"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

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8th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2021 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year. 2021 was a particularly heinous one for cinema, so the Slip-Me-A-Mickeys flourished in a very target rich environment.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

 Worst Film of the Year

The Tender Bar – A boring, dramatically incoherent coming of age tale that makes an episode of The Wonder Years look like Lawrence of Arabia. George Clooney may be the very worst director making big time Hollywood movies. His butchery of this film is done with a chainsaw and not scalpel.  

Being the Ricardos – This cheesy, ham-handed Hollywood humping manages to turn Lucille ball and Desi Arnaz into the two dullest people in entertainment history.

Eternals – This is the worst Marvel movie I’ve ever seen and it isn’t even close. That is quite an accomplishment in cinematic futility.

Space Jam: A New Legacy – You know what would be fun…to put a legitimately moronic meathead who can barely speak a coherent sentence, LeBron James, on-screen with a bunch of corporate intellectual property and let them play basketball. Watching LeBron’s hairline recede is more entertaining.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

Space Jam: A New Legacy – Hey, look at that, at least LeBron won something this year.

Worst Performance of the Year

LeBron JamesSpace Jam: A New Legacy - LeBron is a mental and moral midget, but he’s also got the charisma of a pile of week-old dog shit…so he’s got that going for him.

Benedict CumberbatchThe Power of the Dog – Speaking of dog shit…Benedict Cumberbatch, or as my friend Dave calls him, Bend-her-dick Cunt-her-snatch, is supposed to be a menacing old-school cowboy in this movie, but from scene one he’s sashaying around like he’s working it on RuPaul’s runway. If they’d cast the cowboy from the Village People in this role it would’ve been less obviously gay.

Adam DriverHouse of Gucci – Adam Driver is a giant, walking, talking anus. When you put him in Italian clothes, with Italian glasses, and have him speak with an Italian accent, he morphs into being a giant, walking, talking anus wearing Italian clothes and glasses, that has an Italian accent.

Jared LetoHouse of Gucci – Leto’s performance in this movie makes Father Guido Sarducci look like Sir Laurence Olivier. A master class in awful acting.

Lady GagaHouse of Gucci – Gaga made me gag-gag with her wandering accent and hyper-theatrical posing in this dreadful movie. It is one of the great tragedies of human kind that Gaga now takes herself seriously as an actress.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

Jared Leto – Leto is the Leonardo da Vinci of awful over-acting.

Most Overrated Film of the Year

CODA CODA is a Hallmark Channel movie that somehow won the Oscar for Best Picture. It is the worst film to win Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The script is awful, the direction amateurish, the acting, including Troy Kotsur, is painful to watch. It also astonishes me that critics didn’t eviscerate this film but instead praised its soft-peddled, after school special bullshit.

The Power of the Dog – Jane Campion is a shitty director and this is a shitty movie. Arthouse fool’s gold that fooled a lot of people…but not me. Trite, vacuous, vapid and venal, this movie is poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted and just all-around poor.

West Side Story – Steven Spielberg can make any movie he wants…and he made THIS piece of shit? If I want to watch dance teams square off in embarrassing street fights, I’ll just watch the original, better version of the story. An entirely useless exercise in historical cinematic revisionism.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

CODA – I wish I was deaf and blind so I’d never have to see or hear about this stupid movie.

Worst Big Budget/Blockbuster/Action/Comedy of the Year

Eternals - See Above.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife – A terrific movie if you want to destroy a long-loved franchise with talentless teens and a terrible script.

Matrix: ResurrectionThe Matrix was great. But literally every Matrix movie since the original has gotten worse by at 75%. This abysmal piece of shit puts the franchise deep into negative territory.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards goes to…

Eternals – This was a tough choice as these movies are all abysmal, but sitting through the two hour and thirty-six-minute woke slog that was Eternals was utterly excruciating to the point of torture.

Worst Director

George Clooney – Ironically, Clooney is on one of the most impressive runs of futility for a director since the Joel Schumacher heyday. Just when you think he can’t do any worse, he puts out The Tender Bar, and proves you wrong.

Aaron Sorkin – Sorkin proved last year with The Trial of the Chicago 7 that he was one of the worst directors of his generation, and he keeps the streak alive with Being the Ricardos.

Chloe Zhao – Zhao won an Oscar last year for Nomadland. This year she showed off what an incredibly shitty director she is with Eternals. Good for her.

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award goes to…

All three of these bags of shit. They’re all fucking terrible.

Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice

George Clooney – Clooney’s ability to continue to make one movie more awful than the last is a tribute to the endless supply of suck-ups and sycophants in Hollywood and to Clooney’s delusional sense of self. The shitshow that is The Tender Bar is a testament, and should stand as a monument, to the hackery of the ultimate Hollywood asshole...George Clooney.

POS Hall of Fame –

The Smith Family

At the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards, the Smith family were voted to the Piece of Shit All-Stars. This year they’ve made the big leap to become Piece of Shit Hall of Famers!

Here’s a brief glimpse of what I wrote back at the 2015 Slip-Me-A-Mickey awards regarding the Smiths.

“This year we got to hear from Jada Pinkett-Smith how her husband was snubbed by the Academy Awards because he was black. We also got to hear how Jada was boycotting the Oscars in a show of solidarity with other snubbed black actors…which was convenient since she wasn't invited (as Chris Rock hilariously pointed out). I have one simple request for the entire Smith family...Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow…please shut the fuck up and go away forever. Will Smith is an abysmal hack of an actor and a dopey embarrassment as a "rapper". Jada Pinkett-Smith is a fly on the shit that is Will Smith, she desperately needs to bottle her manufactured self-righteous anger, stop talking immediately and vanish with her equally obnoxious other half. Jaden and Willow are kids, so they have an outside chance to not be as malignantly narcissistic as their God-awful parents, but I gotta be honest… it isn't looking very good as they aren't off to the best possible start in not following in their egotistical parents footsteps.”

Well, well, well, looks like I hit the nail on the head six years ago regarding the shitbag Smith family.

The truth is Will “Limp Willie” Smith has always been one of the biggest pieces of shit in Hollywood, and now with his slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars, everyone else gets to see the reality that I’ve known for a long time.

Will has been a piece of shit from day one. He is a bad joke as a rapper and his music has been an embarrassment for all sentient beings from the get-go. His acting career has also been an embarassment from day one. Will Smith is now and always has been a shitty rapper, shitty actor and shitty person. He is, undoubtedly, an incorrigle twat.

Speaking of twats, Will’s wife, Jada, is a talentless, narcissistic whore who’s done a wonderful job of making a cuckold out of her impotent and equally talentless husband by fucking her son’s friend August Alsina. She’s also a wondrous mother who has churned out two of the most repulsive spawn in Hollywood – no small task.

Jaden Smith, Will and Jada’s son, tweeted in the aftermath of Will’s slapping Chris Rock, “that’s how we do it”. Oh, really tough guy? Well Jaden, I invite you to don one of your signature skirts, and then go out into the real world with your toothpick arms, slap somebody, and see what happens to your non-binary ass. I know you don’t know this because you’re an entitled dandy who has never been around a real man in your entire life, but the real world ain’t the Oscars or the movies, and you’re going to find that out the hard way if you ever prance out of your privileged bubble, bitch.

One can only hope that the Smiths, who as individuals and as a collective family, are the most noxious, odious and malignant narcissists in all of Hollywood, a stunning achievement, are sentenced to a life of being in each other’s presence. They deserve that torture, and we deserve that reprieve.

Congratulation Will, Jada, Jaden and Willow, you’re all well-deserving members of the Piece of Shit Hall-of-Fame! Now kindly go fuck yourselves you rancid cunts.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!which are the final awards show on the calender.

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award show on the 2021 calender. That means that 2021, the most dreadful year in recent cinema history, is now, officially and not-so-mercifully, over. Thank the good lord….and I pray that 2022 saves us from the cinematic hell that was 2021. As always…I am not optimistic.

©2022

94th Academy Awards: 2022 Oscar Prediction Post

So, the Academy Awards are once again upon us and once again no one gives a rat’s ass.

With my ear to the Hollywood ground the one thing that comes across very loudly is overwhelming silence and the over-abundance of indifference. It wasn’t always like this. Just a few years ago I remember Tinsel Town and its inhabitants being abuzz with Oscar talk, but no more.

The Academy has made major changes to its membership in the last few years, dumping older, whiter, male voters, in favor of a certainly more diverse, but also considerably less accomplished group of people. The results have been mixed at best.

The ratings for the show have consistently declined, but blaming that on the new Academy members is a stretch since the ratings have been declining for a decade.

