and later dies.
Director Nanfu Wang, best known for her searing documentary One Child Nation about China’s one child policy, obviously has insights into the Chinese mindset and she is unforgiving when it comes to the Chinese government.
In the Same Breath spotlights the relentless drumbeat of misinformation from the Chinese government that at first diminished the disease’s power, with officials declaring it doesn’t transmit human to human and dissenters arrested for their heresy. When the truth became undeniable, the government shifts into propaganda mode and stories of brave front line medical workers flood the Chinese tv market, with the message that the government and people of China are working hand in hand to defeat the Covid menace takes hold.
Wang, an American citizen born and raised in China, is a skilled documentarian who has a keen eye for Chinese propaganda but a bit of a blind spot for her own American political bias.
The two main villains of In the Same Breath are the corrupt Chinese government and the incompetent Trump administration. Both are deserving of scorn, but at least in the American side of the coronavirus pandemic story, this documentary feels a little shallow as it isn’t just the Trump administration that has misinformed and deceived regarding coronavirus, it’s been the entire political and media establishment.
The documentary almost seems quaint when it ponders potential Trump authoritarianism when in his absence vicious tribalism and covid misinformation have continued to flourish unabated.
To her credit, Wang does briefly highlight some Democrats as being misinformation agents too, and excoriates Dr. Anthony Fauci, for his repeated deceptions, especially early in the outbreak.
What Wang doesn’t do is challenge the orthodoxy of HBO’s decidedly liberal audience. For example, the scientists and medical professionals who signed a letter in the summer of 2020 saying that protesting against the lockdown was dangerous and but that protesting for Black Lives Matter was mandatory because of the alleged epidemic of racism in America, are never mentioned, never mind ridiculed. This egregious event is tailor made for Wang’s thesis but is undoubtedly a bridge too far for the bigwigs at HBO and their liberal audience.
She also studiously avoids the controversial lab-leak theory.
Wang’s main focus is that she’s afraid of what people in power will do to maintain and expand their power, especially during a pandemic. She highlights China’s numerous authoritarian abuses and the Chinese people’s not only acceptance of those abuses, but outright praise for them, to make her case.
This all seems very relevant to the hotly debated vaccination issue here in the U.S., but unfortunately In the Same Breath only covers 2020, so that issue is never raised.
I’m devoutly agnostic on the vaccine question, but it’s striking to me that the same Chinese tactics and techniques regarding Covid featured in the documentary are currently either being copied or mirrored by the elite in the U.S
For instance, Wang makes a strong case that China has undercounted the number of dead in order to make the government seem more effective, turning a possible 30,000 dead in Wuhan into just 3,000.
In contrast, the U.S. corporate media have used a bait and switch approach where the highest number is always the one featured, possibly in an attempt to scare people into compliance. For example, in the early days of Covid the death toll made headlines, then it subtly shifted to the number of positive tests, and now to the percentage of sick who are unvaccinated.
Wang also expresses frustration with the U.S. government’s refusal to share accurate data with the American public, a sentiment she admittedly shares with ‘deplorable’ Trumpers.
China bullied people into silence and compliance by making emotional and nationalistic pleas, while in the U.S., the argument for people to take vaccines is also emotional – do no harm to grandma, and collective – we need to work together for herd immunity.
The bullying impulse is strong in the pro-vaccine movement too, as restricting liberties and requiring vaccine passports for government aid have remarkably become the default position among elites, many liberals and the media, despite resulting in obvious racial disparities.
As for In the Same Breath, it’s a flawed documentary, but if viewers can overcome its limiting bias and see the authoritarian forest for the partisan trees, it’s worth watching for no other reason than to remind of the insidious and nefarious nature of power and how easily freedom is suffocated by governments meant to protect it.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds
The gullible Hollywood star exposes himself to be a useful idiot for the military/intelligence industrial complex by producing a blindly orthodox new six-part discussion series on Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
As the U.S. limps out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, and millions suffer and die under the most brutal of American-induced maladies from Syria to Palestine to Yemen and across the Middle East, I implore you to fear not as Captain America is now on the case.
Chris Evans, the movie star best known for playing the patriotic leader of the Avengers, Steve Rogers, in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, is out to solve the world’s problems and has set his dazzling blue eyes and decidedly empty-head on the mess that is the Middle East.
In 2017, the dreamy Evans founded a civic media organization titled “A Starting Point” which he unironically claims is “non-partisan”. Thankfully for humanity, on August 31st, A Starting Point will air a new six-part series titled “Influence and Power in the Middle East” where “experts” discuss Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Palestine.
I was hoping that this series would feature such Captain America adjacent luminaries as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk, but unfortunately the line-up of speakers is considerably less impressive.
“Influence and Power in the Middle East” features a cavalcade of archaic establishment asses like George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta, and everybody’s favorite raving lunatic and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.
This is literally a murderer’s row of Washington warmongers, nefarious neo-cons and CIA criminals who have raped and pillaged the Middle East for the entirety of their kiss up-kick down careers. This is the equivalent of having Ted Bundy on a dating podcast to share his insights about women.
In addition, apparently former CIA operative Will Hurd is going to “host” these discussions, one could only hope that his experience “hosting” detainees during torture sessions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be replicated with these vile villains.
If I wanted to see Hadley, Haass, Panetta, Bolton and a cavalcade of National Security lackeys and CIA shills spout their obscene and absurd military/intelligence industrial propaganda, I’d just turn on cable news, as CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem to exist solely to platform and/or employ these types of repugnant reprobates.
Speaking of the mainstream media, it’s nice to see Chris Evans, one of those hopeless Hollywood fools who endlessly espouses diversity in movie casting, emulate media business-as-usual with his A Starting Point charade by casting only people slavishly addicted to establishment orthodoxy for these discussions…no diversity of opinion here!
For example, Richard Haas and Dr. Jon Alterman, two pro-Israel shills, will discuss Palestine. I’m sure that will be immensely enlightening.
Another example is having Leon Panetta and John Bolton tackle Iran. Bolton is the John Bonham of banging the drum for war with Iran. You know what won’t get mentioned in that stultifying, establishment-friendly discussion? The U.S. shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner, over Iranian airspace in 1988, killing all 290 men, women and children aboard.
What would be considerably more useful, noble and interesting would be if Chris Evans had used his oversized public stature to actually feature diverse opinions from diverse people, like…I don’t know…maybe have actual Palestinians discuss Palestine, and Iranians discuss Iran, and Syrians discuss Syria and Yemenis discuss Yemen. You know, platform people who never ever get a platform in American media.
And if Captain America really had a pair, he’d have Jamal Khashoggi’s widow and 9-11 victims’ family members come and discuss Saudi Arabia.
But we all know that Chris Evans is entirely devoid of not only testicular fortitude, but of brains.
Evans is such a moron that in 2016 he actually flew into a rage because he believed that Marlon Brando had literally anally raped his co-star Maria Schneider on camera at the behest of director Bernardo Bertolucci while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1971. Think about how breathtakingly ridiculous that is for a moment.
To be clear, Brando did not actually rape Schneider or have any genital/sexual contact with her while filming Last of Tango in Paris, any more than Clint Eastwood really shot people while filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The sex between Brando and Schneider was entirely simulated, but when the egregiously gullible Evans read about a mis-informed rumor that the Brando story was true, he donned his white knight savior costume and valiantly tweeted.
“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage."
He followed that gem up by tweeting, “They should be in jail." The punchline being that Evans was unaware that Marlon Brando had been dead for a decade by the time Captain America courageously hit send on that tweet.
The reality is that Evans isn’t just an empty-headed imbecile but also a shameless establishment shill. This buff buffoon is no doubt great at doing pull-ups, but he has the intellect of a toddler in pull-ups.