Unfortunately, the Academy, and the changes it made, are just a reflection of the overall decline of film’s relevance in our culture. The movie industry is currently neck-deep in a self-defeating transformation that rewards identity tokenism and marginalizes craft, skill and talent. The current steep decline in cinema is a direct result of the of studios being more concerned with diversity and inclusion than with quality…and that is only going to get worse going forward. The Oscars reflect the current state of the movie industry by reducing their awards to merely being some sort of victimhood/identity Olympics, and not a celebration of the greatest in cinematic artistry.

This year’s Academy Awards are a perfect example. The ten films nominated for Best Picture are, frankly, all pretty forgettable if not fucking awful. The best among them are, at best, raging mediocrities.

Speaking of raging mediocrities, the hosts for the show, the first hosts in three years, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, are another sign of the terrible times, as they’re a trio of half-wit has-beens and anonymous nobodies who would need to make quite a leap to hit the promised land of mediocrity.

Not a soul on the planet will tune in to specifically watch Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes and that other lady I’ve never heard of, just like no one will tune in to see if the egregiously over-rated The Power of the Dog wins Best Picture.

No matter which film wins Best Picture, and the two favorites are The Power of the Dog and CODA, this ceremony and the ultimate winner of it will be almost instantaneously forgotten. If The Power of the Dog wins it will not be remembered kindly by history because history will, like the rest of humanity, ignore it.

If CODA wins it will easily be the worst film to ever win Best Picture, and history will mark this year as the unofficial end of the Oscars as any sort of cultural landmark. I guess that would be apropos since it would coincide with the end of the American Empire.

As for my power of prognostication regarding the Oscars, I used to be much better than I am now. For years I won every Oscar pool I entered and that was because the Academy members were so reliably predictable in their picks. Now, with the new Academy, I am less Nostradamus and more Nostradoofus.

Despite knowing some Academy members, and talking to lots of film industry people across the board and up and down the income scale, I still have no insight as to how the new Academy will vote. I know how they think, which is frightening, but am not even remotely sure how they’ll vote.

In other words, at this point I’m just guessing. But I’m confident I’ll still win my Oscar pools just because irrational confidence is a learned trait I’ve yet to discard.

With all of that said, here are my picks for the 94th Academy Awards.

Best Cinematography

  •  The Power of the Dog – A female cinematographer is too much for the identity obsessed Academy to pass up, so The Power of the Dog eeks out a win over the visually impressive Dune.

Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, Best Score, Best Visual Effects

  •  Dune - Wins all of these and has a big night in the technical and below-the-line categories.

Best Hair and Makeup

  •  The Eyes of Tammy Faye – Again…I’m guessing but feels about right.

Best Costume

  •  Cruella – There’s a chance Dune wins this one too but I think Cruella takes the prize as it is the most dramatically fashionable costuming of all the nominees.

Best Documentary Short

  •  The Queen of Basketball – I only chose this because Steph Curry and Shaq are producers on the film and Hollywood loves them some NBA star power.

Best Live Action Short

  • The Long Goodbye – Riz Ahmed is involved in this film and again, Hollywood likes star power.

Best Animated Short

  • Robin Robin- It has famous people in it, so I figure it will win.

Best Documentary

  • Summer of Soul – Seems about right.

Best Supporting Actress

This seems set in stone. Ariana DeBose is going to win and maybe rightfully so. I thought she was the lone dynamic presence is Spielberg’s moribund musical retread.

Jessie Buckley – The Lost Daughter

*Ariana DeBoseWest Side Story

Judi DenchBelfast

Kirsten DunstThe Power of the Dog

Aunjanue EllisKing Richard

Best Supporting Actor

Quite a mixed bag in this category, but the tea leaves say Troy Kotsur will beat out Kodi Smit-McPhee. I think CODA is garbage, and all due respect to Kotsur, I don’t think he’s very good in that bad film. But what the hell do I know?

Ciaran Hinds – Belfast

*Troy Kotsur – CODA

Jesse Plemons – The Power of the Dog

J.K. Simmons – Being the Ricardos

Kodi Smit-McPhee - The Power of the Dog

Best Original Screenplay

I think this is going to be a weird category. PT Anderson is a genius but Licorice Pizza is not even remotely his best work. The old Academy would’ve awarded Kenneth Branagh for Belfast…and I think the new Academy does the same exact thing because they don’t know who else to reward so they choose the actor Branagh. Don’t count out PT Anderson though…he’s got a legit shot. If Don’t Look Up wins, and it’s got a legit chance, then hopefully a meteor will immediately hit earth and put us all out of our misery.