Chris “Captain America” Evans obviously set out to prove with his ‘serious’ A Starting Point venture that he wasn’t just another vacuous but impossibly handsome Hollywood pretty boy, but by the looks of the “Influence and Power in the Middle East” guest list, I can confidently declare “Mission Not Accomplished!”, as he’s only proven himself to be just another useful idiot for the money-hungry and bloodthirsty military/industrial complex and corrupt Washington establishment.
Captain America famously said: “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from. “ However, it would appear Chris does like bullies, especially if they’re from Washington.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Acting Coach & Teacher Westside Los Angeles
FILM
Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve
The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer
American Fiction directed by Cord Jefferson
Poor Things directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
The Holdovers directed by Alexander Payne
Anatomy of a Fall directed by Justine Trier
Ferrari directed by Michael Mann
The Boy and the Heron directed by Hiyao Miyazaki
Godzilla Minus One directed by Takashi Yamazaki
The Killer directed by David Fincher
The Roald Dahl Short Film Collection directed by Wes Anderson
No One Will Save You directed by Brian Duffield
Oppenheimer directed by Christopher Nolan
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
TV
Succession (HBO)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (TV)
Barbie (pod)
Killers of the Flower Moon (pod)
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (pod)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (pod)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (pod)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Mandalorian Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up - White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian
History of the World Part II (tv)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (pod)
The Banshees of Inisherin (pod)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoilers)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler free)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio(pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (pod)
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Moment of Contact - Documentary
House of the Dragon - Current Fantasy TV Champion of the World
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (pod)
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU(pod)
Obi-Wan Kenobi(TV)(first 3 eps)(final 3 eps)
Jurassic World: Dominion(review)/(Pod)
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Lost Daughter(pod)
Pam and Tommy(TV)
Peacemaker (Ep.1-3)/Peacemaker(finale)(TV)
Nightmare Alley(pod)
Everything’s Gonna Be All White(TV)
Ozark(TV)
Finch(pod)
Hawkeye(TV)
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
Succession(TV)
Dopesick(TV)
Ted Lasso Season Two(TV-pod)
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
Y: The Last Man(TV)
Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace(TV)
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union(TV)
The Prince(TV)
What If?(TV)
CODA(pod)
WandaVision/Winter Soldier/Loki(TV-pod)
No Sudden Move(pod)
We the People(TV)
Bo Burnham: Inside(pod)
Tenet(pod)
Exterminate All the Brutes (TV)
Coded Bias (TV)
Coming 2 America(pod)
Ted Lasso(TV-pod)
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
Recipe for Seduction(pod)
The Queen’s Gambit(TV-pod)
The Crown(TV)
Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice
Spitting Image(TV)
Cursed(TV)
Monty Python’s The Life of Brian
Lance(TV)
The Last Samurai(pod)
The Social Network(pod)
Inception(pod)
John McTiernan Films(pod)
There Will Be Blood(pod)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy(pod)
Hell or High Water(pod)
Zodiac(pod)
Ex Machina(pod)
Contagion(pod)
Space Force(TV)
The Last Dance(TV)
Fleabag(TV)
The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
Once Upon a Time…in. Hollywood
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
War for the Planet of the Apes
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
Batman v. Superman : Dawn of Justice
A Very Pleasant Awakening : Thoughts on a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Derek & Orange is the New Black
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: Lee Daniel's The Butler
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: August: Osage County
LIVE MUSIC REVIEWS
La La Land : An Analysis - Political Subtext
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
The Big Short : A Review, a Diagnosis and a Warning
Sicario: A Review and Reports From Down the Rabbit Hole of the Drug War
Citizenfour : A Review and Random Thoughts
Knight of Cups : A Review and Dispatches From the Great Malick Civil War
The Birth of a Nation : A Review and Commentary
ACTING TECHNIQUE AND THEORY
Marlon Brando, The Big Bang and the Birth of Modern Acting
Stillness: Lessons from Redford, DeNiro and Penn
Al Pacino : Top 5 performances
Requiem for a Heavyweight: James Gandolfini
On Grief and Acting: Revelations from Hamlet in the April of my Discontent
Ethan Saylor and a Lack of Empathy Part One
St. Patrick's Day : The Five Best Irish Films
AWARDS NONSENSE
1st Annual Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Annual Mickey Awards (2015)
3rd Annual Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Annual Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Annual Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Annual Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Annual Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Annual Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Annual Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Annual Mickey Awards (2023)
1st Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards(2015)
3rd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2023)
Must-See Documentaries
Can’t Get You Out of My Head directed by Adam Curtis
HyperNormalisation directed by Adam Curtis
Century of the Self directed by Adam Curtis
The Power of Nightmares directed by Adam Curtis
LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA PODCAST
Season 1 - 2020
Ep. 2 - Marriage Story
Ep. 8 - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Ep. 9 - Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Ep. 11 - Coronavirus and Contagion
Ep. 14 - Hell or High Water
Ep. 15 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Season 2 - 2021
Ep. 35 - Promising Young Woman
Ep. 40 - Tenet and Nolan Films
Ep. 41 - Top 5 Alien/UFO Films
Ep. 42 - No Sudden Move and Top 5 Heist Movies
Ep. 43 - WandaVision/Falcon and Winter Soldier/Loki
Ep. 44 - Bo Burnham: Inside & The State of the Comedy Union
Ep. 45 - Black Widow
Ep. 47 - Movie Streaming Recommendations
Ep. 50 - Eternals
Ep. 52 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Season 3 - 2022
Ep. 57 - Spider-Man: No Way Home
Ep. 67 - Ozark Season 4 Part 2
Ep. 68 - Dr. Strange in the Mutiverse of Madness
Ep. 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion
Ep. 72 - Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU
Ep. 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Ep. 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Ep. 88 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Ep. 89 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Season 4 - 2023
Ep. 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin
Ep. 95 - Oscars Wrap Up and Black Panther : Wakanda Forever
Ep. 98 - Ghosted
Ep. 99 - Air (pod)
Ep. 100 Part One - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 100 Part Two - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 101 - Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Ep. 103 - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Ep. 104 - Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Ep. 106 Ted lasso Season Three
Ep. 107 - No One Will Save You
Ep. 108 - Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Films
Ep. 109 - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Ep. 115 - Killers of the Flower Moon
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Truth, Justice and the Curious Case of Chris Kyle
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
The Tragedy of Charlottesville and the Age of Identity
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Election 2016 : Random Dispatches From the Shitshow
Election 2016 Post-Mortem : Crossing the Rubicon and Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Election 2016 Aftermath : A Practical Handbook to Survive and Thrive in the Era of Trump
PROPAGANDA WATCH
November 2023 Propaganda Report - More 60 Minutes
Propaganda Watch: Ireland Edition
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
BLOG POSTS
2024
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
10th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon
2023
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Ahsoka (TV)
Encounters (TV) - UFO Documentary
Winning Time (TV)
Jury Duty (TV)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Barry (TV)
Succession (TV)
Adventures in Idiocy - Dylan Mulvaney, Max and Monty Python
The Mandalorian - Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up (White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian)
The Last of Us (TV)
Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II
9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - Review and Commentary
House of the Dragon Season One - Final Analysis
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
The Greatest Beer Run Ever - Review and Commentary
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
The Rings of Power: Amazon’s Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens
The Last Movie Stars documentary
House of the Dragon - Episode One
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Episode One
Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Final Verdict
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Come and See (1985) and the War in Ukraine
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira, Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Has Defeated Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends the Woke Over the Edge