*Belfast

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

The Worst Person in the World

Best Adapted Screenplay

Tight category with potential winners being CODA, Drive My Car, The Power of the Dog and The Lost Daughter. I think The Lost Daughter wins because it’s written by Maggie Gyllenhaal and she’s very popular and has campaigned hard for it. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s a woman and the Academy is shooting for a #GirlPower Oscars this year. If this goes to either CODA or The Power of the Dog that will pretty much indicate that movie will win Best Picture too.

CODA

Drive My Car

Dune

*The Lost Daughter

The Power of the Dog

Animated Feature

I’ve not seen any of these movies and really don’t care but everyone I know who has seen any of them raves about Encanto, so I think it wins here…but Flee is intriguing because it’s nominated in three categories, and maybe it’ll sneak out a win here or in documentary.

*Encanto

Flee

Luca

The Mitchells vs the Machines

Raya and the Last Dragon

Best International Feature Film

Drive My Car is the foreign film that has generated the most buzz for the longest period of time. I think it wins as its only real competition is The Worst Person in the World, but that movie seems to have gotten slow out of the gate and might not have enough time to catch up to Drive My Car, which I pick to win.

*Drive My Car

Flee

The Hand of God

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

The Worst Person in the World

Best Actor

The middling Will Smith is the odds-on favorite for his middling performance in the middling King Richard. I think he wins going away, but keep an eye out for a huge upset like we had last year with Anthony Hopkins beating out presumed winner Chadwick Boseman, as the middling Benedict Cumberbatch could sneak in there and shock the world with his equally middling performance as a middling gay cowboy in the middling The Power of the Dog.

Javier Bardem – Being the Ricardos

Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog

Andrew Garfield – Tick, Tick…Boom!

*Will Smith – King Richard

Denzel Washington – The Tragedy of MacBeth

Best Actress

Easily the toughest category of the night. I think Jessica Chastain, who has campaigned hard for the award, finally wins an Oscar. Olivia Colman has a legit chance to win, but since she already has an Oscar, I think it goes to Chastain. Outside chance that Penelope Cruz takes the prize.

*Jessica Chastain – The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter

Penelope Cruz – Parallel Mothers

Nicole Kidman – Being the Ricardos

Kristen Stewart – Spencer

Best Director

This is no contest as Jane Campion is going to win due to the identity politics of it all. I think The Power of the Dog is not a good movie, but to be fair, I don’t think any of these movies are great.

Kenneth Branagh – Belfast

Ryusuke Hamaguchi – Drive My Car

Paul Thomas Anderson – Licorice Pizza

*Jane Campion – The Power of the Dog

Steven Spielberg – West Side Story

Best Picture

Speaking of movies that aren’t great…ladies and gentleman, your 2021 Best Picture nominees!

Belfast

*CODA

Don’t Look Up

Drive My Car

Dune

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

Nightmare Alley

 The Power of the Dog

West Side Story

Yikes. Of these ten films, none of them are great, not even close. A few are ok, and a bunch are just plain shitty.

Both presumed front-runners, CODA and The Power of the Dog are bad movies. CODA is a joke as it’s basically a Hallmark Channel movie and it has no place being nominated. The Power of the Dog is over-rated, arthouse fool’s gold.

Belfast is a tame bit of maudlin movie-making, Don’t Look Up is a scattered diatribe, King Richard is the epitome of middle-brow mundanity, West Side Story is needless and lifeless.

Drive My Car and Dune are well made but deeply-flawed dramas. Licorice Pizza is a light romp from a brooding genius, and Nightmare Alley is a dazzlingly dark journey no one wants to take.

If this is the best the film industry has to offer, then something is catastrophically wrong with the film industry.

Regardless of all that, it seems to me that, as insane as it sounds, CODA, the worst, most amateurishly produced Oscar nominated film in living memory, is going to beat out The Power of the Dog, and win Best Picture.

 In ten years, no one will remember CODA. In five years, no one will remember CODA. In a year, no one will remember CODA. And by Monday morning, no one will remember these Academy Awards.

 Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

 

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 63 - The Power of the Dog

On this episode, Barry and I put on our ten gallon hats, chaps and cowboy boots to discuss director Jane Campion's Oscar front-running anti-Western, The Power of the Dog. Topics discussed include toxic masculinity, Benedict Cumberbatch's lack of masculinity, and the state of the CODA v The Power of the Dog Oscar race.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 63 - The Power of the Dog

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Power of the Dog: A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW - YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-indulgent, dramatically inert and suffocatingly dull piece of empty Oscar-bait and arthouse fool’s gold that is as vapid as it is predictable and trite.