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv are crumbling just as new taboos around speech are being erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
A Not-So-Expert Opinion on our Future With the Coronavirus
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
What to Watch: TV Suggestions to Pass the Time
Coronavirus: Thoughts and Musings
Lost Opportunities and Dastardly Deeds in the Age of Coronavirus
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
The Super Bowl Halftime Shitstravaganza
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Martin Scorsese Top Five Films
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Anecdotal Observations on Elizabeth Warren
Thoughts and Musings: Featuring Fredo, Bed Bug, Lady Kicker and More
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Angry Americans, Shark Attacks and Synchronicity II
Quentin Tarantino Films Ranked Worst to First
Propaganda and the Delusion of Wokeness
Women’s Soccer, pay Equality and Pandering
Movie Subscription Services and Box Office Booms and Busts
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
The Emotionalist Buffoonery of Charles Blow
Brief Thoughts Before the End of Game of Thrones
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Game of Thrones: The Battle of Winterfell and the Fog of War
United Sheep of America: Assange, Fascism and Liberal Hypocrisy
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
Beating the Dead Horse of Grammy Award’s Racism
2018
Bush, Bertolucci and a Requiem for Truth
2018 Mid-Terms: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Serena Williams and Her Basket of Deplorables
Burt Reynolds and the End of the Movie Star
The Existential Catholic Crisis
The Awful File: Oscars, Millennials, Brie Larson and More
Thar He Blows: Charles Blow Has a Question...I have an Answer
Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two
Disturbing Dispatches From "Real America"
American Animals, Anthony Bourdain and Late Stage American Empire
Song of Experience in A Quiet Place
The Farcical Fury Over the White House Correspondence Dinner
Morgan Freeman and the #MeToo Whispers
Next Stop - Speculation Station: Syria and Scott Pruitt Edition
I Told You So: Conor Lamb Edition
A Wrinkle in Time, Film Criticism and White Liberal Paternalism
Thoughts on the Academy Awards
#MeToo: It's Not Broke, but You Can See the Cracks
Queen Oprah: Pope of the Cult of Personality
A Week of Holes: A$$holes, Sh*tholes and Rabbit Holes
Some Brief Thoughts on the Golden Globes
2017
Perversion and the Religion of Self
He Who Laughs Last - Edward S. Herman Edition
The Death of Edward S. Herman and the Death Knell for Liberalism in America
Sex Scandals and the Phases of a Panic
While We Were Sleeping...The Dogs of War Awoke
JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins
JFK and the Conspiracy Conundrum
The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don't
Eternal Darkness of the Artist's Mind
Mayweather, McGregor and the Heart of Darkness
Deconstructing Criticism of Oliver Stone's "The Putin Interviews"
The Whitewashing Controversy Part Two: A Response
Caesar Americanus : Trump, Shakespeare and the American Illiterati
Greg Gianforte, Punching Nazis and the Absence of Moral Authority
JOE McCARTHY WAS RIGHT!! Shocking Revelations From a Manchurian Op-Ed Writer
Curious George and the Banana Republic
Through the Looking Glass : Truth and Lies in Week One of 2017
Theatre of the Absurd : Road to Damascus Edition
Meryl Streep, Character and Moral Authority
TWIB : This Week in Bullshit (Feb 17- 24)
President Trump : A Viewer's Guide
Raping Truth : Brando, Butter and Last Tango in Paris
#OscarsSoWhite: Don't Believe the Hype?
The Way of the Gun: Meditations on America and Guns
OP-EDS
2022
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan - Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
In the Same Breath Docdumentary
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
In the Heights and the Woke Albatross
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Culture of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Defeats Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends Woke Poseurs Over the Edge
What Killed Michael Brown? Review
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv crumble just as taboos around speech are erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
2018
A Curious Case of Mystery Attacks, Microwave Weapons and Media Manipulation
In a Fit of Anti-Trump Pique, Liberals Shamelessly Embrace 'Deep State' Criminals
Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness
Captain America v Trump in Battle of the Useful Idiots
Hollywood's Self=Serving and Misguided Immigration Protests
Trump is Deadpool and We're All Doomed
Kanye Tweets He Loves Trump, Civilization on Brink
Hollywood's Malicious Propaganda Dehumanizes All Russians
The Pentagon and Hollywood's Successful and Deadly Propaganda Alliance
Profiles in PC Courage: Brave Millennials Attack 'Friends'
Echoes of Totalitarianism in #MeToo and Russia-Gate
2017
#MeToo Wildfire Rages Out of Control
Has Fear of Putin Seized Hollywood?
Stephen Colbert Heads For Russia Looking For Laughs; He'd Find Better Material at Home
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? Trump, That's What!
Trump - Griffin Scandal Underscores American Celebrity-Obsessed Culture
Suffering Children as Propaganda and the Jimmy Kimmel Story
Colbert Attacks Trump, Was it Homophobic? Hysterical? Or Both?
Oscars and Grammy Racism : Perception or Reality?
La La Land is Hollywood's Version of "Make America great Again"
Buzz Lightyear Claims Hollywood is Nazi Germany, Captain America to the Rescue?
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Snoop Dogg Barks Up The Wrong Tree
Express Yourself? Madonna Don't Preach!!
Goodbye Ringling Brothers, Hello Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow
JOHN OLIVER
The John Oliver Twist 1 : Court Jester as Propaganda Tool
The John Oliver Twist 2 : The Drumpf Affair and Little Bill Maher's Power Fetish
The John Oliver Twist 3 : Waxing Brazilian and Waning Credibility
The John Oliver Twist 4 : Out Trumping Trump on the Great Wall of Trump
John Oliver Twist 5 : Things Said and Unsaid
GENERAL
Irishness, Cultural Memory and the Curse of St. Patrick's Day
BOOKS
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Dreamland by Sam Quinones
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade
Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60’s by Tom O’Neill
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
The Duel by Anton Chekhov
Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov
The Bishop by Anton Chekhov
The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Projecting the Shadow : The Cyborg Hero in American Film by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz
Re-Membering Frankenstein : Healing the Monster in Every Man by G.H. Ellis
Man and His Symbols edited by C.G. Jung
Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C.G. Jung
Under Saturn's Shadow : The Wounding and Healing of Men by James Hollis
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou
Dark Alliance : The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb
Whiteout : The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
Boundaries of the Soul by June Singer
Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant by Daryl Sharp
Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louis Von Franz
Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger
Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt by Sylvia Brinton Perera
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
MUSIC
Centennial Collection by Robert Johnson
The Anthology, 1947-1972 by Muddy Waters
L.A. Woman by the Doors
Hendrix in the West by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Born Under a Bad Sign by Albert King
Burglar by Freddie King
Indianola Mississippi Seeds by B.B. King
Rhythm & Blues by Buddy Guy
The Complete Recordings by Mississippi John Hurt
Trouble in Mind by Big Bill Broonzy
His Best : The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection by Howlin' Wolf
Traveler by Chris Stapleton
The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth by Sturgill Simpson
A/B by Kaleo
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Charlie Parker by Charlie Parker
Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins
Go! by Dexter Gordon
Beauty is a Rare Thing : The Complete Atlantic Recordings by Ornette Coleman
Incesticide by Nirvana
Purple by Stone Temple Pilots
Mingus Ah Um by Charlie Mingus
Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam
Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden
Dirt by Alice in Chains
Brown and Roach by Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Moanin' by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderley
Superfly (Deluxe Edition) by Curtis Mayfield
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
Sea Change by Beck
Signs by Tedeschi Trucks Band
Walking the Line: The Legendary Sun Recordings by Johnny Cash
Misterioso by Thelonious Monk
Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins
The Sky is Crying by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Me and Mr. Johnson by Eric Clapton
The Story of Sonny Boy Slim by Gary Clark Jr.
Bootleg Series Vol. 8 : Tell Tale Signs by Bob Dylan
Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk by Jeff Buckley
Harvest by Neil Young
Email: mpmacting@yahoo.com