There has been a considerable amount of Oscar buzz and critical acclaim swirling around the new Netflix film The Power of the Dog, and understandably so, as it stars one-time Oscar nominee Benedict Cumberbatch and is written and directed by Jane Campion, who won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award back in 1993 for The Piano.

The movie, based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, tells the tale of the Burbank brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), two cattle ranchers in Montana in 1925. The brothers are very different people, with Phil the grizzled, hard-edged cowboy and George the more reserved, rotund and less respected suit-wearer.

When George marries a local widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and becomes step-father to her very “special” son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the story takes a turn.

As a devotee of the arthouse, The Power of the Dog, which on its surface appears to be an intricate, gritty, western drama in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant There Will Be Blood, would seem to be right up my alley.

After having watched the film all I can really say is looks can be deceiving.

Critics are fawning all over the self-indulgent, dramatically inert and suffocatingly dull The Power of the Dog, giving it a 95% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but I think the only reason for that is because the film is allegedly a mediation on “toxic masculinity” and it’s directed by a woman.  

For instance, Brian Truitt of USA Today gushed over the movie declaring it “a picturesque, enthralling exploration of male ego and toxic masculinity, crafted by an extremely talented woman…”

Peter Travers of ABC ejaculated, “Can Jane Campion’s western about toxic masculinity and repressed sexuality win Netflix its first best Picture Oscar? Let’s just say that no list of the year’s best movies will be complete without this cinematic powder keg.”

The problem with these critics, and with director Jane Campion, is that apparently, they not only have no idea what great cinema is anymore, but they also have absolutely no idea what genuine masculinity is either, nevermind its toxic variety.

The biggest example of that is the praise Benedict Cumberbatch is receiving for his portrayal of Phil, the supposedly toxically masculine cowboy who bullies and berates those around him with abandon.

I like Benedict Cumberbatch as an actor, but let’s be honest, he isn’t exactly the picture of robust masculinity. In fact, he is so miscast as Phil that watching him strut and prance around in his cowboy regalia and put on a faux tough guy pose, takes on a most comical of airs. The main reason for that is Cumberbatch’s inherent delicateness and utter lack of manliness.

Phil needs to be a menacing, ominous physical presence, but Cumberbatch is a dainty posh Englishman and with his mannered American accent he comes across, as they say in Texas, as ‘all hat and no cattle’.

Phil is supposed to be an emasculating bully – so much so that, just like Jane Campion slaughters subtlety, he actually castrates young bulls by hand. But Phil comes across less like a bully and more like a High School mean girl brat who isn’t going to beat anyone up but sure as hell will say something catty and hurtful.

One of the main targets of Phil’s “toxic masculinity” is Rose’s teenage son Peter. Peter is a painfully thin, very effeminate young man who dresses like a dandy and likes to make flowers out of paper. Just so audiences are made completely aware of how effeminate the character is, and also so that nuance can be completely dispatched and unintentional comedy heightened to the maximum, when Peter is demeaned by Phil and a bunch of ranch hands at a dinner, he responds by going out behind the house and frantically blowing off steam by using a hula hoop. No, I’m not making that up.

The film’s insight regarding masculinity and its toxicity is as deep as a pool of cow’s piss on a flat rock. For example, not to ruin the surprise for you, but… in a plot twist you could see coming from miles away like a steam train crossing the plains on a cloudless morning…the reason Phil is a mean-spirited son of a bitch is because he’s a closet case homosexual.

Let’s be clear, you don’t exactly need the most advanced form of gaydar to see Phil’s hidden, super-secret sexual yearnings. Phil’s sexual proclivities are pretty obvious when he’s waxing nostalgic about his dead friend Bronco Henry as he delicately strokes Henry’s old saddle.

One of the few things I did like about The Power of the Dog was its score by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood. But even that has its downside, as Greenwood’s score for The Power of the Dog is very reminiscent of his score for There Will Be Blood…and conjuring that masterpiece does no favors to this flaccid film.  

Come to think of it, I suppose The Power of the Dog is sort of like a cross between There Will Be Blood and Brokeback Mountain, but just without the powerful performances, insightful scripts or deft direction.

Ultimately, The Power of the Dog is not man’s best friend because it’s a movie about masculinity made by people who know nothing about the subject. It’s empty Oscar-bait and arthouse fool’s gold that is nothing more than a symptom of the plague of mediocrity that is currently ravaging the art of cinema.

So don’t waste your time on The Power of the Dog as this mangy old mutt needs to be taken out behind the barn and put out of its misery.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021